The 15-hour week

 In 1930, as The Depression set in, the economist John Maynard Keynes looked past the crisis and predicted prosperity. Within 100 years our grandchildren will have to work only 15 hours a week, he said.

2030 is no longer in the misty future, and Keynes’s prediction isn’t close.

My father lived through the Depression. Throughout a long career, he worked a 40-hour week.

The wonders of technology during my lifetime — personal computers, the Internet, smartphones — have made my life easier in some respects. But I worked longer hours than my father did.

The Project Manager Who Used To Play Whiffle Ball In My Backyard has even more technology to enjoy. He works from home and has more flexible hours. But I’ve seen him work 60-hour weeks, many in a row, to wrap up a job for a client.

I think every revolution in technology shows us new ways to exploit things: natural resources, the labor of other people, ourselves.

• Sources: The essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” 
originally published in 1930, was collected inJohn Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963. You could find it online, but I’d pass. The essay contains an important idea and so I have made a note of it. But an anti-Semitic remark turned delight into dismay for me.

A better alternative: This line of thought about work was prompted by Vivek V. Venkataraman’s intriguing essay “Lessons from the foragers,” Aeon, 2 March 2023.

https://aeon.co/essays/what-hunter-gatherers-demonstrate-about-work-and-satisfaction. Venkataraman, an anthropologist, led me to Keynes’s essay.

Christopher Cook's new book

 My friend Christopher Cook recently published a new collection of short stories called The Salvage Yard. I asked him about it. 

 

Q. What’s the story behind The Salvage Yard? How did it come about?

A. Good questions, especially given the book title isn’t taken from any story title in the collection, as is usually the case.  I do explain the title in an Author’s Note in the book.  Most of these stories were started and partly written 25-30 years ago.  I set them aside because I didn’t know how to fix or finish them.  They were wrecks.  And I forgot about them.  Then I recently stumbled across the manuscripts in an old trunk and decided they had some merit, were perhaps worth saving — if I could manage to salvage them.  After some months of work, they seemed drivable.  So I published them.  Half the stories are set in Europe, half are set in the American South.

 

 

Q. Your books probably are better known in Europe than in the United States, and I thought it was interesting that “The Pickpocket,” a story that won a literary award in France, was the first in this collection. Do you have any insight into why the European critics have been faster than the Americans to appreciate your work?

A. “The Pickpocket” is the one story that didn’t need any salvaging.  It has enjoyed some success, has been published in several anthologies, is available in English or French.  I wrote it when I lived in Paris in the 1990s and promptly sent it to several journals and magazines in the USA.  No interest whatsoever.  I couldn’t even give it away.  The story was published in France after receiving an award.  Perhaps 10 years later it finally received attention in the USA and was published there.  A similar pattern occurred with my first novel, Robbers.  It was rejected by everyone in the USA, was published first in France, and then in the UK.  And finally in the USA.  The only insight I can offer as to why these events occurred in the way they did is that I had zero literary connections in the USA.  I never studied writing (sciences were my university major), didn’t know any writing professors, agents, or publishers.  Didn’t know any other writers to speak of, either.  And that does make a difference.  At least in the USA.  But it’s still a mystery.  Because I didn’t have any literary connections in France, either.

 

Q. You’re probably better known for your novel Robbers than for your short stories. But it seems to me that your stories about people who grow up under the influence of fundamentalist religion are a helpful way to understanding them. Every time I read and op-ed piece by someone who is baffled by fundamentalist Christians in the South and says they are irrational and incomprehensible, I want to send them a book of your stories. What’s your secret for getting inside their heads?

A. I grew up inside their heads.  I was raised in a charismatic, fundamentalist, bible-thumping, shouting-in-the-spirit, rolling-in-the-aisles, tongue-speaking Pentecostal family and church.  I climbed the wall and escaped when I was about 17.  Actually, I busted through the wall.  I truth, I exploded the wall.  Mostly with psychedelic drugs like LSD, psilocybin, and peyote.  I then spent years constructing a new belief system custom-made by using all sorts of ideas, values, assumptions, and practices from every paradigm I could find.  I suppose that ongoing lifetime project has been a salvage job, too, now that I think about it.  In any case, I get inside the characters you mention mostly by remembering personal experience.  Though imagination is crucial, too, as always in a creative endeavor.

 

Q. My favorite story is “Henry Johnson’s Soul,” which is about a fellow in Texas who is exasperated by the religious climate. What’s yours?

A. That’s the toughest question you’ve asked.  It’s a bit like asking a parent which is their favorite child.  In some ways I’m partial to “Was JKF Gay?” because it’s based in one of the most destructive aspects of USAmerican culture (right-wing media) and the protagonist, Mildred Potts, painfully illustrates what that can do to a person.  But I also like “The Noise We Do Not Hear” because it shows how love and friendship can save us.  I could go on and on.  This story is funny, that one is ironic, and so on.  So it goes.  Kids, ya know.

 

Q. What’s the link to your book?

A. Available in print or as an ebook at:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BZ6QG8KY?ref_=ast_author_ofdp

 

That other kind of walker

 Some people walk without seeing anything at all.

These days, I try to pay attention to the natural world around me. I’m apt to see the days that I don’t notice something new as a day when I was distracted, not paying attention.

Rebecca Solnit’s book reminded me that some walkers have other things in mind.

Rousseau, for example. His Reveries of a Solitary Walker is the record of what he thought during a series of 10 walks. He improvises on the meaning of a phrase, lunches into recollections, descends into rants.

Some walkers take refuge in thought, as I take refuge in looking at plants, birds and rocks.

Solnit points out that many philosophers have been walkers. Immanuel Kant’s walk through Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad, was called Philosopher’s Path. The city’s residents said you could set your clock by Professor Kant’s progress on his daily walk. And the author of Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics wasn’t paying much attention to the natural world.

These days, I try to pay attention to the natural world. But I know what it is to be lost in thought. On some days, I am that kind of walker.

• Source: Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking; New York, Viking, 2000, pp. 16, 20.

The St. Jerome school

 Years ago, I memorized a bit of advice from St. Jerome:

To solve a problem, walk around.

Jerome and I are in the same class of writers: we’re pacers.

If I’m stuck, I get up and walk around.

As a newspaperman, I walked to the coffee pot a million times. The Old Editor once said that I was the only reporter he’d known who spent 45 hours of a 40-hour week walking back and forth in search of coffee.

I was writing while walking to the coffee pot, unsticking the stuck thinking that is always the problem behind stuck writing.

And walking too the coffee pot, is to my mind, more seemly than pacing. But if there were no coffee in the world, I’d pace.

People walk for many reasons.

A lot of people walk for their health.

I like to walk in the forest, to see the place.

Recently, while in the forest south of Stone Mountain, I ran into a thicket of wild azaleas. It was, I’d guess, about a thousand square feet of solid blooms, about the size of a cottage in the old neighborhood. As bouquets go, it was grand, and I was overwhelmed.

I came out of the woods and saw another walker going in on the trail. He had earphones on and was walking for exercise — trying to blot out all the other stuff, the distractions.

I like to walk the woods with my eyes and ears open, but I know, from all that pacing I’ve done while writing, that people who walk are often up to different things.

Rebecca Solnit wrote the book on walking

 Rebecca Solnit is known for bringing “mansplaining” into the language, but I loved her book on walking.

Yesterday’s note was a plea for walking in natural places. I don’t know of anything that is better for my mental health. I think taking time to walk in natural areas would help others, and my note was about research that supports that claim.

But there are many other reasons to walk, and Solnit gets the heart of it: Walking shapes our imagination.

I’ve tried, probably without much success, to explain why, in moving to Georgia after a lifetime in Texas, I had to get into the forest, find the pond, explore the creek. Here’s how Solnit puts it:

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you get back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

Or, even better:

A desk is no place to think on the large scale.

• Source: Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking; New York, Viking, 2000, pp. 13 and 4.

About walking in the woods

 I’m convinced that just about everybody would be calmer if they spent an hour or two in the woods.

You might have suspected that bias if you’ve been reading these notes.

Poets have talked about the healing powers of nature for centuries. But scientists have gotten a better idea of how that works in my lifetime.

For the last few decades, Japanese researchers have been studying whether walking through a forest really relieves stress.

Japanese culture has a popular practice called “forest bathing.” It’s what I’d call a good walk in the woods. You’re not there to power walk while listening to music. You’re there to notice things, to slip into a natural place, become a part of it.

Stress is measurable. When you’re under stress, your body releases substances, including cortisol and cytokines, that can be detected by saliva or blood tests.

My favorite research paper is stunningly simple. The researchers got a bunch of students together and walked them through a metropolis, a rural village and a forest, drawing blood after every excursion. You can read the tale in the chemistry of a person’s blood.

Human beings evolved in natural settings, rather than in big cities. Our brains trigger the release of stress hormones when we’re on the freeway. Our heart rate jumps and so does our blood pressure. We are ready for fight or flight. We are under stress — physically as well as psychologically — when we are in a big city. But not when we’re in the woods.

Regular walks in the woods allow the chemistry of your body to reset, to experience what the absence of stress is like.

• Sources: Dr. Michael Mosley in his podcast “Just One Thing” interviewed Ming Kuo, a research psychologist at the University of Illinois. Their conversation is a good introduction. The episode “Green Spaces,” with ads, is here: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/just-one-thing/green-spaces-JFbWeVNuKM-/

Here, using the citation preferred by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, are two papers that examined the practice of shinrin-yoku or “forest bathing”:

• Kobayashi H, Song C, Ikei H, Park BJ, Kagawa T, Miyazaki Y. Combined Effect of Walking and Forest Environment on Salivary Cortisol Concentration. Front Public Health. 2019 Dec 12;7:376. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2019.00376. PMID: 31921741; PMCID: PMC6920124.

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

• Im SG, Choi H, Jeon YH, Song MK, Kim W, Woo JM. Comparison of Effect of Two-Hour Exposure to Forest and Urban Environments on Cytokine, Anti-Oxidant, and Stress Levels in Young Adults. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2016 Jun 23;13(7):625. doi: 10.3390/ijerph13070625. PMID: 27347982; PMCID: PMC4962166. 

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

A report from the woods

 The raptor over Barbashela Creek was too far away to identify. I watched it circle for several minutes. It was the size of an eagle, and perhaps it was. But I never got a good enough look to be sure. If you’re an amateur in natural history, you’re an expert in uncertainty.

Seeing that huge bird reminded me that I should catch up some notes from the woods.

• You can see mayapple, Podophyllum peltatum, on the forest floor at Stone Mountain. The plant spreads from a rhizome. Each flowering stem coming up above ground has just two leaves, but they’re big — like twin umbrellas. The leaves remain folded until the stem reaches a certain height and then they unfold. That unfolding is what I’ve noticed in the past two weeks. The forest floor looks like a beach that has sprouted umbrellas for spring break. The single flower, when it comes, will be at the axil, the angle between the two leaves.

• I saw a red buckeye, Aeslulus pavia, blooming just south of the mountain. I’ve heard it called firecracker bush in Texas, which is the western limit of its range. The specimen I saw was a shrub, rather than a tree. Belt high.

• A black cherry, Prunus serotina, has been blooming by the pond at Wade Walker Park southwest of the mountain. The Missouri Botanical Garden says it has “fragrant white flowers in slender pendulous clusters,” — a lovely description of what the textbooks call racemes.

A poem as a snapshot

 Above the harbor, amid the chimneypots …

of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines

            a woman pastes up sails

                        upon the wind

            hanging out her morning sheets

                        with wooden pins.

The wind catches her last sheet and winds it around her amorously. Caught with her arms above her, the woman throws her head back and laughs.

That’s it: a snapshot of lovely moment.

The poem is “Away above the harborful.” It’s the first poem in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World, the first book he published at City Lights.

I am not a Lawrence Ferlinghetti champion. But when people talk about what poetry is, I sometimes think that Ferlinghetti showed what it could be.

When I was a boy, we’d gather around and look at photos from a roll of film that had just come back from the lab. Some of Ferlinghetti’s poems hit me that way.

He sometimes used poetry in the same way that a good photographer uses a camera.

• Source: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World; San Francisco: City Lights Books, p.1. Ferlinghetti was born March 24, 1919, 103 years ago. He died two years ago at 101.

The language of deeply held beliefs

 Suppose you were young again and had just pulled your old pickup off the road to help fix a flat tire. What would you make of this? The old fellow who was struggling with the spare thought his tire — pronounced “tar” in East Texas — had gone flat because of some offense he’d committed against heaven.

It’s a tale that illustrates a point Wittgenstein made about the way we use language in talking about deeply held beliefs.

The old man saw a flat tire and believed it had been caused by an act of retribution. It was punishment for some misdeed or sin.

I looked at the ancient tires and suspected the laws of physics were at work.

The old fellow and I couldn’t agree on the laws of causation.

We could talk about the weather — it was hot, and we got hotter changing the tire.

But we couldn’t even talk about something as ordinary as a tire. If we had tried to talk about the causes of common political problems, we’d have been so lost we might have been funny. 

A friend who lights candles

 My friend Melvyn has been to Paris many times. Whenever he goes, he stops in Notre Dame and lights a candle in memory of his parents, who were Orthodox Jews.

It wasn’t just Notre Dame. Melvyn was, in his younger days, a world traveler. He’d stop in houses of worship, the kinds of places travelers stop to see, and light a candle wherever votive candles are lit. But Notre Dame was best.

Melvyn is not a theist of any sort.

He calls his practice of lighting a votive candle a “little ritual,” which sounds right to me.

The older I get, the more I realize how important these rituals are. The lighting of votive candles helps us digest the loss we feel, even after decades. It helps us to accept that we loss we suffered so long ago is, in some way, still real, still part of us.

Years ago, a businessman told me that the only things people wanted to know about their neighbors were what race they were, what church they attended and what civic club they belonged to. I suspected that most people wanted to know a great deal more — and wanted to know different things.

I think my friend Melvyn’s little rituals add up. I think that if you took the time to notice all the little rituals practiced by a friend or neighbor and came to understand the impulse behind them, you’d know a great deal more than you would if you used the usual tired old building blocks we use to construct an identity.

Spring equinox at Stone Mountain

 It was 26 degrees Monday morning, a tad chilly for the first day of spring.

I sometimes feel baffled by this new place in the Georgia Piedmont. I sometimes feel as we live half a mile south of the North Pole. Flowers are blooming everywhere, and water dish on the birdfeeder is frozen.

On the last day of winter, a few of the beech trees still have last year’s leaves. But most of the leaves are finally on the ground. It looks like the forest south of Stone Mountain is covered in khaki-colored snow.

In my bewilderment, a wonderful book called The Natural Communities of Georgia has become my bible. The authors distinguish mesic forests — forests associated with moist soils — from other kinds of forests associated with drier soils.

I usually take those classifications with a huge grain of salt. My eye tends to find the exceptions, rather than the rules.

But as winter leaves, I have to say it allowed me to see what the scholarly authors were talking about.

In winter, you can see through the mesic forests of the creek bottoms. All the leaves are on the ground. From the creek bottom, looking up at the rising land, I could see where the soils became dry enough for pines.

I usually dismiss such classifications as the stuff of textbooks, rather than things you’d actually see if you put on a good pair of boots. But the line between the deciduous trees of the mesic forest and the pines of drier soils could have been made with a strait edge.

• Sources: Leslie Edwards, Jonathan Ambrose and L. Katherine Kirkman, The Natural Communities of Georgia; Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Trees that hold their leaves through winter are called marcescent. If you need a primer, see “And baffled by the beeches,” Feb. 7, 2023.

No uncertainty, no wonder

 Yesterday’s note was about Bertrand Russell’s essay “The Value of Philosophy.” I should have mentioned this paragraph, which seems right to me. 

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find … that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

• Bertrand Russell’s essay is in The Problems of Philosophy. Standard Ebooks has an edition at https://standardebooks.org.

Russell’s ‘The Value of Philosophy’

 If you study philosophy, people will ask you why you bother. Some people who are practical and who like the sciences just don’t see the point. Bertrand Russell, who was around plenty of such people at Cambridge, wrote an essay on “The Value of Philosophy.” It’s a defense for those of us with a peculiar cast of mind.

Russell noticed something about philosophy that escapes most people.

If you study the sciences you are going to stay focused on the material world. Studying the discipline will make a difference in you and your mind, but it will also allow you to do things to improve the lives of others who don’t have a clue what you’re doing. Most people will not study with you. Their minds will not be opened or trained or improved as yours will be. And so when you invent something wonderful, most people will just flip a switch and enjoy the benefits without understanding how the invention works.

You will know the answer to the research question that led to this improvement. But others won’t.

Philosophy is not like that. The change that a study of philosophy makes is limited to the mind of the student.

Philosophy, if you do it at all, is something you do for yourself.

• Russell’s essay is the last chapter in his book The Problems of Philosophy, a classic now in the public domain. Standard Ebooks has an edition at https://standardebooks.org.

A picture of the imagination

 Salman Rushdie’s observation about reading strikes me as right. He said children love stories because they nurture the imagination, as opposed to our reasoning or logical faculties. The stories you love are a picture of your imagination.

My imagination has changed through the decades, but there are some consistent features. There was little science fiction in the stories I loved as a child and little now. Some of the stories that left me thunderstruck as a teenager still astonish me. Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” is an example. My interest in other writers — Guy de Maupassant and Jack London are in this crowd — has faded. 

I continue to be intrigued by Jonathan Gibb’s site “A Personal Anthology.” He asks his guests to pick 12 short stories for an imaginary anthology. I think that your list of stories is a picture of an individual imagination, more revealing than a photograph.

• Sources: Salman Rushdie, “Ask Yourself Which Books You Love,” New York Times, May 24, 2021. Jonathan Gibbs’s site is at https://apersonalanthology.com/. For my notes on Gibbs’s challenge, see “What short stories would you recommend?” Nov. 2, 2022, and “Willa Cather: ‘Neighbor Rosicky,’” Nov. 21, 2022.

An immigrant that's doing just fine

 On Feb. 8, I had a note about seeing leatherleaf mahonia, Berberis bealei, blooming in the woods near Stone Mountain. I ran across another specimen in the woods in a county park. The fruit looks a bit like a bunch of green grapes.

Berberis bealei is a native of China, but people in the Georgia Piedmont seem to like it. I haven’t heard any complaints about it being an invasive species. Perhaps the behavior, beauty or charm of an intruder has something to do with the reception it gets. I hear all kinds of complaints about kudzu. But everyone seems to admire wisteria, which has beautiful purple blooms. Both kudzu and wisteria came from Asia.

The specimens of leatherleaf mahonia I’ve seen were in the woods. I can’t imagine that a human planted them. Birds eat the fruit and spread the seeds. At that point, I’d say a plant has naturalized. Leatherleaf mahonia did not evolve in the Piedmont’s soil and climate, but it’s doing just fine.

An old fellow finds his place

 Yesterday’s note was from the diary of John Quincy Adams, who was writing about Thomas Jefferson in 1803. This entry is about John Quincy Adams from the diary of Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1842.

Mr. Adams chose wisely and according to his constitution, when, on leaving the Presidency, he went into Congress. He is no literary old gentleman, but a bruiser, and loves a melee. When they talk about his age and venerableness and nearness to the grave, he knows better; he is like one of those old cardinals, who, as quick as he is chosen Pope, throws away his crutches and his crookedness, and is as straight as a boy.

John Quincy Adams’s father, John Adams, had been president, and the son pursued his father’s ambition. Emerson thought Adams was better suited to Congress and that rediscovering his place rejuvenated him.

It was a remark recorded privately, not to convince anyone. It just seemed obvious.

I went to an old book to look up a remark about learning Spanish. It reminded me how much I love diaries, memoirs and letters. It’s enlightening to see what people thought of their contemporaries and what they thought of events when they were news. Thinking about many people and many things — Confederate monuments, for example — tends to change with time.

Source: A Treasury of the World’s Great Diaries, edited by Philip Dunaway and Mel Evans; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1957, p. 224.

About learning Spanish

 In his diary, John Quincy Adams told of how President Thomas Johnson had regaled dinner guests, urging that French and Spanish be the primary courses in the education of young men.

Spanish was so easy, Jefferson said, that he’d learned it by taking a volume of Don Quixote and a grammar on a voyage to Europe — 19 days at sea.

Adams reported the president’s remarks and said:

            But Mr. Jefferson tells large stories …

Having lived in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood for five years, I’d say Jefferson’s story was enormous. But I agree with his sentiment about the learning of languages and regret my lack of education.

Source: A Treasury of the World’s Great Diaries, edited by Philip Dunaway and Mel Evans; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1957, p. 196. The entry is dated Nov. 23, 1803.

What else have I failed to notice?

 I’ve mentioned seeing common violets, Viola sororia. They were blooming before Valentine’s Day, and I worried, needlessly, that the freezes would get them. They are everywhere in the Georgia Piedmont — on lawns and in the forest — and I’ve been puzzled by one stand in a gully about a quarter mile from the house. A lot of the violets come out with white petals that turn purple within a couple of days. A few flowers have remained white. It made my understand how little I understand about the genes of these beautiful little plants are expressed. Is this common and I haven’t noticed? Is this just an unusual variety?

On the same walk, I saw an oriole, so black I couldn’t believe it was a Baltimore oriole. Baltimore orioles are known in Texas, but aren’t common. I didn’t know that they have a “maximum black” suit of feathers for breeding season in spring.

Moving to a new place in old age is disorienting. It makes you wonder what you’ve failed to notice.

A question about punishing crime

 I sometimes wonder, in reading the news, what our society is trying to do, what the collective intention is.

I read a story about how the police had solved a decades-old crime and arrested the culprit, who is now in his 70s. He’d been living quietly and peacefully all that time.

The authorities are sending him to prison, and perhaps that’s where he belongs. But at least part of the notion of a prison is that it’s a place where bad behavior is corrected. I grew up calling the Texas prison system The Department of Corrections.

In cases like this, perhaps we are just seeking vengeance. Maybe we’re pursuing a sense of justice, which requires consistency in punishment. But I don’t think we can talk about correcting behavior at this point.

Every time I hear a cardinal

 Every morning, I see a dozen cardinals. I hear more. They say: “Cheer, cheer, cheer” to me, although it’s almost “jeer,” as if the Cardinals might be Spanish speakers from South Texas.

When I was a boy, my grandfather, knowing I was a St. Louis Cardinals fan, would predict that we would soon see a cardinal.

How did he know?

It took me a while to associate the bird’s call with the bird.

He let me figure it out for myself.

How did he restrain himself from explaining? What kind of patience did that take?

Tramping with Henry in mind

 Here’s Henry David Thoreau, writing in his journal, Jan. 19, 1858:

To insure health, a man’s relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one; he must be conscious of a friendliness in her; when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap to him. I cannot conceive of any life which deserves the name, unless there is a certain tender relation to Nature. This it is which makes winter warm, and supplies society in the desert and wilderness. Unless Nature sympathizes with and speaks to us, as it were, the most fertile and blooming regions are barren and dreary …

I do not see that I can live tolerably without affection for Nature. If I feel so no softening toward the rocks, what do they signify?

I do not think much of that chemistry that can extract corn and potatoes out of a barren (soil), but rather of that chemistry that can extract thoughts and sentiments out of the life of a man on any soil. It is in vain to write on the seasons unless you the seasons in you.

For years, I’ve been walking through woods and creek bottoms. When I’ve crossed old farms, it’s not because I wanted to farm them for crops. It’s because the land somehow gets a harvest of “thoughts and sentiments” out of me.

Stone Mountain in early March

 So many things are blooming: wisteria, jasmine, honeysuckle, azalea.

The pollen count topped 1,000 particles per square meter the other day. Cars are coated with it, and so are the bees. You see clouds of bees, wasps and flies.

People here seem to take the piedmont azalea (Rhododendron canescens) as the icon of spring. It’s got light pink blossoms. But there are so many varieties of azaleas here that I’m just leaving them all in genus Rhododendron for a while.

We ran across a blooming thicket of azalea bushes that covered almost 1,000 square feet of the forest. That’s the size of a cottage in the old neighborhood.  These plants had a much darker flower than the piedmont azaleas that the locals pointed out to me. The color reminded me of a persimmon.

The variation in color is just one part of the puzzle.

You see azaleas in the forest and in yards, and I wonder how the cultivated and wild varieties — if you can even make that distinction — react with each other. I wonder whether some varieties were cultivated to be early bloomers and whether some of those traits have shown up the in forest.

You see dogwoods and redbuds in the forest and in yards. Some of the dogwoods have bloomed, shed their blooms and are have leaves. Some are just beginning to bloom.

An old student learning new things

 I have been getting acclimated to this place and am getting to know the forest just south of the mountain. The climate, geology, plants and animals are new to me. I am having to learn new things, and some of this education has been funny.

On Feb. 7, I found a budding tree, and the buds looked just like young magnolia burrs. They were soft and fuzzy, like a rabbit’s foot. But this tree didn’t have a leaf on it. The magnolias I knew in Texas are those that I see in the forest here: they have leaves year round.

I found this specimen in East Atlanta Village, a trendy place full of young people and bagel shops. I asked some young folks about the budding tree, and they looked at me as if I’d lived a sheltered life and perhaps never been to the big city before.

Of course, they’re magnolias!

The kind I’m used to is Magnolia grandiflora, and the kind I’m getting used to is M. liliiflora, which comes from Asia but is loved by gardeners here.

For the past six weeks, they’ve exploded into bloom everywhere. The flowers are huge, and the colors often range on the same petal: white, pink, mauve, maroon and purple.

Already, they are fading. Petals in those miraculous colors are thick and deep on many lawns.

Waiting on news about artificial emotion

 If you follow the news, you’ve noticed that we’ve made advances in “artificial intelligence.”

I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think if we have advances in artificial intelligence, we must also be able to have advances in artificial emotion.

It would be wonderful if logic were limited to syllogisms. But, as Wittgenstein pointed out, language has its own internal logic.

If you are giving directions to the café, you are committed to using the words “left” and “right.” It’s a package deal. You can’t decide to exclude one and expect to talk meaningfully. The logic of that language game requires it.

We use the words “intelligence” and “emotion” in a similar way, in talking about ways in which experience comes to us or is shaped by our senses. If you decide there’s such a thing as artificial intelligence, you can’t exclude discussion of artificial emotion. If you do, you’re changing the way we use words in ordinary language. That’s not necessarily fatal, but we all ought to take note, as when we notice signs saying we’ve wandered off the main road into an old minefield.

What would artificial emotion look like?

The philosopher Robert Nozick had a notion called the Experience Machine. Imagine a system in which experts could use technology — perhaps using the techniques of deep brain stimulation — to create any kind of experience you wanted. You could experience winning the Nobel Prize or the Olympics. You’d experience any pleasure you wanted.

If you couldn’t tell the difference, wouldn’t the experience be authentic in some way? Wouldn’t the artificial emotion of winning that Nobel in literature be just as good as actually doing it? And isn’t that the same kind of question people are asking when they say that artificial intelligence is close to indistinguishable from the normal variety?

Thinking about Socrates

 I’m interested in philosophy but am not moved by philosophical theories.

Arguably the most influential theory in the development of Western civilization was Plato’s theory of knowledge, the Theory of Forms. He put the theory in the mouth of Socrates. It’s hard to tell how much of this masterpiece is Socrates and how much is Plato.

But the theory is a mess, and I’d write against it if I thought there were more than three card-carrying Platonists left in the world.

We don’t remember Socrates for his (or Plato’s) theory of knowledge.

We remember him for his example, for his life. He lived with integrity. He was committed to the pursuit of wisdom. He relentlessly inquired into what that might mean.

Wisdom is a broad virtue. Socrates took delight in philosophical conversation. But he assumed that a person devoted to wisdom would not only try to be a good person but would be a good person, in some sense.

Wisdom involves figuring out how to make things work in practice. A person devoted to wisdom won’t just argue about wisdom but will live a wise — and therefore good — life. When the democracy of Athens was threatened, Socrates fought in the ranks. That one item on his resume might say more about him than anything you could say about his educational achievements.

I don’t believe that the world has ever been made much better by one person thinking extraordinarily well. I think the world changes for the better when a lot of people do better thinking about everyday problems.

Racism and sexism are still prevalent today. But I know more people today who are suspicious of the loaded concepts of race and gender roles than I did when I was 20.

I think the world is better as a result.

And, fortunately, there are always a few people in the world who inspire us to do better thinking for ourselves.

Is our state flower an invasive species?

 The Cherokee rose grows in the woods here in the Piedmont. The Legislature, thinking Rosa laevigata was a native plant, declared it the state flower of Georgia in 1916.

The Missouri Botanical Garden, which I think is one of the nation’s great centers of learning, says it’s a native of China and came to North America in colonial days. 

I think this is an interesting question: Is the state flower of Georgia an invasive species?

I think the notion of an invasive species is sometimes useful. It can also be problematic.

I understand what outraged ecologists mean when they are talking about invasive species. I understand why activists scour the woods rooting out invaders that are crowding out natives. I have seen kudzu kill tall trees. I think the decision to introduce kudzu was unwise. 

But even if we grant that kudzu is a clear invader, it seems to me that we quickly go from some clear examples to a range of cases that quickly become murky.

What about the species that came with human beings during colonial times? What of those the plants came with the first humans who came to the New World by following the Arctic or by crossing the Bering Straight?

Do viruses count as invasive species? If so, do they count as invasive only when they are introduced by humans or do they also count when they are introduced by migratory birds? And what should we say about the cases where it’s not clear how the invaders arrived?

Some of these views are impossible to hold unless we assume that man is separate from nature. It’s a view as old as Adam and Eve having dominion over the earth, but I think it’s 

There are different kinds of biological relations. The relationships between plant communities are important. But it seems to me that the relationship between a plant species and the combination of geology and climate is fundamental.

If a species grows as well in Georgia as it does in China or Vietnam, that fact takes logical priority over the fact that this plant is bound to clash with some other species that are already there. 

The notion of an invasive species is an interesting concept. But in many cases, I don’t think it’s a biological concept. If a species is the state flower of Georgia and an invasive plant in Texas, we might be discussing law, politics or sociology, rather than biology.

• Sources: The Missouri Botanical Garden’s account is here:

https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/PlantFinderDetails.aspx?taxonid=286461

Here’s Rosa laevigata in a database of invasive species in Texas:

https://texasinvasives.org/plant_database/detail.php?symbol=ROLA

 

 

Poets who write about God

 If the concept of God is coherent, it seems to me that God is a force that must be active today — more like a live volcano than an extinct one. I’d say that the activity must be perceptible and thus open to new perceptions.

And so I’d agree with Emerson:

If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not.

I’d start the investigation with fresh perceptions. I’d look at what our contemporaries are saying.

Yesterday’s note was about one poet’s attempt to get at the qualities of God. Lucille Clifton was alive in my lifetime. Her ideas are strange to me but wonderful in a way that much of the poetry in the Bible is not.

If I were a minister, I’d implore people to read the poets.

Source: The quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson is from “Self Reliance.”

Lucille Clifton: 'brothers'

 If you ask me, Lucille Clifton’s “brothers” is perhaps the oddest poem written about God.

The poet tells us this is “a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though only Lucifer is heard.” It’s not really a conversation — more of an encounter — recalled long ago. God and Lucifer, in Lucifer’s view, are brothers.

Lucifer invites God to “coil” with him — an interesting word — and rest:

let us rest here a time 

like two old brothers 

who watched it happen and wondered 

what it meant. 

Brothers feel entitled to tell brothers where they failed, and Lucifer brings up the creation of human beings, allegedly in God’s own image.

listen. You are beyond 

even Your own understanding. 

that rib and rain and clay 

in all its pride, 

its unsteady dominion, 

is not what you believed 

You were, 

but it is what You are…

Lucifer sees his brother in humans: in the desire to do things that can’t be done and in

the loneliness, the perfect 

imperfection.

Lucifer followed mankind without fear. He followed man and woman as they left the garden, punished for being their father’s children. Lucifer accepted human life, its joy, its pain. What Lucifer can’t fathom is why, when things went horribly wrong, God never intervened.

As in the rest of the poem, there is no reply. It’s a monolog, rather than a conversation. In the silence, Lucifer concludes two things: that there must be mercy and that God has no need to speak.

• Source: You can find “brothers” here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51606/brothers

Baldwin's advice about writing

 Not long ago, my friend Christopher and I were talking about writing and writing advice. We both admired this observation from James Baldwin:

“Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you. If you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you.”

The hard part, when you are young, is that bit about finding a way to keep alive. At least it was for me. Hard, not impossible.

• Source: “James Baldwin: The Art of Fiction No. 78,” interviewed by Jordan Elgrably; The Paris Review, Issue 91, Spring 1984.

It's Texas Independence Day

 On March 2, 1836, the Consultation, as the delegates called themselves, passed a resolution declaring Texas independent. The government of Mexico was chastised for many failures.

My favorite:

It has failed to establish any public system of education, although possessed of almost boundless resources, (the public domain,) and although it is an axiom in political science, that unless a people are educated and enlightened, it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty, or the capacity for self government.

During my lifetime, state schools have been funded not so much by the Texas Legislature as by the courts, enforcing a series of judicial orders in lawsuits filed by citizens who were complaining about the same thing.

A tip on writing from Maya Angelou

 Maya Angelou had a famous writing routine. She’d go, every day, to a sparsely furnished hotel room. She always had a deck of cards, and she said she spent more time playing solitaire than writing.

Here’s how she described it to the Harvard Business Review:

There are times when I sit on the hotel bed with a deck of cards and play solitaire to give my “little mind” something to do. I got that phrase from my grandmother, who used to say, when something surprised her, “You know, that wasn’t even on my littlest mind.” I really thought there was a small mind and a large mind, and if I could occupy the small one, I could get more quickly to the big one. So I play solitaire. I’ve used up a deck of Bicycle cards — good cards — in a week and a half.

Maya Angelou was generous with her advice, and she told this story many times in slightly different ways. A neuroscientist might say she’s suggesting that if you occupy the amygdala you can allow the prefrontal cortex to work. A person with a different view of psychology might say she’s talking about getting into a state of mind that’s fresh and creative, rather than tired and mechanical. It’s the kind of thinking that prompts some writers to use the Pomodoro Technique.

I don’t know how this works. But I think her suggestion that writers should pay attention to their states of mind is important. 

When I first heard this advice years ago, it seemed to me to be too nebulous to be useful. Today, it strikes me as practical.

• Sources: Allison Beard, “Life’s Work: An Interview with Maya Angelou”; Harvard Business Review, May 2013. You can find it here:

https://hbr.org/2013/05/maya-angelou

For another version:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/maya-angelou-how-i-write