Oh that smell

 A thick stand of camphorweed, Heterotheca subaxillaris, grows along the Yellow River just south of the Rockbridge. You can’t miss the identification. Break off a twig, and the odor will put you back in grandmother’s medicine cabinet.

Camphorweed grows across North America, often in sandy places. In Texas, you see it near the beaches on the coast and in the uplands where longleaf pine grows. In Georgia, the Yellow River moves sand around, creating some nice habitats.

The stand I saw was blooming — loads of yellow flowers on dusty green, belt-high plants.

Campho-Phenique, a combination of camphor and phenol, has been around since 1884. My mother and grandmother used it for general first aid, covering everything from fever blisters to bug bites. I spent a good part of my childhood slathered in it.

Distinctions, judgments and doubt

 J.L. Austin thought that usage provides clues that could help us unsnarl philosophical problems, including the thorny problems involving the mind. Austin thought that philosophers should pay attention to the usage of any natural language.

Consider diakrino, an example from ancient Greek. English speakers are used to active and passive voices. Greek has a third‚ the middle voice, for actions that one does for oneself or one’s own benefit.

Diakrino is an interesting case showing the workings of grammar on a concept. In the active voice, it means to make a distinction or to differentiate. In the passive voice, it means a judgment, a distinction made for or about you by others. In the middle voice — all these distinctions being made in your own head — it means to dispute or argue. And, if you’re arguing with yourself, you can be talking about doubt.

In our society, doubt — what a person doubts and why — often is a question of psychology; an inquiry might be handled with the tools of psychological analysis. 

In the account of diakrino, there’s no psychology in the modern sense of the word. The road to doubt, as described above, is just a question of how language was once used.

I can’t help thinking of Seneca’s aphorism: “The doubting pleases me as much as knowing.”

Back to school

Students are back in school in Stone Mountain. It seems early, but I grew up in a different time and a different place. The old Texans didn’t like to see kids in the schoolyard while crops were still in the field.

Montaigne pointed out that agriculture and education are similar. Whether it be cabbages or human beings, the problem isn’t planting them. The myriad cares come later.

Montaigne was an advocate of letting children find their own interests, but he thought good teachers could help.

A poor teacher loads the student’s memory like a pack mule, while a good teacher asks questions that help each student find his own questions. A poor teacher focuses the pupil’s attention on making a living, while a good teacher inspires her to think about what she could contribute to her community.

Montaigne’s principle:

 

We should always guide them toward the best and most rewarding goals.

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 168. 

A small practice

 I subscribe to American newspapers. I believe we should keep informed, especially given the threat to the democracy.

But reading American newspapers comes with a risk: You could get the impression that the entire world is about the Current Occupant of the White House.

As an antidote, I’ve made it a practice to spend a few minutes a day with a Mexican newspaper. My Spanish is laughable or tragic, perhaps both, so this practice is laborious. I plod along with a dictionary.

Does this practice do any good?

I’ve learned that archeologists think they’ve found The Land of the White Jaguar, the home of a Mayan group that held out against the Spanish for more than a century. (It’s in Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala.)

I’ve also learned about Juan Pablo Contreras, a young composer whose music I like. (His “Mariachitlán,” performed by the National Youth Orchestra, is a delight, and his “Pirámide del Sol” is thorny but intriguing.)

This small practice helps me connect to parts of the world that have nothing to do with the Current Occupant of the White House. Maybe it will help me to keep a sense of proportion.

Traherne: ‘Shadows in the Water’

 The poet Thomas Traherne pictured a child looking at reflections in a puddle. Perhaps the child’s imagination ran a bit wild. That happens to adults too.

I like the poem as a gentle meditation on what we think we see.

 

         I my companions see 

         In you, another me. 

They seemèd others, but are we; 

Our second selves these shadows be. 

 

It’s a reminder that the difference we think we see between ourselves and others can be illusory.

Traherne was a 17^th century poet whose poems were lost for a couple of centuries. Lovers of literature in the 20^th century knew him. People in the 18^th and 19^th centuries did not.

Traherne also reminds me to talk about poets who should not be forgotten.

• Source: Thomas Traherne’s “Shadows in the Water” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50448/shadows-in-the-water

What slow reading is like

 Yesterday’s note on Lorenzo Da Ponte was prompted by a remark in David Markson’s Reader’s Block: 

Lorenzo da Ponte ended his days teaching Italian at what would later become Columbia University.

 

It was just a remark, something that came out of the narrator’s memory. (The narrator is called the Reader.) That one line alone did not send me down the rabbit hole. The line hit me because I have been having a conversation with a friend about tolerance — how we behave ethically toward one another even when our values aren’t completely shared. In the context of that conversation, Markson’s line sent me after the rabbit.

I read 15 words in a book Markson calls a novel and spent an hour thinking about implications and possibilities.

That is not the way most novels work. But isn’t that the way conversations with interesting friends work? Isn’t that the way reading works — at least good reading?

It’s slow reading. It’s also delicious fun.

Not long ago, Orange Crate Art had some links to some earlier posts on reading, including one that quoted Zadie Smith. Smith said that we now think of reading as something like going to the movies: we tune in and are entertained. We are passive. She said the classical analogy was that reading was like reading music: you brought your instrument, your attention, your best abilities to the text and tried to play the music an earlier mind had imagined.

It might take me the rest of the year to get through Reader’s Block. I’m in no rush.

• Sources: David Markson, Reader’s Block; Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996, p. 61.

Michael Leddy’s note “Zadie Smith on reading,” Orange Crate Art, Nov. 10, 2006, is here:

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2006/11/zadie-smith-on-reading.html

What comes in with immigrants

 If you can name the first person on the faculty of Columbia who was raised Jewish, you can name the first faculty member who was a Catholic priest.

They are the same person, Lorenzo Da Ponte. He’s less well known as an academic than as a librettist. He wrote the books for Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Casi fan tutti. He collaborated with several composers on 28 operas.

Any account of how opera came to this country would have to include Da Ponte. But any account of his life would have to mention how he was banished from the Republic of Venice. While serving as a priest, he was accused of living in a brothel, where he staged shows. Casanova was a carousing buddy.

Da Ponte left Venice with his mistress and their children. He found fame in Vienna.

Da Ponte was a colorful, notorious and brilliant. I don’t know what the equivalent of “Mozart’s collaborator” would be on an academic resume today, but I imagine it would be impressive.

I’ve been thinking about Da Ponte because I’ve been thinking about tolerance in democratic societies.

Da Ponte was in his 50s when he came to this country and became a citizen at 79. At 84, he was behind the construction of the country’s first real opera house.

This was the 1830s, the days of Jacksonian Democracy, a period when Jews, Catholics and immigrants were persecuted, when Native Americans were set on the Trail of Tears, when slavery was defended and expanded.

It was a famous age of intolerance, a period when the country was focused on what it could keep out, rather than the good it could let in.