A practice and a habit

 One distinction about practices: I am in the habit of drinking coffee and of keeping a notebook. The coffee is just a habit. But I make it a practice to keep a notebook because I think the habit — or the discipline behind the habit — might improve my character. Admittedly, by the tiniest measure.

It’s possible to buy a stylish notebook, put it in your pocket and remember it only when you are at a sidewalk café. It is also possible to use a notebook as a tool to focus your attention. I’d say even when you use the notebook as a crutch to help you pay attention, you are still ahead of the game. Use the crutch and hobble, rather than sit.

I make keeping a notebook a practice because I think there’s a chance it might result in a better me. I have a habit of drinking coffee because I love it.

A kind of literature you can practice

 Yesterday’s note on a cure for whining is, in my mind, a specimen of wisdom literature.

When I was a student decades ago and asked whether one of the university’s departments offered a course, I was told that wisdom literature had a long history but was out of fashion.

A friend and I have been discussing the advice these bits of wisdom contain. Are they religious practices? That implies a belief in God or the gods, which some of these writers didn’t have. Are they spiritual practices? That might imply the existence of an immortal soul, separate from body. Again, that’s a belief that some of these writers didn’t have.

Against sound criticism, I think of these recommended habits as “practices.” I acknowledge that people practice the world’s great religions, as well law, medicine, basketball, yoga and piano. I concede that my use of the word “practice” might invite some confusing comparisons to all those other practices. But it’s the best I can do today.

What would you call them?

A teacher's cure for whining

 Gratitude, like mindfulness, is a virtue that is in style today. Geri Larkin, a Zen teacher, says that if you’re in favor of gratitude you have to give up whining.

She contends that public cellphone conversations, annoying as they are, are (1) public property and (2) great teachers. She listened and classified the calls she overheard: check-ins with kin, mushy stuff, planning and reminders. But three-fourths of the calls were whining.

In The Chocolate Cake Sutra, she provides the cure: at her house a whining hour was decreed. Only whining was allowed between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. daily. It was so miserable the experiment didn’t last three weeks.

The whining was replaced largely by silence.

I’ve always been interested in stories about human characteristics and human character. The so-called wisdom literature that readers know in the ancient books of Ecclesiastes, Proverbs and the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach are good examples. I like Aesop.

But one of the biases of this collection of notes is that the teachers and thinkers of our day are frequently as good or better than the old. This might be better than Aesop.

Geri Larkin, The Chocolate Cake Sutra; New York: HarperOne, 2008.

The trail of the mind

 I’ve mentioned this before: I’ve resisted calling this collection of notes a blog because that word just doesn’t seem quite right. I think it might be a concatenation.

I grew up listening to storytellers. One topic would lead to another. No matter where a story went, no matter what new topic was mentioned, a good storyteller would have it covered. The storyteller’s mind wasn’t so much a storehouse as a treasury, more like Fort Knox than the country store.

Donald Hall, who writes beautiful essays, tells of accompanying his grandfather on a hunt for some lost heifers as a storm was coming.

 

I knew what would come next. Rain or the lost heifers would bring to his mind and his tongue some anecdote of the past and he would recount it to me. I don’t remember what it was, this time. His memory was great, and his curiosity, and the two kept his voice active with stories out of his youth and manhood. We could have walked ten years without breaking the links of anecdote or repeating a single one.

It's how my mind works. I'd like to say there's a governing architecture or order to it. In fact, one thought leads to another.

• Sources and notes:  Donald Hall, String Too Short to Be Saved; Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1979, p. 2. For a note on finding Hall’s book, see “Eureka!” July 17, 2023. For more on concatenation, see “Lytton Strachey’s diction,” Feb. 16, 2023.

Rules written in stone

 Christopher Hitchens’s most famous essay might be “The New Commandments.” It’s a review of the Ten Commandments, along with some suggestions for improvements.

If you’re a populist lawmaker in Texas, the kind that panders to the part of the electorate that is loud and only vaguely familiar with education, you believe that the Ten Commandments were written in stone by the finger of God at a precise moment in history and reflect eternal truths. You are not aware that there are four sets of these commandments in scripture (Exodus chapters 20 and 34 and Deuteronomy 5 and 27). And you are scandalized by the consensus among historians that the texts reflect the customs of an ancient, agricultural culture, as opposed to the pinnacle of divine wisdom.

Hitchens’s summary:

 

What emerges from the first review is this: The Ten Commandments were derived from situational ethics. They show every symptom of having been man-made and improvised under pressure. They are addressed to a nomadic tribe whose main economy is primitive agriculture and whose wealth is sometimes counted in people as well as animals. They are also addressed to a group that has been promised the land and flocks of other people: the Amalekites and Midianites and others whom God orders them to kill, rape, enslave, or exterminate.

 

Hitchens’s essay came to mind when I was reading Aldo Leopold’s writings about at another idea — one that once seemed necessary, but which today seems like it might lead to the extermination of human beings. That’s the idea of private property — in the sense that any use is OK as long as the user (or abuser) is the owner.

Here's Leopold: 

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever “written.” Only the most superficial student of history supposes that Moses ‘wrote’ the Decalogue; it evolved in the minds of a thinking community, and Moses wrote a tentative summary of it for a “seminar.” I say tentative because evolution never stops.

 

In our age, we get trivial software updates twice a week whether we want them or not. The updates are needed to keep our software running. When it comes to the moral codes we choose to run our lives by, some of us can’t grasp that ideas that are thousands of years old need to be updated.

• Sources: Christopher Hitchens, Arguably; New York: Twelve, 2021, pp. 414-22. Aldo Leopold, “A Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982, p. 263.

Safekeeping the items of enchantment

 In 1956, the circus came to town, and a writer went to watch a young woman, a trick rider, practice with a horse for 10 minutes.

E.B. White’s essay “The Ring of Time” captured the moment. The essay has a line that gets to question of why we human beings write.

 

As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.

 

The world has many items of enchantment. It takes different types of writers — different kinds of human beings — to see and appreciate them all. 

• E.B. White’s “The Ring of Time” in The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Philip Lopate; New York: Anchor Books, 1995, pp. 538-44. The quotation is on p. 539. The essay is online here:

http://www.brunswick.k12.me.us/hdwyer/the-ring-of-time-by-e-b-white-3/

Looking outward, looking in

 Aldous Leopold called the dates that he saw various plants in first bloom “birthdays.”

            

Tell me of what plant-birthdays a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.

 

In other words: If you know what kinds of things a person notices in the woods, you know the person.

The last few days, I’ve been catching up with my notebook from recent walks in the forests near Stone Mountain and Arabia Mountain. To most folks, it’s just dull science.

To me, it’s something different, a record of the shortcomings of the observer, and more generally the person. Perhaps this is what it’s like to be on the analyst’s couch.

• Source: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982, p. 48.

Mushrooms, fungi and other stuff

 July seems to be mushroom month in the Georgia Piedmont. I’ve seen several that I think are in genus Amanita.

The genus has 600 species — some edible, some psychedelic, some deadly.

One specimen looked like Coker’s amanita, Amanita cokeri, to me. It was beautiful, with a white cap with white warts. But experts say identification is difficult. It’s beyond me.

I’ve also seen a couple of specimens that are in the broader class of Agaricomycetes.

One looked like silver dollars that were white to almost clear. Others looked like orange ears, probably in order Auriculariales. Again, I’m lost.

Agaricomycetes make up a class of fungus in Basidiomycota. Some of these fungi form mushrooms. The class also includes gasteroid fungi, which I first knew as puffballs.

At Arabia Mountain, I saw what looked like red jelly beans stuck on the side of a rotting log. It was wolf’s milk, Lycogala epidendrum, sometimes called toothpaste slime. It’s a slime mold, rather than a fungus. Amoeba-like organisms called plasmodia congregate to form these fruiting bodies. They use chemical signals to congregate.

Can a spider be charming?

 I watched an orchard orbweaver, Leucauge venusta, repairing a web. It’s a common spider with an oblong body, mostly tan. The orange diamonds on the belly explain the Greek — “with a bright gleam” — in the genus name. It has long green legs with black bands at the joints, which designers or sports uniforms should note.

It’s a beautiful spider. The Latin venusta means “charming.” If that doesn’t sound plausible, consider that the web had several mosquitos among the trapped flies.

Does that count as “charming”?

• Source: The University of Florida’s Featured Creatures collection is a fine resource. The article by Donald W. Hall on the orchard orbweaver is here:

https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/IN1243

Miner bees

Gunter, the enormous German shepherd, is a puppy at heart. He found the colony of miner bees, genus Andrena, going in and out of a hole at the base of a tulip tree south of Stone Mountain. Outbound bees were clean, while inbound bees were loaded with pollen.

There are 89 species in Georgia.

I’ve also seen bee flies in the forest. The family Bombyllidae is bad news for bees.

The queen bee lays an egg into a ball of pollen and nectar and daubs it on the wall of the tunnel. A bee fly lays its eggs near the tunnels. When the bee fly egg hatches, a larva that looks like a worm enters the underground hive and feeds on the bees’ stores. The larva grows and eventually molts into another form, a predator that feeds on bee embryos.

My canine colleague, conducting his own research, concluded that miner bees aren't edible.

• Sources: Professor Mark Schlueter of Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville maintains a site called “Native Bees of Georgia” with some fine photographs:

https://native-bees-of-georgia.ggc.edu/?page_id=90

For the sad story of bees and bee flies, see David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen; New York: Viking, 2021, pp. 57-60.

Bear’s foot in bloom

 As mentioned yesterday, Bear’s foot, Smallanthus uvedalia, is blooming. It’s also known as hairy leafcup, but the Georgians call it Bear’s foot.

It’s big — up to 10 feet, they say — and the yellow flowers are hard to miss.

The shape of the leaves reminded settlers of bear tracks. The leaves are funny, at least to amateurs like me: the lower leaves are opposite and the upper leaves are alternate.

The Florida Wildflower Foundation says that in the 1870s Dr. J.W. Pruit made a tincture from the roots that he used to treat rheumatism. Brooks’ Bears-Foot Ointment came along in 1900 and was used to treat just about every ill known to humans, dogs and horses. 

• Source: The Florida Wildflower Foundation’s article is at https://www.flawildflowers.org/flower-friday-smallanthus-uvedalia/

Canadian smoke and other wonders

 Smoke from the Canadian fires again reached the Georgia Piedmont. It lasted just a day.

From the east, you can usually see Stone Mountain from miles away. But the sky was gray Tuesday. You couldn’t see the mountain for the haze until you were almost on it. It was eerie, knowing something so large was there, yet not visible.

July is warm in Georgia, but nothing like South Texas. It’s possible, with enough cloud cover, to have highs in the 70s. Among the wonders of the month:

• Bear’s foot, Smallanthus uvedalia, is putting out lovely yellow flowers. (More on that tomorrow.)

• Maryland meadowbeauty, Rhexia mariana, is blooming at Arabia Mountain. The flowers were white with just a hint of purple. The anthers are large — they seem almost too big for the flower. The stem is hairy and square.

• Golden ragwort or Appalachian ragwort, Packera anonyma, started blooming in April but is still going. It’s in the aster family with disk and ray flowers. If you see the yellow blooms, you’re likely to see a butterfly. 

If you’re a regular reader and are not interested in natural history, you might want to take a break. This journal needs to catch up on what’s going on in the woods.

Willa Cather's feel for the Southwest

 One more note on Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House: Book II is perhaps the best description of the Southwest I’ve read. (My friend Alvin, who is from New Mexico, would say I should lose the “perhaps.”)

Books I and III are about Professor St. Peter and his family and their home in a college town near Lake Michigan. Book II is an account of St. Peter’s former student, Tom Outland, who grew up in New Mexico. It’s Tom’s story of finding the ruins of an ancient culture at Blue Mesa and his efforts to explore it with his partner, Rodney Blake.

Does that seem out of place to you? Some critics, taking a metaphor from the novel, described the second part as the dazzling turquoise between two bits of pedestrian silver in a piece of jewelry.

I don’t know what to make of the structure. I thought of the second movement in Samuel Barber’s famous string quartet, which Barber turned into Adagio for Strings. I wondered what this part of Cather’s book would read like as a stand-alone work.

Professor St. Peter had two girls who were enchanted by Tom’s stories of the Southwest. And here’s Cather:

 

St. Peter had noticed that in the stories Tom told the children there were no shadows.

 

Shade and shadows are vital to the life in the Southwest. The architecture of public buildings is about shade. The sites of chicken coops are chosen with consideration to shade.

That sentence is a beautiful way to suggest that Tom’s stories to the children lack depth and reality. The real story might not be suitable for children.

That one sentence says a lot — at least to me — about Cather’s writing.

• Source: Willa Cather, The Professor’s House, was originally published in 1925 by Alfred A. Knopf. There are many editions. The quotation is from Book I, Chapter 10.

The Professor and the Kansas boy

 The Professor in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House is Godfrey St. Peter. His family life is changing. His daughters are grown and married. The world is changing in ways he doesn’t really like, and he’s having trouble moving from the old house, where he’s written his books, to the new, better house.

St. Peter is an cultured, sophisticated man. While the family is away in Europe, something of his boyhood — something of his original sense of self — returns. Cather says this:

 

The Kansas boy who had come back to St. Peter this summer was not the scholar. He was primitive.

 

And then this:

 

The Professor knew, of course, that adolescence grafted a new creature into the original one, and that the complexion of a man’s life was largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature as modified by sex rubbed on together.

What he had not known was that, at a given time, that first nature could return to a man, unchanged by all the pursuits and passions and experiences of his life; untouched even by the tastes and intellectual activities which have been strong enough to give him distinction among his fellows and to have made for him, as they say, a name in the world. Perhaps this reversion did not often occur, but he knew it had happened to him …

 

Willa Cather works in mysterious ways. I admire this passage, but I’m not sure I understand it. I have no sense of whether it’s true.

But a running theme in this collection of notes is that one should try to come to grips with the forces of that shape us. I’ve been thinking about the forces that shaped me. One could say there’s something boyish in that. But I’m not sure that I could say that the Professor’s experience has happened to me.

• Sources and notes: Willa Cather, The Professor’s House, was originally published in 1925 by Alfred A. Knopf. There are many editions. These passages are at the end of Book III, Chapter 2. And thanks, Alvin, for sending me a copy.

Eureka!

 It’s hard to explain to the uninitiated the pleasures of a bookstore. Here’s a stab at it:

For years, I’ve had a running page in my endless series of composition books labeled “String too short to be saved.”

Each page with this odd heading is a place for mere suggestions of notes — notes that are too short to be a proper note. The jotting might remind me to think harder and make a note out of the scrap.

All this might sound odd, but keepers of notebooks are a bit eccentric.

I got the title from a collection of stories about a New England farm by Donald Hall. I’d read about Hall’s book somewhere, which has this epigraph:

 

A man was cleaning the attic of an old house in New England and he found a box which was full of tiny pieces of string. On the lid of the box there was an inscription in an old hand: “String too short to be saved.”

 

Bookstores in my part of the world aren’t exactly crammed with old books about farms in New England.

And then there it was.

• Source: Donald Hall, String Too Short to Be Saved; Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1979.

Theroux: ‘My Life as a Reader’

 Paul Theroux’s essay “My Life as a Reader” seems like a model to me. I wish all my friends would write a version.

Theroux is mostly known as a travel writer and novelist, but he’s also a fine essayist. “My Life as a Reader” lists some of the books he loves but also includes these observations:

• We read as children because of the exotic creatures and places (lions in Africa, pirates in the Caribbean) and because the best imaginary friends are in books.

• Some people — Theroux is in this camp — read a writer, rather than books. He finds someone he likes and tracks down everything that writer has written.

• Reading doesn’t just happen. It requires things: effort, concentration, curiosity and intelligence, and “mastery of solitude.” I love that phrase. In a hectic world, many people crave solitude, and a few actually find some. If you’ve wondered why some people are readers and others aren’t, that observation might be a good place to start.

• Source: Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. 

Hibiscus in a gully

 I couldn’t imagine what I was seeing: a plant blooming in an impossible place.

The shrub was clinging to the steep bank of a gully between two houses. The shrub’s roots are holding some soil in the ravine, a small tributary of Barbeshela Creek.

The blooms are unmistakable: it’s a hibiscus shrub, Hibiscus syriacus. 

Some bushes once marked the boundary of the eroding property. Seeds slipped into the gully, and now a plant is growing in a place that I can’t fathom any other shrub growing.

I understand the concept of invasive species. But my mind just won’t do the gymnastics.

Is this shrub really taking the place of a native plant? Could any other plant — native or otherwise —really grow there?

Military history of another sort

 There’s an old story about the time that Gen. Zachary Taylor met Commodore David Conner at the Rio Grande.

Taylor was about to take his army into Mexico. Conner had several responsibilities, one of which was securing the army’s supply line.

The two officers were going to meet to make sure they had a good understanding.

Taylor disliked uniforms and hated ribbons and decorations. But he knew that Conner was a by-the-book officer. So Taylor put on his dress uniform.

Conner, meanwhile, knew that the general famously disliked military fuss and showed up in civilian suit.

This incident did not determine the outcome of the war. It’s just a story about two officers showing some respect for each other and for the other branches of the military.

I like the story for two reasons. I grew up as a lowly seaman at a headquarters where there were more flag officers than seaman. I became an early student of what leadership means in the military. I also know that a lack of respect between members of the high command can be disastrous and tragic. Gen. MacArthur had many talents, but his arrogance — his lack of respect for others — resulted in decisions that cost countless Allied lives.

• Source: The story is in The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, but I saw it recently in Ryan Holiday, Discipline is Destiny; New York: Portfolio-Penguin, 2022, p. 68.

My friend with the blue tail

 The lizard that often greets me at the garbage bin is a five-lined skink, Plestiodon fasciatus. The common name comes from its five stripes, one down the back and two on each side. My guy’s stripes are a washed-out yellow. Stripe color varies.

The young have bright blue tails, and this one’s tail is almost neon. I’m guessing he’s about 5 inches.

They are found in the eastern United States and Canada. The University of Georgia’s Savanah River Ecology Laboratory says they’re common throughout Georgia but are most abundant in the Piedmont, which is our neck of the woods.

They prey on spiders and insects and other invertebrates. And the woods around here must look like a buffet line to the skink.

• Note: I’ve seen some older references to the five-lined skink as Eumeces fasciatus. But amateur naturalists fear to go where taxonomists tread.

Prejudice

 Looking into the sun, I saw a pair of birds chasing a squirrel away from a nest.

The light was too harsh to see markings. But I thought they must be mockingbirds, which are said to be fierce in defense of their territory, rather than gentle bluebirds.

The battle was still hot as I passed. Turning around, I got a clearer look.

In reason: mockingbirds. In fact: bluebirds.

Addison: ‘On the Essay Form’

 On Sunday, I claimed to have read Joseph Addison’s essays for pleasure. But, like the cub reporter I am at heart, I failed to give a single example.

I have a collection of Addison’s essays on Sir Roger de Coverley, a country gentleman — or rather a character in Addison’s imagination. But my favorite is “On the Essay Form.”

Addison says that book writers get a pass. Readers expect dull moments — rest stops in the ultramarathon. But if you’re a periodical writer you’ve got to get to the point, and if you don’t the readers will let you hear about it or abandon you in disgust.

Addison wonders what the world would be like if all writers wrote like that: short and to the point.

A million dull volumes would perish, but we’d be able to find the best ideas. The works of an age would take up just a couple of shelves.

If the ancient philosophers had known the art of the press, they’d have gotten the wisdom of the world out of private libraries and into the hands of the public.

 

Our common Prints would be of great Use were they thus calculated to diffuse good Sense through the Bulk of a People, to clear up their Understandings, animate their Minds with Virtue, dissipate the Sorrows of a heavy Heart, or unbend the Mind from its more severe Employments with innocent Amusements. 

 

He laments that the press of his day seems to have been used only by news-writers and political zealots.

Decades ago, when I was training to be a biologist in college, it dawned on me that lowly news-writers could do a real service by paying attention to what they wrote about and the way they wrote about it. But that’s a long story, not at all brief and to the point.

• Joseph Addison, “On the Essay Form,” was published in 1711. The excellent site Quotidiana has it here:

http://essays.quotidiana.org/addison/essay_form/

Dr. Flesch's writing strategy

 I mentioned Rudolf Flesch the other day. In my days as a newspaper editor, I tried to interest young reporters in his advice for making writing easier to read.

I didn’t succeed.

Flesch is known for his “readability formula.” If you’ve ever had to buy a book suitable for a child who reads at the third-grade level, you are into Flesch’s territory. But I was interested in his observations about the way we think about writing.

Flesch told the story about how news organizations covered the first bombing of Berchtesgaden on Feb. 21, 1945. Reporters rushed to talk to the air crews. It was sensational.

The reporters were stunned that none of the young pilots or their crewmen knew that Adolf Hitler’s house was at Berchtesgaden. It was just another target, a spot on the map.

Flesch loved such stories. He thought writers should pay attention to what people know and don’t know. The 1930s and ‘40s were great times for polling, and Flesch followed the polls. As World War II ended, a lot of Americans thought everybody in Russia got the same pay. With tensions high about the threat of communism to the free enterprise system, only 30 percent of Americans could tell you what “free enterprise” meant.

Flesch said writers tend to overestimate their readers’ stock of information and underestimate their intelligence. Both assumptions are fatal. A baffled reader quits in frustration. A patronized reader quits in rage.

 

The thing to do, of course, is to find out what people know and what they don’t know, and then to right accordingly.

 

• Source: Rudolf Flesch, The Art of Readable Writing; New York, Collier Books, 1962, p. 30.

Reading for pleasure, reading to learn

 Michael Dirda wondered aloud whether people still read Joseph Addison. Does anyone read him for pleasure?

Dirda reminds us that in former days people read Addison to learn something about style. Ben Franklin said he taught himself to write by studying Addison. John Steinbeck set out on his travels with Charley with a four-volume set of The Spectator. And then there’s Samuel Johnson’s pronouncement that the writer who wants to attain an English style must study Addison. (But it was possible to talk of having a Latin style in Johnson’s day.)

I read The Spectator for pleasure, rather than for instruction.

It never dawned on me to study Addison as a model. And I know people who’d say that I suffered horribly as a result.

Worse, in their view, when it did dawn on me that I should I spend some time studying writing, I looked to Rudolf Flesch’s The Art of Readable Writing.

I’ve heard Flesch’s school of thought ridiculed in creative ways. It’s not a “school” at all, just a recipe for brutal, colorless prose. I was told this by somebody: The kind of “writing” that Flesch taught is to real writing what Stalinist architecture is to architecture.

I’d protest, but this online journal is incriminating. I learned from Flesch. I read Addison for pleasure.

• Sources: Michael Dirda poses the question about Addison in his essay “Style Is the Man,” collected in Browsings; New York: Pegasus Books, 2015, pp. 5-7. Rudolf Flesch, The Art of Readable Writing; New York, Collier Books, 1962.

Composition books

 Michael Dirda, a fine essayist, has a big plastic carton near his desk filled with supplies: notebooks, stationary and the usual tools for writers.

Talking about supplies is something writers do. In his essay “Paper,” Dirda gives us a tour of his plastic bin:

 

At one point I owned a few of those ubiquitous Moleskines — the kind supposedly used by travel writer Bruce Chatwin — but they tend to be so expensive that I found myself hesitating to mar their virgin whiteness with my doodles, to-do lists, and earth shaking, indeed paradigm-altering, observations about this and that. Instead I much prefer school composition books, generally those with austere, speckled black-and-white covers. …

 

Like Dirda, I use those composition books with the speckled covers. Like Dirda, I’ve tried other kinds, and that just didn’t work for me. Like Dirda, I often find these composition books on sale when kids and their parents are shopping for school supplies.

This, to me, is delicious reading.

• Michael Dirda, Browsings; New York: Pegasus Books, 2015, p. 18. The book collects 52 weekly essays Dirda wrote for The American Scholar in 2012-13.

A man who was hard to bribe

 The Old Romans must have been tough old soldiers, something like the Spartans. But later writers idealized them to teach civic virtues. Even accounting for storyteller’s inflation, I like Plutarch’s tale about Manius Curius Dentatus, a role model for Cato the Elder.

I came across it in Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny.

The Romans were fighting the Samnites, and a delegation came to bribe Dentatus, a gifted soldier. When the Samnites arrived, they found him roasting turnips on the fire.

That’s a memorable image: A man who was content with turnips probably was not going to be swayed by money. And a man who was content to roast turnips himself, without assistance from servants, probably wasn’t going to want anything anyone else had to offer.

I like the story because I can see hints of my father and grandfather in that tough old character.

• Sources and notes: Ryan Holiday, Discipline is Destiny; New York: Portfolio-Penguin, 2022, p. 34. If you, like me, are puzzled by “Dentatus” and are also Latin-less, it’s a cognomen. You might guess that it’s related to “dental.” Pliny says Manius Curius was born with teeth.

Showing up for PT

 Here's an old mantra: Energy, strength, confidence.

I say that to myself when it’s time for what the navy calls PT, physical training. 

When it’s time for me to train, there’s a period — sometimes an instant, sometimes an hour — of hesitation and procrastination. It’s the most creative period of the day. I search with real inspiration for excuses.

But I know this: If I don’t put my body under the stress of physical training, it won’t absorb certain nutrients. Yours might, but mine won’t.

Without the training, I have less energy. With less energy, I will sit in my easy chair and gradually but inevitably lose strength. As strength ebbs, I might lose confidence in my ability to negotiate the world on my own. It happens to people of a certain age.

Old guys like me should show up for PT.

• Sources: At least in my highly fallible memory, the mantra of energy, strength and confidence was part of navy boot camp 50 years ago. The navy spoke of “street to fleet” training — meaning training that whipped your mind and character, as well as your body, into shape. But the doctrine has evolved into something called “warrior toughness.”

How we talk about the 'soul'

 Do human beings have souls?

The philosophical question is ancient. Socrates’s talk about the flight of the soul in Phaedrus predates Christianity.

But I’m not thinking of the philosophical or theological notions of the soul — whether there is something immortal within us.

I’m thinking of the soul in terms of navy doctrine. Here’s a sample:

 

Character is developed by strengthening the soul. Our soul is our identity, it is the essence, who we are. The soul is what gives that motivation and determination necessary to maintain faithfulness to one’s commitments, beliefs, and values in the face of adversity and the daily grind. Character is simply a manifestation of the soul. The result will be Sailors with a “fighting spirit” living out character to execute for that which they fight.

 

I used to have lively arguments with friends about whether we could talk about “soul” without the baggage of assuming the existence of anything immortal within human beings.

My friends thought that you can’t use the word “soul” without wading into the swamp.

I thought that people use the word “soul” routinely without metaphysical claims. The language is no more magical, mysterious or suspicious than other metaphors.

I don’t think my arguments ever convinced anyone.

But I still contend that, when I was a brainless teenager, I believed I had a soul because the navy said I had one.

• Source: Warrior Toughness Leader’s Reference Guide, a publication of the U.S. Navy, can be found here:

https://www.netc.navy.mil/Portals/46/NETC/doc/Leader%27s%20Reference%20Guide.pdf

Independence Day, Stone Mountain

 Bottlebrush buckeye, Aesculus parviflora, is blooming in the woods south of Stone Mountain. 

Descriptions from the Missouri Botanical Garden tend to be laconic. But the experts said this about the bottlebrush buckeye: “Mid-summer bloom can be spectacular.”

The little white flowers are in cylindrical panicles. The ones I saw were about a foot long. The red anthers and pink filaments, against the white flowers, were hard to miss.

A week ago, I saw a lot of wild petunias — Carolina ruellia, Ruellia caroliniensis — in bloom at Arabia Mountain. They were blooming at Stone Mountain on July 3. Wild petunias bloom all summer, although individual flowers don’t last long.

Why do we see a patch here one week and a patch there the next? Rain?

The flowers I’ve seen are violet, rather than blue.

The dragonflies at the pond at Wade-Walker Park have been putting on an air show. I’ve seen widow skimmers, Libellula luctuosa, and twelve-spotted skimmers, Libellula pulchella. Ebony Jewelwings, Calopteryx maculate, are common damselflies.

The most astonishing thing about the Georgia Piedmont is the climate. It was 75 degrees during a midmorning walk. To a fellow from Texas, that almost seems chilly.

Stephen Dunn’s ‘Propositions’

 A friend and I have been trading notes on grief. I forgot to tell him about Stephen Dunn’s poem “Propositions.”

It’s about thinking and feeling. And more precisely: It’s about our activities before they are formalized by reflection. And so the poem also is about honesty and our capacity to be honest. “Propositions” begins with these propositions:

            Anyone who begins a sentence with, “In all honesty … “

            is about to tell a lie. Anyone who says, “This is how I feel”

            had better love form more than disclosure. Same for anyone

            who thinks he thinks well because he had a thought.

The poet makes several claims, but the one that interests me is that honesty must involve some discovery.

Saying “You’re ugly” to someone who is ugly can be cruel, but it can’t be honest. That lack of discovery disqualifies it as an honest statement.

I think — but am not sure — that this is my problem with my own attempts to express grief. Almost everything I can think of to say about grief doesn’t seem right — and I suspect Dunn is right that the problem involves honesty. 

I can wail, holler and cry. But I make no discoveries in doing any of that. If I try to add words to the howling it doesn't help — at least it doesn't help me. Grief is grief, and explanations that go further just don't seem to enlighten me.

• Sources and notes: Stephen Dunn, “Propositions,” Poetry, September, 2016, p. 487. It’s online here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/90298/propositions

Stephen Dunn was one of the wonderful poets of my lifetime. His death in 2021 was a source of grief.

Passionate people, for and against

 I once had a boss who told me that, in considering candidates for jobs, I should look for passion. A lot of problems are solved, he said, when you find people who are passionate about their work.

It was memorable advice because the ancient thinkers were almost unanimous in holding that the passions were dangerous.

The usage has changed. The better word for modern employers is intensity. The Greek philosophers admired people — not just employees but soldiers, athletes, artists, students and citizens — who were interested, focused, even rapt. But they wanted people who could keep that intensity under control.

The distinction they made was between someone who was self-controlled or self-restrained and someone who acted on impulse. People whose reasoning capacities couldn’t curb passionate impulses were trouble.

The classic example was Alcibiades. As told by Plutarch, Alcibiades was loaded with talent. But lacking self-discipline, he failed Athens when the democracy was fighting for its life.

The ancient thinkers had learned some painful lessons. In looking for leaders — and employees — they looked for evidence of self-restraint, self-control.

• Source: Ryan Holiday, Discipline is Destiny; New York: Portfolio-Penguin, 2022. 

In search of quiet

 If you’re a newspaper editor, people stop you at the grocery store to talk about what the paper is or isn’t saying. They buttonhole you at retirement parties, baseball games and funerals.

Eventually, you have to get away.

Joe Murray, who showed me what a small-town newspaper editor could be, used to slip off to the chapel at the Monastery of the Infant Jesus on Lotus Lane. He was not Catholic. He would sometimes go when the nuns were having a service. But mainly he just wanted to sit in the chapel in the quiet. He said he needed to be quiet.

When he needed a longer retreat, he’d slip off to the old Luther Hotel in Palacios, down on the coast. The Luther didn’t have telephones in the rooms. He’d take a bag of books and just get away for a day or two, be quiet and let his sense of urgency reset itself. 

People who lead public lives owe it to themselves and others to find some quiet in their private lives. Joe realized that and worked at it.

• Note: For a note on Joe’s death, with a link to an obituary, see “Joe Murray, June 28, 2023.