The effort to know the world

 Wendell Berry wrote some things I argue with. But I’m not sure we’ve had a writer who was better at getting to a glaring problem with American life. This clear, brief summary is from his essay “A Native Hill”:

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world … We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never fully understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

 

You can read almost anything and want to change our country’s miserable policies. Berry makes me want to change my own habits. He also gives me hope that if we learn to know the world a little better, something good will come of it. 

• Source: Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays 1965-1980; San Franciso: North Point Press, 1980. The quotation, from the essay “A Native Hill,” is on page 98.

Yellow River, early September

 We found a thick stand of beebalm, Monarda punctata, on the banks of the Yellow River on Labor Day.

The plant reminds me of those tiered trays that English people used to serve sandwiches on at teatime, at least in the movies. With beebalm, you have layers of yellow flowers with pink, purple and green bracts in between.

All those flowers attract pollinators, hence the common name. You can see plenty of bees in a stand of beebalm — but also hummingbirds, butterflies, moths and wasps.

Another common name, allegedly, is horsemint. The plant is in the mint family. If in doubt, crush a leaf and smell.

Also blooming in early September:

• Camphorweed is putting out scraggly yellow flowers. Talk about smell. Break a stem of Heterotheca subaxillaris and you’re in the medicine cabinet.

• The crownbeards in genus Verbesina are also have yellow flowers.

• Kudzu vines are putting out showy blossoms. I’d say the blooms are magenta, oxblood or purple, but I’m not good with colors. I wish I knew more about the variations within genus Pueraria.

• We also saw some fuzzybeans, in genus Strophostyles, which put out lovely soft purple flowers that remind me of pigeonwings, Clitoria mariana. Fuzzybeans are legumes and were used as food and medicine by the ancient peoples.

When you get to know a place, you have a sense of when it’s time to see a blossom of a peculiar shape or color. You start looking, and you might notice, as at the poet Franz Wright put it, “the unnoticed miracle of things precisely as they are.”

Selected and unabridged

 I admire Thoreau. But I don’t have it in me to read the entire Journal.

Thoreau saw it as one book, rather than a collection of notebooks. It’s 2 million words. Opinions differ about what’s worth reading.

Henry Seibel Canby points out that in the early years Thoreau played around with short essays. Thoreau was experimenting with topics to see which could be developed into lectures, which were paying gigs. Canby says most of these one-paragraph essays are “pretty dreadful.”

Carl Bode, who edited a selection of Journal entries, says Thoreau soon put his journal to the right use. I can imagine Professor Bode urging his students to read the whole thing.

In college, I spent an afternoon in the library with what was then viewed as the unabridged Journal. I think it was the 1906 edition. I realized that I needed an editor, even if Thoreau did not. My battered copy of Bode’s selections dates from those days.

I think this is one of the interesting features of remarks, thoughts written in journals, aphorisms. Their brevity leaves a lot of room for the readers to do their own work. One reader interprets, while another goes off on a flight of fancy.

In more formal compositions, the author shows the reader where to go.

Since more is left to the readers’ imagination, you’d expect more disagreement about what’s good and what’s not.

An enormous pile of remarks — Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, for example — can be mined in different ways by different editors.

• Sources: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 128-9.

Selected Journals of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode; New York: Signet Classics, 1967, p. 9.

Thoughts in a journal

 I have argued — tongue only half in cheek — that the remark should be a literary form. I think remarks sometimes stand alone and don’t need to fit into some larger context, such as an essay. 

Here’s Thoreau with the same idea:

 

I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form to greater advantage — than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life — & are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched — It is more simple — less artful — I feel that in the other case I should have no proper frame for my sketches.

 

Here’s Winfield Townley Scott on the same notion: 

 

I am trying to put down things I have thought — collecting them as well as I can remember … It is more fun than writing essays: arrangement, progression, transition, are hard for me to manage …

 

In my mind, remarks, thoughts and notebook entries are the same thing.

I’ve been reading Thoreau’s Journal and thinking about journals, diaries and collections of aphorisms. The question about what we think of remarks seems relevant to me in the age where we post a lot of what we write. Maybe I’m doing the same thing when I post a note online and when I compose something. But I’m not sure my old English teacher would see it that way.

• Sources: Thoreau’s remark was from his Journal on Jan. 27, 1852. I think the source is Henry David Thoreau, Journal, edited by John C. Broderick et. al.; Princeton University Press, 1981-. But, alas, it’s now a lost soul in an old notebook.

A similar version of the entry is in Selected Journals of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode; New York: Signet Classics, 1967, p. 15.

A Dirty Hand: The Literary Notebooks of Winfield Townley Scott, University of Texas Press, 1969. I’ve quoted it at least three times, most recently in “On turning 5, Aug. 26, 2026.” It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/08/on-turning-5.html

Politics and predictive numbers

 Several notes in this collection have described Georgia as a swing state.

Cory Ruth of Atlanta, a political strategist and tech consultant, says that’s wrong. He says the Republican Party has had a structural advantage in every election since 2010. Republicans carried every constitutional office that year.

I might owe readers a correction.

Ruth also said that primary turnout is the strongest indicator of general election outcomes in Georgia. Whatever party shows up with the most voters in the primaries in May is the favorite to win the general election in November.

As Ruth put it, “primary turnout is the best polling.”

Here were the figures reported for the May primaries:

• Democratic: 1.08 million, 53.7 percent.

• Republican: 933,000, 46.3 percent.

Those figures ignore ballots cast for nonpartisan races, mostly judicial.

To me, the most important number is voter turnout.

Georgia has more than 7.5 million registered voters. It says a lot when 27 percent is a record — a cause for rejoicing among those concerned about civic engagement.

The Independent Voter Project does not track independent voters in the same way as the sources used above, so the numbers aren’t comparable. But it’s the only source I’ve found that tracks turnout rates across parties.

Here’s the Independent Voter Project’s report on the total number of registered voters with turnout rates for the primaries:

• Democratic — 3.32 million, 43.8 percent turnout.

• Republican — 2.08 million, 27.5 percent turnout.

• Independent — 2.17 million, 28.7 percent turnout.

• Sources: Cory Ruth, “Georgia is not a swing state, but it could veer blue in 2026”’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sept. 4, 2026.

The report by the Independent Voter Project is here:

https://independentvoterproject.org/voter-stats/ga

A new phrase: 'ICE tax'

 My newspaper reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, arrested 2,250 people in Georgia in July, a 50 percent increase over June. On the same day agency officials were bragging about their public service, I heard the expression “ICE tax.”

The phrase, which was new to me, refers to the hidden costs people pay because of the intimidation of mass arrests and deportations.

A lot of the agricultural workers in the South and Southwest are from Mexico. The pay is borderline, and ICE agents are viewed like sicarios, the enforcers for the cartels. If you’re a migrant worker weighing costs and benefits, you might decide the annual trip north is just not worth it.

It’s apparently surprised some American farmers that they have not been overrun by local folks who want to work in the heat harvesting crops.

Farmers, who are already paying disastrous fuel prices because of a disastrous war, are having to pay higher wages. The higher costs are showing up at the supermarket.

It’s not just agricultural workers. A lot of the people working for low wages at nursing homes and at construction sites are also from Mexico. The homebuilding industry is slowing down in some areas. Nursing homes are raising rates.

I wonder whether the new phrase will catch on.

• Source: I’m not sure who coined the phrase, but an advocacy group called America’s Voice used it in a report mentioned here:

https://americasvoice.org/press_releases/watch-lawmakers-an-economist-and-a-care-worker-sound-the-alarm-on-the-ice-tax-hitting-southwestern-families/

So long, hummingbirds

 Fewer hummingbirds are at our feeders. August was such a frenzy I found myself just barely able to watch from my easy chair. It’s feeling you get from watching a nailbiter of a ballgame from the bleachers.

Terry Johnson, a fine naturalist who lives in Central Georgia, said the Ruby-throated hummingbirds go in waves — the males leaving as early as July, the females going next, and this year’s birds going last. 

Most of us know that the birds mobbed the feeders to store up fuel for the migration southwest, crossing the Gulf of Mexico.

Johnson had the numbers: During the feeding frenzy, the weight of the average female increases from 3.5 grams to 5.5. Each gram of fat can be converted into about 300 miles.

I have been trying to imagine it — what a 57 percent change in weight would be like. The gain in a few weeks. The loss in a few days.