Altitude and coolness co-create the cloud. Humid air is pushed upward by the land, bringing the water it bears to a condensation point, and forming the mist which cloaks such forests year-round. The mist also reduces direct sunlight, reducing transpiration from the trees and retaining more water within the forest system.
Because this drifting mist infiltrates the full volume of the forest—wandering from ground to canopy, between trunks, into every niche—the available surface area for condensation is maximized. And because cloud-forests are characterized by an astonishing density of air plants, or epiphytes (that is, plants which grow on other plants), this surface area is immense. Liverworts, mosses, ferns, orchids, lichens, and bromeliads throng the trees of a cloudforest; hundreds, sometimes thousands of plants can flourish upon a single big tree, in a proliferating density of floral life greater even than that of a rainforest.
Black dress, pink coat, thick beige stockings. This is the third time I’ve seen her. She walks down the middle of the street outside my window, her head bent forward under its helmet of grandmother hair. She carries her handbag like a briefcase with a bomb in it. She has the look of someone whose friends are all dead.
I saw her first outside Saint Spyridon Church, lighting a candle. And then again in Spianada Square, among the scootering children. I lean out the window to watch her disappear around the corner. Maybe there’s nothing suspicious about it. Corfu is a small city, on a small island in Greece. From my hotel room I can see the green edge of the cricket pitch where, in John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, the Czech agent, Axel, chased Magnus Pym in slow, limping circles.
I think, whether you believe in divine creation or solely in physics (though the two are really not incompatible), there can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love. Whether it is because some loving, omnipotent, unoriginated Being consciously decided to make the particular farting, mewling, grasping masterpiece that is you, or because a set of cosmic coincidences aligned so perfectly and yet so improbably that Simon Boas resulted, being alive at all is something we don’t appreciate nearly enough.
In the 1960s, a hospital in London held a ward full of women who suffered from a range of mental disorders. The women in this “sleep room” were subjected to various medical procedures, including electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, and, at times, a lobotomy, without their consent.
In “The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him,” Jon Stock tells the harrowing history of the British doctor who subjected them to medical abuse and gives voice to those who survived him.