Lesson learned

 When I was a boy, my grandfather found a wasp’s gall. He cut it off with his pocketknife and put it in his shirt pocket, next to the Prince Albert tin.

He had intended to sit in his easy chair and, with the 8-year-old version of me as an audience, dissect the gall with a spey blade, showing the wasps within.

But he forgot. Grandmother found the gall while sorting the laundry.

In some families, certain offenses require all the women in the family to weigh in. Grandfather had two daughters, one of which was my mother, and I think at least one great-aunt was visiting. Grandfather was thoroughly blessed out. The lesson I learned had nothing to do with the biology of wasps but with the social order within human families.

I thought of that lesson when I was clearing the blackberry vines off the path to the woodlot and came across a gall. It was made by a blackberry knot gall wasp, Diastrophus nebulosus.

The gall was big enough to have several chambers, and I thought that a dissection might reveal at least six little wasps.

But I learned my lesson. The gall is still on the vine, the one still standing by the path.

It's not a trick of grammar

 The Wise Woman, who earned a Ph.D. and taught college English, is skeptical of books about writing.

She saw many students who were terrified of writing. They came to her classes thinking that they were about to confront 10,000 rules, each of which would show them to be wrong about something, possibly in a way that suggested stupidity.

Telling stories is one of the things that makes us human, the Wise Woman said. How did this deeply human activity become so anxiety-ridden?

I had asked about good books on writing because I was thinking about what I’d learned in a lifetime of writing. But there was fire in her voice. I let the matter drop, and we tramped down the trail through the woods quietly.

Along the way, I remembered that one of the writers of one of the rule books had said something on the subject. I had to look it up.

 

Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, “Writing is an act of faith not a trick of grammar.” This moral observation would be out of place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what a man is, rather than what he knows, will at last determine his style. If one is to write, one must believe — in the truth and worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message.

 

• Source: William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style; New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1972, p. 77.

Reaching people

 The political ads running in Georgia are designed by consultants and should be good — or at least provocative. But they are irrelevant to most of the people I know.

If someone put me in charge for a day, I’d run spots that showed all kinds of people — all colors, genders and ages — pulling up to the fuel pumps and telling us what they were paying for a gallon of gas. I’d have a note saying that the average price in Georgia was $2.78 before the president decided to start a war. 

If you’re not from Georgia, we’re paying $3.86 on average.

I am not a consultant. The people in charge have other ideas about what ordinary people care about.

Does that depend on understanding?

 I’ve heard thoughtful people say that this country is more divided now than it’s been since the Civil War.

I can’t quite believe that. I grew up during the social upheavals of the 1960s and listened to the debates at family gatherings and public meetings. Eric Hoffer, writing during that era, said:

 

How many and deep are the divisions between human beings! Not only are there divisions between races, nations, classes, and religions but also an almost incomprehension between the sexes, the old and the young, the sick and the healthy. There would be no society if living together depended on understanding each other.

 

Hoffer always makes me think, but I’m not sure I believe that — that we can have a society without understanding each other. I don’t think a society would last if it couldn’t find some common ground. To my mind, deciding that we can go on without trying to reach an understanding is a bit like deciding that the termites in the foundation aren’t that big a problem.

I have the same doubt about our relationship with the natural world. I think this might be the biggest lesson we humans have learned during my lifetime: We’d better get better at understanding the natural world and our place in it. If we don’t, our societies, our cultures and our civilizations are not going to last.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 85.

The writer’s responsibility

 James Baldwin said, “The responsibility of the writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”

So much of the American experience seems unhinged to me. Maybe this is a bad example because it’s obvious and easy, but it’s election season in Georgia, and people are saying things that make no sense. Soon, people will do something important — they will vote — based on thinking that makes no sense.

It’s not just our politics. Our beliefs and attitudes about race, religion, the natural world … it’s a long list, these things that don’t make sense but nevertheless influence us.

There’s nothing glorious about these excavations that writers are called to do. Archeologists excavate latrines to see what ancient peoples were fed. It’s an ugly metaphor, but it’s apt. We Americans, especially, are fed so much stuff that isn’t good for us, isn’t good for anyone.

Each generation needs people who will look at and question what it’s being fed.

Today’s Baldwin’s birthday. He was born in 1924 in Harlem. I think his essays are best.

The quoted remark came from a conversation with Nikki Giovanni. Several were recorded for broadcast and were published as A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni in 1973.

What would Hoffer say?

 Eric Hoffer probably ought to come with health warnings, like those for cigarettes and alcohol. But I read him anyway.

People who read Hoffer usually talk about The True Believer. But I like his collections of items — not knowing what else to call his jottings. I was once told that Reflections on the Human Condition is a collection of aphorisms. But some of the items are several paragraphs long. No. 18 is more than 600 words.

Reflections is a strange book. I read it because of things like this:

 

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

 

I wonder what he would think of the hysteria against immigrants today.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 34.

Writing advice from Hoffer

 If I could pass on only one bit of advice to young people who want to write, it would be this: 

That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor the flashes we are without growth and without exhilaration.

 

That’s No. 80 in Eric Hoffer’s Reflections on the Human Condition. Hoffer was talking about all creative work, but I thought about writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once took the time to convince a young Henry David Thoreau to keep a journal. It wasn’t apparent to anyone but Emerson, but Henry had a talent for catching those flashes.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 51.