Addition and subtraction

 The ancient pine south of Stone Mountain had been thoroughly woodpeckered. The drill holes were less than an inch apart. The bark looked like a sieve.

I found a sculptured pine borer, Chalcophora virginiensis, which are as common as pines in Southern forests. The beetle, at first glance, looks like an inch-long sculpture, carved in wood with a chisel, with a lot of rough edges. If you see that, you’ve found a sculptured borer. They are sometimes called metallic borers. If you flip one over and look at the abdomen, you might be reminded of a .22 casing. They are also called flatheaded borers. The larval stage is a worm that looks like a concrete screw: pointed at the tail, getting wider at the top with a head that looks like a mortarboard.

The ancient pine I saw is dying and has been for years. The borers are recycling it. 

Each year, the forest produces tons of new growth — tree trunks, limbs, leaves. It also recycles tons of dead vegetation.

The growth is obvious, especially in spring. The addition is easier to see than the subtraction. The dying, death, decay and release of nutrients to sustain new life is harder to see. But that process goes on all the time.

A moment at the bush

 The canopy of the forest has filled in. I didn’t realize how dark the woods were until I saw the ray of sunlight, stronger than a searchlight, on an azalea, flame red. A burning bush, or so it seemed.

The famous story is in the biblical book of Exodus. The writer of the gospel of Mark says that Jesus referred to it by quoting Moses “at the bush.” No long explanation. No complex citation. Just three words. Everyone knew that story. A couple of thousand years later, it still comes to mind in a moment of astonishment.

Among the other wonders in the woods:

• At a 6-foot pool in one of the burns coming off the mountain, flies were hatching. They were flying off the surface by the hundreds, but I couldn’t identify them. A lot of the 150,000 species in order Diptera are aquatic in their larval stage.

• Spiderworts, in genus Tradescantia, are blooming. The ones we saw were purple.

• A yearling doe, unafraid, grazed within 25 feet of us.

• Sources: For the biblical stories, see Exodus 3 and Mark 12:26.

Everyone knew it was a bad war

 What happens when there’s a bad war — so bad everyone knows it?

Everyone knew the Trojan War was going to be bad. Who wanted to go fight to win Menelaus’s wayward wife back? Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon were rich, arrogant, inattentive, spoiled — difficult guys to like.

They had to go pressure their allies to show up. When they went to Ithaca, Odysseus feigned madness. They found him plowing with a mismatched team — an ox and a donkey — and sowing the furrows with salt instead of seed. Odysseus pretended not to recognize Agamemnon and Menelaus and almost avoided “the draft.” But their adviser Palamedes, known for his wisdom, snatched up Odysseus’s infant son and put the toddler in the way of the plow. The madness act fell apart.

Odysseus was part of the crew that had to hunt down Achilles. Achilles’s mother, Thetis, had put the young man in a dress and hidden him among the girls of the palace. When Odysseus sounded the alarm, one of the “girls” shed clothing and grabbed a spear and shield. Achilles was impressed into service.

Bad wars are not new. People who choose military careers know them and study them.

It seems to me that the first job of the republic’s top military minds is to tell the president and congress when a war is simply not worth fighting.

If you’ve been wondering what the professionals think, remember that the White House has already been purging the top brass.

By the time the Army’s top general, Randy George, was ousted earlier this month, more than a dozen military leaders had been ousted. You can draw your own conclusions about whether their replacements were chosen for their ability to say yes.

There’s nothing new about this either. The Nazis wouldn’t have been able to run over the Soviets in 1941 had not Stalin purged the Red Army of professional soldiers in favor of politically pliable ones.

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.