There is Grief of a Tree

These verses from the Book of Job turn on two distinctions: between hope and grief, and between trees and human beings. Hope belongs affirmatively to the tree, which the scent of water may bring back even from old roots or dead stump. For the human there is no sprouting or budding again—no regeneration, at least not “till the heavens be no more.” Yet even as the passage divides grief and hope in this stark way, it poses messier questions about where subjectivity resides in matters of hope and grief. The King James Version's expression, “hope of a tree,” leaves unsettled the question of the subjective versus the objective genitive. Does the tree experience hope of its own regeneration, or is it only the object of some other subject's hopefulness on its behalf? More recent versions of the passage tend to settle the question. The New Living Translation makes the tree the hoper (“Even a tree has more hope!”); the New International Version casts the tree as the hoped-for (“At least there is hope for a tree”). But even as these versions dispute, together, the question of whether trees are subjects or objects of hope, they all know for whom hope is absent. In an early note on transspecies grief, ecologist and hospital chaplain Phyllis Windle recorded her astonishment at finding that she was “in mourning for these beautiful trees,” the Great Smoky