Montaigne and his essays

 When I retired, people gave me a lot of advice. Here’s what Montaigne said:

It is time to slip our knots with society now that we can contribute nothing to it.

That line was my guide.

I was young once. I had my day. But it was time for younger and better minds to have theirs. And, when your day in public life is over, it’s an excellent time to rediscover the delights of your own home, your own place, your own loved ones, family and friends.

If I could have only one book, I’d choose Montaigne’s Essays. My copy is as worn as my grandmothers’ Bibles.

Montaigne was a lawyer, and the word “essais” meant “attempts” or “trials.” He retired early and spent the rest of his life trying to sort out what he thought about things.

When he went essaying, he was taking at stab at a topic.

He changed his mind frequently. He didn’t bother to correct earlier essays. He let the contradictions stand. He got better as he went.

Reading him makes me think there’s hope for me.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born Feb. 28, 1533. Today’s a feast day in my calendar.

• Sources: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 272. For a little more, see “Marking the day: Montaigne,” Feb. 28, 2022. For a lot more, see the essay on Montaigne at hebertaylor.com.

Steinbeck as a career counselor

 John Steinbeck, turning 60, indicted himself for having lost touch with America. He found that he was writing about a place he didn’t really know because he was working from memory. He recalled an earlier time:

Once I traveled about in an old bakery wagon, double-doored rattler with a mattress on its floor. I stopped where people stopped or gathered, I listened and looked and felt, and in the process had a picture of my country the accuracy of which was impaired only by my own shortcomings.

You might recognize this passage from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.

I read it in college. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I’d gone to school on the G.I. Bill with no thought of a career or job training and, after getting a degree, was about to run out of money.

Faced with the prospect of figuring out a way to stay alive, while doing something that might prove useful to a writer, I thought I might try to find a job as a newspaper reporter. A job like that might make me stop where people stopped and listen to what they were saying.

I’m still living with my own shortcomings as a writer. But Steinbeck’s observation was the closest thing I got to career counseling.

• Sources: John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley; New York: Penguin Books, 1988, p. 5. I’m trying not to mark birthdays this year. But if you’re keeping track, Steinbeck was born Feb. 27, 1902, in Salinas, Calif.

New colors in the forest

 I saw blue violets, Viola sororia, blooming on Valentine’s Day and worried that frost would get them.

Sure enough, we had a freeze, but the violets are thriving.

After the cold snap, dimpled trout lilies, Erythronium umbilicatum, started to bloom. The yellow flowers are scattered over the forest floor just south of Stone Mountain. They’re a plant of the Southeast and so new to me.

In the past two weeks, we’ve had days in the 80s and nights in the 20s, and I don’t know what to think.

If this is spring, this is the way it came to the forest: The red maples put on their red blossoms first. The redbuds bloomed, and then the dogwoods. The beech trees are still holding on to last year’s leaves. They’re the color of faded khaki. The combination of blooms — dark red, reddish-purple, white, green-white — against the deep greens of the magnolias and pines and the exhausted tans of the beeches is lovely.

But I’m still baffled. Blooms that I was expecting to see in April and May are here.

And I’m not the only individual in the Animal Kingdom who is confused. I ran across a Dekay’s brownsnake, Storeria dekayi, on Feb. 8.

Watching the dogwoods bloom

 This is the way it happens: You notice that a tree that was bare yesterday is covered in white flowers. They are bracts, actually, but they look like flowers. The white is dazzling, especially if the tree is in a forest with evergreens.

And then, within a day or two, the white seems to be turning the palest shade of green. That’s if you’re at a distance. As you get closer, you see that the new leaves are coming, following the blooms, as is the way of dogwoods.

Our language is impoverished on this point. You mix white with red to get pink. But the mix of white with pale green doesn’t have a name, at least one that I know.

Some people travel the world to see the wonders. I’ve done a little of that myself. But I don’t think I’ve seen a wonder greater than this.

Learning the local legends

 If you’re new to Georgia, you have to learn things. I had to be told about Nancy Hart.

She’s a historical character, the subject of an article in the New Georgia Encyclopedia. But she’s also become folk hero, maybe not as big as Paul Bunyan or as magical as Pecos Pete, but a legend. It’s hard to tell what’s history and what’s tall tale.

During the Revolutionary War, Mrs. Hart and her husband lived in what was then called the backcountry near the Broad River, about 80 miles east of Stone Mountain. She was an ardent patriot. Georgia had a lot of loyalists.

One day when her husband was away with the militia, six loyalists came by on the trail of a rebel leader. Nancy Hart told the loyalists she had no idea where the man was, although she’d just helped him escape.

The loyalists didn’t believe her. One of them shot her prized turkey and demanded that she cook it for them. The loyalists also demanded drink.

Mrs. Hart brought out some wine. She sent her daughter Sukey to the spring for water and told her quietly to blow the conch shell that she kept there to warn the neighbors.

The six loyalists began to enjoy the wine. They’d stacked their guns in the corner of the cabin, and Mrs. Hart began to pass guns out to her daughter one at a time.

When one of the loyalists saw what was going on, he jumped up.

Nancy Hart warned him she’d shoot. 

He didn’t believe her.

She shot him dead.

A second loyalist tested her and was also shot dead.

Mrs. held the survivors until the neighbors arrived to help hang them. Judicial proceedings were informal in those days. 

The story sounds a bit like a tall tale. But when state engineers were building a highway by the old cabin in 1912, they found the bones of six people buried side by side.

• Source: Clay Ouzts, “Nancy Hart”; New Georgia Encyclopedia. The article is here:

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/nancy-hart-ca-1735-1830/

Kent Haruf’s 'Our Souls at Night'

 The last novel I enjoyed reading was Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night. I didn’t feel as if I were learning a lesson or that I was working on something. I read with delight.

If you’re interested in writing, I can give you a reason to read it: The story unfolds well at a good pace.

It’s about two old people, Addie and Louis, a widow and widower who are alone. In the first chapter, Addie offers a proposition to Louis. He’s invited to come over at night, not for sex, but for conversation and companionship. It’s a recipe for sleeping without loneliness.

And so you have two people who have lived full — sometimes messy — lives, telling each other their stories, just as courting couples do. Addie tells how she lost her husband. Louis tells how he lost his wife.

There are 43 short chapters — each about 1,000 words on average, I’d guess.

I felt I knew two people when the book ended.

You can look for many things in a novel. I’m not much for thrillers or adventure stories. Instead, I like stories that reveal character.

This one does that in the ancient rhythm of courtship. She says, and then he says. The revelations come slowly, a little at a time. I admire the pace.

• Source: Kent Haruf, Our Souls at Night; New York: Vintage Books, 2016.

A wicked spoof by O. Henry

 O. Henry’s story “Tommy’s Burglar” was Library of America’s Story of the Week.

I’d read a lot of O. Henry without running into that one.

It’s a spoof on a minor genre that was popular around 1900: A burglar breaks in and confronts an innocent child, who helps the burglar find his humanity. The burglar is reformed.

The restrictions of that genre — or is it a mini-genre, trope or cliché? —  led to some mawkish writing. O. Henry had fun:

The burglar got into the house without much difficulty; because we must have action and not too much description in a 2,000-word story. 

If you want to know what could possibly go wrong with a formulaic, 2,000-word story for pulp-fiction readers, O.Henry offers a crash course.

Today, an endless stream of shows comes to us through cable and satellite TV, and critics seem surprised that very few of these shows are good. In 1900, newspapers and magazines were full of stories in all genres. O. Henry reminds us that very few of them were good. 

• If this collection of notes has an editorial program, it might be that the world would be a happier place if public-spirited readers signed up for Library of America’s free Story of the Week. You can see what you’d be in for here:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/p/stories-sorted-by-author.html

Our tragic views about mental health

 When I was a teenager, we all learned that we could tell people about our experiences with serious illness — unless that illness was a mental illness.

I followed the newspapers when Sen. Thomas Eagleton was forced to withdraw as the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1972 because he’d sought treatment for depression. That old news was reviewed last week when Sen. John Fetterman sought treatment for depression.

It reminded me of a letter that the writer James Agee wrote to the Rev. James Harold Flye in 1941. Here’s a paragraph that strikes me as tragic:

 

Psychiatry, and for that matter psychoanalysis still more, interest me intensely; but except for general talk with them — which I would like — I feel reluctant to use either except in really desperate need. I don’t yet feel in desperate need, and suspect in fact that I’ll probably pull out of this under my own power. Yet I realize I have an enormously strong drive, on a universally broad front, toward self-destruction; and that I know little if anything about its sources or control. There is much I might learn and be freed from that causes me and others great pain, frustration and defeat, and I expect that sooner or later I will have to seek their help. But I would somewhere near as soon die (or enter a narcotic world) as undergo full psychoanalysis. I don’t trust anyone on earth that much; and I see in every psychoanalyzed face a look of deep spiritual humiliation or defeat; to which I prefer at least a painful degree of spiritual pain and sickness. The look of “I am a man who finally could not call his soul his own, but yielded it to another … ”

 

Agee eventually changed his mind and sought the help of an analyst. But for a long time, he realized that he was self-destructive and didn’t know why. He realized he was hurting himself and others. And he manufactured arguments against getting help.

If you are looking back and thinking about his life, you see pain — to himself, wives, children and other loved ones. And you hope others get help, whatever the rest of society thinks.

• Source: Letters of James Agee to Father Flye; New York: Bantam Books, 1963, p. 116.

Measuring the influence of a man

 Lucille Clifton’s memoir has a difficult passage about her father, who was a difficult man.

After Samuel Louis Sayles Sr. died, the poet tried to measure her father’s influence. The passage mentions Clifton’s siblings, Punkin and Jo, and her husband, Fred. Here’s what she said about her father:

He was a strong man, a strong family man, my Daddy. So many people knew him for a man in a time when it wasn’t so common. And he lived with us, our Daddy lived in our house with us, and that wasn’t common either. He was not a common man. Now, he did some things, he did some things, but he always loved his family.

He hurt us all a lot and we hurt him a lot, the way people who love each other do, you know. I probably am better off than any of us, better off in my mind, you know, and I credit Fred for that. Punkin she has a hard time living in the world and so does my brother and Jo has a hard time and gives one too. And a lot of all that is his fault, has something to do with him.

There are many different ideas in our culture about what being “a strong man, a strong family man” means. Some of those ideas are more toxic than others.

The poet dedicated her memoir to her father, who died in 1969, and

who is somewhere,

being a man.

• Source: lucille clifton, good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980; Rochester, N.Y.: BOA Editions, Ltd., 1987, p. 273.

Lucille Clifton’s memoir

 One of the preoccupations of this collection of notes is the “one-night read,” a piece that can be read in an evening.

The poet Lucille Clifton’s Generations: A Memoir is about 50 pages in my edition. It traces the generations from the poet’s ancestor Caroline, who was born free in Africa. When she was 8, Caroline was captured with her sister and mother and brought to New Orleans. They walked to Virginia, where they were split up and sold. The sisters, who ended up on neighboring farms, never saw their mother again.

That story, which occurred in 1830, is behind the others. One event had consequences for generations.

• Source: lucille clifton, good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980; Rochester, N.Y.: BOA Editions, Ltd., 1987.

A problem in ethics

 Some mathematical formulas are designed to suggest a range of possible answers. A statistical model for where an electron might be in relation to the other parts of an atom might suggest a range of answers, rather than a single correct one. To think that the most probably precise location is the correct answer is not really a mistake — a one-time error in a calculation, say — but a misunderstanding of the problem. It’s to misconceive the problem itself.

Something similar occurs when we talk about ethical principles.

An ethical principle can suggest a range of appropriate actions. That’s the case with the Utilitarian Principle, which holds that the good thing to do is the action that brings the greatest good to the greatest number of people.

A person who decided to sacrifice a little of her own time and resources to help others would be applying that rule. But the rule suggests a range of appropriate actions, not a single action.

What do you say when someone claims there is only one answer?

The philosopher Cheryl Misak tells the story of the Mosquito Net People who have decided that giving money to buy mosquito nets to save people from malaria is the single greatest good you can do. Since it’s the greatest good, you should do that. If you give money to another charity or to your struggling neighbor, you are making a mistake. By doing less than the ultimate good, you are in some way doing a wrong, even if in a small way.

The problem at this point might strike us as an ethical problem — a holier than thou person telling the world what’s good and what’s not.

Maybe that’s so. But the central problem here is with a concept. The idea that doing good is some kind of calculation is not a mistake. It’s a misunderstanding of what the whole business is about.

• Source: Yesterday’s note was on the philosopher Johnny Lyons, who has recorded a series of dialogs called “Talking to Thinkers.” His conversation with Cheryl Misak is here:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQVUQc4lie0

Her discussion of the conceptual problem with ethical principles begins around 46 minutes into the recording.

An interesting thinker: Johnny Lyons

 I’ve started following the writing of Johnny Lyons, who strikes me as an interesting philosopher.

I came across his essay on the American philosopher Thomas Nagel in the Dublin Review of Books. Lyons mentions a couple of Nagel’s characteristics:

• You can write about philosophy or you can do it. Nagel always ends up doing it, thinking aloud as he’s writing.

• Some philosophers build vast systems, providing answers to questions. For others, philosophy is more about the questions than the answers. Nagel is fond of the questions.

I’d agree that both observations apply to Nagel. It seems to me that both observations also apply to Lyons.

Lyons is not an academic philosopher, and I admire his efforts to get philosophical ideas out on the street.

He’s recorded a series of dialogs called “Talking to Thinkers.” His conversation with Cheryl Misak, a philosopher at the University of Toronto who is interested in pragmatism, is fascinating.

• Sources: Johnny Lyons, “Problems, Problems”; Dublin Review of Books, February 2023. You can find it here:

https://drb.ie/articles/problems-problems/

Lyons’s website is at https://johnnylyons.org. The story of how Lyons abandoned a Ph.D. and went to work in the corporate world is under “Autobiography.”

Lytton Strachey's diction

 I recently mentioned Lytton Strachey, whose biographical essays I admire.

I like the length. Life is short, and there are minor characters in history I’d like to know a little about without having to read a dissertation. Strachey was good at that.

After leaving a topic, I often have second thoughts. And I’ve been thinking about Strachey’s diction.

What’s unusual about it? Part of it is that he lived in a different time. But he also had an unusual voice. He chose words.

He wrote of “monitory” messages, when most of us might have said that someone sent a warning.

He said that Horace Walpole wrote “alembicated” sentences, which the dictionary defines as “overrefined as if by excessive distillation: excessively subtle: precious.”

I’m interested that Strachey used those words, though I wouldn’t use them myself.

Here’s one, however, that strikes me as useful: “concatenation.”

Here’s Merriam-Webster:

1: a group of things linked together or occurring together in a way that produces a particular result or effect

2: the act of concatenating things or the state of being concatenated : union in a linked series.

I’ve resisted calling this collection of notes a “blog” because that just doesn’t seem quite right to me. Maybe this is just a concatenation. 

• For recent notes on Strachey, see “A model for a biography,” Feb. 4, 2023; “The lives of friends and acquaintances,” Feb. 3, 2023; and “Letter writers and their readers,” Feb. 2, 2023.

Arabia Mountain, a magical place

 Arabia Mountain is a dome of granite about 12 miles from the house. It’s like Stone Mountain, but its ecosystem has been much less disturbed. It’s now preserved as a National Heritage Area.

If I were a teacher of ecology, I think I’d just invite students on a hike. Most ecosystems are complex, and it’s easy to get lost. But these granite outcrops are such harsh places that relatively few species live in them. The system itself is simpler.

Biologists talk of “primary succession,” the process by which bare rock becomes a place that supports life. 

Over eons, water has eroded the granite domes, making small, shallow pools. Rainwater collects and small plants grow: elf-orpine, grasses and mosses. So do lichens, which are a community of organisms — commonly a partnership between a fungus and an algae — rather than a single plant.

When these die, the decayed organic matter in these pools forms little islands of soil in a sea of granite.

The textbook succession looks like this: in the first stage, the dominant species is elf-orpine, a little red succulent. The second stage is marked by communities with lichens and annual herbs. The third is marked by communities with annual and perennial herbs with haircap moss. 

These plant communities are primitive and ancient.

Elf-orpine is pollinated by ants. This plant evolved before bees were around.

Walking around these granite outcrops will give you sense of what at least part of the earth looked like millions of years ago.

• Sources: Leslie Edwards, Jonathan Ambrose and L. Katherine Kirkman, The Natural Communities of Georgia; Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 2013. You can find a photograph of elf-orpine here:

https://arabiaalliance.org/themes/natural-systems/diamorpha-blooms/

The trail that runs nearby

 I suppose I’m particularly interested in the ancient network of trails in the Atlanta area because one of them runs near our place in Stone Mountain.

If I have to get on a main road, it’s usually Rockbridge Road, which follows part of the old Sandtown Trail, mentioned in yesterday’s note. Rockbridge Road is winding, hilly and scenic. I take it — rather than the freeway — to Atlanta. The rewards of scenery are worth the extra time.

The local historian Mark Pifer thinks the Rock Bridge was never a bridge but a series of rocks or boulders in the Yellow River that allowed a traveler to cross on foot. One day I'd like to find that site.

• Source: Mark Pifer, Native Decatur; Decartur, Ga.: Downriver Books, 2018.

A region of many trails

 Yesterday’s note on the history of Georgia got me thinking about history in a broader sense, about the footprints that human beings leave on a place.

I think Mark Pifer, one of the local historians, is right about this: The trails that the Native Americans left around Atlanta are the oldest marks made by human beings that you can still see.

This region is full of trails. Native peoples had two large communities to the west — Sandtown and Standing Peachtree and extensive trading networks. East-west trails ran to both settlements, and a lot of the trails seemed to have connected to Stone Mountain, which was both a sacred place and a landmark that was hard to miss.

Major north-south trails aimed at the Shallow Ford in the Chatahoochie.

If you look at the winding thoroughfares in this area, you might be bewildered.

But if you know where the Native American settlements were before the Europeans arrived and know where the rivers can be forded, the routes become logical.

The trails usually followed ridges. If you stay on a ridge, you have to cross fewer creeks and wade fewer swamps. 

When one of the early railroads came through, the engineers followed an existing trail and reported that they didn’t have to make corrections. It was the most efficient route.

Pifer notes what a good naturalist would note: The railroad followed the Native American trails. The Native American trails followed animal tracks. The real trailblazers usually have four legs.

• Source: Mark Pifer, Native Decatur; Decartur, Ga.: Downriver Books, 2018.

A day to think of Georgia

 The newspaper says Georgia is 290 years old today. So I’m marking the day.

James Oglethorpe and 114 colonists set up camp on the Savannah River and founded the colony on Feb. 12, 1733.

The settlers arrived with a peculiar blend of ideals and prejudices.

Slavery and large landholdings were prohibited because Oglethorpe did not want another plantation economy. He saw the new colony as a place where poor people who were being imprisoned for debt in England would get a fresh start on small, independent farms.

Slavery was banned. So were lawyers, Catholics and rum.

Georgia was the last English colony. It was settled to protect the increasingly wealthy colony South Carolina from the Spanish in Florida.

Much of that wealth came from the brutal plantation system. Oglethorpe had visions of a better society. But the crown was less interested in his ideals than in a buffer state protecting one of its wealthier colonies.

Oglethorpe’s vision didn’t last long. Instead, the policies that made South Carolina wealthy — a plantation system based on slavery and explosive growth at the expense of Native American communities — prevailed.

The Georgia of today looks a good deal better than the Georgia of the past.

• Sources: The New Georgia Encyclopedia is always good. You can find an overview of the state’s history here:

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/georgia-history-overview/

The Library of Congress has some interesting materials here:

https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/colonial-settlement-1600-1763/georgia-colony-1732-1750/#:~:text=In%20the%201730s%2C%20England%20founded,Oglethorpe%2C%20a%20former%20army%20officer.

Watching a doe from the upstairs window

 A doe came into the woods behind the fence, accompanied by another doe. She would scratch her neck, using one back hoof, then the other.

Sometimes, cows do that just before giving birth.

I watched the doe for a couple of hours. But if a fawn was born, it was born elsewhere.

Henbit and the notion of invasive species

 One of the small plants underneath our feet in the Georgia Piedmont is henbit, Lamium amplexicaule.

It was common in Texas, and I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it in Stone Mountain. It was in Asia, African and Europe before it came to the Western Hemisphere.

The other day I made of note of seeing Beale’s barberry in the woods. It’s on lists of “invasive species,” a concept that bothers me. It makes me wonder when henbit became naturalized here. Did it come with the Spanish explorers? Or when the English colonists arrived? Was it here long before then?

A couple of years ago, I was walking the enormous dog when cottonwood seeds rained down on us. I brushed more than a dozen out of his coat before he jumped in the truck.

Does it matter if the invasive species is brought into a new place with intention? I’m not sure earlier Europeans had any more idea what they were doing when they brought seeds with them than my dog does when he carries home botanical specimens from our journeys.

I guess what bothers me about the idea is the suggestion that man is somehow separate from nature.

Humans and carry plants from place to place. I’m not sure one species knows that much more about the consequences of its actions than the other.

• For more on henbit, see “More common plants in the public spaces,” Jan. 19, 2022.

Stone Mountain, early February

 Stone Mountain in winter. What’s it like?

• The custom here is to mow the lawn in the middle of December and then put the lawnmower away until spring. I was interested, because I come from the land of year-round mowing. Sure enough, the grasses that make up the lawns here are brown. But the wild onions have come up. I see spikey cowlicks on slick haircuts, the short kind that fellows my age remember as kids.

• Despite the cold, daffodils are coming up in gardens. Jasmine blooms hung on to their vines through a freeze that lasted several days. A couple of weeks ago, I saw yellow flowers with ice on them.

• Gumballs — those spikey seedpods that fall to the ground under trees of the genus Liquidambar — are so thick on the ground that it’s hard to get your footing in some places. One Georgia nature writer used the term “minefield.” The density of the gumballs underfoot is impressive. But I was surprised when I looked up. Most of the sweetgums still have thousands of balls on their leafless limbs.

• The biggest change in winter is so obvious you might not remark on it. The canopy has thinned out. You can sometimes see something 300 yards away. In the summer, you couldn't see 10 yards up the trail. The leaf litter on the forest floor is deep, and in Texas you'd be worried about fire. Here it's damp. All those leaves should decompose quickly.

• I’ve heard geese overhead several times. But the canopy of pines near the house is so dense I haven’t seen them. Then, while walking the enormous dog, eight came over the road, flying just above the trees.

• I heard coyotes howling the other night. When I was a young man, I used to go to sleep to that sound. Two coyotes can convince you they are a pack of 20, and I tried to distinguish the voices. The howling is terrifying to some people, I know. But it’s better than comfort food to me.

In the garden and in the wild

 I saw Beale’s barberry, also called leatherleaf mahonia, blooming in the woods. It’s a native of China and went around the world as an ornamental plant.

Wikipedia says that Berberis bealei “has reportedly escaped cultivation and become established in the wild in scattered places” including Georgia. I think we can remove the “reportedly.” The question has been decided.

And baffled by the beeches

 Lest you be led astray by yesterday’s note, I’m baffled by many things here, not just the red maples.

The American beech, Fagus grandifolia, is one of the marker species for what the ecologists call “Piedmont mesic forests.” They are moist and protected.

One of the most famous around here is Depedene. As the name suggests, it’s sheltered in a deep ravine. The mesic forest I’m watching is on the south edge of Stone Mountain, which shelters the woods from north winds.

In places, the beeches are dominant and, though they are deciduous trees, they have held almost all their leaves through winter. The leaves turn bronze and then bleach to a khaki color. The khaki has faded for the past two months.

It’s a sight that still astonishes me, coming through the bare woods to the beautiful stand of beech.

Trees that hold their leaves through winter are called marcescent. Each leaf stalk, called a petiole, is joined to a branch by a layer of tissue that has a lot of small tubes, like veins. The tubules carry water and nutrients between the leaf and the rest of the tree. In the fall, cells in this abscission layer secret a waxy substance that gradually shuts off the flow of water and nutrients. The leaves eventually fall without leaving a wound on the branch.

Some species, including American beeches, don’t develop that waxy substance. They hold their leaves until the new ones arrive in spring.

It's mostly genetics. But some trees can be marcescent as juveniles and grow out of it. 

Muddled by the maples

 The Piedmont Master Gardeners provide an excellent source of information on the natural history of my new home. But even with expert help, it’s difficult to understand something as complex as the ecology of a region.

I’m muddled by the red maples here.

Here’s what the Master Gardeners say about Acer rubrum:

Clusters of small, red buds and red flowers appear on the tree in early spring (March/April) before the leaves appear.

I noticed one tree in bloom on Jan. 29, soon after a hard freeze. Since then, other maples have exploded into color. In places, the woods are dazzling.

I don’t know what to make of this place.

To be fair, Texas is just as confusing. A year ago, I was thinking about the garden in San Antonio. It was 80 in the daytime and 60s at night. But Texas is the kind of place that can bake one week and freeze the next. Last week’s ice storm was spectacular but not unusual.

In Texas, the old timers watched the old mesquite trees. The young ’uns — meaning young mesquites — can be fooled, the old folks said. But the old mesquite cannot. When they start to put out leaves, it’s safe to plant.

• Sources: The Piedmont Master Gardeners are at https://piedmontmastergardeners.org/

If the advice on gardening in Texas sounds familiar, see “They watched the old mesquite,” Feb. 22, 2022.

History in the words of its makers

 Yesterday’s note was an argument for the value of short readings.

My father was drafted in World War II and fought in the Battle of the Bulge with one of Patton’s armored divisions. The division had liberated concentration camps. I do not remember a time when I did not know who Adolph Hitler was or the evil that he’d done.

But as a college student, I was shocked when I had to read a collection of Hitler’s speeches.

All my life I’d heard about Hitler. But I was stunned when I read him and confronted his ideas in his own words. It was the difference between being told about a criminal and meeting him.

Fifty years later, it seems to me that the world includes fewer saints and fewer monsters than I once imagined. I’ve come to see that people who do a great deal of good can and do have monstrous ideas. I also think that the best way to see that is to read people who have influenced history in their own words.

Here is an excerpt of Winston Churchill’s testimony to the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

This short passage is now known as The Dog in the Manger Argument. It’s a network of confused notions: that that the idea of race makes sense, that it follows that some races are superior to others, that outrageous moral wrongs are OK when committed by those at the top against those at the bottom.

It’s the kind of thinking that justified the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. It led to all kinds of crimes that have been bundled into the clumsy word “colonialism.”

Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who would like to be president, has been in the news as he tries to limit what can be taught in history courses. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who would also like to be president, did the same thing earlier but was less successful in making headlines.

Both seem to think that history is something that can be controlled by the state.

I think one way to defeat that nonsense is to make the words of the people who made history readily available.

I think both governors would be surprised at how little help teenagers actually need in making up their own minds.

A model for a biography

 Lytton Strachey held that biographies should be as long as James Boswell’s Life of Johnson or as short as John Aubrey’s short profiles.

But I like another model: Diogenes Laërtius’s The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers.

Diogenes gave an introduction to each philosopher and then let the philosophers speak for themselves. He’d give samples of their sayings and arguments.

The ancient Greek thinkers were big on chreia, which I’d be tempted to translate as “teaching anecdotes.” They were little stories told with a cocked eyebrow. The teller was watching to see if his student was getting the point.

I wish that I had been exposed at an earlier age to a lot of the world’s great thinkers. I think I’d have benefited from a library of small books or pamphlets about important thinkers in history.

A model for such a pamphlet would be something like this:

• A short introduction, putting the subject in context with his or her times.

• A series of quotations, sayings or readings, each no longer than 200 words, that shows what the person thought, believed, valued or fought for. Fifty quotations might be a good standard.

• A short essay on further reading.

There is something admirable in knowing a great deal about a single subject. But far too many people, myself included, simply don’t know anything about some of the people whose thinking shaped the world we live in.

I can imagine a course, something like “Western Civilization” that used to be standard fare for college sophomores, taught as a series of biographies. I’d still like to take that course.

The lives of friends and acquaintances

 “A biography should either be as long as Boswell’s or as short as Aubrey’s,” said Lytton Strachey.

Strachey, who was closer to the John Aubrey school, wrote his biographical essays for magazines. I’d guess most are between 2,500 and 3,500 words. James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson is about 350,000.

I’m a fan of both kinds of biographies.

A person should have a few close friends and many acquaintances. You know your close friends at book length. You know a great deal less about acquaintances — but knowing a little is preferable to complete ignorance.

If you’d like proof that a little is sometimes enough, try Strachey’s essay on “Lady Hester Stanhope.” I don’t think you could make a case that she was an important character in world history. But Strachey made an excellent case that she was one of the great English eccentrics. 

I know a little about her now. And that’s enough.

• Source: The quotation is from Lytton Strachey’s essay “John Aubrey,” originally published 1923 and collected in Biographical Essays; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, N.D. “Lady Hester Stanhope,” originally published in 1919, is in the same collection.

Letter writers and their readers

 The English essayist Lytton Strachey said this about Horace Walpole’s letters:

Though from the point of view of style, or personal charm, or individuality of observation, other letter writers may deserve a place at least on an equality with that of Walpole, it is indisputable that the collected series of his letters forms by far the most important single correspondence in the language.

Do you think that's true?

I’m disputing the indisputable, although my hat is in hand to Strachey, who gives an account of why letters are important to some readers, including me.

I agree with Strachey that letters are like pearls. A good one is an admirable thing, but the real value comes when you have a string — the longer the better.

But I think that’s true because we want to know the person behind the letters — what kind of life he or she lived, what he did, what she valued.

I value the letters of Roy Bedichek, a Texas writer of my grandfather’s generation, because I admire the human being who wrote them. And so I’m interested when he tells how to equip a car for roadside camping, how to cook over an open fire and how to make a good sandwich. I care what he thinks about how vermillion flycatchers came in Texas.

The kind of person that interests any one reader varies to a great degree. It is beyond explanation when we talk about why one person falls in love with another. It’s just a matter of individual personalities.

What’s true in love is true in letters: the love of a letter reader for a letter writer is a peculiar thing.

• Source: “Walpole’s Letters” was originally published Aug. 15, 1919 in The Athenaeum. It’s in Lytton Strachey, Biographical Essays; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, N.D. (A similar version to this paperback was published in 1949.)

MacCaig: ‘Praise of a thornbush’

 Here’s Norman MacCaig again. This time, the poet is examining a scrawny rose bush.

            The ideal shape of a circle

            means nothing to you: you’re all

            armpits and elbows …

                        You are

            An encyclopedia of angles. …

            When the salt gales drag through you

            You whip them with flowers.

It’s a living thing — hardly ideal but perfectly adapted to a harsh environment. In this quick sketch, the images are sharp as thorns.

If you share my taste for MacCaig, look for “No nominalist,” “Go-between,” “Sheep dipping, Achemeloich,” “Frogs” and “Sleet.” That’s just the beginning.

• Source: Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005.