Great Books

 My argument for Great Books is not that they are right but that they are serious.

If you read them, they will change the way you do things — even little things that no one else would notice. I thought about a Great Book — or what I’d consider a Great Book — when I was weeding the garden and noticed that a leaf on the okra plant was dotted with a row of tiny eggs.

I’m not enough of an entomologist to know what I was looking at. I think the eggs had been laid by a ladybug, a kind of beetle that keeps the population of some garden pests under control. I think the eggs will hatch into larva that will be destroyers of aphids, which would otherwise eat on a lot of the plants in the garden.

But since my knowledge of insects is so limited, it’s also possible that the eggs will produce voracious caterpillars that will consume the okra plant overnight.

I should say that this is my okra plant, a single specimen in a row of beans and squashes. I’m in the minority in my family: I like okra, panfried in cornmeal. I’m not an objective observer. I have hopes for this plant, and my first instinct was to get rid of all the bugs anywhere near it.

I almost pinched off the egg-laden leaf but instead thought of a scene from Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, allegedly a book about the delights of country life and pleasures of peaceful reflection while fishing.

The hero in this story loves fish and because he does, he’s all for the extermination of otters, whose chief sin is that they also love fish. The protagonist relishes an otter hunt. When the poor otter is caught and torn to pieces by dogs, the next mission was to hunt down the otter pups and kill them. Then the gentle sportsmen could repair to the pub and sing “Old Rose” and have some  ale.

This is not one of the great moments in environmental literature. There is nothing right about this story, but there is something serious here. It’s the question of what to do when you don’t really know enough to guarantee that you are not going to do any harm.

I left the bug eggs alone.

Gardens are places that allegedly lend themselves to peaceful reflection, rather than disturbing ethical questions. But questions pop up everywhere, and it’s good to have a story in mind — a landmark that helps you get your bearings.

I know that some people go through life without reading Great Books, but I can’t imagine it.

• Source: Izaak Walton, The Complete Angler; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, pp. 39-40.

A smelling mistake

 Asifa Majid, a cognitive scientist at Oxford, presented Michael Rosen, the host of a podcast on language, with little containers that looked like yogurt cups. He could smell — but couldn’t see — what was inside.

Correctly identifying the coffee was easy. But when Rosen mistook a cinnamon bun for a blueberry muffin, Professor Majid said he’d made a common mistake.

But what kind of mistake is that? And how do we make it?

I wouldn’t describe it as a physiological mistake. (The sensors in Rosen’s nose seemed to be working.) But I wouldn’t describe it as a mental mistake either. It’s not what anyone I know would call a logical error — which might suggest that I have a defective sense of what logic should be.

One clue to this muddle is that Rosen determined he’d made a smelling mistake by looking inside the cup and seeing a cinnamon bun. (Roy Bedichek called the sense of sight the despot of the senses.)

Mistakes are helpful in clearing up our thinking. But when we can’t even grasp what kind of mistake we’ve encountered, we’ve usually run across a conceptual problem.

I think this one is a relative of the mind-body problem. No matter how often I bury the ancient distinction between mind and body and their realms of mental and physical phenomena, I find that it’s still finding new ways of confounding me.

Our perceptions don’t fall neatly into either category.

• Source: “Smell” was the topic of the BBC’s Word of Mouth podcast, 11 June 2026.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002xgzt

Thanks to Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art for telling me about it.

Another utopia

 It’s odd what writers think readers want to know.

Consider how the concept of writing a life has changed. St. Matthew starts his gospel with a genealogy. Diogenes Laertius doesn’t get far in his life of Epicurus before he quotes the text of his will.

Epicurus’s will made me think of another genre — the literature of utopias.

The will is a legal document, but it’s also a vision of an ideal world. Epicurus made provisions to allow his friends to live in a garden where they could investigate how the world works and could have philosophical discussions about their questions.

Epicurus  couldn’t imagine anything better.

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II. The text of the will is on pp. 544-8.

A bit like dreaming

 I don’t think the notion of time travel makes much sense, but I can smell a plate of biscuits and gravy and be back in my grandmother’s kitchen, a leap of 50 years.

Many writers have noticed that some odors seem closely linked to memories. Roy Bedichek put it this way:

 

Poets speak of the ‘gates of memory.’ If this gate metaphor is apt, then we may expand it, referring to the sense of smell as the surest key with which to unprison and reanimate scenes and forms filmed yesterday or long ago with such fidelity as, now unreeled, to absorb and fascinate, but not completely to deceive the eye of consciousness. I say ‘not completely to deceive,’ for, whenever in recalling the past, consciousness becomes completely curtained off; it is no longer ‘remembering’ but ‘day-dreaming.’

 

Imagine yourself in a mathematics examination trying to remember a formula. Memory is involved, certainly, but so are your reasoning faculties as you try to deduce what the formula must be. We’re apt to use the word conscious in describing that process. What happens when I smell biscuits and gravy is something else. I think Bedichek is right that it’s more like dreaming.

• Source: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960, p. 219.

One way to measure a life

 The news story, in Spanish, began: There are those who say that a life is measured in World Cups.

I didn’t really understand that point of view until I got to know some fans of El Tri, the Mexican national team.

Mexico, Canada and the United States are hosts to the World Cup, but it’s not an equal partnership. I’m not sure you can measure the seriousness with which something is taken within a culture. But consider the number of appearances each country has made in El Mundial:

• Mexico: 18.

• United States: 12.

• Canada: 3.

There are those who say that fútbol is becoming a big deal in the United States. It’s something else in Mexico.

When people ask, I say I have two teams, not one. I hope Canada does well, too.

Piedmont, early June

 Have you ever seen trumpet vine before the long slender flowers form trumpets? The immature tubes of Campsis radicans are closed at the end, though you can see the seams in the tissue that will open and roll back, forming the trumpet’s bell.

The trumpets were just forming in the vines along the Yellow River the first week of June. I wondered about the weather. We’ve had overnight lows in the 50s — in June — something that’s hard for a Texas native to imagine.

At Arabia Mountain, the sundrops are out. Oenothera fruticose produces beautiful yellow flowers. The yellow is muted — almost as soft as the yellow of a buttercup, but not quite.

Every time I pass a neighbor’s big oak, I count the squirrels below. I usually see at least four and have seen six. I was puzzled one day when the yard was empty.

But around the bend, a perched on a power line, was a Cooper’s hawk.

Poetic noses

 Roy Bedichek did not say that Christopher Morley was a great poet. He said that great poets had written some silly things about the sense of smell. By contrast, Morely’s list of common odors reminds us of the pleasures of paying attention to our noses.

Bedichek recalled a passage in Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Satan’s ability to smell carrion is compared to that of vultures. The poet pictures a horde of vultures, drawn to the scent of an army of men who are about to die.

It’s an astonishing image. But it doesn’t hold up. In Milton’s day, people believed that human beings who were about to die smelled of death. People also believed that Old World vultures found carrion by smell, rather than by sight. The beliefs beneath the image were wrong.

Bedichek admired Milton and quoted his poetry. He didn’t have much to say about Morely, other that in the 1920s, he wrote “Smells,” a short poem that was popular. The charm is the list of familiar smells: ground coffee, pipe tobacco, campfires.

Morely’s list prompted me to make my own.

• Sources: Morley’s poem “Smells” is here:

https://allpoetry.com/Smells

Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960. The essay “Famous Literary Noses” is Chapter 16, pp. 187-202.