Why I read stories

  People read stories for different reasons. I read them like scripture. “Scripture” is what people in the Western world might say. People in the East might call them “teaching stories.”

One of my favorite stories from Zen tradition is about two monks who go on a trip at the behest of their monastery. They must keep a vow of silence during the day. They must avoid any impropriety.

The monks travel and eventually reach an enormous mud puddle. As they are reconciling themselves to wading through the muck, they notice a beautiful girl in a beautiful dress. She also is looking at the puddle with dismay.

The older monk, without speaking, picks the girl up and carries her across the muck and puts her safely on the other side. The monks continue on their way.

At night, when they are permitted to speak, the younger monk erupts. He chastises the older monk for not only getting close to a woman but touching her. His behavior brought shame on himself and also on the monastery. The young monk went on at length and finally wore himself out.

When the rant finally stopped, the older monk said: “Are you still carrying that girl? I put her down hours ago.”

Robert Penn Warren’s “Blackberry Winter” is a girl-in-a-pretty-dress story. It’s about something that happens to a boy, and the boy carries around the memory for decades.

In today’s culture, such events are traumatic. Warren’s story reminds us that we make memories from stuff.

It also reminds us that the most memorable things sometimes happen to us while we are doing something else.

I read stories and sometimes get carried away. I’m not looking for moral instruction. I’m reading for some insight into human nature. Before we make claims about how humans should behave, we ought to learn as much as we can what we’re capable of.

• Note: Robert Penn Warren’s “Blackberry Winter” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 363-84.

Visiting rituals

 My friend Christopher called my attention to the importance of small talk in rural life.

East Texas is known for its forests. The place has a lot of sawyers, and one of Christopher’s ancestors sharpened saws. There’s an art to it, and people who make their living in the woods value it.

Many sawyers are migrant workers. They follow the jobs, going wherever the timber companies are cutting.

The fellow who is about to spend hours sharpening a saw doesn’t know the sawyer, and the sawyer doesn’t know the sharpener. And so, before a deal was struck, there was some conversation. It might seem to be about the weather or baseball or the pecan crop. But all the while, each men was trying to get a sense of the character of the other fellow. No one likes to be cheated.

It’s a kind of visiting ritual, and there’s an art to it.

There are other kinds of visiting rituals. When my brother and I were boys, we would be taken visit distant kin. The visits had fixed elements, almost like elements of the liturgy in high church services.

If people were remarking on how the kids had grown, you were at the beginning of the ritual. If your mother was commenting on the lovely zinnias and a great aunt was giving her a couple of seedlings potted in a tin can, it was almost time to go.

• Note: Peter Taylor’s story “What You Hear From ‘Em?” has a specimen of a visiting ritual. It’s in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 327-42.

Stone Mountain, early April

 Someone threw a switch, and all the azaleas in Georgia bloomed.

The Piedmont is full of gardeners and gardens. I love wild places, but I also like gardens. The neighborhood looks like a party with so much color. In addition to the azaleas, you see Japanese kerria, tulips and daffodils. A Japanese cherry is blooming down the road.

I’ve been helping our handyman build a couple of sheds. Our garden is full of songbirds, butterflies, bees and wasps.

The Wise Woman, cleaning out the greenhouse, found an old coffee can. A wren had filled it with leaves, dog fur and paper scraps. We saw four eggs.

Zweig: ‘Montaigne’

 Ryan Holliday, owner of The Painted Porch bookstore in Texas, said he liked Stefán Zweig’s Montaigne so much he bought 1,000 copies. I got one of them.

Holliday is selling Montaigne as a book for our times. I think he’s right.

Montaigne’s Essays are not about the importance of keeping the lights on in troubled times. His essays are an example of that. Montaigne lived in times that were as chaotic, murderous and fanatical as our own. People were killing each other in the wars of religion. Neighbor turned on neighbor.

Zweig was writing during the rise of fascism and the horrors of World War II. He found Montaigne’s question compelling: What does an individual do when the whole world seems to be going mad?

Sometimes, a writer writes a sentence that captures the book. I think Zweig did that, and this is it:

 

He who thinks freely for himself, honors all freedom on earth.

 

The person who keeps his head and continues to use it has a role in troubled times. He or she doesn’t need to publish or broadcast. In troubled times, we don’t need influencers. An example will do.

• Source: Stefán Zweig, Montaigne; London: Pushkin Press, 2015, p. 116.

After the fire

 The foresters had set fire to the prairie just southeast of the South River. In early February, the tall grasses, including bushy bluestem, were shoulder high and brown.

This time, the earth was covered in short grasses that were as green as Ireland. The 12-foot pine saplings that had encroached into the prairie were crispy.

The foresters who manage the land around Panola Mountain State Park believe in “controlled burns.” The phrase is in quotation marks only because as a reporter I witnessed several bad fires that were set with good intentions.

What people call “prairie” in Georgia isn’t what people who live west of the Mississippi have in mind. People who live on the Great Plains talk about prairies as if they were limitless. The prairie near the South River might cover 15 acres.

It’s smaller than the grasslands I grew up with, but I can see the same tension between prairie and forest — grasses and trees. Fire is part of nature. The prairie expands into the forest after a fire. Without fire, the trees encroach into the prairie.

Since the month is almost gone, I should note that the dogwoods are blooming. Wysteria started earlier. I’ve also seen some silverbells, in genus Halesia.

Among the wildflowers, buttercups, violets and periwinkles are blooming.

It’s also the time for dewberry blossoms. The woods are full of them.

The annotations of Oliver Sacks

 Bill Hayes said Oliver Sacks annotated about 500 of his 10,000 books.

I like that. I don’t make notes in every book either.

Hayes pointed out a couple of things about Sacks’s habit. First, annotating is a kind of thinking. Sacks wasn’t making a note to remind himself of something when he came back to the book later. He might not return to his notes. Making notes was just a way of thinking about what he was reading.

Second, Hayes said an annotation was essentially impulsive. The reflections went into the 600 notebooks Sacks left behind. The immediate responses are in the margins of his books.

• Source: Bill Hayes, “Thinking in the Margins”; The American Scholar, March 19, 2026. It’s here:

https://theamericanscholar.org/thinking-in-the-margins/

Can you do that in Brooklyn?

 Thomas Wolfe’s most famous short story might be “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.” It begins with a guy asking for directions. Two natives get into an argument about how to get there. It’s a wonderful scene. But I like the story because it raises a philosophical question: Can you drown in Brooklyn?

The narrator is a perplexed native who tries to give directions to a hapless guy who thinks he can get to know Brooklyn with a map. The newcomer finds a place on the map. Then he goes and looks.

He’s the guy who asks the question about drowning.

The narrator is so perplexed he can’t grasp the idea.

 

“Yuh can’t drown in Brooklyn,” I says. “Yuh gotta drown somewhere else — in duh ocean, where dere’s wateh.”

 

The new guy has been to places such as Red Hook where there is water. But to the narrator, those are otherplaces in a way, just as the ocean is another place. His concept of the place is different. The story, in a sneaky way, gets at the concept of what a place is.

The concept of place is one of the recurring themes at this collection of notes. Our sense of place is part of our perspective. We don’t notice it unless a newcomer comes along with a different view.

• Thomas Wolfe, The Complete Stories of Thomas Wolfe edited by Francis E. Skipp; New York: Scribners, 1987, p. 263.