After the swashbuckling was over

 When the Greeks went to war against Troy, the stories they had on their minds were of Jason and the Argonauts. But the story of the world’s 50 greatest heroes aboard a single ship is largely the story of a woman.

Medea loved Jason so much she killed her father and brother to be with him. Jason and Medea conquered the world together and ruled over Corinth for 10 years. But when Jason left her, she pretended to take his marriage to another princess with good grace so that she could send her a crown and robe. When the princess put on the new clothes, they burned her to death, along with her father and all the wedding guests. Jason escaped by leaping from an upper window. He learned that Medea had killed the kids.

They were vastly different people, Jason and Medea, and it’s interesting to see what the mythmakers made of them after all the drama was over.

Medea was such a woman that Zeus was infatuated with her. He had his way with many women, but Medea rebuffed every advance. She had been Jason’s queen in Corinth, and she became a queen again. She did not die. She became immortal and reigned over the Elysian Fields.

Jason ended up homeless and friendless. He’d beached the Argo at the isthmus, and later in life and alone, he rested in the shade of the hulk and planned to hang himself from the prow. The hulk shifted and killed him.

• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 256-7.

Can you measure wisdom?

 What is wisdom? Can it be taught? Is it something within a person that can be improved? Can I make myself wiser? 

When it comes to measuring wisdom, I’m a skeptic. But I find the attempts fascinating.

Emily Laber-Warren’s article at the University of Chicago’s Center for Practical Wisdom is the best survey I’ve seen.

I overindulged. I followed all the links. I marveled that psychologists and sociologists are devising experiments to tackle questions that interested the ancient Greek thinkers who were called philosophers, lovers of wisdom.

I was both thrilled and alarmed that some of the new research is on sites for the medical profession. (My sense of what counts as wellbeing has been challenged.)

The attempts to define and measure wisdom interest me. But it seems to me that the consensus among the ancient philosophers was that the evidence of wisdom is not so much provable as obvious: it’s in a person’s life.

Fortune does wildly different things to people. As the Greek philosophers put it, some people were born kings. Some were born slaves. Some would suffer horrible hardship and die young. Some would live long in luxury. Fortune’s gifts are neither equal nor fair.

The question is whether, given the whims of fortune, you can carve out a good life. A wise person can. 

Wisdom was a kind of definition — it’s what you called a person who lived a certain kind of life. If a life had a certain character, or approached it, you called the person who lived it wise.

Wisdom, as the old philosophers saw it, was a conceptual problem, rather than a scientific one. It also was an individual problem. What would count as a wise solution in my case might not in yours.

I’m not sure what Socrates would say about all this research. But I think he’d be interested.

• Source: Emily Laber-Warren, “What is wisdom, and can it be taught?”; Knowable Magazine, March 11, 2026. It’s here:
https://wisdomcenter.uchicago.edu/news/wisdom-news/what-wisdom-and-can-it-be-taught

Puddling

 Eastern Tiger Swallowtails were swarming in the mudflats along the Yellow River. The behavior is called “puddling.”

It’s a spectacular sight. These are big yellow butterflies, about the size of the palm of your hand, and they congregate densely, almost like bees in a hive.

If you ask me, the concept of puddling is a work in progress. Biologists say that the butterflies are lapping up salts, minerals and acids that aren’t available in nectar. But that doesn’t explain the swarming behavior — why a hundred butterflies would try to cram into a space about the size of a washtub when the mudflats along the river go on for miles. I would love to know what causes one spot to be so alluring. Carrion? A quirk of geology, like an eroded salt lens? Or is this mostly social, the equivalent of a cocktail party?

Papilio glaucus is not the only species that puddles. All the butterflies I saw were Tiger Swallowtails and were yellow. The females have two forms: one mostly yellow, like the males, and one mostly black.

The Yellow River was as green as rivers get. It was a beautiful day.

A big river cooter, Pseudemys concinna, was basking on a log in the river. I used to see these turtles on the Neches River when I was a boy. This one was a foot long, nose to the end of the shell.

Azaleas were blooming, and so were mountain laurels. Some of the mountain laurels were just putting out buds and some were in full flower. The woods were noisy with songbirds.

Divided loyalty

 I just read a good book about the Irish revolution and civil war. It made me think about the phrase “divided loyalty.”

Most of the book involves events that occurred between 1916 and 1923. The typescript, written by a friend and former colleague, focuses on what was in the newspapers.

We tend to forget that most of the Irish people were in America, rather than in Ireland. A lot of the newspapers that catered to Irish readers were published in the United States.

Governments in London and Washington suppressed newspapers that didn’t follow the official line. The governments viewed public interest in the unrest in Ireland — and what the British were doing about it — as somehow sinister.

But how could you not be interested in Ireland if you came from that country — or your parents did? How could you not care what happened to family members and old neighbors?

Governments tend to cast divided loyalty as a bad thing, particularly in times of war. Through the years, many people have been persecuted. The concentration camps for people of Japanese descent during World War II is just one example.

I imagine it’s hard being an American today if you have loved ones anywhere in the Middle East. I imagine that if you care about people in Iran or Israel, Lebanon or Gaza, you might be viewed with suspicion that you’re not onboard with America First.

But the idea that divided loyalty is always sinister is a bad idea. Being divided in our loyalties is natural. It’s human nature.

Consider a marriage or partnership. Bringing two families together — two sets of interests — can lead to war or it can lead to alliance. When we expand our horizons, we sometimes discover something wonderful. That’s probably the best feature of this country: the fact that we come from so many places and that we brought with us so many competing loyalties with respect to customs, religion and food.

But even when things don’t work out, there is nothing sinister in thinking about the interests of other people. That’s just a symptom of compassion and empathy. It’s not a problem, just a sign that we’re human.

War and the prerequisites

 Before Japan and the United States began fighting in 1941, Americans thought Japanese technology was so primitive that the Japanese simply couldn’t compete. In reality, the Japanese Zero was so advanced that few American fighter planes survived.

The ignorance was mutual. The doctrine among Japanese militarists was that Americans were materialists — so used to luxuries, so soft, they couldn’t sustain a fight for six months.

Almost all the pre-war thinking proved wrong. Military strategy starts with sociology and anthropology, and the ignorance that led to that war would border on the unbelievable — except that the ignorance that  led to the current war is equally spectacular.

It’s important to remember that not everyone in Tokyo and Washington in the 1930s was stupid or willfully ignorant. But the voices of people who understood other cultures were drowned out by the voices of the loud and willfully ignorant.

I wish more Americans read history.

Rondald Spector wrote the standard one-volume history of the Pacific War. His obituary was in The New York Times the other day.

• Source: Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun; New York: Free Press, 1984.

Falsehoods and lacks

 The Mexican newspapers say that Óscar Melchor Peredo y García, the muralista, died in Xalapa at 99. He painted his first mural in the 1940s and was said to be the last of a school that included Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquieros and José Clemente Orozco.

At La Antigua in Veracruz, he got a commission, and someone suggested he focus on the horses of Hernán Cortés, the conquistador. Cortés brought 16 to New Spain. The chronicles include the names of all 16.

Melchor Peredo noted that the chronicles don’t mention the slaves who arrived with the conquistadores. Human beings abducted from Africa and the Indies weren’t named or described in the chronicles that were supposed to aid the collective memory.

Melchor Peredo’s account of his mural uses the word “conscience” where I would have expected “consciousness,” a reminder that you can’t have a conscience about things that you’re not aware of:

 

Because I have the conscience that there are many lies, and that those things that are taught and those that are not taught, have falsehoods and lacks, the textbooks, etcetera. Even university people have a lot of misinformation.

 

• Source: Charles Da Silva Rodrigues and Paula Alexandra Carvalho De Figueíredo, “A new breed open to the future: Melchor Peredo's mural in La Antigua”; Encartes, Vol. 8, No. 16, 2025. It’s here:

https://encartes.mx/en/silva-carvalho-melchor-peredo/

Nature on schedule

 The azaleas you see in Georgia’s gardens are mostly “true” rhododendrons, meaning that each flower has at least 10 stamens. The azaleas we saw blooming in the forest at Arabia Mountain are in subgenus Pentanthera. Each flower has five stamens. Note that the “true” are contrasted with the native. I sometimes think that’s a recurring theme in our culture.

We went to Arabia Mountain looking for the blooms that follow the calendar. The elf-orpine that seems to be growing out of the granite turns red in winter and then puts out its little white flowers — usually in early April. Diamorpha smallii was on schedule.

Woolly ragwort, Packera dubia, also appeared on schedule. It’s a dusty green plant with yellow flowers. I tend to overlook them until one day in April when there are acres of yellow flowers.

The first hummingbird arrived at the feeder April 6 — a female ruby-throat, I think. That seemed late, and I was already worrying about the collapse of the population when I checked my notebook. I saw that the only thing that had suffered a catastrophic collapse was my memory. Some of us couldn’t get by without notebooks.