The flowers also have something to tell us ..., perhaps that there is something beyond the war, just as there's cyclical time, the time of nature as season and processes imagined until recently as outside of historical time. A human being lives in both, as a political actor, a citizen of this place or that, a seat for a mind with opinions and beliefs, but also as a biological entity, eating and sleeping and excreting and breeding, ephemeral like flowers.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Page 29 - 30)