Oct. 15 is the first day of early voting in Georgia. We got out in the morning and were delighted to see crowds at the polls.
When I got out of the fleet at 20, I promised myself I would never miss an election. I don’t think political campaigns are good for our collective mental health. But voting is. Casting a ballot was a delight.
I think that a lecture on keeping a notebook should have been part of my education. I probably needed several. Maybe one when I started high school. A remedial lecture when I started college.
I remember one lecture on the topic. It was presented by a scientist to a group of limnology students who were advanced enough to help the professors with research. The lesson was on how to keep a laboratory notebook. It was heavy on chemistry. (At one remote point in my life, I was proficient at the Alsterberg azide modification of the Winkler method for determining levels of dissolved oxygen in samples of water.)
I remember coming away from that lecture with a sense of clarity. I knew what the professor wanted. I had an example of how a gifted scientist went about his work.
I wish I’d had a similar lecture from someone in the humanities.
Sometimes I think this collection of notes is an attempt to fill in that gap.
The Yellow River was green Sunday. It looked like a stream in Central Texas.
We’ve had no rain since the hurricane sideswiped us in late September. The mudline on the vegetation in the river bottom is still there. The floodwaters, of course, are long gone. The stream is shallow, clear and green.
We are still finding new trails. Another walker said he’d seen a herd of 10 deer on a hill, so we left the riverbank and went into the uplands. The little herd had broken up, but we saw two doe.
I’ve mentioned a stand of ironweeds, dogfennel and beggar ticks that is a magnet for bees, butterflies and wasps. The ironweeds have stopped blooming. The beggar ticks were still flowering. The dogfennel plants were bowing, heads heavy with seed and dew.
The seasons are changing in the Piedmont. Around the house, we’ve put in our first load of firewood. I’ve started wearing sweatshirts on the morning dog walk.
The other morning, I fed Lucas, the old cat, and opened the door to let him out on the porch. He paused at the sill, looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, and scampered upstairs toward the cot in my study. The migratory birds are moving south. The migratory cat is moving toward a warm bed.
In college, when I should have been studying my textbooks, I read some of Thomas Jefferson’s letters. I was trying to get a sense of the cast of his mind, the shape of it, the way it worked.
If Jefferson could watch the news today and listen to the rhetoric of the presidential campaign, I don’t think his first remark would be about policy. I think he’d notice the heat of the campaign, the emotion.
In 1818, a friend sent Jefferson a stack of religious pamphlets. Jefferson was interested in public opinion and mass movements, including the movement we call the Great Awakening. Jefferson read the pamphlets and returned them, with a note saying:
… as usual, those whose dogmas are the most unintelligible are the most angry.
I live in the swing state of Georgia, and I’ve been bombarded with campaign fliers. We are still arguing about the candidates. But there’s no question about which one is the angriest.
• Source: Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Salma Hale, July 26, 1818, is at the National Archives and is available here:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-13-02-0173
Michael Dirda recommends Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. I’ll have to read it because thinking on paper is what I like to do.
I’m a keeper of notebooks. I found one recently I kept in college. On the first page were two quotations from Eric Hoffer:
That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor these flashes, we are without growth and without exhilaration.
Hoffer captured those flashes on notecards and in pocket notebooks. Then he rewrote his notes, over and again. It was a digestive process. He compared it to a cow chewing her cud. Slowly, the grass becomes cow, and not the other way around, he said.
If that sounds like work, it might be. But here’s Hoffer again:
But I remember how that day I got started on a beautiful train of thought ….
Those flashes, those flights of thought, are hard to beat.
• Michael Dirda, “The surprising history of the humble notebook”; The Washington Post, Oct. 4, 2024. It’s here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/10/04/notebook-history-roland-allen-review/
I wish that curiosity cabinets were back in style. It seemed that everyone in the Renaissance had one.
Athanasius Kircher, who kepts the independent scholars of the 17th century in touch, used to go on tours to examine the curiosity cabinets of interesting thinkers. Kircher would then write letters, reporting to his network of correspondents on who was studying what. That network strikes me as a vital. It was not just a general interest in empirical or experimental knowledge. It was the idea that sharing information that can be verified helps researchers who are interested in different fields.
I got interested in cabinets of curiosities through Sir Thomas Browne, whose own “cabinet of rarities” contained wonders.
I think this sort of things appeals to a certain cast of mind. If you tend to collect things, you’re interested in collecting. And part of collecting is organizing.
Macfarlane filled in a detail about how the cabinets were organized:
• Naturalia — items from nature.
• Arteficialia — ingenious items made by humans.
• Scientifica — scientific instruments.
• Exotica — wonders from afar, often from the New World.
• Mirabilia — things that just seemed miraculous.
It was kind of a Dewey Decimal Classification of the day.
• Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016, p. 216.
If you walk with a dog, you must clean up after him, and it was while performing this usually unmentioned duty that I discovered a wasp gall.
The gall was on the leaf of a white oak sapling and looked like a fuzzy marble, almost as big as a taw. The gall will soon fall with the leaf to the forest floor. In the spring, a wasp will emerge.
It seemed to be Druon quercusflocci. If I were a certain kind of naturalist I’d put the gall in a sheltered spot in the garage, wait for it to emerge in the spring and try to identify the adult. But the Wise Woman would object, so I proceed with doubt.
But the greater question, it seems to me, is how anyone who doesn’t have a dog finds these little specimens.
