Hortus Botanicus

At the Hortus Botanicus—Amsterdam’s living diorama of imperial botany masquerading as ecological benevolence—I drifted through a series of climate-controlled follies, where tropical humidity serves less to sustain life than to steam the spectacles of liberal guilt. The palms stood like listless civil servants awaiting reassignment, while the succulents arrayed themselves in a tableau of passive-aggressive minimalism, daring anyone to mistake endurance for beauty. In the butterfly house—humid, apocalyptic, and faintly absurd—the doomed insects spiraled against netting in a fluttery reenactment of failed utopias. Every Latin nameplate seemed less a taxonomy than a veiled confession: this too was taken. And all the while, the city outside ticked on in its tidy, Calvinist stupor, oblivious to the verdant museum of plunder perspiring politely behind glass.