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.

The descent of the Plumed Serpent

 One of the Mexican newspapers said that 9,000 people came to the Temple of the Plumed Serpent on the equinox.

The enormous stone head of the snake is at the base of the pyramid at Chichén Itzá. The temple was designed so that on the equinoxes, triangular shadows are cast on the stairway. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the body of a giant serpent slithering down the steps to join its head.

The newspaper said that many of the pilgrims were dressed in white and raised their arms as the serpent emerged. People told the newspaper they came to recharge their energies.

It was such a strange image that for a minute I forgot what was in the English-language newspapers that morning. I love my newspapers. But in reading them I sometimes get the feeling that everything significant in the world begins with some pronouncement from the White House.

Years ago, I was told that everyone should learn more than one language, just as a way of broadening one’s point of view.

I will never be a fluent Spanish reader. But I’ll continue to plod.

• Note: If you’re having a hard time picturing the spectacle, the Smithsonian has a 30-second video showing The Descent of Kikulkán here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zvv9EnBuem4

What taking charge means

  Because I have friends in New Mexico, I’ve heard more about Zorro Ranch than I’ve read in the national newspapers. The isolated site is said to have been the worst of several places where Jeffrey Epstein and his friends abused children. If your pastime is criminal, you tend to like isolation. Rural New Mexico has plenty.

A lot of the ranch’s land was leased from the state, and so the question came up: How could the state have failed to have acted on the abuse complaints? Why did it fail to act against Epstein, who wasn’t following the terms of his lease?

The state attorney general at the time, Hector Balderas, said he did investigate. He said his investigation was called off in 2019 by the U.S. Justice Department. The idea was the federal authorities would take charge of the investigation. But my friends in New Mexico say that The New Mexican, Santa Fe’s daily paper, has reported that the U.S. Justice Department never visited Zorro Ranch or interviewed any of the abused children.

If your memory needs help, the U.S. attorney general in 2019 was William Barr, who had the reputation for doing whatever the president wanted. The president was Donald Trump.

When memory doesn't serve

  An old friend and I, catching up after a decade, were trying to think of a name. Memory failed. My friend, who is younger than I am, said he had started playing the age card.

I sometimes use age as an excuse. But the truth is that my memory has always been bad. I would forget to mow the grass when I was a boy, earning a scolding. I have always been like that.

It seems to me that memory plays tricks on people in different ways. I think some people simply don’t form a lot of them. Occasionally, a good writer will take note of that trait. You can find characters in the literature who are so focused on what’s happening now that they just don’t think about what happened two hours ago. Peter Taylor’s character Munsie was that way.

 

She could never be got to reminisce about her childhood in slavery, or her life with her husband, or even those halcyon days after the old Mizziz had died and Aunt Munsie’s word had become law in the Tolliver household. … But, as Crecie said, when a time was past in her mama’s life, it seemed to be gone and done with in her head, too.

 

I have known people like that. I’ve known people for whom regret seemed impossible. They didn’t live enough in the past to have strong feelings about anything.

Such people interest me, but I certainly don’t claim to be like that. I just have a bad memory.

• Sources: Peter Taylor’s “What You Hear From ‘Em?” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 336-7.