"Ever since we had arrived in the United States, my classmates kept asking me about magic carpets. - They don't exist-I always said. I was wrong. Magic carpets do exist. But they are called library cards."

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Yet soil is miraculous. It is where the dead are brought back to life. Here, in the thin earthy boundary between inanimate rock and the planet's green carpet, lifeless minerals are weathered from stones or decomposed from organic debris. Plants and microscopic animals eat these dead particles and recast them as living matter. In the soil, matter recrosses the boundary between living and dead; and, as we have seen, boundaries-edges-are where the most interesting and important events occur.

— Toby Hemenway