A professor prompts a conversation

 Paul Woodruff, who has been teaching at the University of Texas for decades, is good at having the kind of conversations that make for a full, interesting life.

I heard that his death is close at hand. I heard the news because he wrote about it in The Washington Post. The professor was starting one of those conversations about life and how it can be meaningful.

Woodruff holds that life is worth living when we make it worth living. We engage in projects that take time but that have value to ourselves and to others.

Woodruff spent some time trying to prompt a discussion about a difficult topic. He wrote an essay about how one can look at the end of life. He spent time finding a publisher.

When Woodruff finishes one project, he starts on another. He’s always known that one day one of these projects would be interrupted and left unfinished. But that’s no reason to stop.

Rather than mourn, he’s glad that he has things that are worth doing and that he can do them.

I have talked with Professor Woodruff and exchanged email with him, but I know him through his books. The Ajax Dilemma is awfully good, but my favorite is Reverence.

• Sources: Paul Woodruff, “My death is close at hand. But I do not think of myself as dying”; The Washington Post, April 27, 2023. The Post has a recording of Woodruff reading his essay:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/27/death-dying-philosophy-living-illness/

Woodruff’s books are published by Oxford University Press.

Another side of Descartes

 What I’d forgotten about Descartes: How zany he was.

For example, here he is wrapping up Meditation No. 4, in which he outlined a method of correcting one’s judgment:

 

And in as much as it in this the greatest and principal perfection of man consists, it seems to me that I have not gained little by this day’s Meditation, since I have discovered the source of falsity and error.

 

Perhaps tomorrow he will invent calculus or do some such thing, but enough for today.

The 17^th century must have been wonderful. Can you imagine that sentence appearing in a book today?

• Source: René Descartes, A Discourse on Method and Other Works; New York, Washington Square Press, 1965, p. 51.

A better version of the cogito

 Descartes is known for the aphorism: “I think; therefore, I am.”

The French version appeared in 1637 in Discourse on Method. The Latin Cogito ergo sum appeared in 1644 in Principles of Philosophy.

In between was Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641. It’s the book that Bertrand Russell recommended in his short overview of philosophy. 

Meditations doesn’t include the cogito, but it makes the point this way:

 

I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.

 

He tacks on this explanation:

 

… to speak accurately I am not more than a thing which thinks, that is to say a mind or a soul, or an understanding, or a reason, which are terms whose significance was formerly unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing and really exist; but what thing? I have answered: a thing which thinks.

 

Meditations is an interesting statement of Descartes’s philosophy. In my edition, it’s 73 pages long. There are six meditations, and Descartes recommended one a night for those who found the whole book too much for one sitting.

He admitted that each meditation provided a lot to think about.

• Source: René Descartes, A Discourse on Method and Other Works; New York, Washington Square Press, 1965, pp. 21 and 23.

A bit more on Russell's reading plan

 I had a note April 2 on Bertrand Russell’s advice on studying philosophy.

He suggested reading some of the major philosophers, rather than consulting textbooks.

I’ve been following his advice. I had a note on David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding recently. Before that, I’d tackled Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

I remembered the main threads of their thought — Hume’s criticism of our notion of causation and Kant’s attempt to repair the damage. The surprises of rereading have been the other thoughts, the asides. One example: Hume’s observation that our notion of repentance makes sense only if we agree that crime resides in the mind. Crime, in other words, is thought. At least the crime that we punish is thought.

I’d also forgotten the occasional charm Kant's writing. Here’s an example:

 

That the human mind will ever give up metaphysical researches is as little to be expected as that we, to avoid inhaling impure air, should prefer to give up breathing altogether.

 

He's right. Any proposed set of logical limits on thought is a remarkable boundary — the ultimate fence. And we know where the grass must be greener.

• Sources: Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950, p. 116. For the note on Russell, see “How to study philosophy,” April 2, 2023. For the note on Hume, see “Where crime resides,” April 24.

Malcolm: ‘Wittgenstein: A Memoir’

 One of my favorite one-night reads is Norman Malcolm’s Wittgenstein: A Memoir.

My edition has 100 pages, but Malcolm’s memoir takes up only 77. If it makes sense to talk about “flushing out” a 100-page book, the filler is Georg Henrik von Wright’s “Biographical Sketch,” originally published in Philosophical Review.

I love this book because it gives you a sense of what Wittgenstein was like.

He was born into one of Europe’s wealthiest families, grew up in a mansion, gave his fortune away, mostly to his siblings, and lived in college rooms at Cambridge.

His rooms were Spartan and scrupulously clean. He had two canvas chairs, a wooden chair, and a card table to write on. He slept on a cot. The walls were bare. He had a safe for his manuscripts.

He wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while he was a soldier in World War I. He kept a notebook in his rucksack. He finished the manuscript while in a camp for prisoners of war.

Wittgenstein was interested in the logical limits of language, the limits of thought.

An understanding of those limits can yield two vastly different approaches to philosophy.

One holds that any subject that cannot be treated as a science is nonsense. That’s still the largely unspoken view of many scientists today. It’s a view that holds that the arts, ethics, religion and similar subjects are best avoided by serious people who don’t have time to waste.

Wittgenstein took the approach that language indeed sets limits on what can be said about the most important subjects in human life. But the limits do not diminish the importance of those topics.

While facts can be argued, values must be incorporated, embodied, lived.

The memoir gives us a glimpse of the values Wittgenstein lived by. It shows how he furnished his rooms and how he thought about money. It shows what kind of food and clothes he preferred. It shows what kinds of books he read and what kinds of topics he returned to in conversation.

I read Tolstoy’s Twenty-Three Tales to see why Wittgenstein had been so impressed.

During World War II, Wittgenstein and Malcolm had an argument about a comment Malcolm made. The two were estranged for a while. When they reconciled, Wittgenstein said this:

I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any … journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people us for their own ends. You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people’s lives.

I thought about that passage many times. Maybe it was an especially important passage for a fellow who was a … journalist. (Is there any other kind than the kind that requires ellipses?)

Journalists handle questions of everyday life. It’s the stock of our trade. And it is enormously difficult to think well about those questions.

I failed often. But repeated failure doesn’t excuse one from trying.

• Sources and notes: Norman Malcolm: Wittgenstein: A Memoir; Oxford University Press, 1977. The quotation is on p. 39. I bought the edition soon after it was published. I was still in college. The cover price was $2.50.

Wittgenstein was born April 26, 1899. In my world, today is Wittgenstein Day.

A teacher's remark on repentance

 The ancient Greeks called repentance metanoia, a change of mind.

I picture a bunch of shade-tree mechanics, using an old swing set as a derrick to hoist a dead engine out of a pickup truck and drop a new one in. It’s that kind of change — not the kind of change that water makes in eroding granite.

One of the standard examples of the usage comes from Lyco, a teacher who was head of the Peripatetic School in Athens for decades. He said students who wished they’d studied and learned something but didn’t were their own accusers. Their laments confused repentance with laziness.

The usage doesn't suggest something that is solely in mind, solely in thought. Metanoia involves action.

After the old pickup gets a new engine, it runs.

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972, Vol. 1, p. 518; Book 5, Section 66.

Where crime resides

 I have often felt the need for another kind of dictionary.

Language has its own logic. You can’t really talk about flipping a coin without talking about “heads” and “tails.” You get into nonsense — or at least something peculiar — if you arbitrarily decide to exclude one or the other. Similarly, you can’t really give directions if you make it a rule to use only “right” and exclude “left.” Those terms are part of a language game, as Wittgenstein would say.

Ideas have consequences, and those consequences are reflected in language.

Here’s an interesting example from David Hume, whose criticism of our notion of causation is a landmark of philosophy.

He observed that the common conception of law involves a system of rewards and punishments. Would you say that rewards and punishments cause lawful behavior?

Hume points out that our notions of repentance and remorse imply that crime is in mind.

Again, repentance wipes off every crime, if attended with a reformation of life and manners. How is this to be accounted for? but by asserting that actions render a person criminal merely as they are proofs of criminal principles in the mind; and when, by an alternation of these principles, they cease to be just proofs, they likewise cease to be criminal.

We might deplore the act, but we punish what is in the mind.

To me, that sounds suspicious. But then again I think that the law has been a swamp of bad thinking.

I think that a dictionary that pointed out the consequences of language would be useful.

• Source: David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1966, p. 106.

Arabia Mountain in spring

 We returned to Arabia Mountain and hiked the boardwalk and into the section north of Klondike Road.

The elf-orpine, Diamorpha smallii, looks like red pools on the granite. The wooly ragwort, Packera dubia, was blooming on the rock, as were violets, Viola sororia.

The cross vine, Bignonia capreolata, was also blooming. I love the yellow and maroon flowers, which remind me of Indian blankets, Gaillardia pulchella, so common in Texas.

Ecosystems are usually bewilderingly complex, but the system on a mountain of granite is simple. It’s a story of how simple plants adapt to granite, water and sunshine and, in dying and decaying, build up layers of soil that supports more complex forms of life.

I’m fascinated by that succession. For a longer version, see “Arabia Mountain, a magical place,” Feb. 15, 2023.

Rainstorm at Stone Mountain

 We walked in the woods south of Stone Mountain, knowing we might get wet, and we did.

Kind-of-opposites attract: The Wise Woman was covered in rain gear. I was in an old T-shirt and shorts, clothes that couldn't be hurt by water.

But that’s just different styles. We both wanted to hear the sound of rain on the forest canopy.

In the downpour, we walked fast, hoping to get to a shelter on the trail. In our speed, we frightened two deer. Tails up, they flew over a brush pile and were gone. The rain stopped just before we reached the shelter.

You can smell a beech forest in the rain. The world seems to be 15 minutes old.

The last of the old leaves on the beeches went a month ago. The new leaves are intensely green without being yellow. They are soft. The old leaves are still deep on the forest floor. The supple new leaves shush the rain, and the brittle old leaves crackle.

The little creek that runs from the west got a bit muddy in the storm. The rills coming off the mountain were torrents. You could hear the next crossing before you could see it.

Staring into the deep

 Nan Shepherd tells of exploring the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland with a companion. The women stopped to bathe in Cairn Gorm. They waded out, Shepherd leading. 

 

Then I looked down; and at my feet there opened a gulf of brightness so profound that the mind stopped. We were standing on the edge of a shelf that ran some yards into the loch before plunging down to the pit that is the true bottom.

 

It’s a breathtaking scene, but I like this part best:

 

I motioned to my companion, who was a step behind, and she came, and glanced as I had down the submerged precipice. Then we looked into each other’s eyes, and again into the pit. I waded slowly back into shallower water. There was nothing that seemed worth saying.

 

Shepherd writes beautifully about a topic that’s seldom touched: how the silence of a natural place can be enhanced by the right kind of companion on the trail. It’s tricky because what can be enhanced can be ruined.

This scene is in Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, written in the 1940s.

Shepherd is well known but is a new find for me. The recommendation came from Judith Anderson of Scotland. Thank you, Judith.

• Sources: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011.

Robert Macfarlane wrote a lovely introduction to Shepherd: “I walk therefore I am”; The Guardian, Aug. 29, 2008. It can be found here: 

 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/aug/30/scienceandnature.travel

A bit more on Basil

 Basil Bunting, mentioned in yesterday’s note, was so many things he’s hard to describe.

Gareth Prior, a poet who is also a perceptive reader of Bunting, gave this account:

 

In his 85 years Bunting remade himself as frequently and substantially as Yeats: conscientious objector; expat drunk; student; lecturer; hack-writer; skipper; spy; military tactician; diplomat; foreign correspondent; jobbing local journalist; professor; husband; father; neglected genius; lauded poet.

 

Bunting was born in 1900 and grew up among the Quakers in Northumberland. His long poem Briggflats is named after a Friends meetinghouse.

He was jailed as a conscientious objector in World War I and was an Air Force officer in World War II. At least in legend, he edited Shakespeare’s sonnets as a schoolboy, finding the raw poem under accretions.

In the 1920s, he met Louis Zukofsky, who later edited the edition of Poetry magazine dedicated to the Objectivist poets. I love the Objectivists and came to read Bunting, who was something of a kindred spirit.

One section of Briggflats describes the carving of a tombstone.

A mason times his mallet 

to a lark’s twitter, 

listening while the marble rests, 

lays his rule 

at a letter’s edge, 

fingertips checking, 

till the stone spells a name 

naming none, 

a man abolished.

 That passage is wonderful to me.

• Sources: The excerpt from Briggflats: An Autobiography can be found at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30206/briggflatts

Gareth Prior’s post “A Tremulous Thread: Basil Bunting” is here:

http://garethprior.org/a-tremulous-thread-basil-bunting/

Bunting: ‘Chomei at Toyama’

 I don’t know whether Basil Bunting was one of the great poets or one the great eccentrics of the 20^th century. But I love his “Chomei at Toyama.”

Chomei, who was born in 1154, abandoned life in the big city and built a hut on a mountain where he lived as a hermit. He wrote a prose account.

Bunting translated as Pound did. So to say it’s “loose” probably doesn’t cover it.

Chomei describes terrible times: natural disasters and gangsters on the streets and in government. He gives up and builds his tiny house.

I have filled the frames with clay, 

set hinges at the corners; 

easy to take it down and carry it away 

when I get bored with this place. 

Two barrowloads of junk 

and the cost of a man to shove the barrow, 

no trouble at all.

He outlines a life worthy of Thoreau at Walden. He goes to the summit of the mountain and looks out over Kyoto:

a very economical way of enjoying yourself.

He has his books and mandolin. The gamekeeper’s son, 16, comes by for company.

He came planning to stay a month. Five years later, moss grows on the roof.

I know myself and mankind. 

• Source: The poem is here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20166/chomei-at-toyama

Signs of nature, signs of age

 I caught a centipede, Scutigera coleoptrata, crossing the living room floor.

You'd think a fellow who grew up in scorpion country would have learned to wear carpet slippers. But I’m 67 and was barefoot when I evicted the uninvited guest, furious but unharmed. I fear I'm hopeless. 

A modest proposal for vacant lots

 What little education I have comes from books and libraries.

And I can remember a bit about the book I read, in the seventh grade, that made me look at distressed properties and vacant lots in a new light. I don’t remember the name of the book or its author. But in the appendix, the nameless book with the green cover had this suggestion:

• Go to a place with a 6-foot bit of string, attached to a nail.

• Fix the nail into the ground and inscribe a circle.

• Count the number of different kinds of plants (and insects) you find.

I would later learn that this was called an interdisciplinary project. If you remember how to calculate the area of a circle and do some arithmetic involving ratios, you can calculate how many different plants you’ve found per 100 square feet.

You can make comparisons by repeating the procedure in different places.

It’s been 55 years or so, but I remember the stark difference in diversity between a school lawn and a vacant lot.

Yesterday’s note was about distressed properties. If I could encourage my neighbors to pass a law, I’d ask them to make all distressed properties and vacant lots public land. They’d be used for the education of naturalists young and old.

Distressed properties

 About a quarter mile from the house is a “distressed property.” I know, because the small sign from the county says that’s what it is.

County officials mean that someone owed taxes on this overgrown lot. At some point, the accumulating taxes exceeded the market value.

The small sign explaining the facts is five years old and was overgrown when I found it while poking around, looking at rattlesnake weed.

“Beneath everything is the profound science of geology,” my old professor used to say.

The geology of the Georgia Piedmont has something to do with why this region — which has been horrifically disturbed by humans — still has a forest canopy with diverse plant communities below.

There is no naturally level ground here. (I know I’ve said this before, but I’m a Texas boy and cannot quite absorb the fact.) That means that the elevation of the lot that our house sits on is not the same as that of any of my neighbors.

Rainfall is plentiful here, and the water must go somewhere. So little rivulets run between property lines, and feed into bigger runs, rills, streams, channels, branches and creeks.

The “distressed property” is at the bottom of a hill. It was probably just a low-lying lot when developers cleared it 40 years ago. It’s almost a creek bed today.

I can’t imagine wanting to build a house on such a lot. Other people have had similar thoughts through the decades. Meanwhile, the distressed property has produced mature trees, an impenetrable thicket of smaller stuff and some interesting perennials.

I was after the rattlesnake weed, Hieracium venosum, which allegedly grows in rattlesnake habitat.

The distressed lot at the bottom of the hill has a diverse plant community. And because the Piedmont is all hills, there are a lot of these lots that no one can build on. Nature recovers, and all our lots are reseeded with the plants that grow in these small, scattered nature preserves.

Where some people see distressed properties, others see small places that are our salvation.

Years ago, when scientific farming methods were overtaking Texas, Roy Bedichek made the same point in a pair of essays about fencerows.

• Sources: Bedichek’s essays are in Adventures with a Texas Naturalist; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988.

Hieracium venosum, if you’re interested, has low-lying, ground-hugging leaves that are light green with deep green veins. It looks like an expensive indoor plant. In the spring, it produces a foot-long stalk with a yellow flower. It’s in the dandelion tribe within the sunflowers and grows mostly east of the Mississippi.

A flower storm and other wonders

 After a rainstorm, tulip tree (Liriodendrion tulipifera) flowers were on the forest floor south of Stone Mountain. The blossoms are as big as saucers. They have light green petals, with a band of orange and then the lightest yellow around the stamens, which are yellow-white.

Salvia lyrata, lyre-leaf sage, is blooming. You do see this in Texas. The stalk has little purple trumpet flowers, turned out and down. It’s also called cancer weed and is used in folk medicine.

Johnson grass, Sorghum halepense, is making heads of seed. All the things I tend to overlook — horseherb, henbit, dandelions and clovers — are all blooming.

Mountain laurels here and there

 Mountain laurel, Kalmia latifolia, is blooming all around Stone Mountain.

It’s not the mountain laurel I knew in Texas. That was Sophora secundiflora.

The Texas version has purple blossoms and an unforgettable scent. It always reminded me of the tangy sugar candy that came in a straw when I was a boy. You unraveled one end of the straw and shook the tiny granules into your mouth. They were a penny apiece.

The little trees produced big pods of beans. The Cualhuiltecan and other original people brewed a hallucinogenic drink from the beans. The drink was featured in mitotes, those wild parties that so frightened the Spanish fathers at the missions. I always thought it funny that, 300 years later, the tree that had so haunted the authorities had become a favorite ornamental of the parks department.

The mountain laurel in the Georgia Piedmont produces flowers that are pink, red and white. White blossoms flecked with red are common, and some of old Georgians call it calico bush.

The Missouri Botanical Gardens says the blooms go rose to white with purple markings. I’ve seen deep reds — magenta and maroon — but not purple. I’ll keep looking.

• Source: For a bit more on Sophora secundiflora and Texas, see “Mountain laurels are not tame trees,” March 18, 2022.

The other way science works

 I know a fellow who earned a Ph.D. for showing how a chemical process does not work.

At the time, the process was new and thought to be promising. Although the process was being used, the underlying mechanisms weren’t understood. Chemists thought they knew which mechanisms were involved, but no one had done the experiments to show that their assumptions were correct.

My friend expected to show that the common view was correct and move on to a career at a university. But none of his experiments went as expected.

His research showed that the assumptions were wrong. The process’s potential for development turned out to be a dead end.

That, too, is science.

I suspect that’s the way science works most of the time.

The logical framework that my friend hoped to use in his research was:

If p then q.

If p (the hypothesis about how the process worked) is correct, then q (you get the expected results).

1. If p then q

2. q

3.Therefore: p

What he actually got was:

1. If p then q

2. Not q

Therefore: Not p

We try a hypothesis, and we learn when it fails.

A story about sunlight on a stone

 Suppose that a snail is crossing the garden. It goes across a stone that has been heated by the sun.

Snails have cerebral ganglia with myriad neurons — too many to count, as the ancient Greeks would say, tens of thousands.

We humans, who have brains with billions of neurons, don’t know what it’s like to operate with a snail’s cognitive capabilities. But we say that the snail, using its senses, is aware that the stone is hot. Perhaps that’s why the snail is taking a detour.

That is about the extent of the explanatory power of our scientific worldview on the topics of cognition and consciousness.

We have a lot of descriptive information. We have learned about the structures of the brain and their functions. We know a lot about the development of the human brain in childhood. We know about the brains of other animals and can describe their various capacities for reasoning, including their capacity to use tools.

But if we are asked to explain why nature has produced species with such varying capacities for cognitive behavior, evolutionary theory doesn’t take us much past the story of the snail.

We can understand why it would be an advantage for an organism to sense heat.

But why would evolution produce an organism that notices not just that the stone is hot but that it is sunlight that heats the stone? Or one that further notices that every time the sun is shining that the light heats the stone and reasons from subjective perceptions to the universal law of nature that the sun is the cause of the heat?

The example — minus the snail and the dismay about the state of the Western scientific worldview — comes from Immanuel Kant. In 1783, he used the example of the sun heating a stone to show the rational steps necessary to derive a natural law from sense perceptions.

In terms of how this is possible biologically, I think evolutionary theory explains the snail and a little more.

It doesn’t get us anywhere near Kant’s neighborhood.

• Source: Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950, pp. 49n, 59.

A longtime Georgian explains the seasons

 My neighbor Jesse, seeing my perplexity at finding some new flowering plants, asked: “Is this your first spring in Georgia?”

I told him it was. I also told him my perplexity boiled down to this: How is it possible for everything to be blooming when I start my day by putting a fire in the fireplace and don’t dare take the dog for a walk without a coat and scarf?

He said: “The people here speak of Dogwood Winter and Redbud Winter. The dogwoods are already gone. That was Dogwood Winter. The redbuds are still going, so we’re in Redbud Winter now. By the end of the week, it’ll be warm enough to call it spring. By July, you’ll be wanting to walk that big dog without anything on.”

I'm learning.

Easter at Stone Mountain

 The Wise Woman, walking through the woods on a beautiful day, started singing.

A barred owl answered her.

I was surprised, but she kept singing.

A second owl joined in.

A problem with the foundation

 I don’t believe the currently accepted scientific worldview of the cosmos is true.

I don’t think it could possibly be true. But I might be overstating the case.

If you’re interested in the question, you’d do far better to look up the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.

I think a lot of scientists are uncomfortable admitting that the consensus worldview has obvious problems. And so they don't talk about them. But every once in a while, someone does.

The New York Times recently ran an interview with Dr. Roland Griffiths, founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. He said this: 

… I can easily inhabit an evolutionary account that explains how we have come to be who we are — with the exception of the question of interiority! Why would evolution waste its precious energy on our having interior experiences at all? I don’t get that. To me, it’s a very precious mystery, and that mystery, if you want to put it in religious terms, is God. It’s the unknowable. It’s unfathomable. I don’t believe in God as conceptualized within different religious traditions, but the mystery thing is something that strikes me as undeniable.

Our best, most coherent scientific worldview doesn’t explain what many people call consciousness and what Griffiths calls “interiority” — our awareness of our own thoughts and feelings.

I think this failure to explain is not from lack of trying. I think our best scientific worldview can’t explain it. It’s a conceptual problem with the foundations of science — not a problem of physics but of metaphysics. But bad thinking about the underpinnings of science leads to a picture of the cosmos that is incomplete and thus distorted.

• Sources: David Marchese, “A Psychedelics Pioneer Takes the Ultimate Trip”; New York Times, April 7, 2023. It can be found here:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/03/magazine/roland-griffiths-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos; Oxford University Press, 2012. For more on view of Nagel see, “Nagel: 'Mind & Cosmos,'” Nov. 27, 2022.

Confusion, clarity, mystery in 2 minutes

 At first glance, I thought I saw three vultures, circling higher than usual over Barbashela Creek. But two were not vultures.

For an instant, I was trying to figure out what was wrong — their way of flying was wrong, the shape of the wings was not right. … And then one started screaming, and the other screamed back: two red-tailed hawks.

They “buzzed” the buzzard, flying in close. Off the poor buzzard went.

Since then, I’ve been wondering: What had I seen?

Had the buzzard discovered a wounded animal or a fresh kill, something the hawks were interested in? Had they simply stolen his meal?

Or was there a carcass on the ground that had attracted some small scavengers that looked appetizing to hawks?

Spring is lovely, but the foliage is already dense enough to interfere with our lines of sight. I saw the hawks descending toward the creek, but that’s all.

John Cage on attention and boredom

 John Cage — he was such a polymath I hesitate to call him a composer — said this:

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

Cage is known for 4’33,” a musical composition that takes four minutes and 33 seconds to perform. All the notes are silent.

A musician told me that 4’33’’ usually is performed on piano but that the score leaves room for other instruments. Whether it’s a piano composition might be a philosophical question. Whether it’s a performancemight another.

I’m not sure what to make of Cage, but I like his remark about boredom.

If I am bored with the cosmos, I’m not paying attention. Or I’m paying attention to the wrong thing.

If I’m bored, something is wrong with me, not with the cosmos.

If you’re wondering what this observation has to do with anything else in this collection of notes, please consider that Cage, the polymath, liked to walk in the woods. 

In her delightful essay on Cage, Mary Mann says that he lived “on the edge of poverty until age 42, when an Italian game show awarded him $8,000 for being able to name ‘the twenty-four kinds of white-spore mushrooms listed in Atkinson.’”

Cage was an expert. Mann says he taught a class on mushrooms at the new school and founded the New York Mycological Society.

She quotes him about paying attention on his tramps:

 “Often I go in the woods thinking after all these years I ought finally to be bored with fungi,” Cage writes. “But coming upon just any mushroom in good condition, I lose my mind all over again.”

She also quotes Cage putting the same idea another way:

What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods? 

For some people, walking in the woods is some kind of practice, something done to pay attention to something wonderful outside themselves. Cage searched for mushrooms. Guy Davenport searched for arrowheads. I search the Piedmont.

• Sources: The first quote is from Cage’s collection of essays, Silence; 1961. The others are from his Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). All are quoted in Mary Mann, “John Cage’s Endless Project,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 7, 2015. It’s here:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/john-cages-endless-project/

For Guy Davenport’s view, see his essay “Finding” in The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. My note on it is here as “Davenport’s search for arrowheads,” March 15, 2022.

John Muir rides out a storm

 In December 1874, John Muir was exploring the Yuba River in California when a windstorm struck. He’d been staying at a friend’s cabin. When the storm hit, he went outside to watch.

Muir wanted to see how the wind affected different kinds of trees.

The waving of a forest of the giant Sequoias is indescribably impressive and sublime, but the pines seem to me the best interpreters of winds. They are mighty waving goldenrods, ever in tune, singing and writing wind-music all their long century lives.

To get a better look, he climbed a 100-foot Douglas spruce.

The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.

Part of the appeal was the sound. He wanted to hear the song of wind through evergreen needles.

Muir estimated that the tree swept an arc of 20 to 30 degrees in the blow. But he’d seen such trees tested by wind and by loads of snow. He felt safe and enjoyed the show.

When the storm began to abate, I dismounted and sauntered down through the calming woods.

Several notes on these pages have been about the sense of calm most people get from walking through woods. Muir’s essay is a reminder that sometimes the point is not calm but excitement.

• Source: Muir’s essay “A Wind-Storm in the Forests” was The Library of America’s Story of the Week. It’s in John Muir, Nature Writings; Library of America, 1984, pp. 465–73. It was originally published as “A Wind Storm in the Forests of the Yuba” in the November 1878 issue of Scribner's Monthly Magazine and revised as Chapter X in The Mountains of California, 1894. It’s here:

https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Muir-Wind-Storm.pdf

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.

Respect for custom, respect for law

 This collection of notes is not about the news of the day, and so it’s not about Donald Trump, the former president who was arraigned in New York. The news has been all about Trump.

Instead of following the news, I’ve been thinking about old news: Joseph Addison’s piece on “Sir Roger at Church,” published in 1711.

The essay is about the value of customs and customary institutions, including the law. It’s about respect for those things.

It’s about — regardless of one’s views of the gods — the value of gathering regularly as a community, making an occasion of it, breaking out the best clothes, talking to neighbors, being reminded of one’s duties to God and man.

It’s about people who uphold common values, customs and laws, rather than break them, ridicule them, show contempt for them.

Sir Roger was no hero. He was the kind of churchmen who nudged his neighbor awake during the sermon — after he had woken up from his nap.

Sir Roger was a flawed example, but he was not a bad example, as some of the other squires who showed nothing but contempt for the quaint old ways of the common people. 

Addison said ordinary people needed good examples, however flawed.

Ordinary people are “so used to be dazzled with riches, that they pay as much deference to the understanding of a man of estate, as of a man of learning.”

Addison feared that ordinary folks would look up to a disastrously ignorant, arrogant man just because he was rich, rather than listen to the counsel of someone who made it his business to understand the difficult problems we face in common.

But that’s old news from an old, dead newspaper.

• Source: The Spectator, No. 112, Sept. 7, 1711. My copy is in Sir Roger de Coverley: Essays from the Spectator by Addison and Steele; New York: The MacMillan Company, 1918. The edition was part of MacMillan’s Pocket Classics and was edited by Zelma Gray, instructor of English at the East Side High School, Saginaw, Mich. I’m a great lover of books that fit in a pocket.

MLK was killed on her birthday

 Maya Angelou had planned to celebrate her 40^th birthday when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

She stopped eating and wouldn’t answer the phone.

Her friend James Baldwin came by and yelled until she opened the door. He told her to go take a bath and he would get some clothes out of her closet for her. He said: “You need to laugh, and you need to have somebody watch you laugh and laugh with you.”

She recovered — not completely, but she caught her sense of equilibrium — in the “sparkling company” of good friends. Sometimes that’s the only thing that will do.

One of the recurring topics of these pages is grief. Much has been written about it, but most of the advice has not been helpful to me. This is one of the exceptions.

• Source: Maya Angelou told this story many times. Here’s one version:

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

When a tree falls in the forest

 To a fellow from Texas, the Georgia Piedmont seems impossibly wet and lush. The tree pollen is so thick it will almost choke you. New leaves are hiding the forest, cutting down the sight lines of predators and amateur naturalists. New seedlings are coming up everywhere.

And amidst all the new growth, you see dead trees. One old giant, down in the forest south of Stone Mountain, is chest high. 

I’ve wondered idly (without doing research) about the decay — how the nutrients of the dead trees are returned to the soil to nourish the new growth.

A couple of days ago, I saw a fallen log that seemed to be alive. It was covered by a swarm of eastern subterranean termites, Reticulitermes flavipes. They have wings at this stage and are hungry. There were so many termites you could barely see the log.

I still need to do some reading about the nutrient cycle, but I at least have a clue.

How to study philosophy

 Russell ended The Problems of Philosophy with a “Bibliographical Note.” Here the whole thing:

The student who wishes to acquire an elementary knowledge of philosophy will find it both easier and more profitable to read some of the works of the great philosophers than to attempt to derive an all-round view from handbooks. The following are specially recommended:
Plato: Republic, especially Books VI and VII.

Descartes: Meditations.

Spinoza: Ethics.

Leibniz: The Monadology.

Berkeley: Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.

Hume: Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

Kant: Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.

Kant says something similar in the Prolegomena.

There are scholarly men to whom the history of philosophy (both ancient and modern) is philosophy itself; for these the present Prolegomena are not written.

The common idea: You can see philosophy as a history of a literature. In that sense a scholar knows what has been said about some of the common problems we humans face in thinking about the world. But that’s not the same as being struck by a problem and investigating it yourself — or investigating it with an original thinker.

• Sources: Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy. This was first published in 1912, and there are many editions. Standard Ebooks has one at https://standardebooks.org.

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950, p. 3.

We see desert where they saw food

 Thinking about a 15-hour week reminded me of the Pecos People, the ancient people who lived in the desert around the Pecos River.

It’s difficult country. It’s hard to imagine small bands of people surviving there with tools made of stone, wood, leather and plant fiber.

Harry Shafer, professor emeritus at Texas A&M and curator of archeology at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, said the people got 80 to 90 percent of their calories by gathering.

That’s to say the people were informed. They knew things about the place, where to find food at different times of the year.

We see desert. They saw food in prickly pear, lechuguilla, sotol and, near the river and its tributaries, onions, cattails and persimmons.

I’d love to know how human beings figured out that sotol could be food. Sotol hearts are loaded with alkaloids, which are not good for humans and taste bad. But the Pecos People saw possibilities. They fired the hearts over several days in pit ovens.

The fire goes in the bottom of the pit, stones cover the fire, food goes on the stones and the whole thing is covered with grass and earth. Over three or four days, the smoldering heat breaks down the alkaloids while preserving the sugars.

The people pulped and dried the sotol hearts, making patties that were sweet and, if kept dry, lasted for months. It was trail food.