“Between fourteen and nineteen, I was educated in a provincial agricultural school, isolated in the countryside of central Italy.

I was there to learn a real trade. Thus, instead of devoting myself to the study of classical languages, literature, history and mathematics, as all my friends did, I spent my adolescence immersed in books on botany, plant pathology, agrarian chemistry, culture. horticulture and entomology. Plants, their needs and diseases, were the privileged object of all study in this school. This daily and prolonged exposure to beings who were, initially, so far away from me definitively marked my vision of the world. This book is an attempt to resurrect the ideas born in these five years of contemplating its nature, its silence, its apparent indifference to everything we call culture. […]

The plant embodies the closest and most elementary link that life can establish with the world. The reverse is also true: it is the purest observatory to be able to contemplate the world in its entirety. Under the sun or clouds, mixing with water and wind, his life is an endless cosmic contemplation, without dissociating objects and substances, or, to put it another way, accepting every nuance, even to merge with the world, until it coincides with its substance. We will never understand what a plant is without having understood what the world is. […]

Living beings are to the world what flowers are to plants: their sex. We are used to understanding sexuality as a purely organic act or an exclusively biological dimension. On the contrary, we should learn to consider biological sexuality as one of the multiple reflections of a phenomenon of cosmic dimension, in which the world renews itself and modifies its consistency.

The world is constantly rearmed differently, and that's what we reproduce sexually. Life is the sex of the world: not something that happened accidentally and a posteriori at some point in its history, but its original structure, its deepest identity dynamism.”

Emanuel Coccia