What educational reform can do

 I wonder if ancient Athens, the place we know through the voices of so many interesting people, would have been such an interesting place if it had not been in the middle of an educational revolution.

The social conservatives of the day liked to remind everyone that you could still get a traditional education in Athens — for boys, if not for girls. 

Traditional education meant leaning one’s letters. And once you’d learned to read, then there was Homer, a lot of Homer, to read and memorize. Traditional education meant learning by rote. No one really thought about why teachers were poorly paid and relegated to the lower social ranks. Perhaps everyone could see that it didn’t take much intelligence, imagination or talent to bully boys into memorizing their lessons and beating them when they didn’t.

And then, around 450 BCE, everything changed. People who used pay teachers a pittance and snub them in the market began to shell out fortunes to get their boys in with the stars. They paid money to move their sons up on the waiting list.

The change was the arrival of the sophists. The word “sophist,” thanks to Plato, now has negative connotations. Sophos was the Greek word for wisdom. When Protagoras arrived from Abdera, on the Thracian coast, claiming to be a sophist, he meant “expert.” Only later, after Socrates had examined the sophists’ claims to knowledge and found them wanting, did the word get the connotation that is so evident in the word “sophistry.”

Socrates abhorred arguments that simply sought to persuade without getting to the truth.

But when Protagoras and his colleagues opened shop, they were acting on an insight into democratic societies. They saw that the vital quality in such societies was influence.

You had to convince a jury to win a court case. You had to persuade the assembly to pass a law. You had to convince a board to get an exemption to a rule on your business. You had to convince the archon to grant you a chorus if you wanted to produce a play. You had to persuade the assembly again if you were a general and wanted to invade Sicily.

Influence was the thing, and so Protagoras taught rhetoric, the study of arguments and persuasion. Peitho, the word “to persuade,” is an important word in Greek literature.

For a while, you had arguments over whether boys should be memorizing Homer or studying arguments of great public interest. It’s obvious who won.

One of the side effects of that debate is that the arguments of great public interest were recorded, reported, analyzed. We know a lot about what the ancient Greeks were thinking.

I wonder to what extent that would have been possible if an educational reformer hadn’t arrived in Athens and created a stir.

The things you see at the bird feeder

 I’m looking at a white-wing dove with a big, puffy down feather stuck on its claw.

The Enormous Dog That Lives At My House can give himself a good scratch. He closes his eyes with pleasure and scratches with enough enthusiasm to shake the house. He’s better at scratching than the white-wing, but the dove was better than I thought any bird could be.

Real enthusiasm, or so it appeared to me.

Seeing different things in disaster

 Yesterday’s note on the March of the Ten Thousand was about how people handle disaster.

Today’s note is about perspective. Alexander the Great looked at the story of the Greek mercenaries who fought with Cyrus and didn’t see a story of disaster. He saw possibilities.

Alexander saw that the Persian Empire, great as it was, was weaker than people supposed. The story of the Anabasis, in his mind, proved that a relatively small number of soldiers, marching as a disciplined, organized unit, could fight their way in and out of the vast empire, even though greatly outnumbered.

Why would anyone do that?

The empire was fabulously wealthy.

Alexander’s perspective on the story of disaster reminds me of U.S. Grant’s take on another “disaster” during the Civil War.

The rebels were dug in at Spotsylvania Courthouse, Virginia. Armies fought in lines in those days, often two or three ranks deep. But a young colonel in the Union Army named Emory Upton hit on the idea of stacking regiments one behind the other. What if the attack came at 20 ranks deep on a narrow front? The front lines would suffer terribly, of course. But the following ranks would fill the gaps and keep coming.

Upton talked the idea up until the high command bought it. A reinforced brigade of about 4,000 men punched a hole in the rebel lines. The Confederates barely contained the damage. Just barely, the rebels drove the attackers back.

The Union forces suffered heavy casualties, and there was a lot of criticism of Upton.

Grant saw the potential of the idea.

“A brigade today, we’ll try a corps tomorrow,” he said.

He reasoned that if the Confederates could just barely handle such an attack by 4,000, they’d crumble if hit by 20,000.

He was right.

A great scene from Xenophon

 One of my favorite passages in literature is from Xenophon’s Anabasis.

After Athens fell to Sparta, a lot of people thought the world was falling apart. 

In Persia, the great power of the day, Cyrus launched a revolt against his brother Artaxerxes II, the Great King. Cyrus had money and recruited 10,000 Greek mercenaries.

Xenophon asked his old teacher Socrates if he should go. Socrates said no. Xenophon went anyway.

In 401 BCE, Cyrus’s army left Sardis, now in Turkey but then in western Persia, and marched toward Babylon. It was a long march, about like walking across Texas.

Just before Cyrus’s army got to Babylon, it was met by Artaxerxes’s larger army at Kounaxa.

It was a disaster.

The Greeks were not stampeded, but they were the only part of Cyrus’s army that was not. Cyrus was killed. The Greek generals were lured into a trap and imprisoned.

The Greek soldiers had marched a thousand miles through rough country only to see their allies wiped out and their leaders eliminated. They were surrounded and outnumbered. They’d been months away from wives and children, parents and friends. They doubted they’d see any of them again.

Exhausted by battle, grief and bad news, the men didn’t bother to pitch tents or light fires. They dropped to the earth and slept.

It’s one of the great descriptions of men who are starblasted and moonstruck. Milton’s description of Lucifer falling from heaven is the only thing I know of that compares with it.

What do you do when you’re overwhelmed by misfortune?

Well, if you were a Greek of that era, you had an election.

The men voted for new generals. They then formed ranks. They fought their way to the nearest sea, the Black Sea.

In that day, if a Greek soldier could get to the sea, a Greek sailor sooner or later would pass by and pick him up. The Anabasis is the story of how the Greek soldiers made it home. 

Marking the day: Wittgenstein

 What sort of thing is religious belief? First, the grounds for belief are not ordinary grounds. If you were going to state the grounds for a scientific proposition, you’d say something completely different than you would if you were talking about religious belief. If you were arguing for a new law, your statement of the grounds for it would be different again.

Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out that analyzing philosophical concepts is not as straightforward as it would appear. The concepts are in language, and we have to use language to analyze them. We commonly use language to make statements of fact. If you assert “The cat is on the mat,” I can verify the truth of your assertion by using my senses. I can go look. If I don’t believe my eyes, I can touch and smell.

Because that’s the ordinary way we use language, we think that’s the pattern for using it.

Wittgenstein, many years ago, helped me to see that’s just not so.

And, yes, I’m trying to show honor to a thinker who influenced me by marking his birthday: April 26, 1889, in Vienna.

• Source: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967.

And, if you’re curious about this whole business of “Marking the day,” see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

How do you tell a violent story?

 The propensity within human nature for violence: It’s a fascinating subject. Yesterday’s note mentioned Cormac McCarthy, who has written brilliantly about it.

I think how you go about the discussion might be nothing more than a matter of taste. If that’s true, taste is an important consideration in describing one’s character. It’s far more than whim.

Here are three examples of how people have conducted this discussion.

• Homer’s Iliad, which is one place to begin a discussion of Western literature, begins with an example of rage that erupts in violence. One act of violence leads to another. The epic is long and bloody.

• Alice Oswald, a brilliant contemporary poet, published Memorial, which recounts how all the soldiers in the Iliad met their end. She stripped out the plot — the story — and recounted all the spearing, stabbing, strangling, trampling. ... Her account is short, rather than long, and it’s eerie, rather than revolting. Her poem hit me as a meditation on what people do to other people in war.

• The great tragedians of Athens — Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides — recounted the same horrific stories. Confronted with unspeakably violent, gruesome myths, the poets yet spoke in a way that could be consumed by the public, in public — in fact as part of a religious festival. A lot of the plays are about rage and violence. But the acts of violence occur offstage.

Different artists have handled the topic of violence in ingenious ways. The notion that there is one way to do it strikes me as obviously wrong. The notion that the best way is the most graphic way also seems to me to be wrong. It’s the kind of notion that makes sense only if you haven’t read the Greek tragedians or Oswald’s poem.

Great talent, and yet ...

 A friend and I have been sharing notes on writers we like. At points in our lives, we both read Cormac McCarthy with real pleasure. Now, both of us have had second thoughts.

My friend put it this way: “When you're reading it, you're never allowed to forget that you're reading a Cormac McCarthy novel.”

It’s a criticism of the use of talent, not of the lack of talent. The talent can be evident and enormous. And yet …

Here is Virginia Woolf making a similar observation about Henry James:

I have finished The Wings of the Dove, and make this comment. His manipulation becomes so elaborate towards the end that instead of feeling the artist you merely feel the man who is posing the subject. And then I think he loses the power to feel the crisis. He becomes merely excessively ingenious.

Audubon encounters another great mind

 One brief tip for improving life in the United States: Sign up for Library of America’s Story of the Week. It’s free.

Last week’s piece, an essay, was by John James Audubon’s account of Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, who visited the Audubon home in Kentucky in 1818. Audubon calls him “M. de T” in “The Eccentric Naturalist.” Maybe “eccentric” is the best word, although it just begins to cover the subject. “Lunatic” might do. “Genius” is not out of the question.

Rafinesque was brilliant. He was self-educated. But biology was in its infancy, and so Rafinesque collected specimens, wrote books and became a professor.

He was difficult to deal with. One of his flaws was that he claimed credit for others’ discoveries, and so other naturalists played tricks on him. Rafinesque published a description of the Devil-jack Diamond-fish, a denizen of the Ohio River, based on a description by Audubon. The evidence suggests Audubon made up something bizarre on the suspicion that Rafinesque might lift it.

But Audubon’s account of the man is worth reading.

My favorite part: Audubon got Rafinesque settled in his room. Later that night, the house awoke to a commotion. Rafinesque had kept a candle burning, which attracted insects, which attracted bats. Rafinesque, who slept naked, leapt out of bad and tried to collect a specimen of the flying mammal by bashing one with the nearest object at hand. That was Audubon’s favorite violin.

So went the visit. Such is the story of the communing of great minds.

• Souce: John James Audubon’s “The Eccentric Naturalist” can be found here: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/04/the-eccentric-naturalist.html

Air war, over the creek

 Two male grackles, quarreling over territory in mating season, were oblivious that their aerial combat had carried them over Zarzamora Creek until one drove the other out of the air and into the water.

The defeated bird wasn’t immersed. But it was close. His head stayed above water. He rose, flustered and fluttering, but flew back to land.

I’ve watched birds for many years. But I’d never seen that.

Two clues about the seriousness of theater

 It only seems as if theater were a gift from the gods. It was a human invention. It grew out of the choral recitals that were part of the big religious festivals in ancient Greece. 

A fellow named Thespis, in 534 BCE, got the idea of having an actor play the role of the leading figure, arguing back and forth with the chorus. At least that’s what people said in Athens.

The Athenians were serious about their drama.

Drama was publicly funded, and the demand was enormous. Weekends had not been invented yet, but the Athenians had more than 50 holidays on the calendar. Some of the major festivals consumed dozens of plays. A contest entry for comedy was a single play. But an entry for tragedy was four: three tragedies and a satyr play, a short farce.

It’s hard to imagine that Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were working at the same time.

How big a deal was the theater?

Two clues:

• After a single performance of Phrynichos’s “The Capture of Miletus,” the audience burst into hysterical weeping. (Miletus was to the ancient Athenians what Saigon and Kabul are to some Americans today.) The playwright was fined. The Assembly passed a law that made it a crime to produce the play again.

• In times of war, it was permissible to tap the theater fund in emergencies. It tempted some politicians to cut public funding for the arts. The Athenians quickly tired of the demagoguery. They passed a law making it a crime punishable by death to propose cutting the theater fund in times of peace.

A lesson from an ancient law court

 I am a democrat, with a lowercase “D.” I believe in democracies. 

That love of self-determination in government probably influenced my decision to become a newspaperman. Good decisions in a democracy depend on good information, spread broadly.

I believe that democracy should be as direct as possible, that citizens should be well informed an active. In my mind, the chief sign of health in a government is the level of public engagement. 

But people in crowds can sometimes let their feelings run away from their senses. Through the years, democracies have put systems of checks on popular feelings. Those in the judicial system are particularly valuable.

Yesterday’s note was about the legal system in ancient Athens, which operated without many of the checks we now take for granted. 

Under that system, the Athenians killed Socrates.

During the Peloponnesian War, an Athenian fleet won a badly needed victory over the Spartans at Arginusae. But rough weather prevented the ships assigned to pick up survivors off sinking ships from doing their job, and the admirals in charge were focused on trying to crush the enemy.

The Athenians, hearing news of victory, celebrated wildly. On hearing the details of the lost crews, they took vengeance in court. They put admirals on trial and executed six of them.

When you are fighting a war of survival, executing leaders who have proven skills and abilities isn’t a good idea. Athens was a great democracy in the ancient world. But the citizens of Athens lost their independence and their democracy within a couple of years of that great victory at sea.

I think that the kind of direct democracy that allows ordinary citizens to sue doctors and medical businesses as a way of enforcing the state's abortion law is a bad idea. At least one other great democracy tried a similar legal strategy, and we know what happened.

A problematic idea of the law

 The Texas abortion law has been widely copied by states that want to ban abortion. The law has been denounced as a descent into the dark ages by some legal scholars.

I wish the people who hold office in Texas knew something about ancient Athens. The problems with this kind of law were obvious a couple of thousand years ago.

The Texas law is being hailed as revolutionary and innovative because it takes the state out of the enforcement business. The state doesn’t enforce. Enforcement occurs because any private citizen can sue to stop an activity he or she objects to.

Actually, the law is neither revolutionary nor innovative. This is what law was in ancient Athens.

Athens had no police, no public prosecutors, no professional judges. The judge was an ordinary citizen who, chosen by lot, was chairman of the trial. The jurors — 500 was a common number — were chosen by lot.

One citizen prosecuted another for whatever action he considered to be a violation of law.

There’s no problem here — unless you get to the question of whether a doctor, for example, has a right to operate a business. Because if this is your concept of law, the answer is no. If the doctor beats the first lawsuit, he won’t beat the 143^rd. And this system, as the ancient Athenians discovered, created a class of people who went around insinuating that a business person was doing something wrong and demanded money in return for not bringing a lawsuit.

And if you can blackmail a doctor, you can also blackmail a plumber, a carpenter, a teacher … anybody. You can stop doctors from running their medical practices. And you can stop plumbers, carpenters, teachers — you name it — from running their businesses.

I have heard people who call themselves socialists bewail “the fact” that capitalism and free enterprise cannot be contained, much less killed.

Actually, you can put a torpedo through the bow of any enterprise with this concept of law. The Texas Legislature inadvertently and unfortunately rediscovered the old blueprints for the torpedoes.

The Greeks loved their games

The ancient Greeks made a distinction between sacred games and prize games.

The big, prestigious games — the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean — were athletic competitions staged in a religious setting. The idea was that a display of human excellence was an appropriate offering to the gods.

The sacred games were central to the culture. We think today in terms of nations, but the Greek world of 2,500 years ago was made up of perhaps 1,500 poleis, city-states, most of them small, with their own laws and ways. The Greek people, as a whole, kept in touch by attending the games. They kept track of history by dating events according to which Olympiad an event had occurred in. A sacred truce prevailed for a month on either side of the five-day festival. The games were bigger than war.

The prizes at the sacred games were wreaths: olive at Olympia, laurel at the Pythian games at Delphi, and wild celery at the Isthmus of Corinth and Nemea.

It was, like college athletics, high-minded and noble.

It got to be such a big deal that the athletes could cash in. Eventually, hundreds of games sprang up offering cash prizes. They were popular, in the same kind of way that sports have become popular in American culture. The amount of money that changed hands shocked people whose ideals still involved competing for a wreath.

The thinkers of the day had their say:

• Xenophanes complained that people should be known for intellectual achievement, not for their athletic prowess. I heard university professors say the same thing decades ago.

• Aristotle thought athletics ought to be a part of a broader education. But he also thought the extremes of training practiced by elite athletes contradicted the idea of education. A desire for excellence should be instructive, not destructive. 

• Galen, the father of medicine, was appalled by the injuries. But he also railed against the practices of those who proclaimed themselves professional trainers, some of whom had strange ideas about diet.

The striking thing to me is this: Those conversations took place centuries ago, but they have a contemporary ring. In the last couple of thousand years, we’ve harnessed machines, split the atom and learned to fly to the moon. But we haven’t come to an agreement on some basic features of our broad, shared culture.

The Spartan general just couldn't believe it

 Americans, generally speaking, have trouble with the concept of “enough.”

They want more, not enough. And they spend too much of their precious life in the pursuit of more things, rather than the pursuit of just enough. Or so it seems to me.

Herodotus told a story about Pausanias, the Spartan general who broke the Persians at Plataia in 479 BCE. It was the end of the Persian invasions.

Mardonios, the Persian general, had been killed, and Pausanias could not believe the luxury of the Persian general’s camp. Pausanias ordered the captured Persian cooks to prepare the usual meal and he ordered the Spartans to fix the usual grub.

Pausanias then invited the other Greek generals to come compare the cuisine. The Spartan kept asking: How could people who have so much come so far to rob people who are so poor?

It’s a good example, I think, of the failure to understand “enough.”

My friend Melvyn expresses the same idea when he quotes Simeon Ben Zoma: “Who is rich? He who rejoices in his portion. …”

Before the house begins to stir

 I love the quiet of early mornings, before the house begins to stir, before the neighborhood wakes up.

It’s too early for the dog to want to walk or play — he’s snoring softly. The chores are always with us, but they’ll wait an hour. I like to sit in a chair with a pen and a notebook. I like the silence.

A lot of people practice mindfulness, meaning they try to clear their minds of thoughts and ideas that constantly bubble up like a natural spring. I’m just the opposite. I like the natural spring. I like to think about life and all the interesting people and ideas I stumbled across in the course of a day. Each day, I try to make a note of something.

That’s why I have this note about Gunilla Norris, who years ago wrote Sharing Silence. Almost all of that little book has been lost to my memory, but she made me wonder about our affluence. We use it to distract ourselves, not enrich ourselves.

We have places in our homes set aside as recreation rooms or entertainment centers. Norris made me wonder what the country would look like if each house had a place for silence and sanctuary.

As I read her I had an image of countless people rushing home after a day to work to watch a movie or ballgame. And I wondered what it would be like if they came home to a place that was quiet, where they could just sit and think about what they’d seen or the people who were important to them.

Norris wrote: “When we make a place for silence, we make room for ourselves. This is simple. And it is radical.”

I think she’s right. With that one change, you would have a different people, and thus a different country.

Those yellow flowers have me smiling

 Both biologists and naturalists will appreciate that the paloverde is blooming. I smile whenever I see the beautiful yellow flowers, partly because they once got the better of me.

The scientific name of this tree or shrub is Parkinsonia aculeate. It’s in the legume family. In my neighborhood, I hear more people speak of paloverde (green wood) than retama. 

The remarkable thing about the plant is how green the branches are. My textbook says it’s a tropical, and we’re on the northern edge of its range. The leaves look like little pine needles. If the summer is hot and dry — and when is it not? —the leaflets fall off, and those bright green stems and trunk do the photosynthetic work that leaves usually do.

But I was fooled by those flowers. Each has five petals. One of the five has a honey gland at its base. The gland turns red or maroon as it matures.

The first time I saw a red spot on a bright yellow petal I was sure it was a mirid, a common leaf bug. Then I noticed that almost every flower had a bug on it. And then, as I marveled at the infestation, I discovered that the cause of my amazement was my own ignorance.

Someone told me the other day that young people are better innovators because of their ignorance — they don’t know from experience that some things are allegedly impossible and so they try.

That’s the salve I put on my wounded ego. If ignorance is as asset, I can still compete with the 20-year-olds.

Naturalists v. biologists

 Yesterday’s note was about those who want to understand nature and those who want to feel their connection to it.

Here’s another way of looking at the problem: The entomologist William Morton Wheeler, in an address to the Boston Society of Natural History in 1931, considered the distinction between naturalists and biologists. In his telling:

• Naturalists are extraverts, Romantics, observers, collectors, classifiers. If they were philosophers, they’d be students of Aristotle.

• Biologists are introverts, Classicists, theorists, handlers of ideas rather than specimens. If they were philosophers, they’d be students of Plato.

Wheeler had an interesting mind. Some of his specimens are still in the collection at the University of Texas. He was known as a taxonomist, one of stars of the science of zoological classification. But this classification seems like whimsy to me.

What I’d say: The diversity we see in nature is mirrored in the diversity we see in the observers of nature. It’s a spectrum, rather than an either-or. Some observers are trying to understand what they see, and others are trying to feel how they connect to web of nature.

All the observers on the spectrum give some kind of account of what they experienced. Old newspapermen would be tempted to talk about how objective each account was.

I’ve been watching a red yucca in the front garden. It put out a stalk, which seemed to grow about 6 inches a day. Then the flowers came, and while I was counting, a hummingbird came to feed.

I have seen hummingbirds feed on many plants and I know a bit about how they go about it. I was interested in this sight, but also thrilled.

How do we write about nature?

 Richard Smyth’s survey of nature writing in Aeon magazine contrasts two styles that are the results of tastes or sensibilities. Some people want reporting, observations, facts because they want to understand what’s going on. Others want to leave the door open to emotion, how nature makes a person feel.

We human beings are part of the very thing we’re trying to understand.

If you like nature, and writing about nature, Smyth gives an excellent overall view of the field.

The point I found most interesting was made by Wendell Berry. It’s the distinction between knowing something and being familiar with something.

“Familiar” has roots in “family.” It’s used to describe knowing something intimately, as one would a family member.

When we moved to San Antonio, I stared walking along Zarzamora Creek every day, just to try to get a better understanding of our new environment. The question is whether you can know nature as you know your family.

• Source: Richard Smyth, “Nature does not care,” Aeon, 12 April 2022.

What Gorky said about Tolstory

 I like the documents that historians call primary sources: diaries, interviews, memoirs.

But, as Gabriel García Márquez suggested in yesterday’s note, interviews can be based in fantasy, rather than in fact. Diaries and memoirs can be similarly unreliable.

The great Russian writer Gorky left a portrait of the greater Russian writer Tolstoy.

Some of the details are — well, so detailed that they seem genuine. Gorky said Tolstoy had hands with big, ropy veins. He rolled books up like newspapers and put them into the big pocket of his tunic.

Gorky also said that Tolstoy laughed freely, used crude language about sex and asked everyone about their experiences with prostitutes.

It’s not exactly the picture of Tolstoy you get from reading The Gospel in Brief, The Kingdom of God is Within You or 23 Tales. Is Gorky a reliable witness?

Gorky also said Tolstoy really didn’t care much about his friend’s feelings. He valued truth and told it, even when it hurt. Gorky also said he liked to ask friends difficult questions: Do you love your wife? What do you think of yourself? He preferred those kinds of conversations to talking about the weather.

The Gorky remark that seems truest to me was his observation that Tolstoy had suspicious relations with God. He said that Tolstoy and God sometimes reminded him of two bears in one den.

Just so.

A little warning about interviews

 I love interviews. But here is Gabriel García Márquez with a cautionary note:

I had, and still have, a prejudice that may be unfair against interviews understood as a session of questions and answers in which both parties make an effort to maintain a revelatory conversation … An immense majority of the ones I have not been able to avoid … ought to be considered as an important part of my works of fiction, because they are no more than that: fantasies about my life. On the other hand, I consider them invaluable, not for publication, but as raw materials for feature articles, which I value as the stellar genre of the best profession in the world.

• Source: Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, p. 444.

Why I like interviews

 On April 6, I mentioned an interview with Peter Matthiessen. Since then, I’ve traded notes with a friend about a mutual interest in interviews. I confess that on most days I’d be more inclined to read an interview, a diary or a memoir than a novel.

There’s something about getting at it directly: events, great and small, as told by those who actually experienced them. I like those first-person accounts. Historians call them primary sources. 

In the Matthiessen interview, I learned that he kept notes in a notebook, as opposed to index cards or loose-leaf sheets, for his nonfiction books. The right-hand (or recto) pages were for data. The left-hand (or verso) pages were for the remarks that came later, on reflection.  He crossed out material as he put it into a draft.

Though known for his nonfiction, Matthiessen said he covered some of the same topics in fiction to convey his own feelings. Stephen Crane made similar remarks about his use of fiction.

All that was interesting. But what I really recall from the interview is that Kurt Vonnegut, who was a neighbor, came down the street one day and put a bumper sticker on Matthiessen’s truck.

It said: “Your planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of you.”

• Source: Jonathan Meiburg, “An Interview with Peter Matthiessen”; Believer, June 1, 2014; Issue 108.

https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-peter-matthiessen/

Keynes’s advice on writing

 Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes were having tea. He said to her: “You should pretend to write about real people and make it all up.”

It’s the smallest of stories, hardly an anecdote, but I like it for two reasons.

First, it shows how little we pay attention to what others say. This was Woolf’s point in making a note in her diary. She liked to have tea with people because it was an excuse for conversation. She was interested in what other people had to say, including this bit of advice — almost an oracle — on writing.

Second, the advice suggests precisely the kind of story I like. I’ve mentioned Guy Davenport’s story “John Charles Tapner” (Sept. 23, 2021 and March 19, 2022) as an example of the kind of story I like to read. The story is based on a historical event: Victor Hugo’s arrival on the isle of Guernsey to investigate an execution. Hugo was wealthy, outrageous and world famous. He hated capital punishment. And so his arrival in an isolated, rural, conservative place to meet people who had executed a criminal was an encounter.

We know a bit of the story through history. But we can know it in a much more entertaining way through Davenport’s imagining of it.

• Source: Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, entry for May 26, 1921.

Anderson: ‘The Egg’

 “Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms.”

That sentence comes from Sherwood Anderson’s short story “The Egg,” a tale about doomed parents.

The narrator has grown up and is reflecting on his parents’ lives, two people who seemed satisfied at one time and then wanted more. 

The American passion of getting up in the world took possession of them.

Father was a happy-go-lucky farmworker until, at 35, he married a country-school teacher. Mother wanted nothing for herself but was ambitious for her husband and son.

And so the narrator’s parents started a chicken farm. When that failed, they started a café at a railroad station, a bit too far from the customers in town.

Father had collected specimens of chicks — preserved in alcohol in small bottles — hatched with four legs or two heads or two sets of wings. He hauled the collection from failed farm to new café as a kind of talisman.

As the business at the café got increasingly desperate, Father decided that the key to success was having patrons come away with the idea that they’d been entertained. He tried to interest a customer in the trick of getting an egg inside a bottle. And of course he eventually shows his prized collection. It was not a great moment in marketing.

It’s a picture adult failure as witnessed by a child.

Crane was a 'natural psychologist'

 Another portrait of Stephen Crane, this one from Frederic M. Lawrence, who was Crane’s closest friend at Syracuse University in 1891:

He had a great capacity for friendship, though his circle was always somewhat restricted. His sympathy was felt rather than expressed. … In short, he was a keen natural psychologist, a reader of minds of men, and to this he owed his remarkable hold on all who got to know him well.

Lawrence became a doctor and wrote a memoir. Paul Auster quoted this excerpt in Burning Boy.

I have been reading Auster’s book trying to get at why Crane took such a hold on me when I first read him in high school.

I like Lawrence’s observation. Crane had empathy, the ability to get inside someone else’s head by getting inside his shoes and walking a mile. The empathy led to a kind of compassion that was remarkable and that didn’t evaporate when a character showed flaws. I think that must have been what I, at 15, so admired.

• Source: Paul Auster, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021, p. 113.

The question of place

 Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey were having tea, meaning they were having a delicious conversation. She brought up the subject of place.

When we read a lot, qw tend to place writers. We put them in categories — eras and genres being less problematic than evaluations of talent.

The two writers mused over where they might be placed. Some critic had called Woolf “the ablest of living women novelists.” Strachey, known for his biographical essays, wanted to be placed “a little better than Macaulay.”

The whole question is foreign to me. The kind of writing I most admire is the writing you do for yourself. Montaigne is a good example of a person who wrote to work out what he thought. The fact that others appreciated his work was a happy accident, irrelevant to the value of the work.

Writing is something you do for yourself. Place is something other people do to you.

• Source: Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, entry for April 29, 1921.

Do you know what your great question is?

 Here is a remarkable statement from Peter Matthiessen:

“My great question, I would say, comes from Turgenev, from Virgin Soil. One of the characters kills himself, but he leaves a note, and the note says, ‘I could not simplify myself.” … It’s been my great, great aim in life, simplification. Total failure.”

In Samuel Johnson’s little book Prayers & Meditations, there’s an entry in which Johnson is gloomy at his lack of self-improvement. The idea that a human being can find out what he’s supposed to be doing and do it is just too much.

But Matthiessen’s statement suggests that we all have a great question, rather than a purpose. It also suggests that he, at least, knew what his great question was.

The failure seems to me to be only human. It’s the not knowing and not trying that smells like wasted life, unexamined life.

• Source: Jonathan Meiburg, “An Interview with Peter Matthiessen”; Believer, June 1, 2014; Issue 108. You can find it here:

https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-peter-matthiessen/

Matthiessen gave this interview about a month before his death at 86. Interviews work best when the subject engages with the questions, and Meiburg’s questions clearly energized Matthiessen. Thanks to my friend Christopher for sending a link.

A portrait of Stephen Crane

 On Dec. 13, I mentioned that I was reading Paul Auster’s book on the life and work of Stephen Crane. It took more than three months to read it.

It’s a long book, 738 pages plus notes and index, but I was reading slowly, pencil in hand. The margins are full of notes. Burning Boy is the kind of book that I can’t borrow from the library. I don’t so much read such books as digest them.

I think this is a wonderful book, but you might not. I admire Auster’s work, and Crane’s “The Open Boat” shook me awake when I was a teenager. I read it and decided I wanted to write short stories. Crane might not have the same affect on you and therefore couldn’t interest you in the way he interests me.

Crane died at 29. He struck people in vastly different ways. Some writers, such as Joseph Conrad, wrote perceptive things about him. Others, such as Willa Cather, seem to have been opaque. One of the most illuminating things in the book is a description of Crane by Otto Carmichael of the Minneapolis Times. They both worked as correspondents in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Carmichael described Crane this way:

• “A Bohemian.”

• “Absolutely worthless except for what he did.”

• “Irresponsible and unmanageable.”

• Not a newsman. Any city editor would have fired him within a week.

• “Nothing vicious about him or reckless.” He was just “serenely indifferent.” Meaning: “… trifles would change him and big things would not stop him; fancy would hold him to a place and money would not move him from it.”

• In other words, Crane simply followed his interests, and his main interest was danger, how people react to it. Crane didn’t fear it. He was fascinated by it.

Some people live that way because they have to live that way. They have to follow their own interests.

• Source: Paul Auster, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021, pp. 668-9.

She saw him first

 The Wise Woman saw a garter snake, Thamnophis cyrtopsis, along the banks of the San Antonio River the other day, not far from Mission Concepción.

She was pleased that she saw him first. I told her that her trail eyes are getting better. Ever the teacher, the Wise Woman lectured me on the importance of keeping the Enormous Dog out of the tall grass. It’s snake season. If the Enormous Dog is bitten, my name will be stricken from the Lamb’s Book of Life.

On Sunday, on Zarzarmora Creek, the Wise Woman saw a young woman fishing along the north bank. The young woman was wading carefully through the tall grass and dewberry canes, trying to get to a good spot to cast. “Enjoy yourself, but watch your step,” the Wise Woman called to her. “There are snakes around here.”

The young woman thanked the Wise Woman, and we went on.

Three hundred yards up the trail — the Wise Woman was again the first to see it — was another snake, sunning itself on a log on the bank.

“What was it?” the Wise Woman asked.

I usually tell her that it’s harmless and reassure her that there’s nothing to worry about. But this was a diamondback, Cotralus atrox. He was not big — 6 feet is the usual standard for a “big” rattler — but he was big enough. I’d say just short of 4-and-a-half. 

Diamondbacks don’t love water, but they can swim. This one saw the dog, recognized an ancient predator and hit the water. He swam for a long way, a foot below the surface, before he disappeared.

Algren: ‘A Bottle of Milk for Mother’

Nelson Algren’s short story “A Bottle of Milk for Mother” is set in a Chicago police station, where the cops are questioning Bruno “Lefty” Bicek.

Lefty is a big kid, about 19, a baseball pitcher and boxer and a member of the Polish Warriors Social & Athletic Club, a gang now called the Baldheads because of their new, distinctive haircuts.

Lefty tells the cops he’s done nothing wrong and was just going to get a bottle of milk for his mother when he was unfairly detained.

It gradually emerges — and the mastery of this story is in the unfolding of it — that Lefty is a jackroller, a guy who strong-arms drunks. One man, a father of five who depended on his check from the Workers Project Administration, fought back. A gun went off in the struggle. The man was hit in the groin. The cops finally break the news to Lefty: The man’s dead.

The remarkable feature of the story is Lefty’s certainty at each step of the way.

He has rehearsed the line about the bottle of milk for mother. He had been told that if the cops picked him up they’d have nothing on him. If someone did get killed, at worst it would be was manslaughter, 1 to 14 years. 

Experienced members of the gang told Lefty this. He believed them, in the same way some people today believe the prophets of the internet.

By the time Lefty had seen a judge, the illusion was over. “I knew I’d never get to be 21 anyhow,” he muttered.

Algren put a lot in this story: how upper-class Polish-Americans, some of whom are senior police officials, viewed lower-class Polish-Americans in Chicago during The Depression; how the Polish viewed the Irish and vice versa; and how neighborhoods that didn’t offer a lot of opportunities were habitats for characters with names like Dropkick, Bibleback, Cowboy and Catfoot.

But Algren really gets to this: how bad information is absorbed in vacuous societies and how people act confidently on it.

After reading Algren's short masterpiece, I kept thinking of a line from Bertrand Russell: "What philosophy should dissipate is certainty."

 

Moras, but not zarzamoras

 On the south bank across from West Point of Memorial Island are a few flowering berry bushes. Moras, but not zarzamoras.

They are Southern dewberries, not blackberries. The canes look alike, but dewberries blossom and bear earlier. The flowers are white with five petals.

Rubus trivialis is the dewberry, while Rubus argutus is the blackberry.

The stems of the dewberries, in the first year, are called primocanes and are sterile. In the second year, they are floricanes, meaning they have flowers. They tend to bend back toward the ground and root from the tips. The first flowers I saw were on May 28. And they won’t last long.

Late March on Zarzamora Creek

 A few of the joys and wonders:

• The first cypress to leaf — or should I say “needle”? — on Elmendorf Lake is usually the ancient one near the dam. I call it the hawks’ tree. But it’s been two years since the red-tails nested there. Most cypress are evergreen, but in Texas we have deciduous cypress in the genus Taxodium, hence the common name, bald cypress, T. distichum.The botanists usually say they have “needle-like leaves.” The first green I saw was on March 28. Before long we’ll see balls, i.e. cones.

• The redbuds flower first then leaf. First flowers I saw on the creek: March 2; first leaves, March 25.

• I love Rapistrum rugosum, an annual in the mustard family, Brassicaceae. It has yellow flowers on long stems, which are branched and angular. It looks like flowers on a contraption made of Tinker Toys. It’s usually about 3 feet tall. The common name is bastard cabbage, but it’s also known as mustard weed and turnip weed, the latter coming from its taproot. It’s on lists of invasive species. First flowers: March 20.

• Baby ducks, about a dozen, but they were bunched so closely to mother that the many ducklings looked like one solid mass. These are the domestic ducks that were released on the lake in some time long forgotten. The climate is such that we see baby ducks even in winter. These are the first since the last freeze. We first saw them March 29.

At the Medina River Natural Area, the blooms on the yucca were spectacular.