Every time Halley’s Comet returns, the world has changed. Most of the people are gone, while the trees have gone on remembering in their own way.
Beginning in 1066, over more than nine centuries, people are born, form families, fight, migrate, believe, govern, obey, rebel, and die. Kingdoms disappear, republics are founded, old orders return under new names. People’s ideas about freedom, money, religion, and power change, though sometimes only the words do.
Amid all this, the trees go on living and recording.
In England, China, Florence, and America, they watch different parts of the same world. Unlike humans, they do not judge or try to distinguish right from wrong. They record sounds, smells, chemicals that seep into the soil, and the traces left by people passing beneath them. They are not entirely passive, either. They remember some events better than others, record some people for longer than others, and pass their memories to one another through invisible connections.
A castle can become an almshouse over the centuries, and then nothing at all; a family saying can be passed down for nine hundred years; someone standing in the same place can unknowingly repeat a movement made there centuries before.
GINKGO tells history not as a procession of great men and decisive turning points, but as something people live through, misunderstand, survive, and occasionally make ridiculous.
When the comet returns, humanity will have changed again. The trees will still be remembering.
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