Coveralls

 Thoreau warned of any enterprise that requires new clothes. The same warning ought to come with projects that make you find old clothes.

The job to clear the overgrown woodlot began with a search for my coveralls. Years ago, when I would feed cattle with my grandfather in winter, we’d put on coveralls and load the pickup truck with baled hay. I’d carry range cubes in the pockets of my coveralls. Mutt, the Brahma bull, would stick his nose into my pockets and help himself.

Coverall pockets are big and deep enough to accommodate the nose of a 2,000-pound bull. They also are deep enough to carry a Thermos bottle of coffee.

My coveralls were made by Roebucks. I’ve had them for decades. They are dark green but have acquired a patina of paint, engine oil and other substances.

When people imagine Texans tending to cattle, they don’t usually think of coveralls. They also don’t usually imagine lace-up boots. Mine are all hooks, no eyes. Our boots were the only expensive items in our outfits. My grandmother ordered them from a mail-order company that catered to farm families.

My grandfather never went outside without his Stetson, but I was never fussy. Soon after the Iron Curtain fell, I bought a felt cap made by Hückel, which has a factory in the Czech Republic. The cap’s warm and shows less wear than I do. 

If you’re curious, this getup works in layers: long johns, flannel shirt, rag sweater, coveralls and a wool scarf knitted by my grandmother. Even on cold days, I shed layers as I work. The woodlot looks like a clothesline by the time I break for lunch.

Does it seem strange to start a new project by examining old memories? Maybe it’s just natural at my age.

An economist talks about goods

 E.F. Schumacher, the economist, spoke of two kinds of goods: ephemeral and eternal.

Food is vital, but it doesn’t last. On the other hand, nobody worries about depreciation on the Taj Mahal.

Schumacher held that we humans are terrible at analyzing our ephemeral needs. Our needs are modest. But we are prone to confuse wants with needs. We fritter away our time, resources and energy on ephemeral goods.

If we were frugal on the ephemeral side, we would convert some of our resources to the creative work of producing eternal goods.

Schumacher said it was obvious that industrial societies had emphasized the production of ephemeral goods at the expense of eternal goods. Earlier societies had done the opposite. Most of humanity’s cultural heritage predated the industrial revolution, in Schumacher’s view.

In 1975, Schumacher said this:

 

Frugal living in terms of ephemeral goods means a dogged adherence to simplicity, a conscious avoidance of any unnecessary elaborations, and a magnanimous rejection of luxury — puritanism, if you like — on the ephemeral side.

 

Fifty years ago, that was a coherent argument about what people should be doing. You could have based a political platform on that idea.

Today, it seems politics is all about the economy, meaning it’s all about ephemeral consumer goods.

• Source: E.F. Schumacher’s untitled essay is in Voices for Life: Reflections on the Human Condition, edited by Dom Moraes; New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975, pp. 133-40. The quotation is on p. 139. The editor asked 25 thinkers the same question: “What do you see as the quality of life, and what do you think it will become in the future?”

Winter solstice 2024

 As December began, I went into the woodlot at the back of our property. I went to work. I wasn’t just sightseeing.

We’ve been in Stone Mountain two years, and I’ve had plenty to do around the house and garden. It took me that long to get to this project, but I’ve been in the woodlot just about every day this month.

The place was so overgrown I began by making a path, cutting through saplings, privet, briars and ivy with a chainsaw. I had to follow my saw. The brush was impenetrable.

Some of trees in the lot are taller than 60 feet. But the forest floor is crowded with light-starved saplings. English ivy, an invasive species that’s thicker than kudzu in our part of Georgia, is all over the place.

I came across a coyote den, abandoned when the old occupants took note of the our German shepherd. On one of the few days I didn’t get into the woodlot, I watched two does grazing.

It’s a lovely place, and I want to make some trails and a place to sit. The Wise Woman is thinking about a she-shed.

I have no hope of getting rid of the English ivy, but I want to clear some areas for native plants. Some Christmas ferns might get started this weekend.

It seems like a good time to mention this project. I brought a yule log in from the woodlot, cut from a downed tree. It might be big enough to burn through the long night.

Stevenson: 'Ticonderoga'

 I don’t usually like ghost stories. But I liked Robert Louis Stevenson’s creepy poem “Ticonderoga.”

In Stevenson’s telling of the Scottish legend, a Stewart kills his friend, a Cameron. Coming to his senses, the killer runs to the dead man’s brother and says only that he’s on the run for killing a man and begs protection. The fellow promises to stand by the wanted man.

The promise that seemed noble appears in an eerie light when the ghost shows up and demands justice. The brother says he can’t break an oath.

The ghost pleads, but his brother won’t budge. The ghost says he’ll say no more till they meet at Ticonderoga. The brother has never heard of the place.

The disturbed brother travels the world as a soldier in a Scottish regiment of the British army. British forces were crushed by the French at Ticonderoga, N.Y., in 1758.

I had read some Stevenson without running across “Ticonderoga.” I owe the recommendation to Arthur Conan Doyle, who said it’s one of the best narrative poems in English.

• Source: https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/ticonderoga-legend-west-highlands

How libraries are built

 Arthur Conan Doyle said that Edinburgh once had a bookstore that kept an egg box full of “volumes in various stages of decay.” Any book in the box could be had for twopence. 

I never passed without diving into this lucky bag, where among heaps of theological literature, obsolete algebras, torn Latin grammars and tables of logarithms, one might occasionally come upon what would repay one.

 

In the days when money was tight, he built his library with classics. I was delighted that he found the Essays of Sir William Temple. 

Among his finds was a book on international law published in 1642. An inscription says it was acquired by Gulielimi Whyte in 1672. Doyle thought of the previous owner as Willie Whyte, lawyer.

The detail comes from a series of six articles called “Before My Bookcase.” Doyle was recalling his library from afar, offering his views of what was good and what was not.

Some of his views are wonderful. His most battered book was a volume of Macaulay, and he said that Stevenson could “touch that weird, vague note which haunts the imagination.” I’m not sure what more can be said about that fellow.

But a lot of what Doyle said and wrote was beyond eccentric. I take the articles as a kind of antidote, perhaps even as a vaccine. I hope they will keep me from expressing strong views about literature.

• Source: Arthur Conan Doyle, “Before My Bookcase,” was originally published in Great Thoughts magazine between May 5 and June 30, 1894. Five of the six parts are here:  

https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Before_My_Bookcase.

A blog by any other name

 When Eric Hoffer wondered whether he was slipping in old age, he began a journal. 

I wanted to find out if the necessity to write something significant every day would revive my flagging alertness to the first, faint stirrings of new ideas.

 

He recalled the sluice box he’d used as a prospector. What would happen if he searched for ideas instead of for gold?

I have taken several stabs at calling this collection of notes something other than a blog. I’d thought it might be a concatenation. It might be a sluice box.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath; New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Choosing a subject

 Advice to the young: Choose a subject that interests you and make yourself the foremost expert on it.

Max Schuster, the book publisher, used to give new employees that advice. He apparently got to them quickly. Before anyone could tell the new folks where the restrooms and coffee pot were, Schuster told them what they were there for.

Schuster’s advice doesn’t work literally for me. I am not an expert on anything. But the spirit of his counsel is wonderful. It reminds me that there are such things as intellectual pleasures and that they ought to be part of my life.

• Source: Ronald Gross, The Independent Scholar’s Handbook; Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1982, p. xii. If you’re interested in the direct quotation, see ‘One way to welcome the new guy,’ March 14, 2024. As you might guess, I’m still thinking about projects for the coming year.