Sometimes there is a book that is so exactly matched to one’s contours that reading it is a bodily experience. It’s ideas, phrases, arrangements of revelations, so much like ourselves that, like sucrose at the attachment of sucrase, we cannot help but be metabolized.

For me one of those books is The Botany of Desire. In honor of the upcoming harvest festival, I have just reread the essay in that book called “Desire:Sweetness Plant:The Apple.”

It’s not so much the pentacle at the heart of the fruit, or even the metaphor of tasty flesh aiding and abetting the cyanide laced seed it lives to spread. Closer to the heart of my encounter with this essay is the tale of its seeds not breeding true to its parent, producing instead five of its own versions of what it is to be an apple. Sister to that, like a shadow sibling that inhabits the corners of mind, is the fact that the fruit we eat are none of these wild things. My bowl of apples: they are clones of that one parent, that golden delicious or its red second cousin several times removed, that Gala — those parents that came upon their wild selves by the accidental interchange of its genes and its environment are for us, held temporarily in evolutionary stasis.

Still, that’s not it. I think it’s the question Pollan poses early in the essay: “could it be that sweetness is the prototype of all desire?” Even though it is not the first time I was reading the essay, and even though I was sitting outside a coffee shop in the middle of a wondrously beautiful autumn day, it sparked a sudden surge of feeling that left tears threatening to breach the dam of my eyelids. I had to put the book down, drink some coffee and even so, a woman passing gave me a concerned look.

The book is about the relationship between plant and human life. If you’ve read other posts of mine, you’ll recognize that this alone was bound to grab at me. It talks about that relationship in that most promising way, one that joins the clarity of the academic with the intensity of narrative. For example, in the introduction there are two of the best paragraphs I know that explicate the wild-ground between the way our language tries to force meaning and the actual progress of evolution.

So am I suggesting that the plants made me do it? Only in the sense that the flower “makes” the bee pay it a visit. Evolution doesn’t depend on will or intention to work: it is, almost by definition, an unconscious, unwilled process. All it requires are beings compelled, as all plants and animals are, to make more of themselves by whatever means trial and error present. Sometimes an adaptive trait is so clever it appears purposeful: the ant that “cultivates” its own gardens of edible fungus, for instance, or the pitcher plant that “convinces” a fly it’s a piece of rotting meat. But such traits are clever only in retrospect. Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

By the same token, we’re prone to overestimate our own agency in nature. Many of the activities humans like to think they undertake for their own good purposes—inventing agriculture, outlawing certain plants, writing books in praise of others—are mere contingencies as far as nature is concerned. Our desires are simply more grist for evolution’s mill, no different from a change in the weather: a peril for some species, an opportunity for others. Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.

At its heart I think what effects me so much is the narrative relationship Pollan weaves between the story of the apple and the story of John Chapman. It’s that Pollan uses the Dionysian life of Chapman to echo the Dionysian heart of the apple. It’s the fact that like any good poet, Pollan uses the structure he creates to express the meaning of the facts he presents. And for me, that combination along with the simple truth of the data, creates resonant meaning and with that a sense of belonging, an acceptance of the human subsumation into the natural world.

This sense of belonging is so simply sweet, so naturally a part of me that I cannot help but hope that he is right in his assessment that this feeling, this sweetness and belonging, is the natural (and wondrously errant) daughter of my tongue’s delight in the flesh of an apple. What a tribute that would be to the harvest and to the genetic strategies of the apple, that we both, plant and human, have achieved this transformed present by dint of our combined and interdependent biologies.