A thought and its source

 One of the quotations attributed to the naturalist John Muir is not in any of his books: 

Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.

 

The sentence was written by Muir in the margin of one of Emerson’s books.

Dan Styer, an emeritus professor of physics at Oberlin College, wrote a short essay on how he began looking for the source of the quotation and found that the answer was in Vol. I, p. 55 of Emerson’s Prose Works in Beinecke Library at Yale.

I like the essay. It shows how one mind can be influenced by another. In this case, a voice that strikes me as quintessential Muir is Muir responding to another interesting thinker.

I also like the way Professor Styer kept at it. He was interested in Muir’s thought and was willing to track down one interesting thought to a not-so-obvious source.

• Sources: Dan Styer, “The Quotable John Muir,” Jan. 8, 2013. It’s here:

https://www2.oberlin.edu/physics/dstyer/Muir/QuotableJohnMuir.html

I came across the story in Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016. The Muir quotation is on p. 315, and the story behind it is in a note on p. 410.

Euripides: ‘Hecuba’

 Euripides’ Hecuba is one string of misery, all falling on the queen of the fallen city of Troy.

Hecuba, enslaved with the other Trojan women, is powerless and endures two crimes.

The Greek soldiers vote to sacrifice her daughter Polyxena over the grave of their champion Achilles. It’s a barbaric, superstitious custom, but the Greek leaders, not wanting to buck the majority, follow along. They shrug and tell Hecuba it’s political necessity — it can’t be helped.

Hecuba protests to the Greek hero Odysseus, whose life she once saved. Odysseus acknowledges he owes her but falls back on a technicality: he would intervene to save Hecuba’s life, but not her daughter’s. The decision prompts one of the great tirades against politicians in literature.

As Hecuba is reeling from this tragedy, one of the enslaved women finds the body of Polydorus, the one child Hecuba thought was safe. Fearing Troy might fall, Hecuba and her husband, Priam, had sent Polydorus to grow up under the guardianship of Polymestor, a Thracian king. When Troy fell, Polymestor killed the boy and pocketed his money.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, points out that the first crime is the key. Euripides isn’t so interested in what the crime did to the victims — to Polyxena and Hecuba — but what it did to the Greeks.

The Greeks thought of themselves as civilized people — not barbarians, like Polymestor.

Civilized people are not cruel people. But in Euripides’ telling, they do cruel things out of political expediency, catering to the superstitions of the majority.

The cruel abuse was heaped on Hecuba until she snapped. She couldn’t overpower the conquering Greeks, but she could lure the greedy Polymestor into her tent — urging him to bring his two little boys — with promises of more money. It shocked the Greeks when she blinded Polymestor and killed his sons.

There are many wonderful lines in the play. I like this one, spoken by King Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks, as he grapples with the question of who is culpable:

 

Then no man on earth is truly free.

All are slaves of money or necessity.

Public opinion or fear of prosecution

forces each one, against his conscience,

to conform.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Hecuba is on pp. 225-32.

Hecuba, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides III in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 1-68. The quotation is on p. 46.

A smile on my face

 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.

The notebook as a teachable skill

 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.

Autumn in the Piedmont

 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.

What Mr. Jefferson said

 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

Thinking on paper

 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/