Reading up on Carl Linnaeus Life is mere taxonomy, I’m half-inclined to think, reading up on Carl Linnaeus, master of the plants. We need to know where things belong; a book mis-filed is lost forever. By twenty-five our frames are set, those matrices of time and space. First-night loves are in there somewhere; first-time trains from first-time airports; the dawn when your first child was born … and deaths as well, of course. It’s true steel drawers will bend a little; Linnaeus got a few things wrong. And, plainly, our additions still outnumber our deletes—or will until an age of…