The woods, late October

 The woods around here are beautiful and fascinating. Here’s a view from late October:

• Some wildflowers are still blooming. The most common are blue mistflower, Conoclinium coelestinum, and some asters in genus Symphyotrichum. The asters sometimes look white and sometimes have a blue tint. I’ve learned, through the years, that some people can distinguish colors far better than I can. I’ll have to have help with these little flowers.

• The goldenrods, genus Solidago, are also blooming. I’ve seen dense stands on land that have been disturbed by humans, but few plants in the forest.

• I found a nice stand of dogfennel, Eupatorium capillifolium, by a pond. Beautiful in the soft fall light.

• I’ve seen spectacular stands of kudzu, Pueraria montana, but the woods here are mostly full of common ivy, Hedera helix. In some stands, just about every tree trunk is wrapped in deep green to 30 feet. I don’t know whether the forests I’ve been tramping have some kind of immunity against this wildly invasive plant — do they provide too much shade for kudzu? — or whether they just haven’t been invaded yet.

These notes are about the natural history of Georgia’s Piedmont, but they are also about my mind. I can’t really get settled in a place without looking it over.

It takes a while to get familiar with something. But at some point, I want to be on familiar terms with a place.

The earth beneath our feet

 If you drop a ball on the ground in this part of Georgia, you’ll have to chase it. If there is a naturally level patch of ground in this area, I haven’t seen it.

They call this the piedmont. The bigger mountains — the Appalachian Plateau and the Blue Ridge — are to the north. Most of Georgia is coastal plain.

The big change occurs at the fall line, where the ancient igneous and metamorphic rock formations rise out what was once an ancient sea. The fall line was once the shoreline.

If you look at a map, the fall line runs from Columbus, Macon and Augusta. The land rises for about 20 miles. It’s a good place for waterfalls. In the old days, merchants could bring big boats up the rivers to the fall line. If you wanted to ship goods further north, you usually had to reload the freight onto smaller boats above the falls.

Stone Mountain, billed inaccurately as the largest exposed mass of granite in the country, is a couple of miles from our  house. It’s an indication of what lies below the soil here, a stark contrast to the deep layers of sediment south of the fall line.

The geologists say the Appalachians rose 500 million years ago, and it’s been eons since what’s now the Gulf of Mexico was at the fall line. Since then, the rocky formations have weathered, and so the naturalists here use a word I didn’t hear much in Texas: saprolite. It’s the decomposed rock that lies on the surface, Georgia’s famous red clay.

As you’d expect, it’s got plenty of iron oxides. But it also has quartz, silicon and aluminum. I wonder whether those nutrients allow different kinds of microbes to work at decomposing the dead vegetation on the forest floor. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For now, the red clay of Georgia looks like the red dirt of East Texas to me.

A first look at Georgia

 What’s the Georgia Piedmont like?

Let’s start with all these tulip trees.
These big, tall trees that are have turned bright yellow are Liriodendron tulipifera. I think people around here call them tulip trees or yellow poplars.

The reference to tulips is twofold: after the shape of the flowers and also the shape of the leaves. I’ll have to wait until spring to see the flowers, but the leaves do have a striking shape — maybe a Bauhaus take on a tulip.

We had temperatures near freezing last week, but the pines and oaks in the forest are still deep green. The yellow leaves of the tulip trees and the red leaves of the sumacs grab your attention.

Liriodendron tulipifera does not grow in Central Texas, so it’s a wonder to me.

I’ve seen a couple of interesting things from the scientists about this tree.

First, some say that tulip trees made up to 20 percent of the original forest around here, which is mostly oak and hickory. The pines came in as a result of human settlement. Those pioneers loved to log tulip trees. Daniel Boone’s big canoe was made from one.

Second, some scientists say that the gradual disappearance of tulip trees is a just part of a natural progression in an old forest. Tulip trees might be the dominant species in a 150-year-old stand, but not in a 500-year-old stand.

I, of course, don’t know. I don’t know much about tulip trees or the piedmont. I’ve got a lot to learn.

A wonder, and one more

 Yesterday’s note was about looking up through the tall trees and seeing wonders in the night sky. What came to mind was the Lord’s speech to Job:

Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt?

And the more I think of it, it seems another wonder.

Years ago, I took an astronomy course at the university, and it opened up a part of the cosmos to me. Since then I’ve read books and scientific papers with interest.

But what came to mind when I looked up into a dark sky was a line of poetry learned at the knee of my Bible-quoting mother.

How does one account for that?

A moment of wonder

 I feel like a child, looking at things with fresh eyes. I’m not familiar with the forests of northern Georgia. It’s a new environment.

One of the big surprises occurred a couple of days ago about 6 a.m. I went outside to toss some coffee grounds and looked up. There was Orion.

I was astonished I could see the stars. The hills and trees block the ground light — the light pollution that keeps many people in this country from ever getting a good look at the night sky.

From the backyard, it’s a narrow view through the trees. In addition to Orion, I could see Aldebaran, the red heart of Taurus, but that was about it.

Yesterday, the cat got hungry and nudged me awake at 5 a.m. The celestial clock was an hour earlier. Orion’s bow was in view, but his backside was not. The sky was dark enough so that I could see the Pleiades.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I knew all those things were up there. The surprise was being able to see them.

How Sharon Olds writes

 I learned with relief that Sharon Olds also makes indexes when she’s working on a good notebook. I’m not the only one.

Sam Anderson’s profile of Olds in The Times was most interesting when he describes the way Olds writes:

She writes in spiral-bound notebooks. When she’s on a roll, can fill one up in a few days.

Then comes the “fussbudget” phase:

• She reads and rereads.

• She dog-ears pages.

• She makes an index.

In this way, she builds up a huge archive of thinking and feeling; although her finished books tend to be slim, they carry inside them, hidden like dark matter, the gravity of all the unpublished writing that helped make them possible.

I’m interested in the connection between writing and thinking. I contend that writing is a species of thinking, simply one way of doing it. And the way many, many writers do it is the way Olds does it, by working out a notion through a notebook.

Through the years, I’ve been astonished at people who sat at a typewriter and stared at blank sheet of paper or who, in later years, stared at a blank computer screen.

Writing doesn’t begin with typing. It starts with thinking about an idea. It ends when you just can’t think about that idea any more.

A notebook is a good way to work out an idea.

Here’s Anderson’s description:

Olds writes searchingly, as a way to think and feel herself through the world.

I like that. When I write, I’m searching for something.

• Source: Sam Anderson, “Sex, Death, Family: Sharon Olds Is Still Shockingly Intimate”; The New York Times, Oct. 12, 2022.

Looking at too many books

  This is humbling: After the move, I’ve been staring at a mountain of books. Actually, it’s more a mountain range, with several peaks. The only thing neat about this catastrophic mess is that the books are all in boxes.

Freya Howarth recently had an interesting article in Psyche about people who collect books. Her view: The difference between a random pile of books and a library is the process of curation.

Her article will make you think about many things. Here are three:

• About how your library is autobiographical, reflecting the interests of your younger selves, as well as what now passes for your mature, seasoned character.

• About how there are classics, common to the culture, and how there are personal classics, the books that have, in her lovely phrase, “an enduring place in your own reading life.” I’m reminded frequently these days what a remarkable and exasperating thing taste is.

• About how it’s important to have a record of your reading life, to be aware of the books and writers who have influenced you.

I’ve promised myself to go through my books. I have room for a hill, not a mountain, certainly not a mountain range.

• Freya Howarth, “How to Nurture a Personal Library”; Psyche, 14 September 2022.

The executioner and the soldier

 Maistre laughed at the claims that human beings are rational.

Look, he said, at how the public treats the public executioner and the soldier.

In those days, every city had a hangman. But that fellow was widely ostracized. People wouldn’t talk to him. They would snub his family.

The soldier home from the wars, on the other hand, was treated like a hero.

The difference, Maistre said, was that the executioner killed bad men, while the soldier killed honorable men who were fighting for their country and innocent civilians.

Men don’t live by reason, at least in Maistre’s telling.

• Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal; Princeton University Press, 2002.

Berlin’s essay on Maistre

 Of the essays in Isaiah Berlin’s Freedom and Its Betrayal, the one on Joseph de Maistre was the least satisfying.

I’d have said that after first reading. But I’ve found myself thinking about Maistre, especially whenever I read about U.S. Reps. Mary Miller of Illinois, Louie Gomert of Texas, Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia and other outspoken supporters of Donald Trump.

If you’re bewildered by Trumpism — and I am — Maistre offers clues.

In Berlin’s account, Maistre, a minister of the Kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia, was a mild reformer until the French Revolution descended into a reign of terror. Maistre was so revolted that he wanted to exterminate all traces of the liberal thinking that prevailed through the 18^th century.

Enlightenment thinkers saw human beings as naturally good, or at least neutral. Maistre saw human beings as corrupt and vicious. The only way to manage them was to subjugate them, and nothing works like violence and terror.

The assumption of Enlightenment thinkers was that humans are rational. Maistre ridiculed the idea. We operate on instinct, not by reason, he said.

In Berlin’s summary, Maistre’s whole program was to show “rationalist notions do not work.” Reason certainly doesn’t rule. That’s obvious in our institutions. Maistre contended that institutions that last, such as marriage, are the least rational. The institutions that fail quickest are based on reason.

Where the Enlightenment thinkers saw so much that humanity could improve, Maistre saw the possibility of a politics of false optimism. When expectations for continuous progress were dashed, ordinary people felt resentment. Maistre saw that those grievances could be exploited.

He showed how the state could always have enemies — journalists, Jews, Protestants, lawyers, immigrants, American revolutionaries and especially scientists, extremely rational thinkers who are never to be trusted — and that the general population could be kept in constant subservience simply by being on the lookout against them. If you have trained the irrational public to distrust those who reason, they’ll focus their grievances on them, rather than on the tyrannical rulers.

• Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal; Princeton University Press, 2002.

Hazlitt’s ‘On Living to One’s-Self’

 Among the English essayists, I loved Lamb and never knew what to make of Hazlitt.

But then there are passages like this:

 

What I mean by living to one’s-self is living in the world, as in it, not of it; it is as if no one knew there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it: it is to be silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it; to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to meddle with it.

 

It also contains this sentence:

 

For many years of my life I did nothing but think.

 

In places, I can see sentences that I almost might have written. I can almost see, in other words, a family resemblance. It’s as if Hazlitt were some distant uncle, kin to me in a bewildering way. The differences between us are many. The resemblances are few but striking, or so it seems to me.

• Source: William Hazlitt, “On Living to One’s-Self.” My old notes say I found it in A Century of English Essays: From Caxton to Belloc, edited by Ernest Rhys and Lloyd Vaughan; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1951. 

Finding old notes

 Moves across the country are filled with broken vases, lost keepsakes and smashed fingers. But there are some small pleasures, such as finding notes not seen in 40 years. Reading them was like looking in the mirror and seeing a 20-something version of myself.

The notes were on Hazlitt’s essay “On Living to One’s-Self.”

The essay is an argument for the idea that it’s better to live as a spectator in the world, rather than being an active part of it. It’s better to cultivate the private pleasures that nature gives all of us, rather than pursue the uncertain goals of the crowd.

Or so it seemed to the young version of me.

My ambition at the time was to be a reporter for small-town newspapers. I wanted to learn about people. I reported on all kinds of things — boring government meetings and almost unbelievable scandals. I covered shootouts, train wrecks, murder trials and those eccentric characters that give small towns their flavor.

I reported, but left the judgments to others. And, like Hazlitt, I claimed to walk lightly on the earth. I lived simply and moved around without much effort. In those days, all my possessions fit into a Chevrolet pickup truck.

Later on, I would edit a newspaper in a community that followed the news. It was a wildly different life. The newspaper was in the middle of everything. And so whoever was its editor lived a public life. When I’d go to the store, I’d have a conversation about the bond issue in produce, the political endorsements in dairy, and the shocking lack of detailed Little League coverage in canned goods.

In a way, I never got comfortable with that. But looking over those old notes, I can see a young man who couldn’t imagine ever getting comfortable with that.

• Source: William Hazlitt, “On Living to One’s-Self.” My old notes say I found it in A Century of English Essays: From Caxton to Belloc, edited by Ernest Rhys and Lloyd Vaughan; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1951. 

Starting again

 Willie Nelson, who has written a song or two about Texas, put it this way:

When I feel like bragging

I just up and say,

I’m a native son of San Antone.

I’m not a native son, but living in San Antonio feels like something to brag about. We spent five years there. I recommend it highly.

But today, we’re in Stone Mountain, Ga. I'm looking forward to unpacking my books. I’m looking for a new creek.

Lorine Niedecker again

 I suspect Lorine Niedecker found this poem, unnoticed — and thus unloved — in a musty letter somewhere:

Asa Gray wrote Increase Lapham:

pay particular attention

to my pets, the grasses.

The line is from a prominent naturalist to a regional naturalist who was something of a Wisconsin specialist.

I’d say the object here is not grass, which most people don’t notice. It’s the interest that some people have in wonderful objects that others generally ignore. That interest is a nebulous thing, a hard thing to get your hands on and treat as an object.

This poem does it for me.

Lorine Niedecker’s way of writing

 This is a test idea:

Lorine Niedecker’s poems find an image and treat that image as an object, in the way a child treats an object — a crow’s feather, an arrowhead — as a treasure. The object is something I, the reader, can collect, savor.

For example:

Popcorn-can cover

screwed to the wall

over a hole

so the cold

can’t mouse in

The image is so sharp it seems like an object. I can see the tin cover. I can feel the way the cold finds holes in walls — you know, the same way it finds holes and mittens.

I am a fan of the Objectivists Poets. And there are at least a couple of readers of these notes who could give you a far better account.

I have no academic credentials. I’m just a reader, trying to figure out what it is about these poems that grab me by both lapels. As I said, this is a test idea. I think this is right.

A note about La Casita

 This might be our last day in San Antonio, so I guess I should say something about La Casita, the little house on the West Side.

It all started when the Wise Woman came into a little money. She wanted a getaway, a place we could spend weekends and a place we could get away from storms. We’d spent decades in Galveston.

The Wise Woman initially said she wanted a cabin in the woods. When I pointed out that I liked the woods but she didn’t, she bought a little place in on the West Side, near the Produce Terminal.

It’s in the poorest ZIP Code in San Antonio. I learned that because competing political candidates both claimed to be from the poorest neighborhood in town. The Express-News checked the claims, and the candidate from our neighborhood proved right.

It’s a wonderful neighborhood. I have to speak my bad Spanish when I go buy tortillas or get my hair cut. It has mom-and-pop shops and cafes instead of chains. Many little places take only cash.

For three years, I did not see a “for sale” sign in the neighborhood. People around here tend to stay put. The family of one of my neighbors arrived in San Antonio in 1731.

The house itself was built in 1950. The Air Force was expanding in those days. A lot of laborers were making good money and bought modest houses in the area.

The house, five years older than I am, wasn’t in any better shape than I am. We decided to do a lot of the work ourselves, with the help of men and women who know what they’re doing.

For much of the work, the Wise Woman would find a YouTube video. I’d buy some tools and materials. It was a bit like getting stuck inside The Whole Earth Catalog.

It was a transformation. La Casita slowly began to look beloved, rather than bedraggled. And somewhere along the way, we decided the little weekend getaway was the place we wanted to be.

New adventures are calling. But one day, I want to write about La Casita. I need to do it justice.

The work of a college committee

 So many stories are told about San Antonio. They usually involve tales of almost incomprehensible courage, defiance and idealism.

I tell people the town is unusual because it took as the result of a decision by an academic committee.

In the 1690s, New Spain established missions and forts in East Texas as a hedge against the French in Louisiana. In the early 1700s, the College of Querétaro decided to move its three missions from East Texas to San Antonio. 

San Antonio is the home of UNESCO World Heritage Sites because of that decision.

And of course that history occurred long before the famous battle at the Alamo.

Goodbye to an old pair of shorts

 I’ve been thinking about ends and endings.

No deep-dark secret there: Our five years in San Antonio is coming to an end. And for the first time in 47 years, I’m going to live outside my native state for more than a month.

Years ago, the Wise Woman bought me a pair of high quality khaki shorts. They were double-stitched and had a pocket inside the front right pocket for change. They’re the kind of shorts a person might wear to the country club. But I’m just not that kind of person.

And so these shorts became work pants. They were decorated with white paint from the house in Galveston. The splashes of dark brown were from staining the floors in San Antonio.

There were signs that these shorts had worked in the garden: I’ve never actually won a fight with the Wise Woman’s roses.

Those shorts seemed to me to be indestructible, and I was feeling guilty about leaving them in the trash when the second and last U-Haul leaves, allegedly on Tuesday. And then, on a trip to the dump, one seam ripped, and they were gone.

In the past five years, we rehabilitated a little house that had been built for a working family in 1950. I’ve worn out and lost good tools, including an usual pair of short pants.

Simple things can stand for the complicated process of wearing down and wearing out. I've been thinking about that metaphor lately.

'Best of any song'

 I’ve been thinking about poems that are in memory, in me.

Charles Reznikoff’s “After I had worked all day” is an example I’ve mentioned before.

Several of the lines that wander around in my mind, appearing at odd moments, come from Wendell Berry. My favorite is too short to summarize. Here it is:

            Best of any song

            is bird song

            in the quiet, but first

            you must have the quiet.

On most days, it’s a reminder that a human being needs a little quiet in each day. It’s a need, like food, water and rest. Most of the time I hear the poem as if it were spoken by a wise teacher, a friend who can be trusted to guide. 

But sometimes life can seem overwhelming. On one such day, I heard the poem in the voice of a person lamenting, grieving for quiet that wasn’t there.

• Sources: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997; Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint Press, 1999. For a note on Reznikoff’s poem, see “For poets and artists who have a day job,” Dec. 4, 2021.

A hidden cost of exceptionalism

 Since coming from Nigeria, Taler (pronounced “Taylor”) has been asking questions about America and Americans. He’s genuinely interested.

One man asked this question in return: “How did you get here?”

The man was not asking for Taler’s life story. The man was convinced that people in Nigeria travel on foot or perhaps ride animals. A few cars. But no airplanes.

Taler was perplexed that he could not convince the man that he’d simply bought a ticket at an international airport. That wasn’t a possibility in this man’s view of the world. And that limited world view has consequences: Taler’s arrival was a mystery, probably sinister. Where knowledge is absent, conspiracy theories flourish.

Off the cuff, I dismissed the story. America, and particularly Texas, is noted for its crackpots, I said.

But Taler, with fresh eyes, said this: No, this is what happens when you tell children that America has the best way of life in the world. If all the best is here, there is no reason to be interested in what goes on anywhere else.

A god of one's own

 The idea of an ehi, a personal god who is mine and mine alone, is so far from my way of thinking it’s hard to grasp.

Taler, a handyman who has been helping us with chores and helping me with this idea, is from the Ora culture, a minority group in the Edo region of Nigeria.

He says the idea that each of us has a little god who represents us in the spiritual world is ancient and almost universal in West Africa. He said that Christians and Muslims believe in the God of the great religions, but most also believe in ehi.

Some people talk to their ehi daily. For others, the idea is more abstract. Your ehi guides you. But there are many views about how that happens.

My questions puzzled my new teacher. He seemed amused at my attempts to pin down the idea.

It's not one idea, but many.

In his country, there are, by his count, 200 or 300 languages and cultures. It’s natural that such diversity would produce different ideas about ehi — and a lot of other topics. People in different cultural groups have different ideas about what counts as tasty food and what counts as just government. It’s only natural that people of one group would be curious about what people in other groups would think. 

Taler is puzzled that so many Americans seem to think only about American culture, and don’t seem interested in the many peoples in the other 194 or so countries in the world.

It’s not a lack of knowledge or resources. It strikes him as a lack of interest, which is baffling for people who have so many resources that would help them learn.

His ambition is to save his money and travel to at least two new countries a year. He’s curious about what people in other parts of the world think. He yearns to find out —and to see different ways of life for himself. He's  puzzled that some people do not.

How another line of thought starts

I spent a couple of days working with Taler, who is from Nigeria. His father had a farm in the Edo region. He knows what it is to carry water, to live in a world where plumbing exists somewhere else.

He was sent off to school to become an accountant. He came to the United States to find opportunities. He hopes to return to school to get an equivalent credential in accounting.

I like working as a helper whenever a skilled worker calls on our house. You can learn by working beside another person. And so, as Taler worked, we talked, and I came to understand two things I probably already knew:

• I would flunk a current events test for Nigeria and West Africa. I’m sadly ignorant.

• Not knowing about geography, economics and politics is bad, but worse is the ignorance about the people: how they live, what they value, what they believe.

I could give hundreds of examples, but one must do today. I am a lover of a vegetable, native to West Africa, that I like pan-fried in a dusting of cornmeal. Taler winced when I spoke of “okra.” He calls it “okro” and prefers it in soup.

A more substantial and interesting example of what I don’t know: the idea of ehi, a personal spirit who looks over each living being and communicates with the spirit world on the individual’s behalf.

I’m still thinking, meaning there’s more to come. 

How this line of thought started

 This line of thought on thrift began as I watched a young man who was painting the interior of the little house in San Antonio.

Taler is the son of a farmer in the Edo region of Nigeria. He handled paint carefully. When he was finished with a bucket, it was dry.

He was not stingy with paint. He was careful. How you paint a house is, in an unspoken way, an ethical matter.

Another way to look at thrift

 Another way to look at the virtue of thrift: Philip Gulley, a Quaker minister, told of an elderly woman who “lived simply so she could give generously.”

It seems that part of being thrifty is simply learning how to say, “That’s enough.” If you are satisfied with your portion, you might be surprised how much you have to give others.

Conversely, if you are not satisfied with your portion, but want the whole pie, you might be a billionaire and still manage to spend all your time whining that the world is unfair — to you. Your unstrained appetites make you think that everything’s about you and your grievances that you don’t have everything you want. Your neighbors don’t matter in that kind of calculation.

I think the virtue of thrift is connected to democracy — that this virtue contributes to our ability to live in a society where ordinary people rule.

An unpopular virtue and democracy

Thrift is an unpopular virtue today. But I think it might be an index virtue — a marker that shows the relative health of democracy.

The value people place on thrift comes and goes. People today mistake it for greed, meanness, stinginess. In that usage, a thrifty person fails to tip well.

That’s an unhelpful way to look at things.

Thrift stands not against generosity but against waste. It is about the stewardship of resources. It acknowledges limits and emphasizes conservation of limited goods. To put thrift in action requires paying attention and taking care.

If you’re fabulously wealthy, you don’t need to be careful. You can be heedless. But if you’re a small farmer, like Hesiod in ancient Greece, or a small businessman, like Ben Franklin in colonial America, you have to be careful.

Hesiod lived before democracy prevailed in Athens. In his day, most communities were aristocracies, ruled by the “best” people. “Best” meant wealthy, people who didn’t have to work and who had no practical reason for conserving resources. They wasted things and flaunted their waste.

The farmers who had to be concerned about the wise stewardship of limited resources didn’t much care for the “best” people. As Hesiod put it,

It is the idle who are hated.

That thinking is out of style. Today, instead of despising the idle rich, we are taught that to despise the poor. We are taught that steps to conserve limited natural resources are to be despised.

And so, in some circles, people who recycle are ridiculed. So are people who advocate for public education and libraries as a way to be good stewards of our human resources. A large minority of citizens in this democracy are followers of a billionaire who is conspicuous for his wastage, rather than for his thrift.

And so I think Hesiod might have been on to something. Thrift is a value linked to ordinary people, rather than to aristocrats. When ordinary people lose a sense for that value, it’s trouble for democracy, the rule of the people.

Those little details

 Before I got out of the introduction, Eric G. Wilson convinced me that we will probably never know the color of Charles Lamb’s eyes.

The problem was the one I learned as a young reporter decades ago. Sometimes, no matter how hard you investigate, the facts just aren’t there. But more often, the inquirer finds himself with more than one account of the facts, and those accounts disagree.

And so, in the case of Lamb’s eyes, we have witnesses who say they were:

• brown.

• brownish hazel.

• one hazel and one gray flecked with red.

• grayish blue.

In my experience, the majority view is as likely to be wrong as right. The evidence suggests we just don’t know.

I like such a detail in the introduction because eye color is relatively easy. In kindergarten, we can talk about the color of our schoolmates’ eyes. The detail is a reminder: If we can’t get to certainty on such a basic thing, we’re going to have to live with uncertainty in other, more complicated, areas of a life.

• Sources: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022. For similar posts, see “It’s that kind of book,” Oct. 7,2020, and “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.

 

It's that kind of book

 The news that Eric G. Wilson had written a new biography of Charles Lamb set off celebrations at my house. The book has been acquired, and, though I’m just a couple of chapters in, it’s packed with odd, wonderful, puzzling curiosities.

On page 5, Wilson refers the “octosyllabic virtuosity of Matthew Prior.”

So few people, in my circles at least, mention the old poet that I stopped. Is that true? Was Prior octosyllabic?

I wondered what Wilson had in mind. Was he thinking of the slightly naughty poem “A True Maid”?

No, no; for my virginity,

When I lose that, says Rose, I’ll die:

Behind the elms, last night, cried Dick,

Rose, were you not extremely sick?

Better readers will do better. But you can see what kind of book this is. I, at least, have to read slowly, because it’s densely packed with curiosities.

• Sources: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022. The poem “A True Maid” is from the Poetry Foundation’s website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50473/a-true-maid. For more on my irrational love of Charles Lamb, see “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.

A stack of old quarterlies

 As a boy, I sometimes attended a country church. I would sit with my father and other men, mostly farmers, listening to a farmer named Buck teach Sunday school.

In those days, country churches bought booklets called quarterlies. Each had 13 lessons. You studied one a week and changed topics every quarter. You might have lessons on The Psalms in spring and switch to lessons on the gospels in summer. 

In sorting stuff to move to Georgia, I was surprised to see I’d saved a few of those old quarterlies.

Two things struck me:

• I was surprised at the strength of the memories of my father. He’d been raised in that farming community. After Pearl Harbor, he’d been torn away by the draft. He fought through World War II. Then the G.I. Bill gave him opportunities he never imagined. Though he had a Ph.D. and was a Fulbright scholar, he’d sit quietly and listen as Mr. Buck did his best with the Sunday school lesson. If called on, my father would speak. Otherwise, he kept silent. He’d had a different experience with education, but he respected what those men were trying to do.

• I thought those quarterlies would make a good model for other subjects — say, the American poets. Those Sunday school students were mostly older men, and they were trying to come to terms with the Bible, a book they held in reverence, with what education they had. The books I am thinking of, reverently, are collections of poems by William Carlos Williams, Toy Derricott, William Stafford, Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Reznikoff and Lorine Niedecker. I can buy a book of poems. But it’d be nice to have a little guide, perhaps just 13 lessons, to help keep me focused. I could start with William Carlos Williams in the spring, switch to William Stafford in summer … and I can already see there are not enough seasons in the year. But I think it would be fun.

A society known by it destructiveness

 Here’s a line from Meredith Tax’s pamphlet on the damage that American society does to women:

We have to face the fact that pieces have been cut out of us to make us fit into this society.

You can read Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life over a single cup of coffee. It’s a quick, clean expression of outrage at the destructiveness of American society.

It twists women into shapes that are barely recognizable as human beings. It does that to African Americans and to minorities of all kinds.

American society also, in the way it socialized boys, turns out men who are missing pieces of themselves:

The ideal American male, in terms of the dominant values of our society, is a competitive machine, competent, achieving, hard-driving, and soulless, with a sexual life, but not personal life. Fortunately, most men can’t live up to this ideal; but the strain of trying is considerable.

Woman and Her Mind was published 52 years ago. Things have changed.

But this society still does harm on a scale that is barely imaginable.

Meredith Tax died recently at 80. I saw her obituary in The Washington Post and looked up her famous essay.

• Sources: Meredith Tax, Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life; New England Free Press, 1970. This essay originally was published as a pamphlet and then appeared, edited, in books. Tax’s restored the text at her website, https://meredithtax.org. But note the better URL in Michael Leddy's comment.

The Washington Post’s obituary is here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/29/meredith-tax-feminist-author-dead/

A philosopher speaks of drama

 The philosopher, disguised as an Uber driver, was talking about how to live a good life.

He was young, tattooed and dreadlocked. He’d been a truck driver, but wanted to spend less time on the road and more time with his daughters. He’d found that he could make as much money driving people like me to the airport as he could driving freight in trucks.

His recipe for a better life: Treat yourself to better art.

He said I should go to the theater to see live drama, not movies. There is something about a live performance, he said, that’s healing. A performance is recreation, a re-creation of a play. Each is different. The mistakes are there, to be seen and pondered, rather than left on the film editor’s cutting floor. 

The performance is an activity — an attempt, an effort. There are no pretenses to perfection.

Art is like that, he said. Or should be like that.

Same with music, he said: Go to live shows. Don’t hide in your room and listen to recordings.

He searches for discount tickets so he can take his daughters. He wants them to experience drama in a theater. He wants them to see a lot of plays, to learn for themselves what they like and what they don’t before they go off to high school and college to learn what they should like.

So they go to the theater. He said I should too.

A move is on the horizon

 I sat on the porch of a place in Stone Mountain, Ga., the other evening and listened to the breeze in the trees.

You don’t really get that sound in Central Texas. The trees here are not big enough and thick enough to make a chorus.

The sound — more a rush than a whisper — reminded me of the forests of East Texas. As a younger man, I spent a beautiful morning sitting under a stand of longleaf pine in the Upland Island Wilderness, just listening.

I was in Georgia, hauling worldly goods to a new home. Another load should do it.

The last time I spent three months away from Texas was when I was in the Navy. I got out at age 20, almost 50 years ago. So there will be some culture shock.

But already, the place is speaking to me. I’ve just got to listen.

Berlin’s ‘Message to the 21st Century’

 In 1994, the University of Toronto honored Isaiah Berlin with a doctor of laws degree.

Berlin, who was 85 and sick, couldn’t attend. But he wrote a note to be read at the ceremony. He described it to a friend as a “short credo.” It’s better known as “A Message to the 21^st Century.”

Looking at the movements of the 20^th century, Berlin tried to explain how something that begins as an innocent social contract can evolve into despotic oppression.

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used — if necessary, terror, slaughter.

Here, he says, is the tragic idea that was underneath fascism in Spain and Italy, Nazism in Germany, communism in the Soviet Union and theocracy in the Middle East.

The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law.

Berlin’s Freedom and Its Betrayal was a summary of his academic research into a question that fascinated him. “A Message to the 21^st Century” was a summary of that summary.

• Isaiah Berlin, “A Message to the 21^st Century,” The New York Review of Books, Oct. 23, 2014.

A model for a short book

 Isaiah Berlin’s Freedom and Its Betrayal strikes me as the kind of book I ought to write, and you should too.

I’m talking about the form of the book, not the content.

One of the recurring themes of this journal is the notion that most people should leave something of themselves behind, even if that something disappears within a generation. A short book is better than a gravestone.

In 1952, Berlin gave six lectures on the BBC about thinkers he described as brilliant but dangerous — especially dangerous to the idea of liberty.

The lectures were for a popular audience. And the length — one hour each — wasn’t negotiable.

I took a stab at the theme of Berlin’s book yesterday. What I’d like to point out today is that the form of this book has two advantages for readers.

• The book offers the promise of learning something during the course of a week — six evenings with a day off.

• Each evening, you could read about one of the thinkers, that is, you could spend on hour considering a different way of looking at the problem that’s the subject of the book. Henry Hardy, who edited the lectures into the book, said Berlin edited his notes heavily. Each of the six lectures, now in essay form, is 9,000 to 10,000 words. That’s still about an hour of reading.

So here’s a writing assignment if you’re looking for one:

• Consider six aspects of your life or thought that might be helpful to others.

• List them.

• Talk each one through on your walks and in the shower. Get your speech down to where you can explain each aspect in an hour or less. Less is always better.

• Get it down on paper. Consider that you’re first draft.

• Source: Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal; Princeton University Press, 2002.