QUOTE : Cultivated crops, like words, like language, are things that glide into view out of the murkiness of the past. I think of my words as mine, but the chances are than even after fifty or sixty or seventy years of chewing on them, writing them down, word-processing them as a speaker and as a writer, I won't succeed in putting a single new one into circulation. Same with plants, with crops, as a gardener and farmer. What we're given in words and cultivated plants has been worked over for hundreds of generations before it comes to us, and the chances of our adding to it are very slim. What we add is illusion: each time we're born, the world looks new, is new, which gives us a strange kind of leverage against the weight of accumulated biological and cultural existence, which means for a while, off and on, now and then, under certain circumstances, we believe we are the owners or managers or the franchise operators of this world, not the other way around, and that we have invented almost everything in sight, from the words that drop so easily from our mouths to the plants we grow in our gardens.