John Aubrey, notetaker

 Peter Davidson reminds us that this month is the 400^th anniversary of John Aubrey’s birth.

In Davidson’s telling, Aubrey was a patron saint of observers, collectors and notetakers. If you’ve read Aubrey and visit a place he wrote about, you think about what he saw and how he saw it. Davidson says that Aubrey’s writings “enchant the township.”

A writer who does that is a good writer.

I’ve read little of Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Davidson convinced me that I’ve not read nearly enough.

I caught Aubrey’s love of gossip and anecdote. I missed his interest in archeology, antiquities and what we’d now call anthropology.

Davidson paints him as a fellow of endless curiosity. If Aubrey were alive today, he’d probably be collecting notes in notebooks and publishing a few online.

• Source: Peter Davidson, “Speaking Through the Ages: John Aubrey at four hundred”; The Literary Review, March 2026. It’s here:
https://literaryreview.co.uk/speaking-through-the-ages

Aubrey was born March 12, 1626, in Wiltshire. I don’t know him well as a writer and missed marking the day. The month will have to do.

A chronic state of mind

 Edith Wharton, describing American and British expatriates, said: 

they lived in a chronic state of mental inaccuracy, excitement and inertia, which made it vaguely exhilarating to lie and definitely fatiguing to be truthful.

 

That’s from The Mother’s Recompense, published in 1925. Though it’s more than 100 years old, I think that “a chronic state of mental inaccuracy” is a phrase for our times.

• Source: I found the quotation when I stumbled across the engaging blog Old Geezer Re-Reading. It’s here: 

https://oldgeezerrereadingblog.wordpress.com/2025/10/21/reading-an-edith-wharton-from-1925/

You sometimes find astonishing things while looking for something else.

A demanding writer

 Ernest Gaines’s “The Sky Is Gray” reminds me of a Tolstoy story.

You could say that it’s about a little boy going to the dentist or that it’s about a little boy growing to be a man. Maybe it’s a retelling of one of the parables found in the gospels.

With Gaines, as with Tolstoy, you can’t rush through the story and get to a point. You have to take your time, read slowly, go on a journey. Along the way, it’s necessary for you to feel cold and hunger. It won’t do to just note that cold and hunger are features of the world. You must take time to feel them.

Gaines is a demanding writer in that way.

There’s a story within a story about the little boy, James, who is 8, having to kill red birds so the family will have something to eat. His father is in the Army, and his mother is doing farm work, trying to feed the children.

James traps and kills game, but he can’t bring himself to kill the red birds. He cries and pleads. His mother beats him. In exasperation, she kills one of the red birds in the trap before making him kill the other. 

 

Suppose she had to go away? That’s why I had to do it. Suppose she had to go away like Daddy went away? Then who was go’n look after us? They had to be somebody to carry on. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. Auntie and Monsieur Bayonne talked to me and made me see.

 

Relatives and neighbors socialize little boys in the hard lessons they must learn. You might wonder about some of the lessons that we, as a society, make some children learn. 

The story has many wonders.

I had never realized the spiritual significance of the word “Stop!”

It can be the first word spoken by someone who is paying attention to the plight of a poor woman and her son when everyone else is distracted or indifferent. It’s what you say when you want people to slow down enough to let you help. It can be a wonderful word.

• Source: Ernest Gaines’s “The Sky Is Gray” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 103-31. The quotation is on p. 109.

Some Irish folk in Georgia

 On Jan. 10, 1734, a sloop limped into Savannah in the new colony of Georgia. Sloops are small ships, and this one was bringing indentured servants from Ireland to New England. The ship had been battered in storms. Food ran out. When the ship landed, only 40 servants — 34 men and six women — were alive.

In a letter to the colony’s trustees, James Oglethorpe, the colony’s founder, told about the Irish survivors:

 

As they were likewise ready to perish through misery, I thought it an act of charity to buy them, which I did, giving five pounds a head.

 

Oglethorpe was not writing social history. He was explaining expenses to his board.

Accounting for the 40, Oglethorpe said that he gave one to each of the widows in the colony to do farm work. Others went to build a sawmill. Some contracts were sold at sweet rates to magistrates who were so busy with public service they were behind in improving their own lands.

In 1734, slavery was illegal in Georgia. Labor was in short supply. Neighboring South Carolina was the wealthiest of the North American colonies — its wealth built of the exploitation of enslaved Africans. From the beginning, wealthy people in Georgia lobbied to make slavery legal in Georgia.

The indentured servants were not the first Irish to arrive in Georgia. A few were among the original settlers who claimed land in 1732. But most Irish immigrants came as laborers. When Boston and New York took steps to limit Irish immigration, Savannah remained an open door.

The history books say later generations of Irish laborers helped build the canals around Augusta and the railroads that made Atlanta a city.

But I’m new here and still learning this place.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Habermas’s notion of a ‘public sphere’

 I guess you heard that Jürgen Habermas died. The New York Times said he was best known for his notion of a “public sphere.”

He theorized that democracy emerged and could continue to exist in a healthy form only if there was a space that was outside the control of the state, where deliberation and the exchange of ideas could freely occur.

 

Habermas was a fan of coffeeshops. He could go on at length about their history in contributing to the development of civilized thought. He thought that coffeeshops were a kind of model for what a public sphere could be.

Through my working years, I thought that newspapers could be — and should be — another public sphere.

When I tried to explain that idea, I didn’t start with a discussion of investigative reporting but with something simpler: the problems of editing letters to the editor.

In the old days, someone who was known in a community acted as a referee of the public arguments. If he or she did it well, the Sunday paper would have at least two pages of letters offering heated but reasonable discussion of the public’s business.

In more modern times, editors have been dismissed as useless gatekeepers, something that the Internet has proved we can all do without. I find the new way of doing things as enjoyable as watching a basketball game without a referee — an experience that is lacking.

I like the new technology. But I don’t think we’ve learned to use it correctly.

It seems to me that if you define “technology” broadly, you are not talking solely about new machinery and new methods of accounting for profit and loss. You are thinking about features that encourage deliberation and the free exchange of ideas.

Shiny new machinery and shiny new business models don’t necessarily do that.

• Source: Gal Beckerman, “Jürgen Habermas Dies at 96; One of Postwar German’s Most Influential Thinkers”; The New York Times, March 14, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/books/jurgen-habermas-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TVA.yUxm.bCnRGVCQUcDZ&smid=nytcore-ios-share

The public service of sapsuckers

 Several yellow-bellied sapsuckers visit our feeders. They play a role in the ecology of our homestead and the neighborhood.

Sapsuckers drill holes in trees, making little wells of sap. The wells provide nutrients to sapsuckers and to other animals, including hummingbirds, warblers, corvids, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, voles and all kinds of invertebrates. The biologists call those other animals “secondary consumers.” Deer lick sugars from the wells.

Sap is not exactly nectar, but it does contain sugars. Hummingbirds rely on the sapsuckers’ wells before the flowering plants start blooming.

The Wise Woman and I are waiting on hummingbirds, which usually arrive in March. While hanging the feeders, I wondered what other sources of nectar hummingbirds could find in early spring.

I found a paper in Ecology and Evolution that strikes me as a model.

Researchers from the University of Idaho and the U.S. Geological Survey staked out sapsucker wells in Colorado using three methods: direct observation, camera trapping and environmental DNA analysis.

They compared the methods. As you’d expect, the technology is a big step forward. Camera trapping involves motion-activated cameras that can record images day and night. Environmental DNA analysis involves swabbing the area around the wells and running the samples through an automated system.

The researchers’ list of animals that visited the sap wells in Colorado was interesting. I wish researchers in Georgia would do a similar study.

• Source: Rick Clawges, Shannon Blair, Jan Eitel, Leona K. Svancara, Lee Vierling and Kerri Vierling, “Sapsucker Wells as a Keystone Nutritional Resource: Evaluating Methods for Detection of Secondary Sap Consumers”; Ecology and Evolution, Oct. 9, 2025, 15(10):e72277. Doi: 10.1002/ece3.72277. It’s here:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12509469/

 

Composing with notes

 Jillian Hess, a scholar who is interested in notes and notetaking, says that Susan Sontag used notebooks to compose in two ways.

First, Sontag used her notebooks to compose her essays. She collected and sorted materials on subjects that intrigued her. She collected pages of quotations she wanted to use and lists of points she wanted to make. She had lists of words to use and avoid. (Some writers pay more attention to diction than others.) By the time she sat down at the typewriter, her materials were in hand. At that point, she was almost making a collage.

Second, Sontag used her notebooks to compose herself, to make the personality she wanted to be. Hess says Sontag wanted to be the person who was interested in everything. I think some of us are generalists by temperament. We couldn’t specialize in any one field without doing violence to our psyches.

Sontag liked to read the notes of other writers. In 1949, when she was a student, she noted that reading André Gide’s Journals helped her compose herself.

 

They affect me in the same magical way; for immersion into an order and a discipline is the only thing that can soothe me….

 

Immersing yourself into someone else’s order and discipline is immersing yourself in another person’s mind. I love to do that, tramping around in the mind of someone whose order and disciplines of thinking are not like mine. Like Sontag, I like reading other people’s journals, notebooks, diaries and blogs.

• Source: Jillian Hess’s “Susan Sontag's Playground of Ideas” is in her Noted on Substack, March 2, 2026. It’s here:

https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/susan-sontags-playground-of-ideas?utm_medium=email