A lesson in humility

Years ago, when I first moved into egret country, a birder assured me the best way to identify a snowy egret is by its “golden slippers.” That is, the contrast between its yellow feet and black legs is a giveaway.

I often thought the advice was perfectly true but largely useless. Egrets are waders. Those golden slippers are usually underwater.

But one morning, I saw a puzzle: a cattle egret or snowy egret? The plumage was not a good clue. Just as I decided that the bird was too small to be a snowy egret, it flew, showing his yellow feet.

So the day’s lesson was on humility, the kind that would keep me from thinking that my methods are somehow better than the old bird watcher’s.

If you are a naturalist, you need every tool in his box, every trick in the book. 

Great egret, icon of the lake

 The great egret is the icon of the lake. If I were to devise a glyph, it would be of a great egret hunting: long neck at a 45-degree angle to the water, and the line running through the body, from shoulder to tail, is parallel to the neck, another 45-degree angle to the water. The lines along the neck and the body are parallel, at least in my glyph. That’s what it’s like, the great egret hunting.

When the great egret is resting, or doing something else, its body is more upright, and the long neck is folded against the chest.

The greats are the most noticeable bird on the lake because of their size, color and numbers. They stand 3.5 feet tall and have a wingspan of more than 5 feet, meaning they are just slightly smaller than the great blue heron. The great egret is white. He stands out against the green banks of the lake and creek.

Great egrets are more common than the great blues. I used to see one to three great blues each day, but not always. This year, I’ve seen them rarely. I always see great egrets, usually at least six. 

Three species of egrets are common on the lake: great egrets, snowy egrets and cattle egrets. The first distinguishing trait is size. The great dwarfs the cattle egret, which stands 18 inches to 2 feet tall and has a wingspan of 3 feet. The snowy egret is midsize.

The second distinguishing trait is the color of the bill. It’s yellow for the great egret, and black for the cattle egret. The snowy egret is again in between. He has a black bill but a yellow lore — the area between the bill and the eye.

The third distinguishing trait is leg color: black for the great, and yellow for the cattle egret. The snowy egret, always in between, has black legs with yellow feet. Birders call them “golden slippers.”

The snowy egret’s most striking feature is its aigrettes, the showy plumes streaming from its head and neck.

All three of these beautiful birds were on the lake this morning.

A word about the lake

Part of Zarzamora Creek is known as Elmendorf Lake, home of Our Lady of the Lake University.

The lake, like many in Central Texas, is a wide spot in a creek with a dam at one end. The lake is less than 200 yards across in most places. A good golfer could knock a ball across it.

The lake has been there for ages, but the weir dam was built in 1973. I haven’t been able to find information on earlier dams. I’d guess the first was a logjam.

You can find photos of young men and women canoeing on the lake, dressed in the clothes that were popular before World War I.

The forks of Apache and Zarzamora creeks are just above — to the northwest — of the campus. Most folks call the stretch below the forks Apache Creek, but most of the water comes from the Zarzamora Creek watershed. The historians always win these fights about proper names, but I follow the biologists. It’s Zarzamora Creek to me.

The lake in historical times is associated with Our Lady of the Lake, which was founded in 1895. H.E. Elmendorf sold the land to a syndicate that planned Lake View, a suburb about three miles west of downtown San Antonio. The combination of the college and the subdivision prompted the city to run a streetcar line to the area. The planned economic boom never quite amounted to an explosion, which is good for those of us who love the natural beauty of the place.

The lake is deepest near the dam, which was about 12 feet tall. In the middle of the lake is The Island, sometimes called Memorial Island. It’s connected to the world by three footbridges. Bird Island, a small island with no bridges, is just a few feet away from the north shore. It was once home to a spectacular colony of cattle egrets, which the authorities drove away. But that’s another story.

Consider the willows

The willows on the creek banks are big. I’d like to say they’re ancient, but I don’t know that. My parents planted a willow at the home place in West Texas when my younger brother was born. The last time I saw it, almost 60 years later, it was still smaller than these trees along the creek. Are the bigger trees older? Or is it just that these trees along the creek beds have better access to water?

Colin Tudge says that Salicoceae has about 400 species. They can be found in deserts, near coasts and beside glaciers.

Willows are full of surprises. Many species have 11, 12 or 19 chromosomes. But some have 224. The explanation is what biologists call polyploidism.

In humans, two individuals with 23 chromosomes provide egg and sperm that fuse to form a zygote. The haploid number for humans is 23. The diploid number is 46.

Sometimes, a chromosome doubles within a cell, but the cell doesn’t divide. That cell is a tetraploid. It’s rare in mammals but common in plants. The potatoes in your pantry are tetraploid versions of wild diploids.

Odd things can happen. A tetraploid crossing with a diploid yields a triploid. They’re sterile plants, meaning they must reproduce vegetatively. It’s why bananas have no seeds. Triploids double to hexaploids, which are fertile. Bread wheat is an example. 

Willows tend to hybridize, and some hybrids are all one sex. Individuals are clones of the parent, reproducing from suckers. Is that a species? Every time I pass the big willow just north of the Commerce Street Bridge, I wonder if I could even tell you what a species is.

• Source: Colin Tudge, The Tree: A Natural History, 2006.

A daily walk on the creek

When I moved to San Antonio, I wanted to learn about the place.

There was so much I didn’t know and didn’t understand — so many mysteries I couldn’t explain.

“Mystery” is not a fact of life. It’s a prevailing condition. I take William Harvey’s famous saying “All we know is still infinitely less than what remains unknown” as the first law of the cosmos.

We just don’t understand most of what goes on around us. Somehow responding to those mysteries — the vast number of things we don’t know about and don’t understand — is what makes us.

Instead of learning about the entire cosmos, I set myself to learn about a piece of pubic land on the West Side. It was a place to start.

I didn’t have any better plan than to walk along Zarzamora Creek every day and try to pay attention.

Earlier in life, I began to keep a journal. It was based on the notion — a whim — that if I paid attention, the cosmos would give me (or share with me) a little gift. Note the big if. If I paid attention, if I noticed, I would see that something remarkable, perhaps something wonderful, had indeed crossed my path that day. So, like William Carlos Williams, I had a standing heading in my notebook: “Things I noticed today that I had not previously noticed.” I was about paying attention.

And so I go on a daily walk, trying to pay attention to what crosses my path.

Walking along Zarzamora Creek

 Dr. Ming Kuo, a researcher at the University of Illinois, makes some interesting claims about the benefits of walking in natural areas. I heard her on Dr. Michael Mosley’s podcast, “Just One Thing,” and then read some of her papers.

You can find good writing by Thoreau on the benefits of a walk in the woods. But for a long time, the benefits seemed to be psychological, rather than physiological. The best way we had to measure the effects of big doses of nature was the survey: “Do you feel more relaxed or less relaxed when you …. “

Finally, someone decided to measure cortisol, the hormone that is a marker for stress.

This is probably painting it too broadly, but basically you can tell whether someone has been walking through the woods with a saliva test just as you can tell whether someone has been drinking and driving with a breath or blood test that measures alcohol.

The benefits of nature walks go beyond stress relief. The science strongly suggests that doing making them a habit improves the immune system.

When I moved to San Antonio a few years ago, I wanted to get to know the place: the land, plants and wildlife, as well as the people and culture. I started taking daily walks along Zarzamora Creek with a German shepherd.

While I was making notes on water, birds, insects and wildflowers, I couldn’t help noticing that something was happening to me. I tried to be an objective observer. But those walks were— and still are — relaxing, satisfying, joyous.

The Japanese have a tradition of “forest-bathing,” walking through woods with the expectation of being refreshed, cleansed and renewed. Japanese researchers are studying that tradition to see if science can shed any light on it. Hiromitsu Kobayashi, Chorong Song and their colleagues did an interesting study comparing people who walked through forests with those who walked through urban environments.

It’s not just the walking. Those cortisol levels don’t drop if you’re moving along a busy sidewalk.

What’s going on? Kobayashi, Song and their team suggested that E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis might provide an answer. We human beings evolved in forests. We might feel safest, most at home, there.

If you’re interested, here’s some sources:

• “Just One Thing”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vy1l

• Dr. Kuo’s papers

https://psychology.illinois.edu/directory/profile/fekuo

• Hiromitsu Kobayashi, Chorong Song, et. al., “Combined Effect of Walking and Forest Environment on Salivary Cortisol Concentration,” Front Public Health. 2019; 7:376.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6920124/

• Daniel S. Quintana, Maja Elstad, et. al., “Resting-state high frequency heart rate variability is related to respiratory frequency in individuals with severe mental illness but not healthy controls”; Scientific Reports, Article Number 37212 (2106).

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep37212

Maybe it's a matter of taste

 Liking short stories is a bit like liking music.

If I love music and you love music, we don’t necessarily have a lot in common. I might like Mozart, while you love Jimi Hendrix. Maybe we are both interested enough in Joan Baez, Billie Holiday or John Coltrane to argue. 

Short stories are like that. I’ve been slowly working my way through Why I Like This Story, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and published by Camden House in 2019. It’s a collection of 48 essays by American writers. Each essay is about an American short story.

The book has helped me see that there is no one way to tell a story. Further, there can’t possibly be one way to tell a story because there is no one thing that every reader is looking for. The story that really moves one reader doesn’t touch another.

I was surprised that Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” wasn’t on anyone’s list. On most days, I’d say that was my favorite story written by an American.

But Crane didn’t have any story on the list of favorites in this book, and neither did William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Guy Davenport and some others who’ve held my attention.

Some writers whose stories I admire are included in the book, but I was surprised at how often others had found great things in stories I didn’t particularly like. I like Ernest Hemingway’s stories about a World War I veteran named Nick Adams. But I have never seen much in some of his more famous stories.

What should we make of all this?

I’d say this: If you are a writer and someone tells you that a story must be written in a certain way, I’d run.

If you are a writer and are told that there are rules for writing a good story, I’d keep an open mind but take the rules with a grain of salt.

If you are a reader and haven’t found a short story that you love, I’d keep looking. Short stories are like music — and the trick is to read (or listen) until you find what you like.

But that moment when you find it is worth the search. There’s real pleasure there.

Did you know that dog was real?

A recent post discussed a particular kind of short story — something Guy Davenport called the archtectonic story.

In my mind, it’s this: a fictional story that is so well researched, so grounded in fact, that it’s difficult to tell fact from fiction.

In “John Charles Tapner,” a story about how the great French writer Victor Hugo came to Guernsey, Davenport says that that Hugo was followed everywhere by Senate, a little dog with a spot over its eye. Alas, when I first read the story, I was not a good enough Hugo scholar to know whether Davenport was reporting or inventing that detail.

Davenport’s fiction is the kind that made me want to learn more about the man, the era, and the place. The fiction whetted a reader’s appetite for fact. One can find a badly faded image of Senát online.

The post should have come with a disclaimer: Because it’s the kind of story I like to read, it’s the kind of story I’d like to learn to write.

I’m always puzzled why so many people read novels and so few read short stories.

I’m a frank fan of brevity.

I have a friend who is an expert at speed-reading, and I’ve wondered whether his experience of a novel is similar to my experience of a short story. The productivity guru Ali Abdaal said he buys recorded books so that he can play them at twice the normal speed. He says it’s more fun. Getting the material quicker keeps his mind engaged.

I wonder if the same thing couldn’t be achieved by brevity.

A peculiar kind of short story

Guy Davenport, who was a wonderful essayist, thought the most vibrant trend in American literature was the archtectonic novel, which is made up of discrete pieces of imagery, anecdotes, short stories, lives (short biographies), poems, essays, mediations and perhaps a history of certain ideas.

Davenport gave two examples: O. Henry’s Cabbages and Kings (1904) and Paul Metcalf’s Genoa (1965). Genoa was published by The Jargon Society, founded by Jonathan Williams, a poet who began a small press at age 22 to publish stuff he liked.

Davenport said the most successful work in archtectonic form was William Carlos Williams’s long poem Paterson. He also said some short story collections adhere around a theme and have the same effect — a novel in parts. Eurdora Welty had several themed collections, including Golden Apples.

I think the quickest way to get at what Davenport was talking about is Davenport’s own short story “John Charles Tapner.” In 1854, Victor Hugo went to Guernsey to investigate the case of the last man executed on the island. The great writer, then in exile, hated capital punishment. Guernsey was a small place, and the islanders knew their famous guest didn’t approve. Yet they were civil to him, a bit fascinated by him, also a bit appalled.

What was his stay like? Davenport recreates it and imagines it. It is hard to tell where fact stops and fiction starts. I like stories like that — stories that are based on a historical event but that try to get at what the characters were thinking. 

What we readers get is a chance to observe a great man with a passion.

Expertise in an out-of-the-way place

Willard Van Orman Quine was among the greatest philosophers of the 20^th century. He once was on the receiving end of one of the world’s great philosophical jokes.

Quine wrote on the philosophy of logic and language.

He taught at Harvard, and one of his doctoral students, Dagfinn Føllesdal, a Norwegian, later taught at Stanford and at the University of Oslo.

Quine visited Norway in 1972. Føllesdal was his host.

Quine wanted to visit the far North, the land of the Sami people. Unknown to Quine, Føllesdal had supervised the master’s thesis of a young Sami philosopher who studied Quine’s philosophy.

Føllesdal arranged for the young man to stand by the side of the road at Kautokeino, a town north of the Arctic Circle, and offer to show the visitors around.

The young man impressed Quine.

First, there was the young man’s mastery of English.

And then, when the conversation turned to the topic of philosophy in general, there was the cultural level. How did one who lived in such an isolated place know so much about some of the world’s great thinkers?

When the conversation turned to the philosophy of language, Quine knew he’d been had. As Føllesdal put, Quine soon realized he was talking to the world’s northernmost expert on the philosophy of Willard Van Orman Quine.

It’s a good story. Dagfinn Føllesdal’s told it in “W.V. Quine Remembered,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy, IX, 2001, pp. 106-11.

How to be angry

On the way to the bakery to pick up pastries, a Sunday morning ritual, I had to hit the brakes for a young woman who stopped at the green light just before the busy intersection. Traffic was heavy. As I inched around her, she seemed to be consulting a map, trying to decide which way to turn.

I wondered whether I’d always gotten so angry or whether I had slid into the ranks of the angry old men without really deciding to join.

As I got a box of empanadas and regained by balance, I recalled that Montaigne had thought of anger as a kind of temporary disability, something that disabled a person’s judgment. But like a sprained ankle, the injury wasn’t permanent.

Everyone experiences anger. So how’s the best way to handle it?

Montaigne’s advice comes down to a few rules:

• Don’t hide it. If you have a feeling, express it, rather than let it stew.

• Be sparing in doling it out. Do not scatter it around.

• Do not get angry in general. Make it specific. Be angry at the reckless driver, but not at the world.

With his closest friends, Montaigne shared a rule. If they saw him get angry, they were to let the anger run its course. Montaigne’s anger passed quickly, like a thermal shower in Texas. After a quick storm, order was restored. Montaigne did the same in return.

The theory is you do more violence trying to contain the storm than in just letting it pass naturally.

A ‘modern’ idea that’s been around

 Some people seem to think that the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy is a 20^th century idea, a product of the emerging social sciences. Several thinkers have been credited with “discovering” the phenomenon, including sociologists W.I. and Dorothy Swaine Thomas. They formulated the Thomas Theorem in 1928: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”

Here’s Montaigne’s 440-year old treatment of the idea, based on an almost 2,000-year-old story by Plutarch. The ancient Greek writer told how Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, came up with a defense against plots.

A foreigner came to town and bragged that for a good sum he would show Dionysius an infallible way of uncovering plots and rooting out conspirators. Dionysius called the fellow in.

The man said his method was for Dionysius to make a spectacle of paying him a huge sum. The story would get around. It just wasn’t believable that a stranger could get so much money without passing on a very useful art.

Dionysius considered the idea and paid up.

The Greeks had many good stories about self-fulfilling prophecies. Sophocles told one about a guy named Oedipus.

We have long known that human beings are capable of acting on erroneous beliefs and bad information. We recently had a president who liked to act on “alternative facts.” When he took action, some people responded to his confidence, not to his wisdom.

Are these generalizations about human nature the kind of things that one person or a team of scholars discovers? It seems to me that facts about human nature are simply broad agreements about what constitutes a characteristic human feature. The significant thing is not that one person discovered this feature about human beings, but that countless people have seen it an agreed it’s important.

When did we start making art?

Scientists found a set of five prints — human hands and feet — in limestone on the Tibetan Plateau. The prints are 169,000 to 226,000 years old — far older than the cave paintings in Indonesia, Spain and France, the oldest of which might be 45,000 years old.

Did humans or their close kin start making art much earlier than we previously thought?

Apparently so. Eighteen authors led by David D. Zhang published “Earliest Parietal Art: Hominin Hand and Foot Traces from the Middle Pleistocene of Tibet” in the Sept. 10 issue of Science Bulletin. (I heard about it from a friend who sent a link to “Hand and footprint art dates to the mid Ice Age” in the Sept. 14 edition of Science Daily.)

The prints are so old we don’t know the species of the artists. Were they homo sapiens, Denisovans or another extinct species?

What I love about this story is that a philosophical question — What is art? — comes into the play as a scientific question. We all agree that the marvelous cave paintings are art. What about a set of patterned handprints and footprints? The scientific question hinges on your concept of art.

One of the co-authors, Tommy Urban, a researcher at Cornell, was called in to consult when that old question came up. Urban has been studying footprints at White Sands, N.M., as a way of studying early humans.

Urban pointed out that the prints are not accidental — or accidentally placed. Two hominins made them, rather than left them.

Also, there was no utilitarian reason for making them. The artists weren’t trying to do something practical. It was a creative activity, something we think of as distinctly human. 

As it stands, the world’s oldest art was made by a couple of kids. The footprints were made by a child of about 7, while the handprints were made by a child of 12. 

How to find more of yourself to use

 Kenneth Rexroth said this about the value of poetry:

“We recognize in American society that our whole program of education — the kind of man we turn out — is open to serious criticism. We do not produce well-rounded men. The value of poetry in education is just this: that it produces a deeper and wider and more intense response to life. The presumption is not that we will be better men — that’s up to us — but that deeply familiar with poetry, we will respond to life, its problems, and its people, its things, objects, everything, in a much more universal way, and that we will use much more of ourselves.”

Rexroth sometimes strikes me as a cantankerous grouch. But often, he strikes me as a fellow who gets to the heart of the matter. I think he does so in this case.

By a happy accident, I started to read poetry when I was 23. The registrar at the university discovered I’d managed to finish all the requirements of a degree — except that I didn’t have a single credit of English. So the authorities sent me to take a sophomore poetry course in my final semester.

I went reluctantly, but that class made me a lifelong reader of poetry. The habit of reading poetry changed the way I respond to life, to problems, to people. I have, as Rexroth claimed, found more of myself to use.

The quotation comes from his essay “The Poetry of the Far East 
in a General Education,” published in 1958. Even then, people were concerned about the kind of person who comes out of the educational system.

The sad story of Cortes's map

Maybe you’ve followed the debate about the accuracy of various news sources and the spread of misinformation during the pandemic.

The most recent skirmish in this endless war got me thinking about Cortes’s map.

Cortes’s map, which is in the Archives of the Indies in Seville, was not Cortes’s. It shows the Province of Amichel, which included Texas, but that name was used only by Cortes’s rival to the land claim, Francisco de Garay. Also, the map suspiciously omits Cortes’s own city, Veracruz.

The map was likely the work of pilots working for the leader of Garay’s expeditions, Alonzo Alvarez de Pineda. He explored the gulf in 1519.

The map shows the coast from Nombre de Dios, the silver port in Panama, to Bimyny, i.e. Florida, also called Juan Ponce after Ponce de Leon.

The map reflects a great discovery — that the Gulf of Mexico was a gulf, as opposed to a route to China. The Spaniards had run into so many islands they had a hard time fathoming that North America was a solid landmass.

The chart was compiled by sailors whose concern about accuracy was a matter of life and death. The captains of the expeditions tended to be army men, landlubbers. Sponsors of the expeditions often knew even less about navigation.

The pilots themselves knew nothing about the rivers on the coast so they charted them as accurately as they could but left them unnamed. The result was a map that shows a representation of the shoreline we can recognize today. But the map is virtually unlabeled.

The authorities in Spain sat on the map for a couple of years and then published it. They extolled the discovery as a feat of Spanish genius. They also claimed the unbroken shore was crowded with affectionate people who wore gold jewelry.

The map was a sensation throughout Europe. Printers couldn’t keep copies in stock. But each new edition of the map had to be the best, and so publication became a competition. Without any further exploration — any further reporting of the facts — publishers began to fill in the names of the rivers. They checked the chart against the accounts of explorers.

Some of the speculation was based in fact. Spaniards had seen the Karankawa people, who were much taller than Europeans. And so it was easy to conclude that this unnamed inlet must be the River of Giants. Some of the speculation was sheer fantasy: This must be the River of Gold!

Within a few editions, and without any further reporting, the map was labeled. A document that once reflected a healthy respect for the unknown had become an invitation to fantasy.

All this would be funny, except that the notions of affectionate natives and plentiful gold, once planted, were impossible to kill. Eighty years later Spaniards were still wandering around the continent, dying of self-induced hardship. I can’t help thinking that De Soto’s men, after four years of misery, enjoyed sinking his body in the river.

It seems to me that this is human nature. We value reporting, investigation and exploration. But if we don’t get a report, we make something up. Or believe something that someone else has made up.

A bit more on noticing and collecting notes

The poet Winfield Townley Scott wrote this:

“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 …

“One reason for writing these notes: I love to read this sort of thing when somebody else writes it. Almost, I think, no matter who.”

I love to read this sort of thing too. Really good notes — observations about the laws of nature or the laws of human nature — are often distilled into aphorisms, parables, anecdotes, sayings. I like to read all of them.

Wittgenstein, the philosopher, expressed his thoughts in this way. He called them remarks or zettel. On most days, I think this is the way philosophy should be done. I find remarks on concrete examples that illuminate problems in thought more compelling than treatises.

I like to read the notebooks of poets, naturalists, scientists, historians, philosophers — any good thinker. Some of them end up in 818 (American) and 828 (British) section of the library, if your library uses the Dewey Decimal System.

The lines quoted above came from A Dirty Hand: The Literary Notebooks of Winfield Townley Scott, University of Texas Press, 1969.

  

Before we learn, we notice

 I’m interested in a process that is so simple and common that we often ignore it. It’s the way we notice things.

The other day as I walked along Zarzamora Creek, a baby saw my big dog and pointed.

We humans notice before we have language, before we can give reasons for why we find something remarkable, worth noting. But we still notice.

And sometimes we don’t. This baby’s father was so engrossed in his smart phone that he failed to notice that his infant daughter was pointing at my big dog.

Sometimes our attention is focused. Sometimes we’re distracted.

I’d like to know how that works, particularly now that I’ve joined the hearing-aid crowd. I’m frankly interested in squeezing the most out of life.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend who is not religious but who, like me, is on the downhill run told of having the sensation that the universe was speaking to him, trying to tell him something. He said he was doing his best to pay attention.

He wondered aloud whether he was going crazy, but we’ve all heard similar notions.

I’ve heard mystics say that God speaks to all of us through the people we love.

The Transcendentalists held that we could learn something about the underlying laws of the universe by paying attention to Nature.

Einstein said something similar.

The Ancient Greeks had oracles all over the place. One of my favorites was the Oracle of Hermes at the marketplace in Pharai in Achaea. It was common to go there if you were sick.

Pausanias says you approached the statue of the god, left him a small coin, and whispered a question in his ear. He would give you your prognosis — but you had to be paying attention. The god spoke through the first chance words you overheard as you left the market square.

Can you imagine how carefully a suppliant listened to his neighbors on that occasion? Can you imagine what the world would be like if we listened like that all the time?

Saved by a force stronger than fate

The Sunday edition of The Express-News had a lovely story by Michael Corcoran about the jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden.

At 17, Teagarden came to town to play at the Horn Palace Inn. It was 1921. Prohibition was the law of the land, although some communities, including San Antonio and Galveston, had reputations for accommodating those who enjoyed a drink.

The inn was owned by a former police officer named Billy Keilman. Gangsters came looking for him and, while the band played, shot him twice. Keilman survived.

All the musicians had the sense to dive for cover except Teagarden, a kid from Vernon who stared in slack-jaw wonder at the ways of the Big City.

The kid got a grown-up subpoena from the district attorney saying his testimony was required. The gangsters sent word that any testimony would be frowned upon.

While Teagarden was considering the dilemma, he was saved by a force stronger than fate: the Texas weather.

On Sept. 9, San Antonio experienced rains that produced a flood. Residents still point out the high-water mark on the Gunter Hotel, just as Galveston residents point to the flood line at the Mod Coffeehouse on Postoffice Street.

The courthouse flooded. Records were lost. The case dissolved, and Teagarden headed to Houston, where he joined “Peck” Kelley’s band, which had a standing job at a place on Galveston Bay.

All kinds of characters end up on Galveston Bay for one reason or another. I ended up there for a while. But that’s another story.

Corcoran based his story on an essay by Jim Cullum Jr., a cornet player, bandleader and jazz historian, who died in 2019. Years ago, when I was working in Galveston, I began coming to San Antonio on days off. I’d make it a point to hear Cullum play. He had a place called The Landing on the River Walk, and later played at the Gunter. The last time I heard him was at the Cookhouse, 720 Mistletoe Ave., which is a good place to eat.

A couple of notes on grief

 It’s no credit to go through life and see a lot of things if you don’t understand them.

We smile at the tourists who crowd Paris with a list of must-see sights, racing from one to the other, checking them off the list. The presumption is that a full life can’t be lived unless you see them all — never mind what you understand of it all.

I can smile, but I’ve reached the Age of Medicare without coming to the slightest understanding of grief. I’ve seen plenty of it. I’ve observed how different people react to tragedy with the hope of making some generalizations about grief — and I just can’t. I just don’t understand it.

One of the first stories that Montaigne tells in the Essays is about Psammetichus’s grief. The original story comes from Herodotus.

Psammetichus, pharaoh of Egypt, was captured by Cambyses of Persia. Psammetichus showed no emotion when his daughter was led off to slavery and his son was led off to die. But he wept over the capture of a friend.

Montaigne’s view: The first two tragedies were simply beyond the means of expression.

Maybe so, but that seems dubious to me.

Boswell has a story in his biography of Samuel Johnson about grief. Johnson, hearing that an associate had lost his mother, sent a letter of condolence. Johnson suggested that the grieving man write down everything he could remember about his mother. The memories would a comfort as the years passed.

Maybe so, but it seems like an excruciating thing to do right after a loved one’s death.

When people suffer terrible losses, I’m at a loss for what to say.

I have come to understand a lot of things about life in the process of growing old. But I don’t understand grief at all.

What is the minimum it takes to be a writer?

When people talk about writers and writing, I think of Antonio Porchia.

If I were a teacher encouraging young writers, I’d tell them about Porchia. To my mind, he’s a good model of the minimalist writer, a writer who showed us all the things we don’t need to become writers.

Some people have convinced themselves that they need educational credentials, unlimited leisure and financial support.

Porchia was a laborer who had to quit school early to help support his family.

Some writers write stories, some essays, some poems. Porchia distilled what he’d learned from life in aphorisms.

He left behind one small book, “Voices.” It’s a lovely book.

He was also the victim — a happy one, as it turned out — of one of the great burglaries in literary history. If you’re interested in the details, I have longer essay on Porchia at hebertaylor.com.

 

Looking at the canonical works

 Jeffrey Eugenides, the essayist and short story writer, described his stab at an education: “I arrived at college keen to develop a life philosophy. The idea was to begin with the Greeks and stop somewhere around Nietzsche. By reading the canonical works, I thought I could bring an order to my mind that would manifest itself in my behavior and decisions. Now, thirty years later, I look back and have to admit it didn’t happen.” (The quotation comes from By the Book, ed. by Pamela Paul, Henry Holt & Co., 2014, p. 83.)

When I went to college, I had an even more modest goal: I wanted to develop a philosophy of art. I wanted to order my mind so that I could write efficiently, worthily, perhaps even beautifully.

Like a good American consumer and with all the wisdom of a man of 17, I wanted to pay my tuition and have someone hand this philosophy to me.

Almost 50 years later, I am knocking on the same door.

A note on dead ends

I’ve been thinking about dead ends, probably because I’ve made little progress on a writing project.

I came across this story: In 1888, an airplane powered a steam engine flew about 50 yards near Paris. The plane was called the Aeolus. It was ahead of the Wright Brothers by about 15 years. It was the right concept just waiting for the internal combustion engine to be perfected.

The point of the story, which was told by Guy Davenport, is that you don’t see dead ends in real time. You see them clearly in figuring out the history — the story of the past.

Practicing wanton thoughts

Montaigne, a good Catholic in addition to being a writer of genius, practiced wanton thoughts as a kind of spiritual discipline.

His reasoning: People who are getting old are prone to being too serious, to seeing the new as bad and the old as golden. We advance in years, looking backward. We could stand to be more engaged in the life that’s before us now.

Montaigne was a Renaissance thinker. If he were a contemporary self-help columnist, he might have put it this way: If you picture your imagination as a big, shaggy dog, take it to the park once a day and, though the rules say not to, let it off the leash. Just once a day.

A good book to keep you company

If I had to pick one book to keep me company for a while, on most days I’d choose Montaigne’s. I have been reading his Essays since college, convinced by Eric Hoffer that it was worth doing.

In my reading yesterday, Montaigne told the sad tale of Artaxerxes, whose magnificent bridge over the Hellespont was wrecked by a storm. The great Persian king ordered his officials to whip the water. Montaigne told the story as an example of emotion and why it is to be mistrusted.

In Montaigne, you find all things. He talks about writing, warfare, sex, death and his library. He considers the greatness of Plutarch, Seneca and Epaminondas. In one essay, Montaigne, a lawyer, famously puts the penis on trial. He talks about ways to approach fear and grief. He talks of the proper way to die.

What makes a good hunter is his skill and persistence in searching for game. Montaigne is a kind of hunter. Here is a good mind, searching a cosmos for interesting ideas.

If you're interested in Montaigne, there's an essay on what I find so interesting about him at hebertaylor.com.

 

 

What if we could all see the corpsman?

 Atul Gawande has an important article in the Aug. 30 issue of The New Yorker: “Costa Ricans Live Longer Than Us. What’s the Secret?”

Here’s the nut graf, as they say in the newspaper business:

“Although Costa Rica’s per-capita income is a sixth that of the United States — and its per-capita health-care costs are a fraction of ours — life expectancy there is approaching eighty-one years. In the United States, life expectancy peaked at just under seventy-nine years, in 2014, and has declined since.”

In 1950, average life expectancy was 55 in Costa Rica and 68 in the United States.
What happened?

Gupta’s article suggests that Costa Rica simply put public health first. That is, the public health system got priority. Public health officials set the goals for the country’s health-care system as whole. In Costa Rica, everyone is entered into the public health system, meaning each individual’s basic records are there. The county set up teams that include a doctor, a nurse and a health-care technician that visits each household at least once a year.

Despite the poverty in Costa Rica, fewer people die of preventable disease.

In reading the article, I was reminded of the public health system I enjoyed during my misspent teenage years, under supervision of the U.S. Navy.

The Navy did not like sailors missing work. If you were sick enough to miss a watch, you saw a technician called a hospital corpsman immediately. He or she would treat you and get you back on duty within minutes. If you were really sick, you might be passed up the line to a chief corpsman, who had more training, more credentials.

Of course the Navy had primary care physicians and specialists. But you didn’t start out with the specialist. And you didn’t wait for an appointment. And you did not have lengthy discussions about what vaccinations you were willing to take.

The Navy had an intense interest in public health: getting its workforce working at minimal cost.

We Americans have known better for decades.

We talk about helping the sick on Sundays. But we vote for politicians who constantly undermine confidence in the concept of public help. We vote for scoundrels who protect investment in the existing health care system, even though it isn’t all that good at preventing people from dying of entirely preventable diseases.

A must read on Texas history

 If I could require Texas leaders read one book, it would be the diary of Lt. Col. José Enrique de la Peña.

Texas A&M University Press published an English translation, With Santa Anna in Texas: A Personal Narrative of the Revolution, years ago.

The book is so enlightening some people think it’s subversive. It’s a delightful story because De la Peña was a professional officer who thought Santa Anna was an idiot. He was on Santa Anna’s staff, and so he was in position to report that other generals in the Mexican high command thought Santa Anna was an idiot, too.

It’s a good read. If you want a shorter version to get the gist of it before committing yourself to the book, I have an essay at https://www.hebertaylor.com.

All this comes to mind because state leaders have inserted themselves into the debate in San Antonio about the historical interpretation of the Alamo. The lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, took up an ill-advised fight against Forget the Alamo, a book by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford.

Patrick suggested the authors talk to some real historians at the state’s universities, apparently unaware that the book reports on the consensus of those historians.

Texas has endless cultural wars — and some of the most brutal are historical wars. We sometimes think that the story of the state is the most valuable common property we share. 

Popular perceptions of what happened can be wrong, outrageously wrong, if you don’t bother with the facts or let an old John Wayne movie count as the prime historical record.

If you want to get past that, primary sources are hard to beat.

Texas politicians should read a little Plato

In Plato’s Dialogue “The Statesman,” a young Socrates and a fellow identified as the Stranger investigate the nature of good government.

It’s a classic of Western philosophy. The book is more than 2,000 years old, but it sounds like commentary on the news in Texas.

Before you can get an idea of what good government is, it helps to understand what bad government is. And so the Stranger and Socrates construct an outlandishly hellish government.

In this government, there are two expert practitioners of useful arts: a ship’s captain who gets people and cargo safely where they must go and a physician who cares for his patients. Both are expert at what they do. The community is better off for their competence at their arts.

Now suppose we have a legislature with no special competence in those arts. These folks decide they must pass strict laws to guide the captain and the physician.

You can see where this going — or you should be able to see where it’s going.

It results in people who are not doctors telling doctors when and how they will perform medical procedures, including abortions.

It results in people who are not teachers telling teachers how they will teach history.

It results in people who don’t know anything about a subject making rules that make it impossible for experts — people with real competence — to practice the arts that benefit society.

Of course, there are also experts in governance. And, as I said, “The Statesman” is a classic on the topic. No one in public office in Texas seems to have heard of it.

 

  

Eric Hoffer’s pea-picking' parable

The writer Eric Hoffer, who was a migrant laborer before becoming a longshoreman, told of picking peas during the Depression. He needed just a bit to get paid but had to work in a picked-over field. He was hungry, and the pay would buy the evening meal.

Hoffer found an unpicked row and rejoiced. Then, just as he started, another worker appeared. The stranger started picking the row from the opposite end. The stranger didn’t even have a sack. He was just picking peas into his hat. Hoffer thought he might just be picking enough for his supper.

The man finally stopped, approached Hoffer and dumped his hatful of peas into Hoffer’s sack. He said: Now you owe the next fellow a hatful of peas.

I like that story. We Americans tend to think about what we can do for ourselves. We don’t think much about what we owe each other.

 

The day they put the general on KP

 In ancient Greece, a scruffy character was put to work by women who were making preparations to greet the great general Philopoeman. They put him to work drawing water and chopping wood.

The scruffy character was Philopoeman, of course. When the general’s men found him, he was sweating. He said he was paying for his appearance.

It’s a charming story of humility and character, but it’s also a reminder of how often we judge by appearances and how confident we are in those judgments.

The story came to me by way of Montaigne’s Essays, that wonderful book. I was reminded of it when I saw a fellow who seemed to be rummaging in a neighbor’s garbage can. But it was only the neighbor. He was wearing tattered work clothes, but soon pulled out expensive lawn equipment and got to work edging and trimming his lawn.

I smiled at myself, and then looked down and started counting the holes in my work clothes.

Deciding not to do things

Montaigne, on turning 50, said he’d decided we would never again run.

My friend Melvyn, a distinguished physician and world traveler, said — on reaching 85, I think — that he had decided he would no longer travel.

I find both decisions astonishing. A favorite author and close friend decided, on reaching a certain age, that they would no longer do things that are just part of being human. Or so it seems to me.

But on the day I retired, I decided I would do no more public speaking.

But of course that’s different. Isn't it?