The corpse flower, when it opens every few years, attracts admirers by the tens of thousands. It is only in bloom for two or three days, and for those days it stinks. People stand in line to savor its rare stench. What this says about us may be best left uninterrogated. In any case, it can take centuries for mass infatuations, their causes and consequences, to come into focus. When they finally do, we get such books as The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession (Harvard University Press, $29.95), by Sarah Bilston, a professor of English literature at Trinity College in Connecticut. Bilston studies the orchidomania of late-nineteenth-century Britain, during which hothouses spilled over with blooms, hundreds of thousands of them, in febrile purples, ambers, and scarlets. The top nurseries had baronial grounds and names that summoned Savile Row: James Veitch & Sons, Messrs. Rollisson’s, Sander & Co. (This last was Her Majesty’s “Royal Orchid Grower.”) They drew streams of visitors and floods of revenue. At auction, a single orchid once fetched 650 guineas, more than $120,000 today. The flowers’ rarity and fickle temperament—even shielded from the dour English weather by greenhouses, they survived only under the greenest of thumbs—made them precious commodities. Like bottles of champagne recovered from old shipwrecks, they invited connoisseurship.

In time, the most coveted species of orchid, Cattleya labiata, became a potent symbol of Britain’s imperial reach. It came from Brazil. Few knew where, exactly, but few cared—it had been wrested from some faraway land, and that’s what counted. For a botanist, Bilston points out, “exotic” means simply “nonnative,” but for the orchid-sniffing public, as for others since, the term was more perfumed. (Think of Jack Horner, the pornographer in Boogie Nights, who claims to make “exotic pictures.”) The name labiata, conferred by the botanist John Lindley, referred to “the orchid’s pronounced crimson lip,” Bilston writes, conjuring “women, sexuality, desire.” Full-color illustrations of the species in, for instance, the Floral Cabinet and Magazine of Exotic Botany turned it into “a sort of botanical pinup,” she notes, emphasizing the flower’s “massive, pouting, sensual blooms” alongside rhapsodic descriptions: “Who can behold with indifference this ‘herb of glorious hue’ ”? It was fiendishly difficult to propagate, which made it all the more desirable. The labiata, the Floral Cabinet declared, was “unquestionably the queen of orchidaceous plants.”

By the Camp-Fire in the Odontoglossum Forest, an illustration by Gustave Guggenheim, after photographs by Albert Millican from Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter: An Account of Canoe and Camp Life in Colombia, While Collecting Orchids in the Northern Andes, 1891. Courtesy Brown University and the Biodiversity Heritage Library

The plant had arrived in Britain courtesy of William Swainson, an amateur naturalist who had traveled to Brazil in 1816. Hoping to make a name for himself back home, Swainson ventured inland, raking up every flora and fauna in sight. Of the hundreds of plants he shipped to England, the orchid does not seem to have attracted much of his interest. It probably wasn’t even in bloom when he found it. He died in New Zealand in 1855, apparently unaware that his discovery was a celebrated curio well on its way to becoming an international fetish object.

Four years later, James Veitch & Sons unveiled a hybrid orchid, Cattleya × dominiana, a kind of designer flower for the masses. Their spectacular new breed—“blush coloured, with a delicately veined lip” and a “pale citron centre”—was a triumph of science, but also, maybe, according to critics of the day, an affront to God’s will. The specimen, which represented the new, had the unexpected effect of making the original labiata seem old and therefore more appealing to those Victorians who felt accosted by modernity. The flower’s “resistance to propagation now looked less like an annoyance and more a signal of its authenticity,” Bilston writes. Before long, botanists became convinced that the true labiata had been lost, so steadfastly did it resist the forces of mass production. Specimens sold under its name were mere imitations. The genuine article must have crept out the door as the telegraph walked in.

Undeterred, the most prominent nurseries sent “rootless, working-class, ill-educated” men in pursuit of the flower, glutting Brazil with orchid hunters in the 1880s. Boys’ adventure stories of the time, with such titles as The Priceless Orchid and The Orchid Seekers, depicted these men as bare-chested romantics whose strength and valor (one hero “could throw a cricket ball one hundred and ten yards”) enabled them to scale every precipice and scour every jungle mountain single-handedly. The reality was less swashbuckling. Hunters gambled, fought, fell ill, and died on the job. They scrawled frustrated notes to their miserly bosses: “please state the localities [the orchids] come from when possible as Brazil is a large country to search for plants in,” wrote one. “Tell me why you write to me in every second letter to keep sober,” demanded another. To maintain a competitive edge, they bribed the locals, circulated false stories about their findings, disguised their shipments home, and peed on one another’s plants. “Plant hunting required cunning, resilience, and a seemingly unshakeable sense of entitlement to the resources of other nations,” Bilston writes. Those resources proved to be less fecund than anticipated. Collectors had been “ransacking the forests,” as one put it, for decades, and the forests themselves were soon “stripped.”

Left: Cattleya Labiata lindl. var. Alfrediana, a color lithograph, after an illustration by G. Putzys from Lindenia: Iconographie des orchidées, Vol. 2, 1886, by Jean Jules Linden. Courtesy the Meise Botanic Garden, Belgium, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library Right: A lithograph by Maxim Gauci, after an illustration of a beetle from The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala, 1837–43, by James Bateman. Courtesy the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Peter H. Raven Library, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library

On the docks in England, no one could be sure that the boatloads of orchids were genuine labiatas, but they were proclaimed as such anyway. Advertisements boasted of the rediscovery of the grand, old autumn-flowering cattleya from “Swainson’s original hunting ground.” One 1891 photograph, clearly staged, showed “sober men examining paper records,” Bilston writes, “while a fascinated child reaches hungrily toward orchids that spill from a crate.” But the “lost” orchid was recovered just as the exotic was falling out of fashion. Xenophobia, along with the cottage-garden movement, which favored native flora, brought the orchid craze to a gradual halt. By 1909, a spoof ad told of a New Guinea orchid “that only grows among the bones of dead men”—perhaps a more macabre joke than intended, given the lives claimed by the trade.

The title of Yiyun Li’s new memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), could serve as a rebuke to anyone who lusts after orchids. One must, Li writes, “refrain from giving the flowers and plants metaphorical or symbolic meaning beyond nature’s mere way of being”:

After James died, someone sent me a picture of spring flowers and touted “earth’s regenerative power.” . . . My garden is not a metaphor for hope or regeneration, the flowers are never tasked to be the heralds for brightness and optimism. Things in nature merely grow. There is no suicidal or angry rose, there is no depressed or rebellious lily. Plants have but one goal: to live. . . . They live until they die—and either they die as destined by nature or are cut down by other elements in nature.

James, the younger of Li’s two children, killed himself in February 2024 by jumping in front of a train. His brother, Vincent, had died the same way, six years earlier. They were nineteen and sixteen, respectively. Li states this plainly, because her book is “about facts and logic, written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be.” In life, James dealt in figures and philosophies; though he had studied at least seven languages, he rarely spoke, and in kindergarten wrote a sign that read, “IM NOt TaLKING Becuase [sic] I DON’t WaNT TO!” At six, he announced that his mother could never know the contents of his mind, and that “the world is made of dots and squiggly lines.” Li addresses his death, and her life after it, in the same analytical register, with a spirit of “radical acceptance.” James “knew that we would respect his decision to take his own life, and he trusted that we would endure his death, as we had done it once before.”

This endurance extends to Li’s writing. Her novel Where Reasons End, from 2019, tried to feel its way into Vincent’s death. Finding that approach unsuitable in a book for James, she decides to proceed “through thinking, rather than feeling.” It’s a principled and forbidding project, an edifice to reason built on a foundation of sorrow. Li in these pages appears neither guarded nor vulnerable, neither stoic nor inflamed. She describes a cerebral asperity “in which lucidity and opacity are one and the same,” a ferocious empiricism that accepts the limits of what’s real. Her lack of emotion baffles the people around her, who expect, or even require, keening expressions of grief.

Li has no patience for this last word—the self-help set has left it tortured and emaciated. “Grief” now denotes an almost metamorphic process that ends with the larval bereaved becoming a butterfly. Li doesn’t see herself ever leaving the cocoon. She chafes at the euphemisms that surround death, and I share her aversion to these. When I hear “passed away,” I think the deceased has executed a daring merge on a superhighway; “zest for life” sounds as if his memory were seasoned with a secret blend of herbs and spices. People find it severe to use the word “die” when someone dies.

There is an abundance of ways to avert one’s gaze from the corpse. After Vincent’s suicide, a few mothers told Li they planned to tell their kids—Vincent’s friends—that he’d had an accident. “I explained to the mothers that their proposal seemed to me a disrespect of their own children and a violation of Vincent’s memory,” she writes. “Not calling a fact by its name can be the beginning of cruelty and injustice.”

Li chronicles many feeble efforts to acknowledge the magnitude of her suffering; parts of her book are a kind of etiquette guide. There are clumsy overtures from God-fearing types, and tactless stabs at empathy: “Her children are in college now, and my child is in college too. So we are in a similar situation as you are. We don’t get to see our children that often, either.” There are friends so flummoxed that they simply say nothing, and never get around to saying anything else. Strangers cozy up to her—she teaches at Princeton, and perhaps, if they pay their respects just so, their children could enroll there. Most egregious is the woman who complains to Li that her daughter, a close friend of Vincent’s, did not receive a farewell text from him, as two others had.

Writers like to acknowledge the poverty of language, usually as we screw up the courage to try something fancy with it. Hordes of us are out there hoping to say the unsayable. Not Li. When she writes that “words fall short,” she means it: the one stock phrase she likes is “there is no good way to say this.” The power of Things in Nature Merely Grow resides in her refusal to pay obeisance to words. Even so, there are a few she returns to conspicuously, poignantly. One is “cloudless,” twice used to describe the faces of young people—not with envy, but with resentment. Another is “abyss.” During her own bout with suicidal depression, in 2012, Li wrote it on a page and showed it to another woman in the psych ward:

She squinted at the word for a long moment and sighed. “Abyss, abysmal, abysmally,” she said. “I feel abysmal, yes, I feel abysmal. Do you feel abysmal? Abyss, abysmal, abysmally.”

This halting, haunted recitation, almost like the conjugation of an unfamiliar verb, speaks to Li’s state more precisely than anything else in the book. “The abyss is my habitat,” she writes. “One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.”

“I should have rejoiced if the earth had swallowed me up and stifled me in the abyss. But my invincible sense of shame prevailed over everything.” That’s Rousseau, in his Confessions, explaining how he felt after he framed his household’s cook for stealing a ribbon. Even as the cook faced dismissal, Rousseau couldn’t admit that he was the thief. He was “absolutely desperate to avoid being stripped naked morally,” Frédéric Gros writes in A Philosophy of Shame: A Revolutionary Emotion (Verso, $24.95), translated from the French by Andrew James Bliss. In cataloguing the varieties of shame, Gros roughly defines it as “an amalgam of sadness and rage,” often rooted in the fear of exposure. For Descartes, it was melancholy percolating through self-love; for Spinoza, “a certain kind of sorrow which arises in one when he happens to see that his conduct is despised by others.” But philosophers have too often tossed it aside in favor of guilt, which appears to be more bound up in morality. Gros hopes to revive it as a force for change, citing Marx: “If a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.”

Studies in Suffocation I, a drawing by Robyn O’Neil © The artist. Courtesy the artist and the Menil Collection, Houston. Purchased with funds provided by the William F. Stern Acquisitions Fund; Raymond Stainback; Susanne and William E. Pritchard III; Candace Baggett and Ron Restrepo; and Julie Kinzelman and Christopher Tribble

A Philosophy of Shame is never quite sprung. The book extends a rickety rope bridge between psychological shame—the I-must-bury-my-face kind that follows when one is caught being stupid, horny, or poor—and patriotic shame, which fells those in power with its righteous anger. (Gros quotes the historian Carlo Ginzburg: “The country we call ours is the one that we are capable of feeling ashamed of.”) What links personal and political shame is “imagination,” which, when it’s “misfiring,” generates the “derisive laughter and hateful mockery” of the crowd: “How they must look down on me right now, or worse still pity me!” By contrast, Gros writes, “a properly functioning imagination rises ardently to the occasion . . . inventing new identities and sources of solidarity and channeling rage.”

Perhaps my own imagination isn’t properly functioning. On the heels of Li’s memoir—“words fall short”—how disorienting it is to find Gros in a categorical mode, trusting words to classify and systematize. Distinguishing between guilt and shame, he writes that the former “penetrates us personally, burrowing a tunnel of anxiety in the entity that we call the self,” while the latter is “a dense and pervasive substance, an objective state that does not depend on my own personal emotions.” Maybe so, but I couldn’t always tell them apart in his account. Gros’s efforts to isolate shame only prove how imbricated it is with guilt, humiliation, remorse, and rage.

That said, Gros still offers a diverting whistle-stop tour: past “the self-esteem merchants,” who beg us to stop being ashamed of ourselves; the honor-bound families for whom shame was “a deliquescence, a liquefying of prestige”; the victims of rape and incest, who struggle to foist their shame on perpetrators; and “the man standing in front of the firing squad who realizes, just before the rifles go off, that his laces are undone.” His touchstones—Camus, Sartre, Deleuze, the Paris Commune, the soixante-huitards—are resolutely, sometimes hermetically, French, but this is part of the charm. “People tend to forget,” he writes, “that the opposite of guilty is innocent, but the opposite of shameful is indeed shameless—in the latter case, it is the first word that carries the positive ethical value.” We need shame, then, in some ambiguous, malformed way or another. The alternative is a life of leniency, unsullied by any kind of reproach: cloudless.