Readers, fast and slow

 Sophia Nguyen had an article in The Washington Post about voracious readers. I enjoyed reading about people who read 300 books a year. I’m just not that kind of reader.

My friend Alvin can read a book a day. When he was a boy, his mother insisted he take a speed-reading course. It changed his life. One of the distinctive features of his personality is that he goes through several books a week. We have a weekly conversation, and we seldom talk about the weather.

I wish I could read quickly, but it’s just not in me. I tend to think and brood while reading, making me a slow reader. I frequently put down a book to make notes. (I never sit down with a book. I sit down with a book, a pencil and some index cards.) I’m a plodder, and that plodding quality is also a distinctive feature of personality, I suppose.

Still, I’m always reading. I claim to be a voracious reader, just not a fast one. 

• Sources: Sophia Nguyen, “Want to finish more books? Super readers share their tips.”; The Washington Post, March 30, 2024.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/03/30/super-readers-how-to-read-more/

Lydia Davis: ‘The House Plans’

 Some young people have imaginary friends. I had an imaginary farm. I was older than I should have been when I finally acknowledged the dream was not going to become a reality.

It’s hard to explain how something that lives only in imagination can sustain you. But Lydia Davis gets at it in her short story “The House Plans.”

 

In the beginning, my blueprint had absorbed all my time and attention because I was going to build my house from it. Gradually, the blueprint became more vivid to me than the actual house: in my imagination, I spent more and more time among the penciled lines that shifted at my will. Yet if I openly admitted there was no longer any possibility of building this house, the blueprint would have lost its meaning. So I continued to believe in the house, while all the time the possibility of building it eroded steadily from under my belief.

 

The farm had a foothold in my imagination by the time I was 12. It persisted in my imagination for years, even when I discovered other things that I’d hope to discover while farming.

It’s the only explanation I have for the collection of books on agriculture on my bookcase. Somehow, I can’t get rid of them.

• Source: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; New York: Picador, 2009. “The House Plans” is on pp. 51-61. The quotation is on p. 55.

Stone Mountain, late March

 This week, the azaleas bloomed. The Georgia Piedmont is a riot of color. The local folks love their gardens, and I’m mystified by the many cultivated varieties. They are all beautiful, but I suspect these plants will soon escape the garden and end up in the forest.

The stands of native azaleas have not started to bloom.

The blossoms of the garden azaleas came about 10 days after the wisteria started blooming.

I’ve seen stands of jetbead, Rhodotypos scandens, at Stone Mountain, Deepdene and Yellow River. It’s a 3- to 6-foot shrub in the rose family, with white flowers with four petals against ovate serrate leaves. The Missouri Botanical Garden says the leaves are medium green, but they look dark to me.

The shrubs are lovely, but they’re invasive. They came from Southeast Asia to the United States in 1866. They started as a garden plant and are now all over the forest.

The common name jetbead comes from the fruit. If you went looking for a plant bearing jet-black marbles, you’d find this plant in autumn. The fruit is poisonous.

On another walk through the woods, I came across Vinca major, greater periwinkle or blue periwinkle. It’s also beautiful, also invasive. Another garden plant that escaped.

Mary Oliver: 'The Journey'

 I am interested in people like the Quakers who try to hear the still small voice.

To many, it’s the voice of God, the voice Elijah heard when he was standing on the mountain. But others hear the voice of their higher nature or better self. Artists listen for their muses. When I was about 6, my mother said that my conscience — which I took to be a pesky version of the still small voice — would speak to me often, given my propensity for mischief.

Poets usually do better than the philosophers with topics like this, and I like Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey.” It begins:

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and

began,

though the voices around you 

kept shouting

their bad advice —

Sometimes, to hear your own quiet voice, you have to get away from people. The journey Oliver is talking about begins in solitude. She finds this: 

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and 

deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do —

determined to save

the only life that you could

save.

Source: You can find the complete poem here:

http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_thejourney.html

Bedichek reports on progress

 Roy Bedichek’s life changed fundamentally when he married Miss Lillian Greer. But before he could marry he had to find a way to make a living.

Picture this: It’s 1910, and Roy has bicycled across West Texas and staked a homestead and desert claim: 320 acres outside Demming, N.M. He had six months to get on the claim. He worked as a stenographer in town to save money. Here he is writing to Lillian about his progress:

 

Well, when my time was getting about up, I borrowed what money I could, got a camping outfit and a man, went out to my place and dug a well and built a shack 12 x 14 and stretched up a tent. During the winter months, I lived in the tent, cooked and ate, slept and read and wrote in it. It is 9½ x 12. I had no success in selling stuff I wrote. I lived on frijole beans and rabbits which I caught in traps — I lived to myself like a lone wolf in a cañon.

 

When the businessmen organized a chamber of commerce in town, Bedichek got a job as its secretary at $75 a month. He also made some money on the side corresponding for newspapers and agricultural journals.

 

I couldn’t afford to keep a pony in town so I sold him, and I walk eight miles night and mourning to my shack and am thus homesteading it.

There are cracks in my shack that you can throw a cat through. My tent is getting a little ragged.

 

I’m not sure why Miss Lillian married Roy and moved to Demming. But she did.

Roy Bedichek became a wise and wonderful writer. But I can’t imagine what he would have been if Miss Lillian hadn’t put him under firmer management. Can you?

• Source: The Roy Bedichek Family Letters, selected by Jane Gracy Bedichek; Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1998, p. 50.

He rode a bike across Texas

 Among the Texans, Roy Bedichek was the wisest and sanest.

But he did some inexplicable things. As a young man 115 years ago, he decided to stake a homestead claim in the Denning, N.M. To get to his dream, he decided to ride a bicycle from Eddy, which is near Waco, across West Texas.

I did some inexplicable things as a young man, so I love this story.

Karen Derrick-Davis, a great-granddaughter, is following Bedichek’s path. You can find her notes here:

https://www.adventureswithbedichek.net/post/a-wet-start-holed-up-in-bartlett

• Notes: It would take a while to explain why I love Roy Bedichek. For those interested:

https://www.hebertaylor.com/roy-bedichek

A beloved tree in Deepdene

 I have loved Deepdene Park for longer than I’ve lived in Georgia. One of its stars is a 185-foot tulip tree, which rises above the canopy. We went to see it the other day, to get a last look before the canopy fills in and the top of this giant is lost to sight.

The park is a 22-acre gully. “Dene,” an old synonym for “valley,” is generous, I think. But Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. looked at the place and saw the potential for beautiful, albeit compact, park.

Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. and his nephew and stepson John Charles Olmstead drew up plans for Druid Hills, an affluent development, in 1893. Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. was already famous for his work on Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, as well as the U.S. Capitol grounds.

Deepdene seems to be bigger than it is because so many trails are squeezed in at different elevations. Some are close to street level, at the top of the gully. Some are along the creek below. You can cross several bridges on the high path. Below, you can cross the creek on steppingstones in several places.

I love the idea of this park. Even in the middle of big housing developments, there are places — such as gullies — where houses can’t be built. I like the idea of saving wild places and of encouraging people to get off concrete and onto paths.

When we went, the redbuds and serviceberries were blooming. The forest floor was full of violets.

• Source: For details, see:

https://www.tclf.org/druid-hills-deepdene-park

Wittgenstein as a writer

Wittgenstein wrote 3 million words.

He published 25,000.

He was a writer. That’s what he did. 

To his mind, writing and publishing were radically different. Obviously, one did not often lead to another. Writing was just a way of thinking — a way of working out the ideas that interested him. 

The desire to write

 The writer Hugh Prather left this aphorism to torment people like me: 

If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire is not to write.

 

The implication is that the desire is for something else.

The Old Editor used to make a similar point. He said that he knew a lot of people who wanted to be famous and to spend their days talking to interesting people in cafes in Paris. He mentioned a fellow we knew who wanted to be a writer but did not want to write. The Old Editor counseled him to buy a beret.

I get the point. But not writing is not always a case of misplaced desire.

A construction project began at our house this week. I can assure Prather and the Old Editor that you can have a desire to write while you are unloading a half ton of floor tile off a truck and moving everything that was in the kitchen elsewhere, which means that you are not actually writing.

I searched my soul for any hint of desire that I’d rather be doing backbreaking labor.

I claim to be innocent.

• Source: Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person; New York: Bantam, 1983.

A safe and legal way

 I was reading an old book and had a small epiphany. The insight was not religious or philosophical. It was an insight into how an idea could be expressed, perhaps better, in a language that has grammatical features that English doesn’t have.

And I remembered this, marked in a textbook that is almost 50 years old:

 

Grammar, though no longer stylish, is a good thing. A knowledge of grammar enables us to speak and write correctly, clearly, elegantly; and to recognize the same qualities in others. Studying a foreign grammar forces us to see and to ponder the different ways in which things can be and have been said; it gives us a chance to look at other modes of expression than our own and to glimpse other modes of thought behind them. It makes us more aware (and more wary) of what we are reading and writing, hearing and saying. In short, grammar is a safe and legal way of expanding one’s consciousness.

 

I have made a lot of stupid mistakes in my life, but deciding I needed to learn something about Greek was not one of them. 

It seems almost miraculous to me that you can learn things as a young person that will fascinate you when you are old.

And I wish that more people who are as old as I am would tell younger people that. I think that’s why you go to college and why you don’t skip the humanities. 

• Source: C.A.E. Luschnig, An Introduction to Ancient Greek; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975, p. 17. 

Some people who like Malamud

 One more note on Bernard Malamud, and I’ll be done for a while: For reasons I can’t fathom, some people do not think of him as one of the great American writers of the 20^th century. But the people who like him really like him — though they like him for different reasons.

Cynthia Ozick loved “The Silver Crown” and claimed to have stolen it when she wrote the novella “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories).” Joyce Carol Oates taught “My Son the Murderer” and chose it for The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. Robert Giroux, Malamud’s editor, thought his best might be “Jewbird,” which features a scruffy blackbird who talks and tells the family that he barges in on that he’s running from “Anti-Semeets.”

Malamud did different things. You can read him for magical realism, which Malamud said was just old-fashioned fable. Other stories are realistic. I like his two late “biographed stories.”

I read him as a teenager for his character Arthur Fidelman. Fidelman, who confessed to being a failed painter, appears in six stories, which were collected as a novel in Pictures of Fidelman.

My tastes have changed, but I still like the conundrum: I haven’t read the novel but have read the stories. It makes me wonder whether I can claim to have read a novel that I didn’t know existed before I read it.

• Sources: Bernard Malamud, The Complete Stories; New York: The Noonday Press, 1998. I love that book, but you can get a taste of him by reading “The Silver Crown” in Library of America’s “Story of the Week” archives here:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2023/04/the-silver-crown.html

The site includes some details on Cynthia Ozick’s love of that story and on the newspaper article that moved Malamud to write it. If you’re interested in the discussion about “appropriation” in literature, this might be good.

Malamud: ‘In Kew Gardens’

 Late in life, Bernard Malamud began to see what a biography would look like in the form of a short story. He called his experiments “fictive biographies” and “biographed stories.”

“In Kew Gardens” is a story, but the historical figure of Virginia Woolf is recognizable. Can’t you see her in these lines?

 

Her erotic life rarely interested her. It seemed unimportant compared with what went on in the world.

 

The old king emerged from the wood, strumming a lyre. A silver bird flew over his head, screeching in Greek.

 

For years, she simply went mad.

She spoke in soft shrieks.

 

Malamud's late stories remind me of Guy Davenport’s meticulously researched historical fictions. We know the difference between fact and fiction, but some parts of the world have borders defined by fences and razor wire and others have vast frontiers with no boundary markers.

• Sources: Bernard Malamud, The Complete Stories; New York: The Noonday Press, 1998. “In Kew Gardens” is on pp. 614-18. The quotations are from pp. 614, 615 and 617. For more on Guy Davenport’s stories, see “Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner,’” Nov. 22, 2022.

Malamud: ‘The First Seven Years’

 I’ve been thinking about Vivian Gornick’s suggestion: In a Bernard Malamud story, the situation is more important than plot — the situation is the story.

I’d say “The First Seven Years” is an example. I’d say this is a situation, rather than a plot:

Feld, a shoemaker, runs his shop with Sobel, a refugee who is conscientious, faithful and honest. Sobel seems to want little from Feld.

But Feld has a daughter, Miriam, 19, and when Feld encourages a nice college boy to ask Miriam out, Sobel finds out and erupts.

Sobel was 30 when he arrived in New York, having just escaped the Nazis. Miriam was then 14. Sobel let her borrow his books and talked with her when she asked questions. He’d been waiting for her to grow up. In a way that Feld couldn’t see, Sobel loved Miriam.

But the situation is in plain sight, even if the characters can’t see it. When Feld asks the nice college boy to call on his daughter, he takes the young man into the backroom, and they wait for the sound of Sobel’s hammer to resume its pounding before talking.

• Sources: Bernard Malamud, The Complete Stories; New York: The Noonday Press, 1998, pp. 69-78.

For the original note on Vivian Gornick’s comment, see “One favorite writer speaks of another,” March 17, 2024.

For the biblical story of Jacob working for his beloved Rachel, see Genesis, chapter 29.

Spring arrives in the Piedmont

 I’m not much of a naturalist. My sense of being a lucky witness to beauty overwhelms me, and I forget my scientific questions.

We were walking along the Yellow River, which was yellow from the spring rains, and saw a red maple leaning over the river. It was flame red, all buds, no leaves.

The yellow and red stopped me. We were walking through a forest that was turning green. Green, in spring, is many colors, not one.

Temperatures have been in the 70s each afternoon so the leaves are coming out. A million leafy curtains are going up, hiding things from our view. The world is getting smaller.

A neighbor’s house, just 105 yards away from the window of my study, seemed nearby all winter. I could see it through the bare trees. Now it’s nearly gone.

That’s what living in a forest is like. In winter, you can see. In the spring, the forest closes in around you.

Spring is noisy, as well as beautiful. On the Yellow River, cardinals were discussing territorial claims and a hawk was screaming overhead.

The loudest sound was the chorus of frogs.

Roy Bedichek called them the most vocal of animals — and the most altruistic.

 

There is hardly another form of life which is eaten so freely and with such relish by so many different species. It seems that the frog does not eat to live so much as he lives to be eaten.

 

But I judge that spring has arrived by the song of the lawnmower: one starts, another answers.

 Humans are animals too, and this, to me, is the sign that spring is here.

This year, I heard the first lawnmower on March 14. I heard the second 10 minutes later. It’s only a matter of time before the Wise Woman decrees that I must get out of the easy chair.

• Source: Roy Bedichek, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988, p. 32.

One favorite writer speaks of another

 Vivian Gornick, a favorite essayist, has written on Bernard Malamud, a favorite short story writer.

People like different things in fiction. I think most readers of stories would say they like a good plot. Malamud liked situations, as opposed to plots. Gornick put it this way:

 

In each of these tales, as in a fable, the situation is the story: The settings are elemental, the characters have no agency, human psychology is on hold.

 

I just hadn’t seen that, but her observation seems right to me. She also had this insight into Malamud’s characters:

 

Emotional deprivation — that which prevents the development of an inner life — is what twists each and every one of them out of shape. Without an inner life, human existence remains primitive — infantile and primitive. Malamud’s gut understanding of this equation is beyond heartbreaking.

 

I'm still thinking, but I suspect she's right about that too. So many of the people I knew as a young man had no inner life, which seemed like a tragedy to me. I loved Malamud's stories without being able to say what it was that made them so vital to me. 

• Source: Vivian Gornick, “Tales of Life: The magic of reading and rereading Bernard Malamud”; The Nation, February 2024. It’s here:

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/bernard-malamud/

Gornick wrote the essay because Library of America’s is publishing its third volume of Malamud.

A line from Maslow

I periodically wonder why some people make notes in notebooks. I always look at my old notebooks to see whether they contain anything that would help with the question. One old notebook had this quotation, attributed to Abraham Maslow:

Every intellectual used to keep a journal.

Keeping a notebook almost seems natural to me. Different kinds of people do it: working folks who like to read, research scientists, teachers whose curiosity is not quite exhausted after a day in the classroom. It has something to do with liking to think. Perhaps it involves the notion that your own thoughts are, in a way, your life’s work.

• Source: Ronald Gross, The Independent Scholar’s Handbook; Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1982, p. 18. I have not been able to trace the quotation to one of Maslow’s books.

The old editor, take 2

 I mentioned the other day that I’d been thinking about some advice I got from an old editor. The advice had little to do with newspapers and business. It had a lot to do with what kind of person I wanted to be.

This fellow was big on cultivating interests and friends outside of work. He thought newspapers would be better if more newspaper editors did that. Some jobs can be demanding, and I’m grateful that someone, way back then, was telling me that there’s meaningful work to do outside of the kind of work that pays the bills.

A couple of bits of his advice spilled over into newspaper work.

I made it a practice to begin my day at the local coffeeshop.  I’d usually meet someone to talk about some issue that was important one of the many groups in a diverse community. Sometimes, though, I’d just eavesdrop. I did this before the phrase “echo chamber” became common. But newspapers, like politics, can become echo chambers. A daily trip to the coffee shop is a pretty good defense.

I also kept a list of things my beloved community was missing. And every once in a while, I’d ask the readers what they thought could be done to fill a specific gap. It was always surprising how many people are willing to put aside differences to make their communities a little better.

One way to welcome the new guy

 Ronald Gross’s first job was at Simon and Schuster. On his first day, he was summoned to the office of Max Schuster, one of the cofounders of the publishing company. Schuster said:

I have one piece of advice for you — not just for success in this business, but personally. Begin at once — not today, or tomorrow or at some remote, indefinite date, but right now, at this precise moment — to choose some subject, some concept, some great name or idea or event in history on which you can eventually make yourself the world’s supreme expert. Start a crash program immediately to qualify yourself for this self-assignment through reading, research, and reflection.

I like the idea that the head of a company would offer advice not aimed at promoting the business but at helping a new employee become a better person.

• Source: Ronald Gross, The Independent Scholar’s Handbook; Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1982, p. xii.

The writer in my dreams

 An article in The Washington Post suggested that lucid dreaming is a learnable skill.

I found the article astonishing — mainly because I know so little about psychology.

I’d like to be able to suggest to my dreaming faculties that they produce a short story. After a hard eight hours of sleep, I’d wake up to a Pulitzer Prize winner. All I’d have to do is type it up.

Better than AI, in my book. 

The Post’s article prompted an exchange with a learned friend, who was already up on the research and was tolerant of my ignorance.

Since then, I ran across a peculiar practice of Adelbert Ames Jr., a scientist whose interests included optics, binocular vision and psychology.

Ames would pose a question to himself before going to bed. He’d then forget about it, not letting the problem interfere with his sleep. When he woke up, he often found he’d made progress.

His notes were collected in The Morning Notes of Adelbert Ames Jr., the newest entry in my long list of books I’d like to read.

• Source: Richard Sima, “The science of lucid dreams — and how to have them”; The Washington Post, Feb. 29, 2024. It’s here: 

https://wapo.st/431Czvd

Georgia Piedmont, early March

 The shrubs are greening. Most of the trees are not.

Some of the dogwoods are brilliant white — all blossoms, no leaves. Some have a faint green tinge — the blossoms are competing with the new leaves.

Among the plants that are blooming:

• Woolly ragwort, Packera dubia, has yellow flowers over dark spear-like leaves. The first blooms I saw were in a seep. 

• Rue anemone, Thalictrum thalictroides, a little herbaceous perennial, is putting on flowers. The first blooms I saw had white petals in a whorl around a green eye. 

• Strawberry bush, Euonymus americanus, is budding. The plant looks like a green Tinkertoy set this time of year, all elbows and angles. Biologists describe it as a “multi-stemmed, suckering” shrub.

• Yellow jessamine, Gelsemium sempervirens, has bright yellow blossoms and grows everywhere. The sight of yellow flowers in a young pine lured me off the trail. I had to get closer before I could see the vine.

What an old editor said

 I once heard an old newspaper editor say, “To be an editor, you have to project confidence and humility at the same time.”

If you live in a small town with a good newspaper, you know the editor. He or she insists that the paper cover everything, especially the most controversial topics people are discussing.

The editor insists on fair, accurate and balanced reporting. He or she asks readers to submit letters offering their own views and prints them quickly — while they’re still news. The editor is diligent about running opposing views, especially those that take the newspaper and its editor to task for their failures.

Typically, the editor is not very interesting. But the newspaper is. It’s interesting because it’s a reflection of a community, with all its disagreements and different points of view.

Unfortunately, a lot of communities do not have good newspapers. They have newspapers that avoid controversies, allow advertisers to influence coverage, and never question what kinds of things people in the community would have to do to make their place better.

Unforgivably, they try to focus public attention on the trivial, rather than on the serious.

In such communities, there’s no reason to read the paper. There’s no reason to write letters to the editor or to know her. There’s no reason to know whether the editor has confidence in what she’s doing or a sense of humility that comes with an understanding of how often she and the newspaper have failed.

• Note: For the best account of the relationship between a good newspaper and its community, see Henry Beetle Hough, Country Editor; New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. 1940.

Virginia Valian: ‘Learning to work’

 I wish I’d had a teacher who’d told me about Virginia Valian’s essay “Learning to work.” I think eighth grade might have been a good time.

A lot of people have a problem with work. Valian, a psychologist, did. She was the kind of student who didn’t study and waited until the last minute to write papers. When she reached graduate school, there was no longer any way to avoid the problem. Her attitudes about work were preventing her from writing a thesis.

She found a way to get started — working 15 minutes a day on her project. A lot of us have resentments about having to work, and 15 minutes was all she could face. But as she cultivated a daily habit of writing — her work — she found she enjoyed it. She was pursuing an interest and learning. She was learning something about her field, and she was learning about herself.

Valian got through her thesis. But, since her field is psychology, she was interested in the question of why so many of us have problems with work. 

She began to see work in the context of a happy life.

For her, happiness meant developing her own talents and interests. It also meant developing one talent deeply. That was her work.

Happiness also meant developing relationships with others, including an intense relationship with her partner, other relationships with friends and still others involving politics.

Happiness involves balance. A healthy relationship with work raises the question of time: what’s a reasonable amount?

Now, I think that the right amount of time is whatever amount leaves room for the other important activities in my life and still allows me to make intellectual progress. There is no fixed right amount. 

I found the essay fascinating, although I don’t know enough about psychology to understand all of it. The more practical parts seem right to me.

Since retiring, I’ve continued to pursue my own interests. Some are deep enough to involve work: research, thinking, writing.

It’s natural to want to pursue those interests — to want to work on them. And it’s good to think about how you’re going to fit that work into your life.

I could have used a lesson around eighth grade and a refresher before retirement.

• Source: Virginia Valian, “Learning to work,” in S. Ruddick & P. Daniels (eds.), Working it out: 23 women writers, artists, scientists, and scholars talk about their lives and work; New York: Pantheon Books, 1977, pp. 162-178. The quote is on p. 177. Valian’s essay is available here:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b3a3c2596e76feeba40905e/t/5b46366570a6add65490e050/1531328102222/1977workingItOut.pdf

A question about great books

 The New York Times has a weekly feature called “By the Book,” an interview with an author about reading habits, tastes and preferences. One of the recurring questions is whether a great book can be badly written.

Montaigne died centuries before The Times was founded. But he considered the topic:

 

What I do know is that when I hear of anyone lingering over the language of these Essays I would rather he held his peace: it is not a case of words being extolled but of meaning being devalued. ...

 

Every time I see the question, I wonder what the person who devised it thinks of the Gospel of Mark. Love it or hate it, that short book influenced Western civilization. But the author did not have a gift for prose.

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993. The quotation is in “Reflections upon Cicero,” p. 281.

Primitive plants, massive rock

 I’ve read that perhaps 8 percent of the world is covered by lichens. That figure has got to be low in the Georgia Piedmont. Lichens and mosses are everywhere.

At Panola Mountain, a 5-acre outcrop that I thought was naked granite a couple of months ago was covered. The hard edges were soft and, in some places, fuzzy.

It was an observational error. I’d confused one part of the outcrop for another. But it made me realize that I know nothing about the advance and retreat of primitive plants in this harsh environment. How long it would take for lichens and mosses to cover five acres of a rock face? A couple of months? A thousand years?

People who see the monadnocks once usually describe them as otherworldly. Visiting them regularly meddles with my sense of time. 

Andrew Motion: ‘Laying the Fire’

 The poet goes downstairs and finds his father building a fire.

It seems to me the poet is going down the stairs in his dreams, or in his memory or in his imagination. The point of view shifts: sometimes the poet is a boy and sometimes he’s a man.

Both man and boy are amazed at the meticulous way the old man builds a fire.

 

His voice is kinder than I expect,

as though he knows

we have in common a sadness

I do not feel yet.

 

The boy skates to his father on gray socks over polished wood floors.

I’ve been thinking of this wonderful poem, and I’m not sure why. My father died a couple of years ago as February turned to March. And as February turns to March, I’ve been thinking that each fire I lay will be the last of the season.

For many people, poems are things in books. Somehow, poems have gotten into my life.

• Source: Andrew Motion’s poem was published in Coming In To Land: Selected Poems 1975 — 2015; New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2017.  It’s on Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/143667/laying-the-fire

The notion of zimzum

 I’m not a theological thinker. My knowledge of zimzum comes not from a theologian but from a short-story writer, albeit an extraordinary one.  

Here’s Isaac Bashevis Singer: 

I availed myself of the doctrine of zimzum, that wonderful notion which is so important in the Cabala of Rabbi Isaac Luria. God, Isaac Luria says, is omnipotent but had to diminish himself and his light so that he could create. Such shrinking is the source of creation, not only in man but also in the Godhead. The evil host makes creation possible. God could not have his infinite works without the devil. Out of suffering, creativity is born. The existence of pain in the world can be compared to a writer’s suffering as he describes some dreadful scene that he lives through in his imagination. As he writes, the author knows that his work is only fiction produced for his and his reader’s enjoyment. Each man, each animal exists only as clay in the hands of a creator and is itself creative. We ourselves are the writer, the book, and the hero. The medieval philosophers expressed a similar idea when they said that God is Himself the knower, the known, and the knowledge. …

God is not static perfection, as Spinoza thought, but a limited and unsatiated will for perfection.

We are here to do creative things, including creating comedy, music and literature out of suffering. Singer said that, in his case, the trick was learning to create out of inhibition.

• Source: Isaac Bashevis Singer, an untitled essay in Voices for Life: Reflections on the Human Condition, ed. by Dom Moraes; New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975, pp. 79-80. The book is a collection of essays with a couple of interviews. Moraes asked 25 people, “What do you see as the quality of life, and what do you think it will become in the future?”

An expert speaks of naval theory

 Milan Vego, a professor at the Naval War College, wrote a remarkable paper “On Naval Theory.” He’s trying to get naval officers who are preparing for higher command to think about what a naval theory would look like.

Navies that lack a comprehensive theory of war at sea invariably see adverse effects on their performance in combat …

The professor outlines various features of such a theory. I expected his notes on history and technology, but I was surprised by one feature:

Naval theory also should be simple and understandable; otherwise, it would be too difficult to apply to any but the most specific conditions. A naval theory should be written in clear language so that it can be understood easily by all, debated, and accepted. Clarity requires precision, and superfluous wording should be avoided. Additionally, jargon and buzzwords adopted from business or psychology do not have a place in military or naval theory as they often are ephemeral and ambiguous. Optimally, naval theory should be written concisely but clearly. This requires using short words, sentences, and paragraphs. Short sentences are more easily and quickly understood than longer ones, although the danger of being so concise as to be incomplete or unclear must be kept in mind. 

Whatever you’re thinking about, it helps to write clearly and briefly.

• Source: 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 

For another note on Vego’s paper, see “A story of strategic importance,” Feb. 17, 2024.

Stone Mountain, early March

 It’s an odd time of year. We had a freeze after an afternoon high in the 70s. Lawns are brown, but green blades are just beginning to come up. It’ll be spring, I guess, when I hear the first neighbor to give in cranks a lawnmower.

Last week, the dogwoods put on white blossoms. We had bare limbs one day and limbs heavy with blooms with next.

The dogwoods were about a week behind Magnolia liliiflora, a native of China that gardeners in the Atlanta area have planted everywhere. The flowers range from a pale pink to magenta.

We also have pear trees with lovely white flowers — not only in yards but deep in the forest. I take it these are Callery pear, Pyrus calleryana, another native of Southeast Asia. It was popular with landscape gardeners. The birds spread the seeds as thoroughly as the apostles spread the gospel.

Cardamine diphylla, a small plant in the mustard family, is putting out little white flowers with four petals. It’s called toothwort, but I think the common name around here is crinkleroot.

Beech trees don’t lose last year’s leaves until the new leaves come out. You still see stands of those lovely leaves, ranging from copper to washed khaki, so weathered they’re almost white. The other day I saw a stand that had a red maple mixed in. The maple had wisps of red flowers standing out against the tans of the beeches.

The woods were quiet, and I didn’t move. I just looked.

A shameful story in Texas history

 During the Civil War, enslaved people were driven like cattle into Texas by slaveholders who were fleeing Union forces in other states.

It was called “refugeeing” slaves. The euphemism meant that when your humanity had eroded to the point that you could treat other human beings as property, rather than people, you would think that it’s only business to drive people across borders to protect your investment.

Some of the slave owners who were moving to Texas thought that, even if the South lost the war, Texas would become an independent republic again, rather than rejoin the Union.

Confederate authorities estimated as many as 150,000 enslaved people arrived in Texas from other states.

Historians are debating the accuracy of those numbers. Among the reasons to doubt their accuracy is that contemporary records treated enslaved people as taxable property, rather than human beings, and some wealthy planters tried to avoid taxes. What’s beyond debate is that the number of African Americans in Texas increased dramatically during the war. The census recorded 182,566 enslaved people in 1860. More than 250,000 were freed in 1865.

Why bring up this shameful episode in Texas history?

It’s not well known, and it’s the kind of story that people across generations have conspired to keep hidden. I’m pretty sure that a history teacher could get into trouble for giving an accurate account of how it came to be that so many African Americans arrived in Texas during the last years of slavery.

• Sources: Professor Caleb McDaniel, who teaches history at Rice University and who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for Sweet Taste of Liberty, has a post titled “How Many Slaves were Refugeed to Confederate Texas?” on his blog, 25 June 2013:

http://wcaleb.org/blog/how-many-refugeed-slaves-in-texas

Happy Texas Independency Day

 On March 2, 1836, the Consultation, as the delegates called themselves, passed a resolution declaring Texas independent. The Consultation chastised the government in Mexico City for its many failures. After winning independence, Texas’s governing class continued faithfully with many of those failures, though it did move the seat of government to Austin.

Though I’m in Georgia now, I’m planning to celebrate with a bowl of red. Margaret Cousins, who was an editor at Doubleday, provided me with an excuse:

Chili is not so much a food as a state of mind. Addictions to it are formed early in life, and the victims never recover.

• Source: Frank X. Tolbert, A Bowl of Red; Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1988, p. 10. Ms. Cousins, who was once Tolbert’s editor, was living in New York and was searching for a good bowl of chili when she came up with that line, which expatriates will take as universal truth. 

Sophocles: ‘Oedipus the King’

 Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, observes that the Oedipus legend is a common type of story in Greek literature. Someone makes an unpleasant prediction. People try to avoid it. But in some naturalbut surprising way, the prediction is fulfilled.

‘Oedipus the King’ is “vividly naturalistic,” Kitto says.

Sophocles and the other ancient playwrights held that the universe is rational. It operates under physical and mathematical laws. It also has moral laws, which are just as certain, just as effective.

We can complain that the universe is cruel but not that it’s chaotic.

It’s why the gods, who know the laws, can predict what will happen.

Oedipus, who is insolent and impetuous and prone to wrath, suffers what the universe has in store for people with certain kinds of character flaws who insert themselves into explosive situations.

As Kitto puts it, “Oedipus … is blasted as a man may be who inadvertently interferes with electricity.”

These lines, sung by the chorus, catch the theme:

 

Insolence breeds the tyrant, insolence

if it is glutted with a surfeit, unseasonable, unprofitable,

climbs to the roof-top and plunges

sheer down to the ruin that must be … 

 

This is the play we know from college, and different lines strike different people in different ways. I have the vaguest boyhood memory that says my father, who taught the play when he was young, quoted these lines:

 

Soon you will see a sight to waken pity

even in the horror of it.

 

In my mind, he took the lines as a maxim, a law of nature. If you bring the best of yourself to a bad situation, you will feel pity for others when you are tempted to simply look away in horror. If you bring your lesser self to that same situation, you’ll just look the other way.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Oedipus Tyrannus is on pp. 142-49. The quotation is on p. 148.

Oedipus the King, translated by David Grene, 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. 9-76. The quotations are on pp. 48 and 67.