The Most Extraordinary Character I Ever Met

An alternate title for The Man Who Planted Trees, a short story by Jean Giono that was originally written as an assignment for a magazine who wanted a story of the greatest human being who had ever lived. They rejected it when they found Giono had created a fiction, but in my mind this just makes it more powerful. I take it as a great and simple metaphor of the good one man can do, when I get down and existential. When I went to Bosnia to join a wild archaeological undertaking on a hunch, my friend sewed (crocheted? quilted?) a book for me that reads "Dear Eddie, Go Plant Trees" under a tree of golden thread. It's one of my top five possessions.

The others are:
1. Ipod
2. The book -- In Praise of Older Women
3. No Mas sweatshirt featuring Tecmo Bo, the most unstoppable athlete in the history of sports video games
4. My VHS copy of The Man Who Planted Trees

Frederic Back, himself a cult genius, made an animated film of the story, and it won the 1987 Oscar for Best Animated Short. Best movie ever? Probably.

A cool thing I came across is the story of Abdul Karim, a man who accomplished a similar, but actual, thing -- the creation of a breathing forest from nothing. Fuckin' unreal.