Georgia Piedmont, late February

 One of the beauties of early spring in the Georgia Piedmont is the dimpled trout lily.

Erythronium umbrilicatum has thick green leaves, speckled with a purplish brown. The flowers have six petals and are bright yellow. The anthers are purple.

I saw my first blooms of the year on Feb. 24 near Arabia Mountain. Last year, I saw them on Feb. 23 near Stone Mountain.

The biologists count trout lilies among the “spring ephemerals,” plants that thrive in the sunlight on the forest floor before the trees put on leaves. They ephemerals become dormant when the canopy fills in, shutting off sunlight below. The Georgia Native Plant Society lists trilliums, bloodroot and mayapples as spring ephemerals.

• Source: The Georgia Native Plant Society’s page on dimpled trout lilies is here:

https://gnps.org/march-2019-dimpled-trout-lily/

Something to read for a while

 Montaigne, the master of the essay, said:

Learned we may be with another man’s learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.

 

Eric Hoffer said he came to Montaigne by happy coincidence. He’d finished the season as a migrant laborer and thought he might spend the winder doing some prospecting. He had a premonition he would be snowed in. So he went to a used bookstore and asked the owner for a big thick book, small type, no pictures. It didn’t matter what it was. He just needed something to read that would last a while.

As in all Hoffer’s tales, something wonderful happens. He’s snowed in. He finds a book that not only carries him through the winter but intrigues him for a lifetime.

Hoffer claimed to have learned what a sentence was by reading Montaigne in Florio’s translation.

I think Hoffer learned Montaigne’s habits of mind: to find a question that interested him, to consider what others had said about it and then make up your own mind.

I came to Montaigne through Hoffer, through his barely believable claim that an uneducated or badly educated person could get an education by reading one book.

Barely believable and somehow true.

• Sources: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993. The quotation is in “On schoolmasters’ learning,” p. 155.  Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born Feb. 28, 1533. Today’s a feast day in my calendar.

The ones you take to heart

 While wondering about the influences that shape us, a line of Peter Orner’s came up: 

Stories, both my own and those I’ve taken to heart, make up whatever it is that I’ve become.

 

That’s it, isn’t it? The stories we take into our heart are like the stray dogs we take into the kitchen, allegedly just for one night. The world is full of stories, just as it’s full of stray dogs. But the ones you take to heart get you. Once inside, they don’t leave.

• Sources: Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live; New York: Catapult, 2016. 

Sanders: ‘Under the Influence’

 Scott Russell Sanders is a fine essayist. His meditation on what it’s like to be the child of an alcoholic is said to be a classic.

It begins:

 

My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food — compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because he ever quit drinking but because he quit living.

 

I kept reading, trusting that voice to tell me something that I, a child of teetotalers, know about only from a distance. Sanders’s essay gave me a better understanding of something that’s hard for anyone to understand.

All of us must try to understand the influences that shape us. Sanders’s attempt is courageous.

He says that one of the reactions to alcoholism within a family is secrecy. You don’t want outsiders to know. The secrecy is linked to shame, which in turn can explode in anger.

Sanders decided to write about his experience when his young son began to try to take responsibility for Sanders’s own depression. The boy thought if he were a better son, he could fix his father’s life. Sanders recognized the pattern.

 

I write, therefore, to drag into the light what eats at me — the fear, the guilt, the shame — so that my own children may be spared.

 

We write for many reasons. This is the one that most interests me.

When people question the value of the literature … well, they must be talking about some other kind of literature.

• Source: Scott Russell Sanders’s “Under the Influence” was originally published in Harper’s, November 1989. I have it in The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate; New York: Anchor Books, 1994, pp. 733-44. The quotations are on pp. 733 and 744. The essay is online:

https://sfuadadvancedcnf.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/under-the-influence-scott-russell-sanders.pdf

A book I’d like to read

 I wish someone would publish Eric Hoffer’s notebooks.

Hoffer’s biographer, Tom Bethell, says there are 131 of them at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Bethel gave several examples of the kinds of notes Hoffer made in an article published in Harper’s in 2005. This one, written in 1951, seems like description of a lot of people I met in Texas politics who had a party affiliation, rather than an identity:

 

The Incomplete Individual

It is fearfully simple: The incomplete individual cannot stand on his own, cannot make sense of himself. He is a part and not a self-sufficient whole. He can make sense, have a purpose, and seem useful when he becomes a part of a functioning whole.

 

I’m less interested in Hoffer’s politics than in the way he worked as a writer.

He did research at the public library. He’d make notes and copy passages that interested him. He’d then work through the notes, making connections with other ideas in other notebooks, recasting ideas until they were clear, discarding the old notes as newer, better ideas emerged in clearer, briefer language.

Hoffer owned few books and few other possessions. Lili Osborne, who was close to him, said that when Hoffer died it took about an hour to clean out his room.

It seems like a good way to work to me.

• Source: Tom Bethell, “Eric Hoffer and the art of the notebook”; Harper’s Magazine, July 1, 2005.

A philosopher's reading habits

 A recent note discussed an old interview with the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who’d just joined the faculty at Notre Dame. It was an introduction.

When the interviewer asked what he thought a good education would consist of, and MacIntyre said: “What every child needs … ”

It struck me that you can learn a lot about a person by asking about his views on education.

The last question was about the books that MacIntyre read outside his field.

It hit me again: You can learn a lot about a person by asking about his reading habits.

Here’s how MacIntyre responded:

• Tough calls about whether it’s philosophy or some other kind of literature: Dante, Jane Austen, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Borges.

• Books read every 20 years or so: Redgauntlet, Women in Love, To the Lighthouse.

• Books read more often: Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Too-Birds.

• Short stories: Flannery O’Connor, Peter Taylor and Máritín O’Cadhain.

• Books that helped him survive the past 20 years: Saichi Maruya’s Singular Rebellion, Randal Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, Robertson Davie’s Rebel Angels, Patrick McGinley’s Bogmail.

• Books he hoped to be reading in the next 20 years: The Táin Bó Cúailnge, Eileen O’Connell’s “The Lament for Art O’Leary,” Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero,” the poetry of George Campbell Hay, Sorley MacLean, Iain Crichton Smith and Máritín O’Direáin.

• The “perpetual low-life diet”: Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, etc.

Interesting list. Interesting organization.

• Source: “In Interview with Alasdair MacIntyre,” Cogito, Summer 1991. For the  original note, see “What every child needs,” Feb. 18, 2024.

Eccentrics on the high seas

 Fletcher Pratt, who was known as a writer of science fiction and fantasy, posed this theory: 

Whenever a novelist, from Tobias Smollett down to Robert Louis Stevenson, has wanted an eccentric character, he has drawn either a painter or a sea captain, and usually the latter.

 

Do you think it’s true?

I’d have guessed you’d have found more eccentrics among English vicars and college professors. My own experience with eccentrics leans heavily toward people who write for and edit newspapers.

Pratt has plenty of examples of eccentric captains. He includes pirates, which hardly seems fair.

My favorite is Tordenskjold, also known as Peter Wessel, born in Trondheim when Norway was part of Denmark. He became an officer in the Danish Navy.

In 1714, Tordenskjold led his 18-gun frigate Løvendals Gallej against the 28-gun De Olbing Galley, which had been built in Britain and was under the command of a British captain named Bactmann. The ship had been placed in service of Sweden and was headed for Gothenburg.

The fight went on for 14 hours.

Tordenskjold couldn’t board the bigger ship with its bigger crew. The bigger ship was too damaged to catch its more agile tormenter.

Tordenskjold, under a flag of truce, complimented Bactmann on the interesting fight and said he’d gladly continue it, but he’d run out of powder. He asked if he could borrow some.

Bactmann declined. After toasts, the two ships limped away.

It's a good example of eccentricity. But I still doubt that sea captains are the foremost eccentrics.

• Source: Fletcher Pratt, “Some Naval Eccentricities”; U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 57/9/343, September, 1931. You can find it here:

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1931/september/some-naval-eccentricities

Lamb's peculiar diction

 Among the peculiarities of Charles Lamb’s writing is his diction.

When I looked up “decussated,” which means to intersect or cross, Merriam-Webster said the verb was coined in 1658 by Sir Thomas Browne, a neglected writer Lamb championed. The adjective arrived around 1823, when Lamb was at his peak. The adjective has got to be Lamb’s work.

If you’re a Lamb reader, you might know:

• tumid — convoluted language, the opposite of “simplicity” in writing, as Eric G. Wilson observes.

• pleonasm — redundancy, wordiness.

• atrabiliousness — melancholy. (“Melancholy” is based on the Greek for black bile, which allegedly caused the mood. “Atrabiliousness” is based on the Latin.) 

Lamb’s writing is also a museum of artifacts that mostly have gone the way of 19^th century life. Such as:

• saloop — sassafras tea served with milk and sugar.

• rappee — dark snuff.

• besom — a broom, especially one made of twigs.

• griskin — pork loin, especially the lean end.

I could go on, but I’d guess that for most folks a little Lamb goes a long way.

Changing seasons, changing colors

 Arabia Mountain has streaks of red on its granite outcrops. Elf-orpine a small, primitive plant has changed colors, from green to red.

Diamorpha smallii is a rare plant that grows on the granite. It’s baffling. If you asked skilled gardeners to look at the “soil” that the little plants are growing in, they’d probably ask for a magnifying glass.

A couple of weeks ago, the elf-orpines were green. In spring, the plants turn red and then put out white flowers. The change of color seems early to me, but I’m a newcomer to Georgia.

Elf-orpines are living dinosaurs among the plants. They are pollinated by ants, having evolved before bees.

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

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

Sophocles: ‘Electra’

 Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, says that Electra is the play that gives Sophocles critical readers the most trouble. 

The heroine, however much we may pity her, whatever her character may have been capable of, has become a harsh, unlovely woman, a credit to her own mother, as she herself says (v. 609). 

 

Electra is indeed her mother’s daughter. Her mother, Queen Clytemnestra, murdered her husband, Agamemnon. Electra seeks vengeance against her own mother for killing her father.

Kitto says we modern readers tend to trip over two words. First, theos is usually translated “god,” but we think that a god must be benevolent. The Greeks reckoned Ares as a god. We think of war perhaps as a force, and not a benevolent one.

Second, dike usually is translated “justice,” but it also has a primitive sense of “the way” or “the right way.” To the Greeks, “justice” could mean putting things back in balance, and that’s not necessarily a benevolent process. A damaging flood can relieve a drought. Although the flood restores the balance of nature, it might be a tragedy for people.

In Aeschylus, Electra’s brother Orestes is commanded by the god Apollo to kill his mother as a matter of justice.

There’s no such command in Sophocles’ play. In Sophocles, dike is natural. It’s natural that a person of Electra’s character would live for vengeance. It’s just a law of nature. Violence produces violent reactions.

There’s much beautiful poetry in Electra. These lines, spoken by Electra, get to Sophocles’ theme:

   

Terrors compelled me,

to terrors I was driven.

I know it, I know my own spirit.

 

Evil is all around me, evil

is what I am compelled to practice.

 

The hate you feel for me and what you do

compel me against my will to act as I do.

For ugly deeds are taught by ugly deeds.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Electra is on pp. 135-42. The quotation is on p. 135.

Electra, translated by David Grene, is in Sophocles II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 121-87. The quotations are on pp. 134, 137 and 149.

Loving something others don't

 I was delighted by Dana Gioia’s essay “The Imaginary Operagoer: A Memoir.”

He grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles, a place where opera was not loved. But he decided that it must be wonderful, so he read everything he could about it. He learned the history, the composers, the stars. He dreamed about the day he’d get to go see one.

 

Many children lead secret lives. Mine was simply more elaborate than most. In public, I was an excellent student with an unpronounceable last name, a bit of a loner, terrible at sports. It was not a glamorous identity, but it was a manageable one. In private, I was a voluptuary who lived in his imagination fired by music, books, and art. I was never bored by solitude. I was preoccupied with things no one else liked.

 

Gioia had an uncle who was a merchant seaman who had boxes of books and records. Every child needs to have someone like that uncle.

We’re early in the year, but Gioia has already made it a good year for essays.

• Source: Dana Gioia, “The Imaginary Operagoer: A Memoir”; The Hudson Review, 2024.

https://hudsonreview.com/2024/02/the-imaginary-operagoer-a-memoir/

What every child needs

 I’ve lived my life surrounded by teachers, good ones who have examined the question of what an education should be. Since I am not, and have never been, an educator, I’m not in position to say.

But I ran across this from Alasdair MacIntyre, who would be on my short list of living philosophers whose ideas are interesting:

 

What every child needs is a lot of history and a lot of mathematics, including both the calculus and statistics, some experimental physics and observational astronomy, a reading knowledge of Greek, sufficient to read Homer or the New Testament, and if English-speaking, a speaking knowledge of a modern language other than English, and great quantities of English literature, especially Shakespeare. Time also has to be there for music and art.

 

MacIntyre is talking about education to prepare students for college. He thought we need fewer subjects and more depth.

 

(Such an education) would produce in our students habits of mind which would unfit them for the contemporary world. But to unfit students for the contemporary world ought in any case to be one of our educational aims.

 

What I like is the notion of what an education is for: to develop habits of mind.

I’m interested because I have contradictory views about my own habits of mind. It’s obvious that they need work — a transformation, rather than a tune-up. It’s also obvious that at 68 my habits of mind are largely set.

• Source: “In Interview with Alasdair MacIntyre,” Cogito, Summer 1991. The interview was introducing MacIntyre to the community at the University of Notre Dame. He had been appointed professor of philosophy. He’s 95.

A story of strategic importance

Xenophon tells the story of how Socrates gently questioned Glaucon, who’d decided a person with his talents should get into the management of public affairs.

Socrates asked him how he would rate the land and naval forces of Athens compared to those of its enemies.

Glaucon said he couldn’t say off the top of his head.

Socrates asked if he would like to consult his notes.

Glaucon didn’t have any.

The teacher was reminding his student that it’s hard to make good policy decisions when you don’t have a clue about the facts.

I thought of that story the day after I read Professor Milan Vego’s paper “On Naval Theory.” Vego teaches at the U.S. Naval War College. Among the things Vego tells his students:

 

The most important factor that affects the character of war at sea is the international balance of power.

 

And then:

 

Experience shows the great danger of underestimating or, even worse, ignoring other changes in the international security environment, demography, and law of the sea and their effect on the character of the future war at sea.

 

Those changes in the international security environment are serious business. Organizations like NATO depend on trust, like our banking system. And if you have people constantly undermining the public’s confidence in the banking system — or, say, in NATO — things can unravel.

That’s the kind of thing the experts tell naval officers who are selected to go to the War College, which is generally a requirement for higher command.

The day after I finished Professor Vego’s essay, a former president did his best to undermine confidence in NATO. That’s when I thought of poor Glaucon. 

• Sources: Vego, Milan (2023) “On Naval Theory,” Naval War College Review: Vol. 76: No. 3, Article 6. 

Available at:

https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol76/iss3/6

Xenophon’s story is in his Memorabilia.

Yellow River, high water

 The Yellow River was yellow on Valentine’s Day. It was carrying a lot of sand with some clay after the rains. The current seemed to be moving at 3 or 4 mph.

About a mile and a half south of the Rock Bridge, a natural formation of boulders that the Cherokee and Choctaw used as a crossing, the river takes a hard left, turning to the east. We’re on the eastern side of the Eastern Divide, meaning the Yellow River eventually flows into the Atlantic. Over the ridge along Rockbridge Road, the watershed of the Chattahoochee flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

A little creek empties into the river near the bend, and Gunter, the enormous dog, wanted to explore. 

Valentine’s Day is also his birthday, and so we went, curious to see what was so interesting to him. The creek has sandy banks. Gunter found tracks showing where deer had crossed the creek and raccoon had fished in it.

Another furlong below the creek are some rapids. We climbed the bluff on the south bank and listened to the river sing.

Sophocles: ‘Antigone’

 Sophocles is at it again: this play has two central characters, not one.

And I am at it again, following Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the tragedies.

Antigone, the title character, is gone before the play gets started. Her fate is straightforward, and she faces it with resolve and courage.

Creon, the new king of Thebes, has decreed that anyone who tries to bury Polyneices, who attacked the city with an army, will be executed. Polyneices was Antigone’s brother. She buries him. 

All the drama lies with Creon. He is so sure of that his decree is righteous.

But the chorus of Theban elders hesitates about whether the decree is wise. News comes that Antigone is defying the decree. Creon’s son Haemon, who is Antigone’s fiancé, pleads for her life and suggests the decree is unjust. Word comes that the people of the city are grumbling. Teiresias the prophet tells Creon bluntly that he’s making a catastrophic blunder.

Creon has many chances to back away from a bad decision. But he does not because he cannot. He’s the kind of leader who can’t admit he’s wrong — can’t change his mind even when the evidence mounts that he’s heading toward disaster.

About tyranny they were never wrong, the old Greek tragedians, how well they understood how quickly an inability to empathize with others leads to insensitivity and then cruelty, erodes trust, makes a person forever suspicious. People who are so self-centered and distrusting of others are unable to take counsel, unable to yield, unable to change course. They come to ruin, as do those who follow them. It’s a law of nature.

There are so many good lines in this play it’s hard to pick a favorite. But today it’s Tiresias verdict on the tyrant:

 

Stubbornness and stupidity are twins.

 

And, after a bitter argument:

 

Let him spend his rage

on younger men and learn to keep his tongue,

and keep a better mind than now he does.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Antigone is on pp. 129-35. 

Antigone, translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, is in Sophocles I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 157-204. The quotations are on pp. 193 and 196.

Sophocles: ‘Ajax’

 A tip about Sophocles’ play Ajax: It’s not really about Ajax, who kills himself halfway through the play. It’s also not about Odysseus, who is onstage at the beginning and end of the play. It’s about the contrast between the two.

That’s how professor H.D.F. Kitto reads it. With that insight, you can see things in Sophocles’ gorgeous poetry that you might otherwise miss.

Ajax was, except for Achilles, the Greek’s greatest warrior. He was the bravest. He was indifferent to his own hardships and sufferings, which is a virtue — but he was also indifferent to the sufferings of his men, which is not.

That’s the flaw: Ajax didn’t really empathize with others, so he didn’t understand them. He couldn’t understand Odysseus or his success. When the top honor was given to Odysseus rather than to Ajax, Ajax could think of no reason why Odysseus was deserving. The only reason something like that could have happened was that Odysseus was dishonest — the competition was rigged.

By contrast, Odysseus could empathize with Ajax. He understood Ajax was a superb warrior. Odysseus was empathetic and sympathetic. When Ajax suffered, Odysseus felt pity.

Kitto says Sophocles is relentlessly moral. His point is that one of these ways of living is better than the other.

Among my favorite lines are these, spoken by Odysseus as he thinks of Ajax:

Yet I pity

His wretchedness, though he is my enemy,

For the terrible yoke of blindness that is on him.

I think of him, yet also of myself;

For I see the true state of all of us that live —

We are dim shapes, no more, and weightless shadow.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Ajax is on pp. 124-9. 

Ajax, translated by John Moore, is in Sophocles II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 1-62. The quotation is on p. 13.

Stone Mountain, early February

 A year ago, I was baffled. Now, I’m just curious.

I know now what I didn’t know then: that the bare trees pushing out that those soft, fuzzy burrs that look like rabbit paws are magnolias — Magnolia liliiflora, instead of the evergreen M. grandiflora I was used to. M. liliiflora comes from Asia, but you see it everywhere around Atlanta. Gardeners love it.

The authorities say I should be seeing the burrs later in spring, but I saw them in early February last year.

I’m also seeing red maples in flower. Acer rubrum flowers before it puts on leaves, and you see whisps of red in the forest now. Again, the authorities say that I should see the flowers in March and April, not February, but I saw them at the same time last year.

That report comes with foreboding. Last year, many farmers in Georgia reported losses of up to 90 percent of their peach crops. Warm weather encouraged blooms. Then we had hard frosts.

Among the other signs of spring: Leatherleaf mahonia, Berberis bealei, is blooming. It’s a big evergreen shrub that can become a small tree. It’s from China, but suggestions that it has “reportedly” escaped into the wild are a bit late. The yellow flowers on a long raceme are lovely.

We’ve also seen some net-winged beetles flying. The ones I’m seeing are fire-engine red. They are in family Lycidae, but I cannot distinguish among the many species. Some feed on nectar, so I’m looking for flowers. Most of the blooms are violets and dandelions. 

While I’m looking for signs of spring, the American beech tree, Fagus grandifolia, is the grand contrarian. The beeches are still holding on to last year’s leaves. With all the weathering, some of the leaves are still copper colored, but most are drained of color and look like worn khakis. Some are almost white.a

Happy Georgia Day, y’all

 The folks in our new home celebrate Feb. 12 as Georgia Day.

On Feb. 12, 1733, James Oglethorpe, a general and social reformer, founded the last of the original 13 English colonies. He came with 114 people, some of whom were freshly sprung from prisons in London for indebtedness.

Oglethorpe argued for the colony by playing on English insecurities about South Carolina, which had become wealthy. The English were sure the Spanish in Florida and the French to the west were bent on plunder.

The source of South Carolina’s wealth was its plantation system based on slavery. It was a brutal, exploitive system that led to vast differences between the rich and the poor. Oglethorpe and like-minded trustees had something else in mind for the new colony. Slavery would be prohibited. Landholdings would be limited to 500 acres. Georgia would be a place where poor people in London who were being locked up for debts could get a fresh start on family farms.

It was idealistic, and it didn’t last long.

Georgia has some interesting history. For example, it’s hard to imagine the Civil Rights Movement in United States without Georgians. If you’re interested, Georgia Day is a good day to get started.

• Sources: The Library of Congress has an article on “Establishing the Georgia Colony, 1732-1750” here:

https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/colonial-settlement-1600-1763/georgia-colony-1732-1750/

The New Georgia Encyclopedia has an overview of the state’s history here:

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

Making your own

 I ran across a quotation from William Blake:

I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s.

I will not Reason & Compare: My business is to Create.

The quotation was in the context of making your own religion. I’m not sure Blake made a distinction between spiritual and artistic matters. 

The motto reminds me of Roy Bedichek’s observation that you’re either your own doctor or a fool by 40. He practiced his own kind of self-care.

It also reminds me of my grandfather, who, never satisfied with a store-bought smoke, rolled his own.

• Source: The quotation is from Jerusalem. I found it in The Portable Blake, ed. by Alfred Kazin; Penguin Books, 1976, p. 460.

Charles Lamb to the rescue

 If I had my way, Charles Lamb would be recognized as one of the great English writers, and many people would be marking his 249th birthday.

Lamb’s Essays of Elia are wonderful. So are his letters.

Lamb’s life was marked by tragedy, but he was lucky in his friends. They included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Keats, William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. They also included George Dyer, an absent-minded, self-effacing fellow who was one of the great classics scholars of the day.

In later life, when Lamb and his sister, Mary, lived in Islington, Dyer left their house and, lost in thought, walked into the river. 

Lamb, who was 5 feet tall in his shoes and slender, rescued him, somehow getting to the right point on the riverbank to grab the sinking scholar.

Before either the rescuer or the rescued could recover, a one-eyed man who claimed to be a doctor and who made a practice of reviving people who’d fallen into the river appeared. This fellow always prescribed cognac — for the victim, for the traumatized loved ones and especially for the doctor.

It’s a Lamb story with all the trimmings: a tragedy or tragedy barely avoided, caused by human stupidity or thoughtlessness, with salvation achieved by sheer luck, and the moment of triumph interrupted by absurd characters who wander in as if sent by heaven.

• Sources and notes: Charles Lamb was born Feb. 10, 1775, in Inner Temple, London. Lamb’s version of the story is in the essay “Amicus Redivivus” in Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia; London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1978, pp. 245-9.

Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022, p. 342-4.

Several posts mention Wilson’s book. The first was “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.

Seeing technology as a threat

 I am not talented at technology. When I read the newspaper, I prefer the kind that occasionally gets ink on my fingers. But I do not think social media and other new technologies are ruining the country.

I’m always a bit surprised when newspaper and magazine editors conclude that the latest in information technology is ruinous.

Here’s James Russell Lowell, writing in 1864, on the new tech of his day:

A nation can be liable to no more insidious treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly its electric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of the community, till the excited imagination makes every real danger loom heightened with its unreal double.

Yesterday’s note praised Lowell. Today, we bring him back to earth.

• Source: James Russell Lowell’s “Abraham Lincoln” has been published by Project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/906/pg906-images.html

Lowell's essay on Lincoln

 When I was in high school, briefly, I discovered four authors: Emerson, Thoreau, Richard Wright and Baldwin.

I loved Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine. But, for me, the real fun in American literature began with Emerson. Most of the earlier writers had to be endured, rather than enjoyed.

Recently, I’ve been looking at some of those early authors again, to see what the teenaged version of me, in his arrogance, missed.

I can’t remember what I read of James Russell Lowell, but I remember thinking I could do without a second helping. I’m sorry I jumped to that conclusion.

His essay “Abraham Lincoln” contains several wonders, but this is superb:

 

Hitherto the wisdom of the President’s measures has been justified by the fact that they have always resulted in more firmly uniting public opinion. One of the things particularly admirable in the public utterances of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal character. There must be something essentially noble in an elective ruler who can descend to the level of confidential ease without losing respect, something very manly in one who can break through the etiquette of his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason and intelligence of those who have elected him. No higher compliment was ever paid to a nation than the simple confidence, the fireside plainness, with which Mr. Lincoln always addresses himself to the reason of the American people.

 

That part of the essay was written in 1864, when Lincoln was running for re-election. (Lowell added a new ending to the essay in 1865, after Lincoln was killed.)

Americans are divided in 2024, but we were murderously divided in 1864. The nation faced divisive issues, and Lowell talked about them. But I think he was right to focus on character before policy. The Greeks held that some personalities are tragically flawed, and that people who follow such leaders blindly always end in ruin. That idea seems to be badly out of fashion today, but I think it’s true.

Lowell gives a clear description of what those of us who believe in democracy ought to expect in people we entrust with office.

If I could be editor for a day, I’d commend Lowell’s essay to the new generation of editorial writers.

• Source: James Russell Lowell’s “Abraham Lincoln” has been published by Project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/906/pg906-images.html

Aerial dogfight

 I heard the crows first, coming closer, disturbed. If I were being anthropomorphic, I'd say they were berserkers, not just disturbed.

Then I heard a hawk scream and then a series of screams.

Overhead, the hawk went into a series of tight clockwise turns. It was being mobbed by crows. Then its mate came plowing through the crows, breaking up the formation, and the mob turned on the new hawk, who led most of them away. As the mob pursued the new target, one crow bumped the hawk in flight.

It was a solid hit. I wouldn’t have believed it, but I saw it.

A writer looks at the author's photograph

 Ted Kooser, who notices such things, points out a trend in the author’s photograph — the small photograph accompanying the biographical blurb on book covers. He says the style is to “show people in various degrees of distress.”

I had noticed some odd photos without seeing the trend. I had noticed the trend toward trauma in all things published. I suppose a photo of a smiling author of a book loaded with anxiety might strike people as a mistake, like an actor breaking character.

Kooser says that before the author’s photograph we had the author’s engraving. He says Walt Whitman directed his engraver to enhance the crotch.

Kooser is against the trends, old and new. He wants the author to appear as he or she is.

I was delighted when he gave the poet William Stafford as an example. Stafford appears to be “someone who is more interested in what he is looking at than he is in himself,” he says.

That’s sounds right to me. It’s the way Stafford appears in photographs and it’s the way Stafford writes.

• Sources and notes: “From the Desk of Ted Kooser: The Author’s Photograph” was published April 11, 2016 on the blog of the University of Nebraska Press:

https://unpblog.com/2016/04/11/from-the-desk-of-ted-kooser-the-authors-photograph/

Kooser is a famous poet. For my argument that he is also a wonderful essayist, see “A magnificent book tells what home is like,” Jan. 2, 2022.

Knowing your own backyard

 Rufus M. Jones, a Quaker teacher and writer, wrote an account of his boyhood that includes a familiar lament to those who are interested in nature.

It should be said that I knew no botany as a boy. I wish our teacher had spent less time instructing me in the geography of Russia and Terra del Fuego, and had taken a little time to give me some specific knowledge about the flowers and the birds of our own region.

 

Jones wrote that lament almost 100 years ago. Things were not much better when I was a boy, and a naturalist recently lamented that most junior-high students could identify dozens of brands of sneakers but could not name the common plants and birds they see on their way to school.

I wish I’d had the kind of teacher Jones imagined when I was a boy.

• Source: Rufus M. Jones, Finding the Trail of Life; New York, The Macmillan Company, 1927.
https://archive.org/details/findingtrailofli0000jone

Old Tragedy, modern oratorio

 I like Aeschylus’s plays, and I like the form of Old Tragedy. The playwright of Aeschylus’s day had limits: He was given a chorus and a couple of actors.

People knew the story behind these tragedies before they got to the theater. It was shared myth. The playwright couldn’t really make a plot with the idea of keeping the audience in suspense. Instead, the actors would carry the narrative along, and the chorus would come in with gorgeous poetry, emphasizing where we in the audience ought to feel the story and not just think about it.

Some scholars say it’s a mistake to compare Old Tragedy to oratorio, but that’s what I’ve been doing.

I like that form, too, although I suppose it’s been out of style since Handel died. I like following a story by listening to music, and I think the Greek audiences must have liked following a story by listening to poetry.

My play list included a couple of Soviet-era pieces:

• Sergei Prokofiev’s “On Guard for Peace”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqivbo3nN3M

• Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Song of the Forests”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp3677LsJmQ

Both were new to me, though both composers have written music I love. (If I had to pick favorites: Prokofiev’s ballet “Romeo and Juliet” and Shostakovich’s last “Sonata for Viola and Piano.”)

Also: Herbert Howells’s “Hymnus Paradisi,” Igor Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex, William Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast” and Bohuslav Martinu’s “Epic of Gilgamesh.” There’s some debate about what to call some of these pieces, whether they are oratorios or something else. I’ll leave that to scholars. I just dropped in to listen.

Early February in the woods

 A few violets, genus Viola, are blooming in the woods south of Stone Mountain. The color was a surprise after the hard freezes and big winter storm. But I’m not sure when to expect blooms in the Piedmont. I didn’t see violets until after Valentine’s Day last year.

The beeches are still holding their leaves.

At Arabia Mountain, we saw the cocoon of a Polyphemus moth along Stephenson Creek. Antheraea polyphemus is common across most of North America and is beautiful. It’s also big, with a 6-inch wingspan. I would love to see this one again in its next form.

The art of reading a room

 Phrasius, a Greek from Cyprus who was said to be a son of Pygmalion, had a reputation as a visionary.

Busiris, king of Egypt, called him to the palace when the land was ravaged by drought. The king and his counselors spoke of failed crops and starvation.

Phrasius said it would be a good idea to sacrifice a stranger once a year. Stranger meant foreigner or immigrant.

The king and his counselors, looking around the room, saw only one stranger.

It’s a lesson to writers on the importance of point of view.

Had he thought about it, Phrasius might have discovered some surprising possibilities in how that story was best told.

Robert Graves tells the story in his account of the Labors of Heracles.

Heracles had just strangled Busiris’s half-brother, Antaeus, king of Libya, and was headed home to Mycenae with a load of golden apples. Antaeus was a child of Mother Earth. As a wrestler, he gained strength from her touch every time he hit the ground. The more Antaeus was thrown, the stronger he got, and he killed every challenger until Heracles figured it out and throttled him aloft.

Wherever Heracles went, he was repulsed by human sacrifice. Graves says the Heracles stories glorify the cult of Olympian gods at the expense of the old cult of Cronus, which practiced human sacrifice.

Busiris was delighted when Heracles showed up as an uninvited guest. Heracles allowed the Egyptian priests to bind him on the sacrificial altar, even though he could break any bonds forged by men. Heracles was on the altar when Busiris approached with an ax.

That was the end of Busiris. Heracles hated human sacrifice, but he loved blood and gore.

• Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 146-8.

Whittier: ‘Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl’

 John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem is a series of portraits of family members, people who love each other. They’re New England folk and are cooped up together by a storm. No one seems to mind.

You can get a sense of Whittier’s skill — the consensus is that it’s limited — as he sets the scene:

 

The house-dog on his paws outspread

Laid to the fire his sleepy head.

The cat’s dark silhouette on the wall

A couchant tiger’s silhouette on the wall.

 

The lines don’t grab me, but I stay to take in the scene: Cider simmers by the andirons in the fireplace. Nuts are in the basket. The family members pass the time talking. Mother tells of an old Indian attack

 

And how here own great-uncle bore

His cruel scalp-mark to fourscore.

 

We meet the uncle who is “innocent of books” but knows the woods. We get a look at the household’s meager library, pamphlets mostly, with one novel that’s hidden from the kids.

It’s a big deal when a carrier comes through the snow with the weekly newspaper.

The highlight — a modest one — is when mother pauses

 

One moment, seeking to express

Her grateful sense of happiness

For food and shelter, warmth and wealth,

And loves contentment, more than wealth.

 

The Boston Atheneum’s article on Whittier says that when he died, The Atlantic published a long article on him by George Edward Woodberry.

Woodberry’s take on Whittier: “The secret of his vogue with the plain people is his own plainness."

That seems right.

If I were asked to cite examples of well made lines of poetry, my first thought would not be of Whittier. But he notices the details of ordinary life. His poem takes me away from one world to another for a short while, and I always enjoy my visit. I’ll come back again.

• Sources: John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl” is on Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45490/snow-bound-a-winter-idyl

Carley Stevens, “John Greenleaf Whittier”; Boston Atheneum, Nov. 20, 2019. The article is here:

https://bostonathenaeum.org/blog/john-greenleaf-whittier/