Woolf: ‘The Modern Essay’

 Virginia Woolf, a wonderful essayist, sometimes wrote about the essay. She said several things:

• The essay exists to give pleasure.

• Some of that pleasure is in encountering another personality. Montaigne included plenty of himself in his essays. So did Charles Lamb. But that personal element then lay dormant until Max Beerbohm arrived.

• “The public needs essays as much as ever, and perhaps even more.” But there are practical limits about what a writer can do. Woolf was talking about how long an essay should be, and whether a writer could write one in a month for a magazine, or once a week or once a day for a newspaper.

She spoke of the demand for “the light middle,” an essay not exceeding 1,500 words or, in special cases, 1,750. In my day, a newspaper column was 500 words. The column — a single column of type — began at the top of the page and ended at the bottom.

Woolf pointed out the relationship between length and frequency. Where Lamb wrote one essay, Beerbohm might write two and Hilaire Belloc 365.

 

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.

 

I agree with the first sentence. Anyone who’s done it can tell a story about heartbreak. But I’m dubious about the second claim. Some writers trust the public a great deal, while others don’t. Some worry about giving offense. Others don’t.

But I sympathize with trying to write for people who are busy, harried, overwhelmed. Trying to give them something, even if it’s short, seems worthwhile to me.

• “The Modern Essay” is in Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Incorporated, 1925. Project Gutenberg has it here:

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300031h.html#C18

Old Tragedy

 Maybe it’s an acquired taste, but I don’t think so. I loved the plays of Aeschylus the first time I read them decades ago. I love Old Tragedy.

If you don’t know what Old Tragedy it, it’s basically — and superficially —two actors and a chorus.

But as H.D.F. Kitto points out, it’s a different concept. Those of us who grew up on Hollywood movies have a sensibility that is closer to the Middle Tragedy of Sophocles and the New Tragedy of Euripides. From the time of Sophocles, we’ve conceived of drama as a conflict or contest between characters. The Greek word for contest is agon. We speak of a protagonist and an antagonist. No conflict, no drama.

Before Sophocles, playwrights had a different view. Tragedy was not a contest between two characters. It was a hero facing his or her destiny. The drama played out within the hero, as he or she reacted to developments, thinking aloud in a conversation with the chorus.

That's Old Tragedy, and a lot of people don’t like it. It’s all talk. Not much happens. The action, what little there is, isn’t all that exciting.

But to some of us, the conflicts within ourselves are every bit as interesting as those we have with others.

Old Tragedy focuses on the fact that human beings make moral choices and sometimes we fail spectacularly. Sometimes, we slowly realize how our own flaws led to disaster. Such stories, to some of us, are irresistible. I shouldn’t want to watch such trainwrecks, but I can’t resist.

• Source: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The chapter on Old Tragedy is on pp. 33-67.

How it works

 Two old people, a woman and a man, are walking on a trail in the woods. She discovers she’s stepped in dog poop. She tries scraping her feet, but the treads of her new hiking boots are deep. And they’re new.

She, a city girl, is distressed. He, a country boy, is not. 

He makes her put two hands on a pine tree and lifts her foot, like a blacksmith working on the hoof of a horse. He works on the boot for a minute with a pine stick and then they’re on their way.

Two generations ago, when they were young, people wondered how it would work: two people, from such different backgrounds, with such different ways, trying to be together.

That’s how it works.

Aeschylus: ‘The Suppliant Maidens’

 We have only the first play in a trilogy by Aeschylus. Scholars still debate what the playwright was up to.

In myth, Zeus seduced or raped Io, daughter of a river god of Argos. Zeus turned Io into a heifer to protect her from his jealous wife, Hera. It didn’t work. Hera sent a gadfly, which pursued the heifer all the way to Egypt. Io regained human form and gave birth to Epaphus. In later generations, there were two brothers: Egyptus had 50 sons, and Danaus had 50 daughters. The 50 daughters, the Danaids, were pursued as unwilling brides by their cousins. The women fled to Argos, seeking protection. When Pelasgus, the Argive king, found the women in the sacred grove, he asked:

 

Who claims to be the calf of Zeus?

 

As yesterday’s note suggested, the dramatic question is whether Pelasgus and the Argives would protect the women. It was a sacred duty to protect suppliants. But if the Argives protected the women, it would mean war.

A favorite part in the play is when Pelasgus, horrified by the dilemma, seeks an easy way out. He suggests that marriage might not be a bad thing, keeping the money in the family and all. The women, speaking as the chorus, tell him that they’d rather die.

They point out the clasps and belts of their Egyptian dress and gradually make it clear that they’ll hang themselves from the statues of the gods if Pelasgus doesn’t act.

 

Chorus: Here, you know, are fine devices.

King: Tell me.

Chorus: Unless you promise —

King: What would your bands accomplish?

Chorus: Statues with new tablets to adorn.

King: Speak simply.

Chorus: From the gods to hang.

King: A whip to the heart.

Chorus: Now you understand, for eyes we gave you.

 

It’s an ancient story told well.

There are many items in this collection of notes about “one-night reads,” stories that can be read in a night. If you like those kinds of stories, these plays are hard to beat.

• Source and notes: “The Suppliant Maidens,” translated by Seth G. Benardete, is in Aeschylus II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1956. The quotations are on pp. 16 and 22-3. Almost everything about this play has been argued, including whether it was indeed the first in the trilogy, whether the series included a satyr play (making it a tetralogy), whether the lost plays The Egyptians and The Daughters of Danaus were the second and third parts. 

Going to the theater in 500 B.C.

 What was drama like around 500 B.C., when Aeschylus was learning to be a playwright? Greek tragedy changed rapidly in three generations: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Traditional drama had a single actor playing against a chorus. Aristotle says Aeschylus added a second actor and Sophocles added a third. Sophocles had new ideas about how to handle dialog. We soon had painted scenery, and Euripides was criticized for being overly fond of what we call “special effects.”

What was tragedy like before this exciting period began?

H.D.F. Kitto thought Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Maidens offers a good clue. Kitto calls the form “lyrical tragedy.” Here’s Kitto’s summary:

 

The chorus enters and expounds the situation; the actor enters and gives us an impression of his general position. Now all the dramatic forces are present; something may be kept back … but nothing new can enter. It is more important however to notice that nothing new is wanted. The limitation, like most limitations to the great artist, does not mean poverty but intensity.

 

The actor represented a main character, “drawn in outline only.” Playwrights would later explore the details of personality in their characters and would develop dialog as a way to show the quirks of that personality. But the characters in “lyrical tragedy” were a bit like paintings and sculptures in Classical Greece. They portrayed idealized forms with calm countenances — with no hint of individual expression on their faces.

We tend to think of drama in terms of personalities. The drama Kitto describes or imagines is more general. It’s simply a story of a human being confronting a moral problem, instead of a unique personality confronting a moral problem in a unique way.

In The Suppliant Maidens, the 50 daughters of Danaus show up in the Greek polis Argos, fleeing Egypt and forced marriages with their cousins.

They go to the altars of the gods and ask King Pelasgus for protection. The Greeks gods made it clear that it was a duty to protect suppliants. The Egyptian suitors made it clear that protecting the women would mean war.

In the past 2,500 years or so, writers have learned a few things about characterization. But in this play Pelasgus is just a human being, fated to be a leader, and doomed to make a choice that’s tragic. Is it better to expose your people to a horrific war or to the outrage of the gods?

The drama is in the moral question, rather than in the characters or the plot.

• Source: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954, p. 31. Greek scholars complained that Kitto was dated when I was in college 50 years ago. I still find his ideas stimulating. 

Christmas, Panola Mountain

 The sound of rain in the woods in winter is wonderful. The leaf litter is deep, and we could hear raindrops pattering over 20 acres of woodlands on a hillside near Panola Mountain.

We just listened. We got wet, but it was worth it.

Little streams are full and running. The water mumbles as it falls over rocks.

On Christmas Eve, we went to Yellow River.

We admired a lovely stand of foxtails, a grass in genus Setaria. The seed heads, dry and yellow, do look like foxtails.  

We also found some dried Pear-shaped puffballs, Apioperdon pyriforme, a kind of spherical fungus that grows on dead wood. The puffballs had died, hardened, lost their footing and rolled into a hollow of the log. It was if we’d stumbled across a bowlful of wooden marbles deep in the woods. Had Professor Tolkien been around, we could have talked of the work of elves.

William Stafford: ‘Just Thinking’

 The poet William Stafford used to get up at 4 a.m. to write. He was a teacher. He had a family, and early morning was the time he took for himself. If you wake up before other people, he said, you can be free for awhile.

That practice was a way of life, rather than a method, a matter of character, rather than of craft. Rising early as a practice is something that a person of a certain character does. A certain kind of personality finds the habit, almost as a need, and the habit shapes the person.

Stafford was a teacher of writers and explained his routine many times. One version is in his poem “Just Thinking,” which includes this stanza: 

 

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,

bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No on

stirring, no plans. Just being there.

 

That’s what I’ll be doing Christmas morning. I hope you get some quiet too.

Merry Christmas.

• William Stafford, The Way It Is; Minneapolis, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1998, pp. 32-3.

A note on fiction

 When two companies of Texas drovers would meet on the trail, they’d put their best man forward in a competition. If you’re guessing the contest involved marksmanship, you don’t know the old Texans. The contest involved lying.

Maybe a better word would be “fiction.”

J. Frank Dobie, in his essay “A Preface on Authentic Liars,” makes the distinction between authentic and inauthentic liars.

A pulp Western writer who writes that a Texas cowhand had blankets on his saddle in August is just a liar. Don’t look for redeeming qualities.

On the other hand, Dobie loved to tell about the cowboy who saw a blue Norther coming and tried to outrun it. He ran his horse hard and beat the storm by a head. In the barn, the cowboy wiped sweat off his horse’s nose and mane and treated the hindquarters for frostbite.

A lie about cowboys and their horses, perhaps, but the gospel truth about Texas weather.

• Sources: The essay is in J. Frank Dobie, Prefaces; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975, pp. 1-25. If the story sounds familiar, I’m guilty of telling it more than once (“February in Texas,” Feb. 16, 2022). Guilty, also, because I’ve been thinking about fiction.

A glimpse of Elizabeth Anscombe

 G.E.M. Anscombe was a student of Wittgenstein’s. She translated his Philosophical Investigations.

I’ve already mentioned that M.W. Rowe’s biography of J.L. Austin includes some fine portraits of people who played roles in the history of philosophy after World War II. His sketch of Anscombe is another example: 

 

Most unusually, in the intensely stuffy, pre-feminist, and conventional atmosphere of the 1950s Oxford, she simply didn’t care how other people saw her. She had no thought of using ‘Mrs.’ or taking her husband’s surname; she was fond of four-letter words …; she invariably — an unusually for the time — wore trousers, and when the doorman of an expensive Toronto restaurant explained that she could not enter wearing trousers, she simply took them off in front of him.

 

In the days when I was a newspaper editor, I hated to read profiles and obituaries of people in academic circles that provided endless lists of publications, lectures and committee assignments but failed to give a sense of personality. Even with limited space, it’s possible to do better.

• Source: M.W. Rowe, J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer; Oxford University Press, 2023, p. 558. 

Rugged individualism and bitter cold

 White-breasted nuthatches, which are common in the Georgia Piedmont, are cavity nesters, the biologists say. These birds roost in holes in trees.

Terry W. Johnson, a retired wildlife biologist who writes a wonderful blog, says these birds usually roost alone. But in cold weather, they share space, as many as 29 birds in the same cavity.

I'm thinking of Johnson's observation because temperatures have been in the 20s at night in the Piedmont for a week.

People in the North will smile, but I say that’s cold.

Source: Johnson’s blog is called Backyard Wildlife Connection. His post on nuthatches is here: 

https://backyardwildlifeconnection.com/2023/11/22/backyard-secret-white-breasted-nuthatches-change-their-roosting-habits-in-extremely-cold-weather/

Winter solstice

 Today’s the day that the sun stands still, or stops moving to the south and starts returning toward the north. The ancient peoples of the North helped it — or got in tune with it — by burning a yule log and hearing prophesies of the bards.

The winter solstice seems like a good time for settling accounts. It’s undeniably a long night. The workday is shortened. There’s time to think.

It also seems like a good time for fireplaces and candles, good lights for sitting and thinking, leaving the electric lights for working (on another day).

Maybe firelight and candlelight are the best lights for letting go of things, including all those plans for the year that didn’t work. Once I’ve said goodbye to the things that didn’t work, maybe it’ll be easier to think about the things that might work better.

Keeping a notebook

 Yesterday’s note about the habit of keeping a commonplace book made me wonder why more people don’t keep some kind of notebook.

The answer, of course, is that keeping a notebook is work.

The reason people forget that it’s work … well, that’s interesting. If you make it a daily practice and if you started long ago, you find that somewhere along the way the work turned into a habit. I have forgotten about the work. It’s just something I do.

William James put it this way:

 

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.

 

The quotation comes from “The Laws of Habit,” the eighth lecture in Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. James quotes a famous regret in Darwin’s autobiography. Darwin said that when he was young, he took pleasure in poetry, especially Shakespeare, and in music. But after years of scientific work, Darwin found he’d lost the ability to find joy in poetry and music. Here’s his lament: 

 

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive....

 

Here’s James’s comment:

             

We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before the destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not to let the greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view. We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled?

 

A few minutes a day with poetry, art, music. A few minutes with the natural world and with friends who can hold a conversation. A few minutes with spiritual and religious ideas — and with the work of philosophers.

That seems like a good life to me. It’s the kind of life that provokes thought, so it’s a good idea to make notes as you go.

• Source: William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1925. Project Gutenberg has it here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16287/16287-h/16287-h.htm#VIII__THE_LAWS_OF_HABIT

Swift: 'A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet'

 Jonathan Swift’s “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” is satire. It’s fun, with tongue-in-cheek advice.

Swift urges the young poet to give up his religion and points out the ways that the pursuit of wisdom and the life of a poet are not compatible. He praises rhyme and talks of rhyming Homer.

So let the buyer of this advice beware. If you follow it literally, you’ll become a cartoon of a poet, rather than a poet.

But in the satire, there was a note on commonplace books.

 

A common-place book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that “great wits have short memories;” and whereas, on the other hand, poets being liars by profession, ought to have good memories. To reconcile these, a book of this sort is in the nature of a supplemental memory; or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own by entering them there. For take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.

 

Still satire, rather than advice, but I love that phrase “a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation.”

If I go a day without seeing, hearing or reading something remarkable, it’s possible I’m living in a dull world. Or, more likely, it could be that I’m not paying attention.

• Source: Jonathan Swift, “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” is in English Essays from Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay; New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910, pp. 112-30. That’s Vol. 27 in The Harvard Classics, the “Five-Foot Shelf of Books” edited by Charles W. Eliot. But Bartleby has it here:

https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/hc/english-essays-from-sir-philip-sidney-to-macaulay/a-letter-of-advice-to-a-young-poet/

Logic, philosophy and a typewriter key

 Since Aristotle, logic has been considered a branch of philosophy. Logicians and philosophers teach in same academic departments at universities.

I’ve often wondered why. But I have a difficult time trying to explain why I’m baffled that the two enterprises are still under the same tent.

M.W. Rowe’s excellent biography of J.L. Austin has an interesting account of the American logician Willard Van Orman Quine. My courses in logic are more than 40 years old. While looking up some points, I ran across Quine’s obituary.

Quine, in addition to being a logician, was recognized for his work in the philosophy of science. But his love of science didn’t translate into a love of new technology. When personal computers were common, Quine held on to his typewriter, a 1927 Remington.

Because he used logical notation, Quine had to have some of the typewriter’s keys modified. The second period, second comma and the question mark had to go.

A reporter asked him whether he missed the question mark.

Quine replied that he dealt in certainties.

That story gets at my bafflement about logic and philosophy. Some philosophers would say that the question mark is the most important key on the keyboard.  

• Sources: The anecdote about the typewriter is in Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “W.V. Quine, Philosopher Who Analyzed Language and Reality, Dies at 92”; The New York Times, Dec. 29, 2000. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/29/arts/w-v-quine-philosopher-who-analyzed-language-and-reality-dies-at-92.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

M.W. Rowe, J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer; Oxford University Press, 2023. Rowe has an account of Quine’s rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction on p. 505. It’s clear and brief.

Morris: 'A Texas Education'

 My friend Phil, who was my boss during our newspaper days, sent me a clip of Willie Morris’s essay “A Texas Education.”

Morris, a native of Mississippi, went to the University of Texas and was editor of The Daily Texan during his senior year. His tenure was famous for a fight between the newspaper and the board of regents. It was a doozy: academic freedom, free speech and segregation.

The essay is mostly about that brawl. But the part that most interested me was how Morris, at 17, got off the bus in Austin and gradually came to understand what a university might be about. He told of being invited to the home of two graduate students and being stunned to see wall-to-wall books.

 

It is a rare experience for certain young people to see great quantities of books in a private habitat for the first time, and to hear them talked about seriously in the off-hours. Good God, they were doing it for pleasure, or so it seemed. 

 

People rarely ask, but when they do, that’s my answer. Why go to college? Why read books? Why think about writers and ideas when you could be making money, feeding the poor, fighting injustice and saving the world?

Pleasure. Some things you do for pleasure.

• Source: Willie Morris, “A Texas Education”; Commentary, August 1966. The article is here:

https://www.commentary.org/articles/willie-morris/a-texas-education/

Thanks, Phil.

Winter with thunder

 Winter arrived Dec. 10. The Wise Woman is a gardener and watches the weather. She knew a big cold front was coming, and we went into the forest at Panola Mountain to see it blow through.

We bundled up. She has a yellow foul-weather hat, the kind that you see in old pictures of New England fishermen. 

We walked until the big dog, sensing the front, told us it was time to turn around. The wind was at our backs when the cold rain began. We got wet and had a thoroughly good time listening to the thunder.

Verlyn Klinkenborg has appeared in these notes a couple of times recently. I think he’s a fine writer. If asked for one example, I’d quote his remark that a thunderstorm is the music of Rameau, not of Wagner.

If he’d written only that line, I’d remember him.

• Source: Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003, p. 80.

Just an accident

 I am reading a new biography of John Langshaw Austin, probably the chief figure in ordinary language philosophy. Rather than try to tell you what that is, let me give you an example.

Our concept of “accident” was influenced by Aristotle. He made a distinction between essential and accidental properties. If you are investigating what makes a human being human, it helps to focus on essential properties, rather on accidental properties, such as eye color or height.

The ancient Greeks had trouble defining the essential properties of humans. Humans are animals obviously. But what makes them distinct? Their sociability? Their moral faculties?

The essential properties proved tricky. But whatever it was that made a human being human, the accidental traits —whether a person had brown or blue eyes or was lefthanded or righthanded — didn’t matter. Two people could have different traits and still be human. Those traits were an accident, something that occurred by chance.

Students of logic don’t go far before absorbing the concept of “accident.”

But philosophical problems occur when concepts change, and the concept of “accident” has changed. Consider what’s happened since insurance companies started reckoning with automobiles.

An “accident” today is a car collision with no assignment of blame, even though everyone thinks, perhaps unfairly, that responsibility lies with the guy who was weaving in and out of traffic and who almost hit a pedestrian while driving on the shoulder to cut ahead of the car in front of him. But, since the collision occurred during a rare moment when the discourteous driver was in the proper lane and since assigning legal responsibility is an expensive process, no blame was assigned. It was just an accident.

Aristotle talked of accidents as events that lacked necessity — that occurred by chance. The sentence “The accident was inevitable” would have entailed a contradiction within the concept, making it incoherent.

Now, we speak of an accident as an “unfortunate event resulting especially from carelessness or ignorance.” We speak of “an accident waiting to happen.” It’s as if we are saying that the discourteous driver was so bad that the accident seemed almost necessary.

Maybe this is the simplest way to look at it: The senses of the word “accident” have evolved in different directions. What Aristotle called “accident” and what the insurance companies call an “accident” are not the same thing. We use the same word for contradictory concepts.

If you must think about accidents, be careful.

• Source: M.W. Rowe, J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer; Oxford University Press, 2023.

A sketch of Gilbert Ryle

 I’m reading M.W. Rowe’s biography of J.L. Austin because I’m interested in ordinary language philosophy. I’d recommend the book, although I know that my enthusiasm for the subject is not widely shared.

Still, there’s some wonderful writing. Here’s a sketch of Gilbert Ryle, whose book The Concept of Mind, published in 1949, is often cited as an early example of this approach to philosophy.

 

Tall and upright (he had been a rower in his youth), Ryle had a box-like, knobbly head and a strong face — with a shallow slightly jutting jaw, and a wide thin-lipped mouth whose corners gradually turned downwards as he aged. Not a man given to introspection, he tended to be brusque, punctuating his sentences with a distinctive half-cough, and seeming to bark answers to question. Although the general impression was semi-military, most found him an exceptionally nice man — decent, uncondescending, unpretentious, generous with his time, and concerned to notice people who were likely to be overlooked. …

In cultural matters, he affected a breezy no-nonsense philistinism saying, for example, that he had no ear for tunes, although he made an exception for literature and deeply admired Jane Austen. When asked whether he ever read novels, he replied ‘Oh yes. All six. Every year,’ and he himself developed an excellent prose style, characterized by epigrams and lists.

 

If this were a character in a short story, I’d keep reading.

• Source: M.W. Rowe, J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer; Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 392-3. For more on this book, see “Reading your way into it,” Nov. 6, 2023, and “Intelligence officers, philosophers and eccentrics,” Nov. 7, 2023.

365 stories

 Ray Newman, a writer in Bristol, started 2023 by planning to read 365 short stories.

He did it, and you can see which stories he liked most at A Personal Anthology, a site that asks invited guest to talk about 12 of their favorite stories. 

Newman said some interesting things about his journey. I liked these two points, especially:

• A story a day sounds like a lot. But if you assume that the average short story collection has 10 pieces, that’s 37 books, which somehow sounds better.

• “The time was easy to find: I just spent less time refreshing Twitter, and more time with a paperback in my hand.”

I’m thinking about what I want to read in 2024. More stories would be good.

• Source: https://apersonalanthology.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Getting familiar

 Verlyn Klinkenborg says he carries simple botanical keys around in his head for the same reason we learn the stars — not to be an expert, but “to feel at home on the Earth.”

We speak of knowing the stars. We’re familiar with them, almost friendly. 

A year after moving from Texas, I’m becoming familiar with the common plants of the Georgia Piedmont. Only by learning the natives can you learn to spot the strangers, the intruders, the species (like me) that are invasive.

When I walk the dog, I make it a point to wave at every neighbor and passing car. At first, my behavior struck people as odd. One fellow told me people assumed I was a new arrival to the metro area, fresh from the country. A year later, it’s surprising how many people stop to talk.

Of course, my way of learning about a new place is out of style.

Instead, newcomers are greeted by companies that push security systems. They can provide you with security cameras that give you alerts on your phone every time motion is detected. You can subscribe to apps that will alert you to every crime reported within miles of your new house.

This technology is the way of the world. But, like Klinkenborg, I’m less interested in the ways of the world than in finding a way to feel at home on the Earth.

• Source: Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003, p. 19.

December in Stone Mountain

 I went into the woods south of Stone Mountain just to see the beech forest. American beeches, though deciduous, are marcescent. They don’t shed their old leaves until the new ones arrive in spring.

The deep woods are open now that the oak and hickory leaves are on the ground. You can see a deer 200 yards away. But then you come to a stretch of bottomland where beeches are dominant and you see trees heavy with brown, tan and taupe leaves. 

It’s beautiful to my eye.

The stands of dogfennel are also beautiful. They’re head tall plants that seem to grow feathers when it’s time to broadcast their seeds.

We think of winter as barren, but seeds are everywhere, flying through the air and sticking to your trousers. The big, shaggy dog came out of the woods with an impressive collection.

It was cold and rainy — and quiet for a bit. But then about 20 crows became frantic about something I couldn’t see. People who think dogs can bark forever and describe canines as the most longwinded complainers don’t know crows. Sonically, 20 crows are more like a marching band than a string quartet.

• Note: If you really want to know why beeches don’t shed their leaves until spring, see “And baffled by the beeches,” Feb. 7, 2023.

A philistine looks at art

 Experts call them Goya’s “Black Paintings.” Francisco de Goya painted them in his last days, and he painted the pictures on a wall, though they are now in the Prado. Some people find the images terrifying and difficult to look at.

I love one of them. 

Goya didn’t title these paintings and didn’t call them his “Black Paintings.” Experts caution that people tend to see things in Goya that might or might not be there. People call the painting I love “The Drowning Dog” because many people see a dog and they also see that the dog is caught in an enormous wave.

I see the dog but not the wave.

I’m a country boy, used to looking at landscape, emphasis on land. Even on the plains of West Texas, land rises and falls, breaks and folds. The Earth is filled with ridges. I’ve seen coyotes suddenly appear as if they emerged from of the earth and then noticed that they were coming over a barely perceptible ridge, maybe 6 inches high.

Instead of seeing a doomed dog caught in an enormous wave, which seems unlikely, I see an ordinary dog doing what canines do — they pop up in ways that humans find hard to understand.

Many native people who were here before the Europeans said that when it is time for a human being to die, the human doesn’t need to worry. A canine will pop up and show the human’s spirit where to go.

I’ve looked and looked at copies of Goya’s famous painting. I just don’t have it in me to see what so many others see — something so forbidding, so fearful.

• Sources: For an explanation of the Black Paintings and an illustration of “The Drowning Dog” see Stephen Phelan, “Goya’s Black Paintings: ‘Some people can hardly even look at them’; The Guardian, Jan. 30, 2019. Jung mentions the image in Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols; New York: Anchor Press, 1988. 

The pockets of coveralls

 One of the puzzles of life is how baling twine collects in the pockets of coveralls. Here’s what Verlyn Klinkenborg has to say about it: 

It’s hard to describe the emergency that a length of bailing twine would fix, but you’d know one if you ever rode into one.

 

If you’re a certain kind of crofter or householder, you ride into most of these emergencies yourself, rather than call for help. And so odd bits of twine, wire and hardware tend to collect in your pockets, along with an assortment of tools, nails, screws and staples.

Sometimes you try to organize your pockets. But poorly stocked pockets are useless in an emergency. And if you carry everything you might need, you find that you can’t sit down when you finally get to your easy chair.

Yesterday, the dog barked, pointing out some horrific problem at the back of the place. When I investigated a saw the raccoon, intent on coming in from the cold.

My pockets were stocked and ready for trouble. But there are emergencies that bailing twine won’t fix.

• Source: Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003, p. 10.

How the Christmas goose got to town

 Texans like to talk about the cowboys who drove big herds over the trails to market before the West was fenced in. But, given the season, I’ve been thinking about the goose drives of even earlier days.

Thomas Bewick, author of A History of British Birds, saw one in 1783.

He was in Chelmsford, 30 miles northeast of London, when a flock of 9,000 waddled through. The birds were headed for market in the big city.

Like the cowboys of the Wild West, the goose guys of England were generally young and poor, desperate enough to accept the hardships of the trail. The drivers got their birds moving at 3 a.m. and stopped for the day at 9 p.m. They could make eight to 10 miles a day, Bewick said.

Bewick, if you don’t know him, was a wood engraver who was interested in nature. His History is the forerunner of our field guides. If you’re a collector of field guides, as I am, you owe Bewick a libation. Bewick is the patron saint of a healthy section of my library.

• Sources: A good place is the Bewick Society, http://www.bewicksociety.org/

I heard the story from Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009. This  wonderful book has been mentioned many times.

A writer talks of setting

 Willa Cather claimed she detested elaborate settings. She wanted writers to get to the drama. Elaborate descriptions of the setting infuriated her. She wanted to see a room left “as bare as the stage of a Greek theater.”

It’s ironic that one of the great settings in American literature comes from the story “Neighbor Rosicky.” Rosicky, a Czech speaker, had left the old country and settled on a homestead in Nebraska. He’s a good man with a bad heart. His doctor and his wife have told him he must take it easy.

 

That winter he stayed in the house in the afternoons and carpentered, or sat in the chair between the window full of plants and the wooden bench where the two pails of drinking-water stood. This spot was called “Father’s Corner,” though it wasn’t a corner at all. He had a shelf there, where he kept his Bohemian papers and his pipes and tobacco, and his shears and needles and thread and tailor’s thimble. Having been a tailor in his youth, he couldn’t bear to see a woman patching at his clothes, or at the boys’. He liked tailoring and always patched all the overalls and jackets and work shirts. Occasionally he made over a pair of pants that one of the older boys had outgrown, for the little fellow.

While he sewed, he let his mind run back over his life.

 

I can see every detail of that place. Father’s Corner is better than any man cave.

By the way, I’m absolutely not marking the birthdays of literary heroes this year. But if you happen to know that Cather was born on Dec. 7, 1873, that’s your business.

• Source: “Neighbor Rosicky” is in Willa Cather, Great Short Works of Willa Cather, edited by Robert K. Miller; New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1992. The quotation is on pp. 227-8. Cather’s scathing remarks about writers who overset the setting of a story are in the essay “The Novel Demoublé,” in Willa Cather, On Writing; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. 

Quiet rooms and small refuges

 Dag Hammarskjöld had a role in the building the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. He was especially interested in what he called The Room of Quiet, a place where people who were making important decisions could sit in silence and think.

Hammarskjöld paid attention to the details. When the room was done, he wrote a pamphlet, The Room of Quiet, published by the UN in 1957. He said:

 

We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence. This house, dedicated to work and debate in the service of peace, should have one room dedicated to silence in the outward sense and stillness in the inner sense.

 

I have been thinking about small places of relative quiet and refuge in our big, fast, noisy world. The Christian Science Monitor has a lovely essay in the latest edition about how putting rocking chairs in the terminal changed the atmosphere of the airport in Charlotte, N.C.

On a trail at Arabia Mountain, the Wise Woman sat on a bench and put down water for the dog. She noticed the memorial marker on the bench and observed what a lovely gift it was — a small place of refuge for the public, offered by fellow citizens in a moment of grief.

• Note: For more on Hammarskjöld, see “A man who wrote memos to himself,” Nov. 3, 2023.

A first lesson on writing

 The most important writing lesson is the first one, the one that helps you decide whether you are a writer, a person who writes.

One of the best first lessons I’ve seen comes from a person who doesn’t like to write. Marc Payne, an information technology guy, did an interview with the Cool Tools blog, recommending index cards as tools.

Payne wanted to keep a record of his life. Every day, he records something on an index card: what he’s doing, a book he’s reading, a quote, something.

He dates the card and puts it in a card catalog tray. Today’s card goes in front of the card for Dec. 5, 2022, which is front of the card for Dec. 5, 2021. If Payne wants to see what he was up to a year ago or five years ago, he can find something about the day.

Asked why he preferred index cards to a notebook, Payne answered that he didn’t really like to write, but the small size of the notecard seemed manageable.

The part of the lesson I’d take home: Try small, manageable, often. Just try. See whether this kind of writing is for you. If it is, then you can proceed to Lesson 2, and start studying the craft.

I like the interview because I think that writing, at some level, has a lot to do with how you live your life.

• Source: “Marc Payne, IT Specialist,” Show and Tell #393, Cool Tools, 1 Dec. 2023.

interview by Kevin Kelly, blog founder, is here:

https://kk.org/cooltools/

The part about index cards starts at 2:24.

The strange ways of cats

  I have always loved dogs. I have a cat because the Wise Woman loves cats.

The cat and the Wise Woman have a warm and loving relationship, but the cat is cautious.

For example, the cat does not sleep next to the Wise Woman. I grew up in the Navy, sleeping on racks, bunks that are remarkably narrow. If you roll over in a Navy rack, you fall out. Among the joys of boot camp is hearing a shipmate’s scream in the middle of the night followed by the thud of a body hitting the deck. You learn, quickly, to sleep despite occasional screaming. You also learn to sleep without moving.

The Wise Woman was never in the Navy and rolls around in her sleep.

The cat sleeps next to me, keeping as far away from the Wise Woman as he can get.

The cat has discovered that it is best to summon me, rather the Wise Woman, when he gets hungry. He has discovered that the best way to rouse the manservant at 5:30 a.m. is by vigorous licking with his sandpaper tongue. He has discovered that even slugabeds will move if you lick near an eye. He has also discovered that it is not wise to rouse the Wise Woman in this way.

I do not know how it happened, but I have become the feeder of the cat and the cleaner of the litterbox.

I also don’t know how this happened: I could not bear to live in a house without a cat.

Support for higher education

 I’m pretty sure that some of my mother’s people were among the original illegal immigrants in Texas.

In the days of Spanish rule, it was illegal for English-speaking people who were not Catholic to enter the realm. I’m pretty sure that some of my ancestors were in the woods of East Texas before it was legal.

They were sharing the woods with Cherokee people, before almost all of them were shamefully forced off their lands in 1839. My grandmother told tales of Old Larissa, a community in Cherokee County. Some of the old timers spoke of the victims and survivors of the Killough Massacre as if the family knew them.

The old-time nature of the family came out in odd ways. I’m fond of the University of Texas, but my mother spoke reverently of Southwestern, the oldest college in Texas.

That memory got me thinking about what “education” must have meant to my ancestors, who admired it from afar.

In our time, fewer states have fought harder to undermine public education at all levels. But in the 1800s, people believed that Texas needed improvement and that education would do the trick.

People did unusual things to support the founding of a college.

J. Frank Dobie tells the story of the Rev. Andrew Jackson Potter, a Methodist minister who was assigned to raise $500 for Southwestern. The prevailing wage was $1 a day.

Potter raised $200 by the deadline. But he knew a gambler who wasn’t above methods that insured success. Potter gave the $200 to the gambler, who doubled it in one hand.

Potter met his fundraising goal. There are no reports of ethical qualms.

• J. Frank Dobie, Prefaces; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975, p. 31.

Jung: 'Man and his Symbols'

  If you are tired of mythology, don’t despair. This is just a note about the book itself: It’s another example of the kind of book I wish my friends would write.

John Freeman, a journalist, interviewed Carl G. Jung for the BBC in 1959. Freeman urged Jung to write a book for laymen about his thought and work. Jung patiently listened and firmly said no.

But Jung had a dream. Instead of consulting with other psychiatrists, scholars and specialists as he did in life, the Jung of this dream was talking to ordinary people — and they understood him.

The byline says the book was “conceived and edited” by Jung. Jung wrote the introductory essay of about 85 pages. But he also wanted to include essays by colleagues who had developed and expanded his work.

Freeman said Jung worked on the book the last year of his life.

I have known people who spent a lot of time planning their funeral and burial. I wish that people would spend a little time writing about their own thought, the ideas that sometime took possession of a life.

I’d like a book, but an essay would be even better.

• Source: Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols; New York: Anchor Press, 1988. John Freeman tells the story of how the book came to be in the Forward.

A day to remember

 Last year, I marked dates that are important to me, such as the birthdays of literary heroes.

This year, I’ve been making an effort not to do that. I’m trying to move on to other experiments.

Today’s an exception. On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus. It was the most human of crimes: She refused to be defined by others.

Her action affected millions of lives, including my own. I wasn’t two months old, but the event happened in my lifetime. As I grew older, human beings landed on the moon, invented the Internet, unraveled the genome and experimented with artificial intelligence.

But if I were asked to name the most significant event in American history in my lifetime … well, I’m marking the day.