Noticing

 One of the recurring themes of this collection of notes is noticing. It’s possible for a person to go into a crowded room and be so self-absorbed that he notices no one else. The same thing is possible when a person goes into the woods.

Thoreau’s ability to observe — to notice, to attend, to pay attention — is the trait that still astonishes me. Here’s Canby, describing Thoreau in the 1850s:

 

No other man alive could have seen so much. And all this in a mounting excitement, stirred by his sheer love of wild nature, but also by the constant novelty of familiar places growing daily more complex as he penetrated their infinite variety. When he was able to identify the flowers, there were their habitats and times of opening to be studied. Then suddenly he discovered the lichens, and every weathered rock became a museum. Then the grasses, never really seen before, caught his attention, and proved rich and confusing beyond his guess. After that it was the mosses, the mushrooms, the hawks and the owls, the wild ducks, the flora of the swamps, then trees and their succession‚ and so on and on. One can take this Journal from the fifties on, and label each section as the moss year, the tree year, the muskrat year the bullfrog year. Of course they overlap. 

 

I like that outrageous claim. We tend to notice people who are the wealthiest, the most famous, the most powerful. But shouldn’t we wish for ourselves that we see a lot, rather than earn a lot or impress others a lot? Shouldn’t we want to  go through life noticing the world we live in?

And what should we want for our children: “No other person could have made so much money” or “No other person could have seen so much”?

• Sources: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 312.

There are so many posts about noticing it’s hard to find a place to start, but this might do: “Davenport’s search for arrowheads,” March 15, 2022.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/03/davenports-search-for-arrowheads.html

Lucas the cat

 Lucas, our old cat, died. I buried him in the woodlot, a place he loved.

When the Wise Woman adopted him from the animal shelter, the veterinarian told us he was about 3 years old and had a heart problem. The vet predicted Lucas wouldn’t last long.

Lucas was almost 20 when his heart finally failed.

The Wise Woman has always had cats. When she talks to cats, they listen.

I was raised among dogs by dog people. Cats have always been foreign to me.

I crossed some kind of bridge with Lucas.

When he came to live with us, Lucas insisted on sleeping either on me or next to me. When he got hungry, he told me, as if he were afraid to bother the Wise Woman. When service by the waitstaff was slow, he complained to me. If I slept past his breakfast time, he swatted me in the head, not the Wise Woman.

He sat on the seat beside me when I drove the truck as we moved from Galveston to San Antonio. He sat beside me when I drove the truck when we moved to Georgia.

Just about every word of this online collection of notes was written with Lucas curled up nearby. He found my writing to be a dull activity, which pleased him. He saw opportunities for undisturbed naps.

Psychologists say that grief disorients you — if you feel a loss as a great loss, a fundamental loss, you begin to question all your assumptions. You wonder what else you’ve taken for granted and what else could be taken away. You blunder around, confused and lost, for a while.

I buried Lucas almost two weeks ago. I’m just now able to post a note about it.

Who proposed to Henry?

 I love short stories. I especially love a short story about a historical event that is so well researched that it’s hard to tell where the fiction starts. Guy Davenport and Bernard Malamud wrote wonderful specimens.

If you know contemporary writers who are interested in that genre, please pass along a suggestion: I’d love to read a story about who proposed to Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau, 30, was staying at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house while the great man was lecturing in Europe. Thoreau wrote him a letter on Nov. 14, 1847, that reported:

 

I have had a tragic correspondence, for the most part all on one side, with Miss ——. She did really wish to — I hesitate to write — marry me. That is the way they spell it. Of course I did not write a deliberate answer. How could I deliberate upon it? I sent back as distinct a no as I have learned to pronounce after considerable practice, and I trust that this no has succeeded.

 

Thoreau goes on, but that’s the gist of it.

Canby thought it likely that Sophia Foord, 43, was the proposer. But he made a case that it was Margaret Fuller, 37, the first editor of The Dial.

Canby said that he hoped it was Fuller, a brilliant woman who was frequently exasperated by Thoreau and his writing.

To me, the question is: What did any woman see in the man?

Thoreau was not widely viewed as companionable. As Canby described him in another context:

 

A chestnut bur, hiding its sweetness, Thoreau was to most men.

 

Who would pursue a chestnut bur? I would love to meet her.

Fiction writers can get to questions that historians cannot. 

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 261 and 245.

I’ve gone on about this sub-genre of short story. Here are two examples:

“Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner,’” Nov. 22, 2022.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/11/davenport-john-charles-tapner.html

“Malamud: ‘In Kew Gardens,’” March 20, 2024.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/03/malamud-in-kew-gardens.html

What it's like to write a book

 Here’s Annie Dillard on what’s it like to write a book: 

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

 

I’m not sure it would be a good idea to share that view with freshmen studying English Composition. It probably wouldn’t have helped me decide what to do with myself.

Still, I wish I’d had a better sense, early in life, of the many different things that writers have tried to do — or could try to do. I wish I’d had a better sense of the possibilities.

 • Source: Annie Dillard, The Writing Life; New York, HarperPerennial, 1990, p. 52. 

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard said this about writing:

 

It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

 

One of the recurring themes of this online collection of notes is that writing doesn’t start with questions of craft. Dillard talked about writing as a way of life, rather than a collection of skills or competencies.

I suppose you saw her obituary in the newspapers too.

• Source: Annie Dillard, The Writing Life; New York, HarperPerennial, 1990, p. 11.

Scuppernongs

 Ancient Algonquian speakers noticed the sweetbay magnolias and named the river in North Carolina askuponong, place of the sweetbay tree. In the early 1800s, Europeans noticed the bronze-colored grapes growing on the riverbank and called the grape and the river Scuppernong.

The grapes are muscadines. Most muscadines are purple to black. The coloring of the scuppernongs is the work of a recessive gene — as simple as blue eyes in humans.

Muscadines grow in states along the coast from Delaware to Texas. They grow up the Mississippi Valley to the Missouri. As I boy, I pillaged vines at my grandparents’ places in East Texas and West Tennessee. But I have never seen anything like the vines in the Georgia Piedmont.

I owe readers a clarification: I’d spoken of August as the peak month for wild muscadines here. The vines  are still producing. I have learned to think of peak months.

I’m interested in the grapes because the idea of “sustainability” has been spreading from biologists to farmers.

European grapes are wonderful, but they are susceptible to Pierce’s disease, caused by bacteria. Muscadines are naturally resistant, which is why an amateur naturalist like me is baffled by the bumper crop. If you’re a farmer, we’re talking about the lower costs of fighting pathogens and less chance of crop failure.

• Source: Peter C. Andersen, Ali Sarkhosh, Dustin Huff, and Jacque W. Breman, “The Muscadine Grape (Vitis rotundifolia Michx)”; askifas, n.d. The site is run by extension agents associated with the University of Florida.The article is here:

https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/HS100

Footnote, with skaters

 A showoff, a Greek statue and stooped man went skating.

It’s not a joke — just a footnote on American literature.

Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne lived in the same village — Concord, Mass. — and knew each other. Hawthorne’s daughter Rose Lathrop left an account of the three writers skating on the river.

 

Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice‚ very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air. 

 

Lathrop thought her father would have liked to have been better friends with Thoreau. But Thoreau wasn’t much interested in Hawthorne’s writing.

Henry Seidel Canby says Thoreau read for knowledge and disliked fiction. Canby’s verdict:

 

There can be no other American man of letters who read so little American literature.

 

• Sources: The passage on the skaters is from Rose Lathrop’s “Memories of Hawthorne.” It’s quoted in Henry Seidel Canby’s Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 174. Canby’s note on Thoreau’s reading is on p. 188.