The art of the obituary

 Michael Dirda says the best obituaries “juxtapose obvious public accomplishments with the sheer strangeness of people’s lives.”

I think he’s right. I think the same is true of stories about fictional people.

Take Sherlock Holmes, for example. Catching criminals is some kind of public accomplishment, but does that make for a good life, an interesting life? It’s hard to say. But if you add that achievement to an eccentric personality, you have something.

Holmes’s crime solving was good, but I kept reading when I learned he kept his correspondence pinned to the mantel with a jackknife and kept his stash of shag tobacco stuffed in a carpet slipper.

Dirda quotes Chekhov’s line that only a god could see the difference between success and failure in life.

It’s one reason we read obituaries. We want to know about the kind of lives other people have led, the experiments other people have tried.

• Michael Dirda, “What reading about dead people tells us about life”; The Washington Post, Jan. 16, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/01/16/joy-obituaries-reading-dirda/

Old festivals

 The ancient Athenians loved festivals. One pair was called the Kallynteria and the Plynteria, the tidying-up and the washing festivals.

Once a year, women went to Athena’s temple and swept it out. They took the ancient wooden statue of Athena on a procession to the sea, where they washed it and draped in fresh clothes. The round-trip might have been seven miles.
Young men were allowed to appear in the procession, but they were decorations. Women ran this operation.

I was thinking about the art of cleaning while taking a break from mopping the floors at our place. The Navy discovered I had a talent for swabbing decks more than 50 years ago. You have to wonder about the ways different people think about gender roles. 

The Athenians thought the day was unlucky and risky but celebrated anyway. The statue had a name: Athena, Guardian of the City. When the goddess was busy with her bath, who was protecting the city?

The Leibniz Appreciation Society

 Bertrand Russell, the logician, had a bust of Leibniz, an earlier logician, that he would address. Russell talked logic, of course. He also berated Leibniz for choosing a life at court rather than at a university. 

If you ask me, both were better logicians than philosophers. Interesting the reading public in their best work strikes me as a difficult assignment.

But I enjoyed Anthony Gottlieb’s new essay in The New Yorker. For me, the highlight was not Leibniz’s logic or his philosophy but his letters. He wrote 15,000. He had more than 1,000 correspondents.

Leibniz, like Gottlieb, was a networker: someone interested in circulating interesting ideas, hoping the good ones don’t get lost. 

• Source: Anthony Gottlieb, “He was a genius for the ages. Can we give him a break?” The New Yorker, Jan. 6, 2025.  It’s here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/13/leibniz-in-his-world-the-making-of-a-savant-audrey-borowski-book-review-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds-a-life-of-leibniz-in-seven-pivotal-days-michael-kempe

What to do about sickness

 Herodotus said that the Persians didn’t consult doctors. Herodotus knew that his fellow Greeks would be interested.

It was part of Greek culture that an individual must cultivate excellence. It was assumed that a person would practice a skill if he or she showed natural talent. People who were good at shipbuilding would become ship builders. People who were good at healing would become doctors.

To the Greek mind, excellence was important. It’s best to find an expert. The Persians thought differently — and their thinking was such a departure Herodotus described it.

 

Because they do not consult doctors, when someone is ill they carry him to the main square, where anyone who has personal experience of something similar to what the ill person is suffering from, or who knows someone else who has, comes up to him and offers him advice and suggestions about his illness. They tell him what remedy they found effective in their own case, or what they saw working in someone else’s case, which enabled them to recover from a similar illness. No one is allowed to walk past a sick person in silence, without asking what sort of illness he has.

 

Roy Bedichek used to say that you’re a fool or your own doctor by age 40. I heard a version of that adage often. I grew up among people who didn’t have much faith in the medical profession.

Like the ancient Persians, rural Texans considered the symptoms, recalled cases from history and offered counsel and recipes for cures.

Not having anything to offer was some kind of social failure.

• Sources and notes: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 87.

Thawing out

 Sunlight comes in at a low angle in winter, so you can see the water falling from the trees as the snow melts. The big drops fall like little flecks of lightning and explode like fireworks if they hit a limb on the way down.

That’s the way winter storm released its grip on Stone Mountain.

The storm was a trial for many Georgians. But the power stayed on at our house. The roads were a nightmare, but the Wise Woman is a relentless maker of plans and preparations. We stayed put.

The most astonishing thing about the storm was that 10 pounds of birdseed and suet were consumed by creatures that weigh ounces. Some of the smaller birds needed the food so badly they didn’t fly when I refilled the feeders.

If you’re of a mind to do one small thing that might give you a better connection to the natural world, get a feeder and tend it. Most commercial feeds feature a lot of millet, which isn’t that nutritious. In cold like we just had, the birds like the energy stored in fat-laden seeds. Sunflower seeds are good.

But don’t worry about the technical details. Just put up a small feeder and watch. The watching will inspire you to learn as you go.

Dashiell Hammett on Adak

 I wouldn’t have heard about PAFs — Premature Anti-Fascists — if a friend weren’t interested in Dashiell Hammett.

Hammett set the tone for American crime writing with The Maltese Falcon and other novels and stories. He made, and blew, a bundle in Hollywood in the 1930s.

In World War II, he enlisted as an ordinary soldier, although it took him three tries. He was 48 and in terrible health. He’d been treated for tuberculosis as a soldier in World War I. He drank and smoked constantly.

In 1942, the Army took him again, although it had already paid him disability money.

Hammett was shipped to Adak, Alaska, where he edited the base newspaper. Duty in the Aleutians wasn’t exactly coveted, and the book on Adak was that the Army sometimes sent troublemakers there, including PAFs. These were leftists who’d seen Hitler coming. They were the kind of people who went to Spain to fight.

Hammett was involved in leftist politics and hated fascism. After serving in the Army in both world wars, he would be sent to prison after refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

• Sources: Peter Porco, “Deadline Adak: Dashing Dashiell Hammett’s Adak newspaper for the troops”; Anchorage Daily News, Jan. 18, 2015.

https://www.adn.com/we-alaskans/article/deadline-adak-dashing-dashiell-hammett-adak-newspaper-troops/2015/01/18/

Herodotus on Persians

 I think I like Herodotus because the space he carves out in a reader’s imagination is vast. His reports on the ancient world can’t be taken as the literal truth. But he helps us imagine what distant people might have been like.

Herodotus says the Persians took education seriously but had only three subjects: horsemanship, archery and honesty.

That’s not literally true. Herodotus later tells us how the Persians bridged the Hellespont, suggesting expertise in mathematics, engineering and logistics.

Still, honesty must have been important to them in a way politically active Americans might find baffling. In his account of the Persians’ religion, Herodotus says that the two chief sins were lies and debt. Lying was the worst. Debt was not in itself a problem, but the Persians thought it led necessarily to lying, which was.

• Sources and notes: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 62-3. The Histories, which Herodotus viewed as nine books, are on my list for 2025.