Word: rootlets
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...England village ruled by corn, or by any other crop, in the 19th century manner. Agriculture still gets done, but only in a desultory or else a superindustrialized fashion. No matter. It suits Tryon to imagine a great green heart beating slowly beneath the earth, with every rootlet and capillary in the village pulsing to it. Where the author goes from there, though obvious enough in synopsis, is dark and intricate in the working out. His language is artfully chosen to match the slowly quickening mood of the narration. He gives Ned and Beth a 19th century primness that undermines...
...plants produce vast numbers of barely visible seeds, sometimes as many as half a million from a single plant. The seeds fall to the ground and mix with the soil, where they can lie for 20 years without losing vitality. A seed does not normally germinate until the rootlet of a suitable plant creeps close to it through the soil. Influenced by a mysterious substance that the root secretes, the seed wakes up. Out of it pokes a root that snakes through the soil, attaches itself to the host, and thrusts sucking tubes into its juicy tissues. Then life begins...
...Music Department, which had been a sort of gypsy in the University, camping at one time in the chem labs and later on in the Bursar's office. Harvard had not been the world's most congenial patron for the art. Puritan distrust of music as a rootlet of evil lingered on throughout the 19th century: Francis Parkman was said to have ended his yearly budget report at the Corporation with "Musica Delenda Est." By 1914, however, most of this sinfulness seemed to have worn off, and music was looked on, at worst, as a useless frill...
...Significance. The tree of life has roots as well as branches. Shelley shinnied to the topmost twig, swaying above sanity with piercing cries of joy. Savaron, cursing brilliantly, burrowed down through the loams of illusion to the last dark rootlet of which words can tell. Psychologically, the book is a faultless exposition of the destructive approach to super-manhood. It would be restless reading for maiden aunts, a dangerous typhoon for souls without some windward anchor of faith or stupidity...
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