Essays and short stories

 A second thought on Harold Bloom’s comment about contemplation having no place in short stories:

Among the wonders of Tobias Wolff’s novel Old School is this line, delivered by one of the school’s English masters, Mr. Ramsey:

One can imagine a world without essays … Stories, though — one could not live in a world without stories.

I’m not sure that’s right — at least not for me. But again, the point is taken. Stories can get to you in a way that essays don’t.

• Source: Tobias Wolff, Old School; New York: Vintage Books, 2003, p. 131

A small point about short stories

 Here is a minor thing, but a remarkable thing, about short stories: There are some stories that make an impression on you that don’t bear rereading.

I read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in high school and was properly thunderstruck. But I have never been able to get through it again.

I thought it might just be me. But I ran across the critic Harold Bloom’s remark about “The Lottery.” He said it “wounds you once and once only.”

Bloom was harsher in his judgment of J.D. Salinger’s “Seymour: An Introduction.” Bloom found it impossible to reread. He faulted its smug spirituality and said the story fails the test of narrative value.

That may be why Salinger’s fiction stopped. Contemplation can be a very valuable mode of being and existence, but it has no stories to tell.

I do like contemplation. I read essays as well as stories. But the professor’s point is taken.

• Source: Harold Bloom, Short Story Writers and Short Stories; Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005, p. 151.

November in Stone Mountain

 A place will teach you things, if you let it.

• The obvious difference is the temperature. It dropped below freezing several times before Thanksgiving. We’re at latitude 34 degrees north. I’d lived at 29 degrees for decades and wasn’t quite ready for that.

• Being up here on the tundra also means the light is different. It comes in low in the evening, more from the south than from the west. In the days when photographs were taken on film, artists liked low-speed Kodachrome because the colors were deeply saturated. That’s the way the colors are here in the woods at dusk: the yellows in the hickories are so bright you doubt your senses. As the light fades, the hickories disappear first, and then the dark green ivy, which covers most of the tree trunks, blends into the silhouettes of the trees. The last color to go is the lighter green of the pines. Why is that so? It’s got something to do with the wavelength of the natural light, but I haven’t found a good answer. 

• I mentioned, in an earlier note, the difference in the thickness and density of the vegetation. When a breeze blew through the forest, I could hear it. It’s the same when the leaves start falling. They come down so fast at times you can hear it. This is old hat to anyone who knows the Eastern forests. I do not. It’s astonishing to me.

• I watched a maple in a city park turn gold. Three days later the top third of the canopy was gone. A week later the tree was bare. When the leaves start falling, they can go quickly.

• One of the revelations of late autumn is the prominence of beech trees. They are everywhere, scattered throughout the oaks, hickories and pines. The other deciduous trees have lost enough leaves that you can see the beeches, which have held onto their leaves a little longer. You see green, gold and red on the same tree.

Nagel: 'Mind & Cosmos'

 Ten years ago, Thomas Nagel published Mind & Cosmos. The subtitle is Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.

Nagel is not a theist. He does not want religious thought to influence the sciences. He does not want creationism taught in schools. He begins:

One of the legitimate tasks of philosophy is to investigate the limits of even the best developed and most successful forms of contemporary scientific knowledge.

What follows is a brief, clear demolition of the scientific outlook — it’s not really a theory; Nagel calls it a Weltanschuaung — that almost everyone assumes is true.

The “almost certainly false” is generous. This outlook has reached dead ends.

The outlook involves many things: a hierarchy of the sciences — physics, chemistry and biology — and an effort to unify their findings; a materialist conception of what exists, what’s real; an account of how matter behaves through the theories of relativity and of quantum mechanics; an account of how living things change through evolution, as presented by Darwin and developed through our understanding of the chemical structure of genetic material.

But real theories are useful. They explain things. But this view has limits. It does not, and apparently cannot, explain some of the most interesting questions about the cosmos.

For example, our almost universally accepted outlook can’t do anything with the mind-body problem, how it is that we humans and other purely materialistic beings experience consciousness or awareness.

Another limitation of the view is that it doesn’t say much about how life emerged from matter. The current explanation involves an almost infinite series of accidents. That kind of explanation has to be a provisional explanation — a place to start. You’d expect scientists to examine those accidents and elucidate them. But if you’re decades into the inquiry and have made no progress it makes sense to ask whether a near infinite series of accidents is any kind of an explanation at all.

The alternative is to back up and re-examine the underlying assumptions and logical groundwork.

The laws of the sciences, as we humans have formulated them, are not teleological for completely understandable historical reasons. If the answer to every scientific problem is “God designed it that way” you don’t get past the Dark Ages.

Nagel envisions a different kind of teleology. In addition to the physical laws we’re familiar with, he asks whether there are additional laws “biased toward the marvelous.”

The teleology that I want to consider would be an explanation not only of the appearance of physical organisms but of the development of consciousness and ultimately of reason in those organisms.

There is much more to Nagel’s book. But it’s only 128 pages and it’s clear. It’s worth the time of anyone interested in science.

And, if you’re curious, this line of thought came from Christopher Cook’s comments on Spinoza. I think Spinoza’s system of thought would allow the kind of teleology that Nagel’s talking about.

• Source: Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos; Oxford University Press, 2012.

 

Giving Spinoza his due

 While I was eating Thanksgiving dinner, my friend Christopher Cook was marking the 390^th birthday of Spinoza.

Spinoza was seriously out of style when I was in school. We went from Descartes on to Leibnitz, Berkeley, Locke and Hume, skipping the chapter on Spinoza.

Part of it was about style. Most ancient philosophers thought the great questions were all connected. They thought that finding the best way to live was included in questions about what kinds of things make up the universe and how the universe is organized. Spinoza had such a conception of philosophy. But about a century ago, the focus shifted to analytic philosophy. As the name of that school suggests, most contemporary philosophers analyze the details of specific problems.

There was a more serious objection to Spinoza. Since the dawn of the scientific revolution, scientists and philosophers have rolled their eyes at teleology, the notion that nature is up to something, that it’s moving toward an end or purpose. Note in that language the troubling presumption of design. To move toward an end or purpose is to move by design.

That kind of thinking opens the door to a lot of nonsense. (Perhaps you’ve tried to unravel this analogy: The existence of a clock implies a clockmaker. Does that in turn imply the existence of a cosmos-maker, since a cosmos obviously exists? If you haven’t grappled with that question, the essays of David Hume are a good place to start.)

Teleological arguments have produced a lot of nonsense. But even our best conceptual systems haven’t eliminated the possibility that nature is up to something.

The world, conceptually, would be a cleaner, neater place if that possibility were eliminated. But while the vast majority of rational thinkers behave as if that question had been resolved, it has not. 

Spinoza’s thought acknowledges that possibility. He suggested that scientific thought, as it was conceived in Europe at the dawn of the scientific revolution, couldn’t close that door. Hundreds of years later, it still hasn’t.

It’s why Einstein muttered, “I believe in Spinoza’s God.”

• Sources: Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life; Cambridge University Press, 2001; Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza; Pelican Books, Inc., 1975.

A fictional sketch of a poet reading

 Here’s a second thought on Tobias Wolff’s Old School.

The story is about a boy at a prep school. Early on, the poet Robert Frost, a friend of the headmaster, comes to the school to read. Here’s the passage where the boy describes the occasion:

Frost was good at masking his eyes under those hanging brows, but now and then I saw him shift his gaze from the page to us without losing a word. He wasn’t reading; he was reciting. He knew these poems by heart yet continued to make a show of reading them, even to the extent of pretending to lose his place or have trouble with the light.

His awkwardness took nothing from his poems. It removed them from the page and put them back in the voice, a speculative, sometimes cunning, sometimes faltering voice. In print, under his great name, they had the look of inevitability; in his voice you caught the hesitation and perplexity behind them, the sound of a man brooding them into being.

The next time someone asks me why anyone should read fiction, I’ll mention that passage.

Fiction can do many things, including showing us what a remarkable personality is like. That beautiful passage makes me wish I’d known Frost.

Tobias Wolff: 'Old School'

 Tobias Wolff’s Old School is about a boys school and a case of plagiarism. But the deeper theme is about how we are dishonest, with others and with ourselves, about questions of identity.

The narrator, a scholarship boy, doesn’t tell outright lies about his background. He’s vague. He learns to suggest things. He allows misleading assumptions about himself to stand.

We humans are constantly working on our image, our brand. It’s such a part of what we do that we do it unconsciously.

Spoiler alert: If you plan on reading this book, stop here. 

What can bring that unconscious habit of deception into the light?

A case of conspicuous honesty. One of the boys, Purcell, is going to be kicked out of school for refusing to attend chapel. For him, it’s a matter of principle.

He said that God was just a character in a Hebrew novel and if it came to that he’d rather worship Huckleberry Finn. Really, he said, I don’t believe a word of that stuff.

His friends tried to reason with him. Purcell was firm. No more chapel.

            Just going through the door makes me a liar, Purcell said. I’m not going to go again.

This act of honesty shocks the narrator into thinking about the roles we play, the performances we give that involve family, ethnicity and class.

By now I’d been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally. But I never quite forgot that I was performing. In the first couple of years there’d been some spirit of play in creating the part, refining it, watching it pass. There’d been pleasure in implying a personal history through purely dramatic effects at manner and speech, without ever committing an expository lie, and pleasure in doubleness itself: there was more to me than people knew!

All that was gone. When I caught myself in the act now I felt embarrassed. It seemed a stale, conventional role, and four years of it had left me a stranger even to those I called my friends.

Most of us don’t bother to examine the forces that shape us. I suspect that if Americans who look like me could trace the steps they took from innocent infancy toward an identity as a white person the country would be a better place.

Wolff is an interesting writer who took a stab at a profound topic.

• Source: Tobias Wolff, Old School; New York: Vintage Books, 2003.

The bias of youth

 So why did I leave two of my favorites off a list of 12 short stories?

Perhaps we have a bias for stories we read when young. Memories of them have been with us for a lifetime. Sometimes, those stories shape you. Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” had that affect on me. When I finished reading it, I wanted to learn how to write short stories.

Perhaps it’s a bit like first love. The first experiences of anything tends to stay in memory.

I discovered Willa Cather’s “Neighbor Rosicky” and Guy Davenport’s “John Charles Tapner” when I was past middle age. They strike me now as better stories, far more interesting than most of the works that astonished me when I was young.

You’d expect a person’s tastes to mature with age.

At 15, I thought that Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” had to be best thing anyone had written.

As I got older, my view of what a good human being changed, and so my view of what a good story is had to change too. I spent my teenage years in the navy. And when I got out, feeling old at 20, my idea of a good man didn’t include much of the kind of heroism London wrote about.

As the Russian writer Ilya Selvinski put it, “This was the first cigar we smoked in our youth.”

Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner’

 When people talk about what stories mean, I usually hold my tongue. 

It’s a bit like asking what words mean. The words “I do,” spoken in chapel, mean something very different from the word “and” when you order a ham and cheese.

Words do different kinds of things and so do stories.

Yesterday’s note was about a kind of story that hits me as a contemporary version of scripture. These stories illuminate the possibility of human goodness in some way. They are hard to do well, and I admire the writers who can pull them off.

Other stories do different things: Science fiction stories do different work than detective stories. We use them differently. They feed different parts of our imagination.

Different kinds of stories resonate with different types of personalities. A person who loves one kind of story might not like another. That seems natural to me. It would be odd, in a world of such diverse tastes, if we all liked the same kind of story.

One of the kinds I especially like is a story that captures a moment in history.

I spent my working years with newspapers. Objectivity is the ideal: Good reporters try to give an account of the facts that everyone who would tell if they witnessed the same event. But good reporters are human, and they fail daily.

One of the reasons is that we simply never know all the facts. What we decide to include and how we arrange the facts we do know colors our account in small ways that erode the ideal of objectivity. We just don’t know.

I like to read short stories about small but fascinating events of the past. There are gaps in the factual accounts. Imagination fills in those gaps.

To me, the model of this kind of story is Guy Davenport’s story “John Charles Tapner.” Tapner was the last man executed on the isle of Guernsey.

In 1854, Victor Hugo, who was famous for his hated of capital punishment, went to Guernsey to investigate. The great writer came with his official family, his mistress and his dog, Senate.

Guernsey was a small place. The islanders knew their famous guest didn’t approve of executions and was not likely to write warm, glowing things about them. But they found him fascinating and appalling. They weren’t bored.

So what was Hugo’s visit to Guernsey like? We know it occurred. We know some of the facts. We even know what his dog looked like. We don’t know what most of the people were thinking.

To get a complete picture, Davenport had to imagine it.
His research was thorough. It’s hard to tell what’s fact and what’s fiction.

Willa Cather: ‘Neighbor Rosicky’

 On Nov. 3, I tried to list 12 short stories that I’d include if I were editing an anthology. I’m already dissatisfied.

The glaring omissions are Willa Cather’s “Neighbor Rosicky” and Guy Davenport’s “John Charles Tapner.” I don’t know which two from the original list would have to go to make room for these two, but I couldn’t do without them.

I’ve written about “John Charles Tapner.” (See “A peculiar kind of short story,” Sept. 22, 2021.)

I can’t explain the absence of “Neighbor Rosicky.” Michael Leddy, commenting on the challenge to choose a personal anthology of 12 stories, said he’d include the three stories collected in Cather’s Obscure Destinies. “Neighbor Rosicky” is one of those. Last year, I wrote this sentence: “I think ‘Neighbor Rosicky’ was Cather’s masterpiece.” But I didn’t say why.

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read “Neighbor Rosicky” and think you might, stop here. 

“Neighbor Rosicky” does something that’s hard to do: It captures what a good person is like. It’s easier to write about great men and women than it is to capture ordinary people who somehow embody goodness.

Rosicky was a Czech farmer who died of a bad heart at 65. He was the kind of fellow who would tell the storekeeper to round up his bill and throw in some candy and fabric for the women back on the farm.

He thought of others and showed them hospitality. He tried to ease their burdens. He knew what was bad in this world — our stressful workplaces aren’t nearly as toxic as the factories of the Gilded Age —  and he tried to steer younger people away from that pain.

His “American” (non-Czech) daughter-in-law, Polly, slowly realized that Old Rosicky had shown her love. She was shocked when she realized that no one — not even her mother — had loved her like Old Rosicky.

It was as if Rosicky had a special gift for loving people, something that was like an ear for music or an eye for color. It was quiet, unobtrusive; It was merely there.”

That passage has the heft of scripture to me.

There are many small pleasures in this story. Rosicky had a bad heart and wouldn’t follow his doctor’s advice to take it easy. I love the doctor’s lament that a Bohemian can’t be separated from his coffee or his pipe. And I love the space that Cather created called “Father’s Corner,” a spot near a plant-filled window, where Rosicky had his chair, surrounded by Bohemian newspapers and books, tobacco, pipes and tools.

• Source: Willa Cather, Great Short Works of Willa Cather, edited by Robert K. Miller; New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1992.

Walter Benjamin on his library

 I am looking at deep piles of books, stacked against four walls. I’m supposed to be thinking about what kind of shelves would make order out of this chaos.

Instead, I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library.”

I tell myself this: I like to write, which is just a way of thinking. And because I write, I think I might use all these books before I die.

Having a library is practical, I tell myself. 

But that’s not completely true, and Benjamin points out why it’s not. To a collector, each book is a prize, not just an object. It has a history as well as a use.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.

I can see, in these stacks of books, evidence of the passions of a younger self, interested in Greek thinkers and grammar, Wittgenstein, Hume, botany, astronomy and poets, essayists and short story writers.

Shalamov: ‘In the Night’

 A recent note about Faulkner’s story “The Bear” prompted some doubts and second thoughts.

The note focused on Faulkner’s use of details — his showing, rather than telling.

But there’s a related art in conveying a story: pacing.

One example is Valam Shalamov’s “In the Night.”

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read this story and think you might, stop here.

This story is only 1,300 words or so, but it unfolds slowly. 

We are looking over the shoulder of Glebov, who is with a group of men in a camp. As the men go out at night, led by Bagretsov, it becomes clear they are in a prison camp.

It slowly becomes clear that the men are going to rob a grave. When a prisoner dies, the other prisoners can’t let warm clothes and boots go to waste. Sometimes, cigarettes are found in a dead man’s pockets.

Bagretsov cuts his hand, digging stones from the cairn. The bleeding won’t stop.

Glebov examines the wound and says, “Poor coagulation.” 

“Are you a doctor?” Bagretsov asks sarcastically. And then it hits you: Of course he was a doctor, before the gulag. That’s the kind of place a gulag is.

Details make a story. But they aren’t just reported. A story, as opposed to a report, is allowed to unfold at its own pace.

Shalamov was a master at pacing.

• Source: Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories, edited by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe; New York: Bantam Books, 1983, pp. 159-62.

If I were in a book club, I might say this

 The running question for the past three days has been about what we can and can’t discuss in book clubs.

Sometimes, I hold contradictory thoughts:

• William Faulkner played a role in a culture that was violently racist.

• All of us who grew up in this culture — especially those of us who grew up in the South — played a role, great or small, in this tragedy. If you are trying blame, you’ll find that it doesn’t focus on any one person. 

• Faulkner’s writing about people of African descent is painful to read. But the fact that something is painful doesn’t necessarily count as a pass to ignore it.

• Knowledge about our shared history is better than ignorance. I think it’s especially important to look for information about casual attitudes, attitudes about which there was no trace of anguish or moral doubt. Some racists had to be reassured that it was morally OK to separate parents from children when selling human beings. By contrast, the use of racial slurs usually needed no reassurance. That was casual — unquestioned, almost unnoticed. Historians like primary sources — diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper articles — when they look for information about those kinds of attitudes. But it seems to me that fiction often throws better light on how individuals came to accept the unacceptable.

• We Americans still live with racism, and we’ve got to get beyond just being bewildered by it. A lot of what passes for American politics is overtly racist, and many of us — including me — sometimes throw up our hands and claim to be bewildered. We just can’t comprehend how we got to this place. But if you look at the historical records, you will be a little less bewildered. If you read newspaper advertisements offering human beings for sale, you will be less bewildered. If you see the casual use of racial slurs in public speeches and newspaper articles you will be less bewildered. And if you look at our literature you also will be less bewildered. Knowledge is better.

• It seems to me that part of the difficulty in having discussions about literature is that so much of the writing about American life is still painful and that this pain is not evenly shared. It’s not fair to make a person of African descent go through the pain of discussing a Faulkner story for the enlightenment of a white person. It’s also not fair to make two students — one who is wounded by the racism in a Faulkner story and one who is delighted to see the racism exposed — discuss the story. It doesn’t matter whether both those students are of African descent. Or whether they are not.

• Consent seems to be crucial. I don't think you can have a productive discussion with unwilling participants. Yet I'm an excellent counterexample. Time and again, good teachers kindled a passion for learning about an unlikely subject in an unwilling, uncooperative student.

At this point, I just don't know. I think there is something of value to learn in our painful history and literature. But I don’t know how to teach that. (I admire those who do.)

I also think this: The world constantly changes. There are writers today who can reach today's readers  in a way that Faulkner’s stories cannot. A lot of the writers I read are from my generation and those before. I need to catch up. Maybe if I did, my imaginary book club would too.

What I learned from Faulkner's 'The Bear'

  When I was in my 20s, I would have told you that William Faulkner’s “The Bear” was perhaps the greatest short story written by an American.

But the world that Faulkner portrayed was racist. It was a society that exploited people, and turned to violence when the exploitation was questioned. Faulkner’s role in that way of life makes it unlikely that “The Bear” is going to be read by the local book club.

I can tell you what I admired about it.

The story is about a quest. Year after year, some men hunt a bear that is so smart and strong that it escapes. The bears been shot several times, and its tracks are distinctive because of its trap-mangled toes.

A boy who grows up hearing about the almost mythical bear finally grows old enough to tag along. One day, the boy followed the bear’s tracks, got lost and stopped at a fallen log …

seeing as he sat down on the log the crooked print, the warped indention in the wet ground which while he looked at it continued to fill with water until it was level full and the water began to overflow and the sides of the print began to dissolve away.

Faulkner could have written that the bear was very close and that the boy realized it. He could have written that the boy experienced wonder and fear.

But the details of the track — so fresh that it is still filling with water — let the reader know, without being told, just how close the bear must have been. Those details let the reader feel that wonder and fear. The art of the story is the difference between experiencing a character's feelings and being told about them.

Like the boy in the story, I grew up a little, as a reader and a writer, when I first read it. 

Yesterday’s note was on an essay about what we can and can’t talk about in discussing books. I don’t know what I think about that topic, and so this is an essay or trial run — a stab at it. As you might guess, the question has become one about short stories, rather than about books.

• Source: William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses; New York: Vintage Books, 1973, p. 208. And, yes, I’ve mentioned this passage before: “Or maybe look at a story by Faulkner,” Feb. 9, 2022.

How we talk about fiction

 I take Naomi Kanakia’s essay “The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions” as a challenge. I’ve got to get better at reading and talking about fiction.

Kanakia points out some obvious things. When we talk about fiction with friends, most of us simply state what we like and what we don’t. It’s a short discussion.

When we read nonfiction, on the other hand, we are reading about ideas — something we can argue about. Those discussions tend to be more interesting. As a result, some book clubs — and some literary reviews — lean heavily on nonfiction.

The people enjoy fiction. They want to read it. The interest and passion just doesn’t show up in the discussions.

That’s a broad statement. No doubt there are book clubs that have discussions of fiction that are ripsnorters. But my experience is in line with Kanakia’s. 

Her essay has stuck in my mind. I’m still thinking about a constructive way to respond to it.

• Source: Naomi Kanakia, “The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions”; Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 2, 2022.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-dreariness-of-book-club-discussions/

How long does it take to write one?

 When Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories came out 15 years ago, readers usually said something like this: The book makes you think about what a short story is.

Some of her stories were remarkably short.

I like short shorts. They were popular in the 1930s, when some magazine offered readers a short story that would fit on one page. The short short’s descendants have been known by other terms, including flash fiction and sudden fiction. The terms are still evolving.

Some of the thinking about the form of short shorts is interesting. But I think there might be a simple explanation.

Some writers do their best work when they can work through a draft in a single sitting. In earlier times, a Chekhov or a Tolstoy might have had all day — and perhaps all day for several days. Today’s writers seem to be living, and thus working, at a faster pace.

For example, Claudia Smith:

I found that I did my best work when I could write through a piece from beginning to end with­out much inter­rup­tion, and for a flash piece, that usu­al­ly was about a half hour. I’m not say­ing the piece would be fin­ished, just that I would have a draft done. 

Perhaps a lot of the theory about compressed form might be explained by the compressed time that a writer can give to a draft at any one sitting.

I imagine that most readers, like most writers, are living a faster pace. I’m one of those who appreciate the shorter stories. 

• Source: Tiffany Sumner, “Flash Interview: Claudia Smith Chen”; FlashFiction, April 10, 2014.

A story that sheds a little light

 In a recent list of favorite short stories, I included one by my friend Christopher Cook. He often writes about a subject that fascinates me: how people are religious.

He’s especially good at telling about the church folk of East Texas. Christopher is a native and knows the place and its people well.

Some of the ancient sages thought that the chief problem in life is anguish — wanting life to be something other than it is. I knew many people in East Texas who were like that: “If only I could get to Nashville and play my songs” or “If only my husband could get a job at the mill” or “If only we could get our boy out of jail.”

Often, the person would put religion on the ache like salve on a sore.

Christopher is best known for his novel Robbers, but I like his short stories. The aching of some of his characters is familiar to me. I don’t just know of it. I know it well, having seen it daily, talking to people as a young reporter. It’s just as he portrays it in his stories.

He writes about ordinary people who have a sense that life’s not quite right and should be better. What fascinates me is that instead of examining that anguish, that ache, that dissatisfaction, they go to church and get saved.

I've seen some good nonfiction writers take a stab that phenomenon. But I come closer to understanding it, I think, when I read a good story.

• Sources: Christopher Cook, Screen Door Jesus & Other Stories; Austin, Texas: Host Publications, 2006. The notes on favorite short stories are at “What short stories would you recommend?” Nov. 1, 2022, and “How can anyone stop at 12?” Nov. 2, 2022.

And also a symbol

 Sometimes, symbols take the place of notes in the margins of my books.

I use lambda, the Greek “L,” for a word I don’t know or for an image I like. The words and images end up in a notebook.

As a result of that habit, I can tell you that a bumbailiff is a bailiff empowered to arrest debtors and that an aspergillum is a contraption, with a brush and can, used to sprinkle holy water.

No, I’m not saving words for my next conversation. I won’t speak them. I won’t write them, at least not in my own voice. But I think the practice of noticing such words makes me more aware of diction — the fact that different people use different words in telling a story.

That’s such an obvious thing you might wonder why I’d even mention it.

Have you ever read a line of dialog and had the sense that something wasn’t quite right? That the words the character is using somehow don’t match the character? That little doubt in a reader’s mind is fatal.

Diction is an obvious thing, an important thing. And getting it right in dialog is a harder than it looks.

(If you’re curious: I suspect that both bumbailiff and aspergillum came from the vocabulary of Robert Graves.)

A note in the margin

 I had to shut off the voice that said: “Thou shalt not write in books.”

Of course you shouldn’t write in library books. Library books are public property and you should treat them as a naturalist treats public land: the motto is “leave no trace.”

But my own books are different. I bought them because I wanted to digest them, not just read them. I wanted to take what was between the covers and make it a part of me.

The cow eats grass, but the grass becomes cow, not vice versa, Eric Hoffer used to say.

Hoffer was a great one for making ideas in great books his own. He read, and thought about what he read. He wrote notes in pocket notebooks as they occurred to him. He later reworked those notes on index cards. He eventually began to publish essays and books.

I use notebooks and index cards too, but I also mark the spot in my own books that ignited the chain of thought. And so my own process looks like this:

• I read a book, making a note where something inside me reacts. Sometimes it’s a question. Sometimes it’s a proposed amendment. C.S. Lewis called his notes “festoons.”

•  I work through the marginal notes in notebooks and index cards until I get comfortable, that is, until I find a version of the original idea that I can use.

• I then talk about the notion with friends who can be trusted to give me an honest appraisal. Or I post the notion at this site and hope for a constructive reply. This note, for example, was prompted by just such a discussion. (Thanks, Alvin.)

That’s the process. The collection of notes you see on this site might be called “The Collective Marginalia of Heber Taylor.” That’s wrong, but not far wrong.

A wonderful little book on physics

 If you like one-night reads, don’t miss Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

The book, which about 80 pages, started as a series of newspaper columns. You might guess that an old newspaperman would like that. But through the years, I came to realize that most Americans just don’t read much about science. I admire efforts to interest ordinary people in the sciences and to encourage people to appreciate some of the difficulties.

Rovelli works on two themes. First, he gives us a tour of physics. The first lesson is a wonderful summary of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The second is a brief on quantum mechanics. What we know about the first and second lessons is that they are contradictory.

For many people of my father’s generation, there was profound concern about conflicts between faith and science. I’m much more interested in the conflict between science and science.

One of the efforts to find a synthesis involves quantum gravity. If you have the cast of mind to be interested in these notes, you really ought to become familiar with the term. And Rovelli will get you there.

The second theme of this book is on what doing science is like. It’s like following a trail, and mainly what you do is doubt — yourself, the conflicting data, the competing pictures of the world that are contradictory and thus can’t both be right.

My favorite sentence in the book: “Genius hesitates.”

• Source: Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics; New York: Riverhead Books, 2016.

A bad case of sibling rivalry

 If you read ancient Greek literature, you run across references to “the house of Atreus.” We’re mainly talking about Agamemnon and Menelaus, the brothers who led the Greeks against Troy.

Agamemnon and Menelaus were disasters as leaders. Homer and the tragedians who followed his lead said the brothers brought hardship and sorrow to the Greeks. The brothers’ hubris caused so much suffering you sometimes have to remind yourself that the Greeks won the war.

Less known is the story of their father Atreus, son of Pelops, who gave his name to the Peloponnese, i.e. the snappy but geographically incorrect “Isle of Pelops.”

Atreus had many siblings, but one brother, Thuestes, was such a rival that their poisonous relationship spread hardship and sorrow among the Greeks.

Atreus made a vow to the goddess Artemis to sacrifice the best of his flocks to her. The god Hermes, who had a grudge against Pelops and his brood, dropped a lamb with a golden fleece into the flock, just to make trouble.

The vow required Atreus to sacrifice the lamb to the goddess. He did, but he kept the fleece for himself.

Once trouble starts, it’s hard to stop. Atreus’s new wife, Aerope, known to some writers as Europe, fell in love with Thuestes. He agreed to be her lover — if she’d give him the fleece, which he said his brother had stolen from his pasture. She did.

The nobles of Mycenae were considering both brothers as candidates for the kingship, and Atreus argued that the golden fleece was evidence of divine approval.

Thuestes seemed shocked. “So you’re saying that the owner of the fleece should be king?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Well, we agree on something.”

Dramatists dragged out the story of how the nobles went to see who had the fleece.

Thuestes had it, but through divine intervention, Atreus became king. (The intervention was spectacular. It was, in myth, the sun set in the east.)

Once on the throne, Atreus took vengeance on his brother, serving him a dinner of his own children, cooked in a stew.

Thuestes wanted vengeance so badly that he consulted the oracle at Delphi. When he was told vengeance could come only through a son born to him and his daughter Pelopia, he committed rape.

Atreus thought that Pelopia’s son, Aegisthus, was his own. Aegisthus was just 7 when he killed Atreus, and Thuestes came to the throne.

There’s more, but you get the gist.

Homer’s Iliad is the story of an ill-fated expedition against Troy, led by two flawed characters. It’s bloody and gruesome, and I’m pretty sure I know a state legislator or two who would try to ban it from public libraries if they knew about it.

I’ve been thinking about the story in terms of a modest theory about Greek literature: If a mythical story strikes you as an awful example of human behavior, inquire into the backstory. If you look at the story behind a troubling character, you’ll often find that his dad was even worse, and you don’t want to know about grandpa.

• Robert Graves’s account is in The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 43-51.

Absorbed by ordinary matter

 I went down the rabbit hole for a couple of days with Theodore Gray’s The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe.

I read somewhere that Oliver Sacks, who loved the periodic table more than most good writers, had been fascinated by this book. I found a copy in the public library.

Two days later I can say this: The book is full of information — atomic weights, density, graphics on the order in which electron rings are filled, spectral emissions, charts of melting and boiling points. Some of the photographs show elements in pure forms. Others show elements in common products.

I know that few people would share my enthusiasm for the book. You might have to have an interest in chemistry and metaphysics, disciplines that are interested, in different ways, in the question of what is, to love this book. Gray introduces that question of what is this way:

The periodic table is the universal catalog of everything you can drop on your foot. There are some things, such as lights, love, logic, and time, that are not in the periodic table. But you can’t drop any of those things on your foot.

There are all kinds of things in the cosmos and some of the naturally occurring material things are wonderful and just barely believable.

I can also tell you this about The Elements: It hit me like Material World: A Global Family Portrait, first published a generation ago. That book is a collection of photographs of typical families in various countries worldwide, posing in front of their houses with their possessions. And so you had an American family with its television sets, furniture sets and appliances, and families from other parts of the world who were proud of their bicycles and livestock. With both books, I was absorbed, unable to do much else until I’d finished, regretfully, the last page.

• Sources: Theodore Gray, The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe; New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2009. Peter Menzel, Charles C. Mann and Paul Kennedy, Material World: A Global Family Portrait; Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 1994.

The way some scientists think

 Let’s reconsider Isaac Asimov’s suggestion that the level of radiation of a particular isotope of potassium determines the window of opportunity for the development of intelligent life.

The background appeared here on Nov. 6, 2022. In a nutshell: A radioactive form of potassium is common in foods that are healthy for humans. Asimov suggested this isotope opened a window of opportunity for the development of intelligent life. Too much of that radioactive potassium, and the long genomes that are characteristic of intelligent creatures would have broken apart. Too little, and the rate of mutation would have been too slow for intelligent creatures to evolve.

In the 1930s, perhaps the leading school of philosophy in the West was Logical Positivism. Most of its famous proponents were members of the Vienna Circle, although an Englishman, A.J. Ayer, wrote the book that became the manifesto for that school of thought. Language, Truth and Logic is arguably the clearest book on philosophy ever written.

The thesis of the Logical Positivists was that only statements that can be verified have sense. That is, scientific hypotheses have sense because you can, by testing, show them to be true or false. Religious texts, poetic declarations of love and other such things can’t be submitted to tests of verification and thus have no sense. They are nonsense.

The problem with the Logical Positivists’ viewpoint is that their central tenet — that only statements that can be verified or falsified have sense — can’t be verified or falsified. Strictly speaking, at least as Logical Positivists speak, it’s nonsense.

But most of the philosophers who made up this school were scientists, and verifiability is essential in constructing a scientific framework for understanding the world. Whether that’s the only meaningful framework for looking at the cosmos is another question.

I’m reciting this bit of intellectual history to get to this point: When I was a student of the sciences many years ago, the most penetrating minds I came across were like Asimov’s: they were creative. They spun off suggestions, some of which were verifiable and some of which were not, constantly. These scientists didn’t know or understand some aspect of the cosmos. And so they used their imaginations to try to come up with an explanation.

In my view, Asimov’s suggestion is not a hypothesis. I can’t imagine how it could be tested. But I think it’s penetrating suggestion, conjecture ... or something. It suggests a meaningful possibility, a way in which the cosmos might work.

I think science is full of that sort of thing. I also suspect that if more young people knew it was full of that sort of thing, they’d be far more interested in science.

At some point, a fact becomes relevant

 Here’s a little more on thinking and how we form hypotheses when we are on the trail of a problem.

The philosopher Carl G. Hempel tells the classic story of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiz, who solved the problem of why so many women died at the First Maternity Division at Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s.

From 1844 to 1846, 7 to 11 percent of the women who came to give birth in the First Division died of childbed fever.

In the Second Division, the rates were 2 to 3 percent.

The answer, of course, was that the hospital was a prestigious institution where medicine was taught. The faculty and students were using instruments in autopsies and then using them in the maternity ward with only superficial cleaning.

The problem is obvious now, and medical practitioners now take care in sterilizing their instruments to prevent infections. But the problem wasn’t obvious then. Semmelweiz solved the problem by testing several hypotheses.

One was that childbed fever was spread by crowding. He checked, and found that the Second Maternity Division actually was more crowded, in part because women were trying desperately to avoid the notorious First Division.

Psychiatry was in its early stages then, and some of Semmelweiz’s colleagues thought that the presence of a priest, going through the wards with a procession of assistants to administer last rites to dying women, might have a distressing and weakening affect on the others. Semmelweiz arranged to sneak the priest through the wards on his rounds. 

The story goes on, but you can see why a scientific problem is not just about getting the facts.

What counts as a relevant fact changes as the hypothesis changes. If you think that crowding might explain childbed fever, the relevant facts involve the numbers of patients on the wards. If you think that stress caused by priestly processions might explain childbed fever, the relevant facts involve the priest and his passage through the wards.

It turned out that the relevant facts involved microbes. But no one suspected that was possible when Semmelweiz set out on the trail. Those facts became relevant when he formed a hypothesis that microbes were somehow causing childbed fever in a way that was not known to medical science at the time.

A fact becomes relevant when it's attached to a hypothesis, that is, to a possible explanation.

• Source: Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,  Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.

A notion, not a hypothesis

 I’ve been thinking about scientific hypotheses and about what a hypothesis is.

Here’s an example of something that looks like one but is not:

About one in every thousand atoms of potassium is in the form of an isotope that has an atomic weight of 40, rather than 39. As the word “isotope” implies, it’s radioactive.

Potassium is an essential nutrient for humans. I couldn’t begin to calculate how many of those isotopes I eat with a diet that includes black beans, lentils, bananas and dark leafy greens.

Presumably, when the earth was younger and hotter with radiation, there was a lot more radioactive substances in the food chain.

Isaac Asimov suggested that the level of radiation of that particular isotope of potassium determines the window of opportunity for the development of intelligent life. Too much, and the long genomes that are characteristic of intelligent creatures would break apart. Too little, and the rate of mutation would slow. After eons, we’d still have snails rather than mammals.

It’s an ingenious and telling idea. Students learn from teachers who think aloud like that.

But that suggestion is not really a hypothesis, is it? Can you imagine going to your academic adviser with a proposal to test it? And if that suggestion is not a hypothesis, what would you call it? A bit of speculation? Just an idle notion?

Carl G. Hempel, a philosopher, used to say that one of the most common misconceptions about science is that it is driven by facts — that scientists let the facts drive their hypotheses. Actually, science is driven by minds that are imaginative, as creative as those of poets and fiction writers.

I think science is full of suggestions and speculations like Asimov’s. I wish we had a richer vocabulary to talk about those kinds of illuminating suggestions.

• Sources: A short summary of Asimov's suggestion is in Theodore Gray's The Elements; New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2009. For a discussion of what we ought to count as a hypothesis, see Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,  Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.

Give me fiction, but hold the novel

 W.G. Sebald said: “I try to write prose fiction but the novel genre is alien to me.”

Alas, it’s so with me.

Few of the “great” novels have stuck with me. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, on the other hand, struck me as a wonder.

I liked Death Comes for the Archbishop. But Willa Cather told anyone who would listen that book  was not a novel.

If you follow this collection of notes, you’ll know that I generally prefer short stories. But this is not just length.

I do like some longer works of fiction. I’d call Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet a wonderful work of fiction. I wouldn’t call it a novel. 

This attitude might just be petty stubbornness and a refusal to grow up. When I was in high school, briefly and without distinction, I had allergic reactions to Fitzgerald and Dickens. I probably behaved badly to those who tried to convince me these were great works.

If I were in charge of the educational system, kids would get a pass on Great Expectations and The Great Gatsby. They’d probably have to read Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams.

Fortunately, I’m not in charge.

• Source: “Interview with W G Sebald,” by Sebastian Shakespeare; Literary Review, October 2001.

Saint-Simon looks at technology

 Of the six thinkers that Isaiah Berlin considered in his discussion of the enemies of democracy, Joseph de Maistre is the one I dislike most.

When you attack reason itself, when you no longer believe in giving reasons — and truthful reasons — for actions that affect others, you’re committed to resolving disputes by violence.

That’s the political divide in this country today: those who believe in persuasion and those who are ready to use force.

In discussing Berlin’s book, I didn’t say which of the thinkers I liked most. It’s Comte Henri de Saint-Simon. Mostly, it’s his personality, which oscillated between the sublime and the barmy.

Saint-Simon fought with Washington at Yorktown, somehow survived the purge of nobles when the French Revolution disintegrated into terror, went to Panama to advocate for a canal before it was feasible, and taught his servant to wake him up by saying: “Rise, M. le Comte — you have great things to achieve.”

Some of his ideas were daffy. His followers formed a sect, which had a distinctive costume.

Above all, I like one sentence that Saint-Simon wrote:

I write because I have new ideas.

He had at least one idea that I’m still thinking about. I grew up hearing that human needs are basically fixed — food, clothing, shelter. Saint-Simon thought that human needs change constantly because technology changes. You could make the case that access to the Internet is now a need.

Saint-Simon used a metaphor that strikes me as having been unfortunately influential in our thinking about technology. He talked tools as weapons. The plow is a tool to force the earth to give us what we want. The progression from military tools — swords, muskets, missiles — was to force others to do what we wish.

The idea is wrong and dangerous — and more imbedded in our thinking than we’d want to admit. I hope that seeing that idea clearly in his thinking might help me see it more clearly in mine.

• Source: Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal; Princeton University Press, 2002. Earlier notes on Berlin’s book appear Sept. 30 through Oct. 2, and Oct. 24.

How can anyone stop at 12?

 If I were putting together an anthology of a dozen short stories, I think I’d pick these:

• Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat,” a story that convinced me that I wanted to be a writer.

• Leo Tolstoy, “What Men Live By,” a retelling of — and an perhaps an improvement on — the gospel through the eyes of a poor shoemaker.

• Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River,” about healing after trauma.

• J.D. Salinger, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” a story that occurs entirely in a cab in New York City. 

• Gabriel García Márquez, “María dos Prezares,” a story about a 76-year-old prostitute who dreams she is going to die but finds she was mistaken in interpreting the dream. Her dog is one of the great dogs in fiction.

• Roberto Bolaño, “Last Evenings on Earth,” which is unforgivably bawdy and astonishing.

• Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I,” which is so short it’s hard to believe it’s so good.

• William Carlos Williams, “The Use of Force,” about a doctor who tests wills with a little girl who’s a terrible patient.

• D.H. Lawrence, “The Blind Man,” a story that contrasts the temperaments of two men.

• Alice Munro, either “Dear Life,” about misperceptions and family lore, “Amundsen,” about the unfortunate ways we seek love, or “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd,” about an improbable friendship. I can’t decide which.

• Christopher Cook, “Heresies,” one of his many stories about how religious beliefs influence life in Texas.

• Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Speckled Band,” because a literature that excludes Sherlock Holmes is of not for me.

I’ve enjoyed stories by William Trevor, Truman Capote, James Joyce, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams and Willa Cather, and this list would probably be different tomorrow. It’ll have to do for today.

Thanks, Michael, for the suggestions, and thanks, Christopher, for the note on Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool” and the prompt.

What short stories would you recommend?

 A year ago, I had a series of five notes on one-night reads.

I’m just now exploring Jonathan Gibbs’s site “A Personal Anthology.” It features a weekly newsletter, in which he asks someone what they would choose if they were asked to pick 12 short stories for an anthology. Here’s his introduction to the challenge:

The task is to pick and introduce a dozen stories. These might be their personal favourites, or their undisputed list of the greatest ever; they might make a themed collection, or they might be a literary version of Desert Island Discs: twelve stories that have marked them as readers, and mark their journey through life.

I’ve been thinking about the works we read time and again, and how those works shape us.

Readers, if you’d send me a list I’d be grateful. I’m genuinely curious. I’m also always on the prowl for a good story.

• Sources: Jonathan Gibbs’s site is at https://apersonalanthology.com/. As you might guess from the spelling, he’s based in the United Kingdom. I got a quick introduction here: https://tinycamels.wordpress.com/about/. My notes on one-night reads were published Oct. 29 through Nov. 2, 2021. The one on short stories was No. 4 in the series (Nov. 1, 2021).

A sight that comes and goes

 One more note about Stone Mountain, and then I’ll switch topics for a while: The roads here follow tracks that were made in the days when humans traveled on foot or horseback. They wind through the terrain, which is mostly covered in tall trees.

I grew up in West Texas, where a good view might be 40 miles. Here a view is often more like 40 yards, and often 40 feet. 

And so it is that although Stone Mountain is there, you don’t always see it. I don’t even seen it often.

And then, I’ll round a corner, heading for the coffee shop, and it’s there: a stone face, mostly granite, rising 750 feet above the forest and village. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.