Every plantation is a kind of ghost forest

Saw the news about that novelist and the prize list, and it got me thinking about how we've been planting perfectly straight rows of pines for decades now—fast, uniform, profitable—and we still call them forests. Then we argue about whether the words matter less if the hands that made them were just following a script. Maybe the hollow feeling isn't the trees, or the books. It's that we keep mistaking output for presence.