Yu. N.. About vegetable oaks

About vegetable oaks
Yu.N.

Publication date: November 7, 2000

I never cease to be amazed at these oaks: what a variety of plant forms they allow themselves.

That is, if you turn back to the natural history textbook for the 4th grade (and today’s schoolchildren are usually deprived of this, I mean, the 4th grade, which makes it seem like they don’t know the services), then everything is in order: the sun rises , the rooks follow the plow, and the oak is an oak, its acorns are normal and the leaves are cut out where necessary, but otherwise rounded.

Going beyond the fence, you soon become convinced that this is the case, as Peryshkin prescribed. You make a horse out of acorns with the help of matches and believe that nature obeys correctly stated laws.

Many (I hesitate to say “all”, since I have lived in the world for a long time and have already been in a madhouse) retain this childhood faith for the rest of their lives.

We know from fiction or, it seems, from somewhere else that in Greece the oak tree was dedicated to Zeus. But for a simple-minded person, not tempered by a close study of botany and still inclined to believe in the rational structure of anything except man himself, it is often a shock to discover that this very one, dedicated to Zeus, is evergreen, the leaves have small, square and prickly, and In general, it looks more like an Ilex opaca holly than an illustration from a natural history textbook. Sitting on such an oak bush by mistake is a very invigorating experience.

Perhaps someone thinks that I am talking about training in botany for fun. Short-sighted man! Let him ask anyone, even Google, about Holm Oak, and he will get an endless series of natural history textbooks for the 4th grade of all possible languages, from New Zealanders all the way to Americans through Greeks and Swedes. It turns out that it is only here that the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea, and horses... I no longer dare say anything about horses, since I started about oaks.

Yes. Having first realized this very simple truth in form, different people behave differently. Some huddle in a corner and look like a wolf from there. Others begin to console themselves and others that one and many are a small quantitative difference, after all, they are not a continuum - this is where, by the way, botany, which is the ultimate science, comes to the rescue. “Everyone knows, and only repetition // The future promises,” the poet consoled himself and those around him.

Now, they say, now we will master this, although wild and ugly, but completely enumerable set of forms, and the new cartilage will be fruitful for us.

When I go out for a walk along the surrounding foreign, crooked streets, I immediately find no less than five species of oak trees . Red oak (and sometimes even scarlet), with leaves like maple, only oblong - shingle oak, which has acorns the size of pine nuts, and leaves like ash - English oak, insidiously similar to ours - some other monsters with furry acorns...

Botany of humans

system was invented in ancient times by several foreigners for the purpose of consolation or for the purpose of profit I don’t know whether the PRIZM .

Let me illustrate its action with the following example. My neighbors (22303-2235) love to sing. Mexicans often get together and sing in chorus in such a way that it seems that the tape recorder has not yet been invented. Sometimes some Mexican high school girl sings in the morning when she returns from a date and, I must say, confuses the sleep of single men. Blacks sing into a microphone on a tiny lawn in front of their church at a crossroads: the pastor is in the middle, like a root priest, and the ministers are behind the guards, howling and clapping their hands. Arab women sing in slender voices in a laundry room. Four Russian families, which an inquisitive researcher could distinguish in 22303-2235, cannot sing and generally ended up here by mistake: in six months none of them will remain here.

So, the PRIZM system knows nothing and is not interested in singing.

The Chicago Botanical Garden has a much larger than life-size statue of the naturalist Carl Linnaeus. A natural scientist does not sit on horseback or, say, on chairs, as a commander or playwright would. No, he lay down in a rather expressive pose on the grass and extended his right hand in the direction of a small bronze flower, which the sculptor was very, very successful with. The whole flower looks like a disheveled teenager, and Linnaeus breathes kindness and benevolence, even though its surface is extremely chipped. It seems that he wishes well to the flower, and is not just exploring.

Our idea of ​​a scientific researcher presupposes, although sometimes a burning, but always somewhat detached interest in the subject. The sculptor here, of course, clearly sinned against the historical truth - but the rose garden in which this motionless action takes place, as a result, became very cozy, and every day Linnaeus has a wedding ceremony (in this way it is partly similar to the Noginsk Monument to the Unknown Soldier, which is near the station ) (although the whole ceremony takes place in the garden, including test questions and for rich and for poor).

The PRIZM system... ah, it’s completely lost. Surprisingly, it turned out that applied human botany is one of the most dreary branches of human knowledge. It is also called microgeography. She cannot afford to go down to the individual, but instead uses regression models to examine how much pumpernickel will be eaten in 22303-2235. I’ll tell you anyway that it’s not enough, because it’s expensive. However, it cannot really go down to the last four digits. Try typing 22303 into this form , and then tell me which one is me or especially my neighbor Rodriguez, a painter by profession, who just got drunk and drove his wife and children out of the house, and then his eldest son kicked him out, so he became ride a bicycle to the village of Chernoe and took with him the most valuable thing (the TV, that is), but the TV kept falling and falling from the trunk... that is, I’m already a little confused here with Rodriguez, it seems.

Yes. The impatient reader has probably already drawn the moral. Well, this Prism is your old junk, and it’s only good for shooting at squares. They say that, equipped with wires and an Oracle database, other private companies, which are increasing their presence on the Internet in every possible way, will soon effectively gather such a thing on us that you won’t be able to hide in 22303-2235 - although Rodriguez and I don’t need to hide anywhere, no one knows us doesn't catch. And then, you see, for an individual, new and for some reason so-called “high” technologies will come up with something so that he can roam around the world, as if in his own administrative-territorial unit.

They will be able to show us internally convincingly that an oak tree is also an oak tree in Africa, and if this bird in my bushes today sings like an impeccable nightingale, and tomorrow it imitates a car alarm just as flawlessly, then this makes my inner world richer, and this By the way, it's worth the money!

Here I fall silent in confusion.