A craftsman and his ways

 This weekend, I watched a craftsman work. He didn’t mind the company. 

His way of working struck me as careful, precise and unhurried.

As if he’d read my mind, he said: “I can work rapidly, quickly. But I don’t hurry.”

My Texas grandmother spoke of people and their ways — the idea being that the way people approach things is important.

I’m interested in the way people work and usually notice their habits, routines and schedules. But that’s just a part of it. Before some people pick up a tool, they bring an approach to their work — perhaps it’s something you sense in their demeanor or presence — that’s subtle but noticeable. 

The poet William Stafford gets at that quality with these lines:

 

Wisdom is having things right in your life

and knowing why.

If you do not have things right in your life

you will be overwhelmed:

you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.

 

• Source: William Stafford’s poem “The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune” is in The Way It Is; Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1998, p. 141. 

Not yet

Salmon P. Chase, who is probably best known as President Lincoln’s treasury secretary, was prone to brooding over the American experiment. Here’s a sample:

 

The Democracy is not democratic enough yet.

 

That was written in 1868, when Chase was chief justice of the United States. What was true in 1868 is still true today. Can you imagine what it would be like if the ranking officer in the federal judicial system believed that?

• Source: The original source is the Salmon Portland Chase Papers in the Library of Congress, but I found the remark in William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, p. 134.

Greats and commoners

 To think you can persuade people strikes many reasonable people as a quaint idea. Haven’t we all read about how polarized the country is? How no one in a political camp can be persuaded by evidence?

Some people don’t change their minds. The Make America Great Again movement is evidence that about four in 10 American voters are not persuaded by anything.

And yet public opinion does change.

I grew up in places that had separate drinking fountains and segregated schools.

When I was a kid, the level of raw sewage that could be released into the watersheds around New York City was roughly one quart in a bathtub-full.

Things that we once accepted disgust us today.

Human beings do change. Although it takes too long, we eventually see the light of better ways.

Trying to persuade others is slow, tedious and frustrating. But when people change their minds, the change is real in a way that what we call a political victory isn’t. One party wins an election and gets the upper hand on the other. But political parties can’t win elections indefinitely supporting policies that the majority opposes.

The slow, frustrating work of trying to persuade your neighbors can be discouraging. It helps me to take a long view and think of Montaigne, who lived through horrific times. When he started publishing his Essays in 1580, Europeans were exterminating each other in wars of religion.

Montaigne loved his place in the world but could appraise it objectively. He thought of himself as a Gascon rather than a Frenchman, a man of the region rather than a man of the country. He was loyal to the government of his day.

He was interested in the people, the institutions and the customs of the people, although he thought of the people, institutions and customs of his region, rather than of the country. He was not interested in the Great Men and Great Women of his day. As he put it:

 

I feel, by the way, no driving passion about the great of the land, neither love nor hatred. …

 

I find it hard to govern my own feelings about our country’s leaders. But I think Montaigne’s counsel is sound. There’s wisdom in paying attention to the health, education, welfare and prosperity of the ordinary people and their institutions. If you want better representative government, start with the people. The commoners, not the greats.

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 893. The quotation is from “On the useful and the honourable,” the opening essay in Book III.

Writers, check your spontaneous thought

 I would love to better understand how some creative people — Darwin and Beethoven, for example — worked “a relatively short day (four to five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of unstructured time, and long vacations.”

That description is from Michael Pollan’s piece in Latham’s Quarterly. Pollan says that The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought has details on the routines of people who seem to catch inspiration while keeping their noses far from any grindstones. I plan to take notes.

Pollan’s article had a couple of interesting claims:

• Spontaneous thought — I’m more familiar with the term “stream of consciousness” — was known to the Victorians. But they were uncomfortable because they thought that our thoughts should be controlled. They thought that a constant inner monolog was a sign of madness.

• Around World War I, something changed in the way people viewed spontaneous thought. The stream of consciousness technique used by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf went from the fringe to mainstream. What does that say about inspiration? Does it come from without or within? From the Muses or from somewhere inside, a deep place we aren’t always aware of? Are fiction writers — especially those like Woolf and Joyce — just better at tapping into the thoughts that escape the attention of us ordinary mortals?

• Source: Michael Pollan, “An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day”; Lapham’s Quarterly, June 29, 2026. The article, adapted from Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, is here:

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ordinary-mind-ordinary-day

When to be an American

 I’ve already had enough of the 250^th anniversary. I’m pretty sure that if Henry David Thoreau were still with us, he’d have had his fill too. I’ve quoted this line before:

I would remind my countrymen, that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.

 

• Source: The Quotable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 389. It’s a line from the essay “Slavery in Massachusetts.”

Can you imagine the 300th?

 I’m marking the 250th anniversary of the country by wondering what the 300^th will look like.

I won’t be around for it, but I suspect that our descendants will wonder how the people living now could have acquiesced in it all.

I think they’ll say that we, the generations living today, failed to stop the destruction of the natural world. We can’t keep a farm from being paved over to make a strip mall, much less stop the logging of the rainforests.

They’ll also say that we failed to stop the destruction of the poorest in our society by an economic system that was designed to prey on them. The design was just too obvious. Why else would we have the prison system we have? Why would we have debates in our legislatures about whether 600 percent is an acceptable annual rate for payday loans? I know the political arguments in defense these practices. I think our descendants won’t care to try to understand them. They’ll just despise them.

I could go on with this list of failures, but it would be longer than the Declaration of Independence. 

I don’t think the great people of our day, including the Current Occupant of the White House, will be much remembered by people marking the 300th. I think our descendants will remember the abuses and the failure to stop them. They’ll put the blame, rightly, on us, the ordinary citizens, who should have done better.

I’m expecting a bad review in 2076, but I’m going to go down swinging. I’m going to try to persuade other ordinary citizens that life is not only worth living, it’s worth thinking about. And if we really put our thinking caps on, we can find ways of living that are less destructive to the earth and to each other.

We can do better.

Listening to crows

 American crows caw year-round in our neighborhood. I’ve been trying to distinguish one call from another. One that’s easy to identify is the begging call made by juveniles.

I started hearing the youngsters in May. Some were still in the nest and are clamoring for food. Some were on the ground but couldn’t fly yet and called on the adults for help.

The begging call sounds more like a “wah” than a “caw.” If you don’t know it, there are links to recordings below.

Some of the fledglings will go off on their own, while others will stick around and help their parents. Biologists talk about “helpers,” adult birds that help the breeding pair.

Crows eat just about anything, and there’s a lot of calling among the adults. When someone discovers a bonanza, everyone in the family is called in, while members of other families are warned off.

Research suggests some gender roles among the helpers. Females tend to act as sentinels, allowing the other adults to forage. Males tend to act as enforcers, driving off crows from other families and joining in mobbing predators.

One call is unmistakable: the scream.

On a trip to Walker’s Pond, we saw six crows mobbing a red-tailed hawk. I think the hawk had discovered a young crow on the ground and had hoped for lunch. It left disappointed.

• Sources: Recordings of juvenile crows begging are here:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hs=MtVV&sca_esv=05ee508a17931f71&hl=en-us&q=Begging+call+juvenile+crow+youtube&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiY_ICkqLKVAxWP4ckDHb7gDzQQ1QJ6BAhXEAE&biw=312&bih=516&dpr=3#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:1f9f8c5a,vid:JtrVloeFzFQ,st:0
and here:

https://youtu.be/OnBD9As92fE?is=gvj6sroDK0m29nRQ

Dr. Robin Tarter’s master’s thesis, “The Vocal Behavior of the American Crow, Corvus Brachyrhynchos”; The Ohio State University, 2008, is available here:

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=osu1204876597&disposition=inline