Another notion about bird calls

 Peter Tate, the English ornithologist, begins his entry on cockerels with this: 

As urban society has spread and farming practices have changed, the waking of the whole community by a farmyard cockerel who crows at first light has all but ceased to exist.

 

That was true at one point. But backyard chickens have come and gone and come again. I hear Gallus gallus at several places in the neighborhood.

The Slow Living Movement has not come to the metropolitan Atlanta, judging by the frantic freeways. But our neighborhood has several backyard henhouses, attesting to the taste for homegrown eggs and poultry.

I hear — rather than see — them. The crowing is comforting. It seemed half the houses in the old barrio in San Antonio kept a rooster and some hens.

Several notes in this collection are about birds of the Georgia Piedmont, and the fact that I’ve failed to mention Gallus gallus says something about my skewed sense of what’s “natural.” Tate says these birds were domesticated in Southeast Asia and were in Greece by 700 B.C.

They’ve long served as alarm clocks. Tate says that the Coptic Church used cockerels to call the villagers to worship.

• Source: Peter Tate, Flights of Fancy: Birds in Myth, Legend, and Superstition; New York: Delacorte Press, 2007, p. 4.

Quirky little colleges

 Goddard College, one of those small, quirky liberal arts schools, is closing. I don’t know why I should consider it such a loss but I do.

I think teachers should talk about what could be done to improve education and those of us who are not teachers should yield the floor. But my own education was so strange I have spent a lifetime thinking about these small schools and wondering what might have been. I’ve studied the history of Black Mountain College. I’ve admired the Great Books curriculum at St. John’s College. I’ve daydreamed about what it would have been like to have done farm work at Warren Wilson College.

I think some people just don’t fit into the customary academic arrangements. I think that’s true of teachers, as well as students.

In 1971, Goddard hired a young woman named Louise Glück to teach poetry. It was her first teaching job, but the college made an inspired choice. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020.

A finely tuned thinking machine

 While looking for something, I frequently find something else. In trying to find some insight into how grief works, I found a wonderful description of a mind. 

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them — never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

 

C.S. Lewis was despairing about his capacity to understand his own grief.

• Source: C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed; New York: HarperOne, 1994, p. 64.

Becoming someone

 Barry Lopez was trying to write on a plane. The man sitting next to him said his daughter wanted to be a writer and asked if Lopez had any advice. Lopez did.

Three things: First, a writer should read. Third, she should travel. In between was this:

 

Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but if that she wishes to write well she will have to become someone.

 

I gave a version of that bit of advice to young reporters. I think, as a rule, we try to teach students to do things before we try to help them be somebody. I think a liberal arts education helps. I think a newspaper written and edited by people who’ve read some literature, philosophy, history and science and who have thought about these things is likely to be better than a newspaper written by people who haven’t. I think that’s true of almost every enterprise, including medical practices.

I wish people were not in such a rush to finish their education.

Sometimes, just sitting with a young reporter, we’d talk about what a good education might look like and whether we might improve our own by spending time at the library.

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1999, p. 14. 

Wittgenstein on what we know

 Wittgenstein suggested that using the word “know” suggests an experimental process was involved in our thinking.

It’s straightforward when I talk about what I know from having conducted a scientific experiment.

It’s a little less straightforward when I say that I know what I want, although I have, through experience, learned about things that I want and don’t want.

But consider what happens when people say they know what they believe. I wonder what kind of experiments were involved, how the person making the claim put their beliefs to the test. In Georgia, one of our congressional representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene, provides interesting cases of beliefs almost daily.

This note is not about politics. It’s about how people think. I’ve found Wittgenstein to be an excellent guide to that subject. He was born on April 26, 1889, in Vienna. I’m marking the day.

Barry Lopez on what stories do

 Barry Lopez spent his life telling stories. He also did some deep thinking about the concept of a story, “a powerful and clarifying human invention.”

Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended in listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.

 

When I was young, I thought a good story answered all the questions. Nothing was left to the imagination. I came to see what Lopez describes so well. A good story has enough space within it to allow a reader’s imagination to slip the leash and run.

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1999, pp. 10 and 13. Lopez has a lot of good advice on writing. Thanks, Christopher, for steering me to the book.

J.B. Priestley: 'Delight'

 I’ve recommended J.B. Priestley’s Delight a couple of times without giving an example of what makes it good. It’s time to make amends. Here’s an excerpt from “Cozy with Work”: 

In our younger days we writers — or composers or painters — like to talk a lot about work and what we are going to do, but we do not like actually working, which usually means removing ourselves from the company of other great souls and toiling away in solitude. This becomes easier as we get older, and once we are well into our professional middle age, instead of being reluctant we are often eager to disappear into our work and are angry when we are prevented from toiling in solitude. Indeed, I often feel delight now in merely surveying my desk and the rather pitiful implements of my craft (and here the painter has the advantage) laid out on that desk, all waiting for me. Typewriter, paper, pencils and erasers, notebooks, works of reference — they are all ready for me, those sensible old colleagues. Here is my own tiny world that I understand.

 

I like that picture because it delights me too.

Priestley’s little book consists of 110 short essays, which he calls “reflections,” on small things that delighted him. I think almost all of us should write such a book, although an essay, being shorter, might  be even better.

• Source: J.B. Priestley, Delight; New York: Harper & Row, 1949, p. 100. 

Another look at little contentments

Yesterday’s note about little contentments reminded me of a couple of books.

The most recent is the poet Ross Gay’s collection The Book of Delights. He wrote short essays about things that delighted him. He wrote one a day for a year and chose 102 for his book.

J.B. Priestley did the same a couple of generations ago. His Delight is my favorite book of this kind. The preference is a matter of voice, I suppose. Priestley was a grumbler who found myriad things to complain about. The fact that there are delights amid all the muck surprised him — and the pleasant surprise was itself a kind of delight.

This is the kind of book or essay that almost all of us should write for friends and children. People get a sense of who you are by what you love.

• Sources and notes: Ross Gay, The Book of Delights, Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2019.

J.B. Priestley, Delight; New York: Harper & Row, 1949. For another note on it, see “One-night reads: Recommendations, 1,” Oct. 29, 2021.

Little contentments

 I was thinking about the cloud of yellow butterflies flying over the Yellow River. We were on a bluff, and the swallowtails were circling below us, and the river was running below them.

I can describe the scene, but I have trouble describing the feeling: a wonder at the world and also a satisfaction in being in it. The poet Wendell Berry got closer to that feeling than I can when he wrote about not wanting the great things …

 

but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman's silence
receiving the river's grace,
the gardener's musing on rows.

 

I love those lines and those little contentments. I’m fortunate and grateful that my life is full of them.

• Source: I have “The Want of Peace” in Wendell Berry, New Collected Poems; Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2012, p. 78. If I owned just a few books, that would be one of them. You can find the poem here:

https://apoemaday.tumblr.com/post/619744598319824896/the-want-of-peace

Kant on the antimonies

 The most interesting part of Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena is his account of the four antimonies. They are:

• The world has, as to time and space, a beginning.

• Everything in the world consists of elements that are simple.

• There are in the world causes through freedom.

• In the series of world-causes there is some necessary being.

No. 1 is cosmology. No. 2 is atomic theory. No. 3 is the old debate about free will and determinism. No. 4 involves the existence of God.

Kant was fascinated that you could find “equally clear, evident and irresistible proofs” for and against each thesis.

 

Here is the most singular phenomenon of human reason, no other instance of which can be shown in any other use of reason.

 

Kant said that in these four cases, reason “perceives that it is divided against itself, a state at which the skeptic rejoices, but which must make the critical philosopher pause and feel ill at ease.”

I’m interested but less disturbed. Logical arguments are concerned with truth, and when we speak of truth we are looking at the basis for a claim. Some claims are not based on anything. While some baseless claims are just nonsense, Euclid didn’t offer proofs of his axioms. A system that allows us to have arguments within it has to begin somewhere.

• Source and notes: Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950, pp. 86-8.

Kant was born on this date 300 years ago, April 22, 1724, in Königsberg, East Prussia, now Kaliningrad, Russia. Kant has appeared in a handful of these notes. By contrast, Wittgenstein has appeared in 35. I have a couple of friends who are more interested in Kant’s thought than I am. I am thinking of them today with gratitude.

Saunders: ‘Home’

 George Saunders’s story ‘Home’ is about the place veterans come home to.

Mikey, home from a combat tour, finds that his mother has a new but unemployed boyfriend and that they are being evicted. Mikey’s sister has married into a posh family and has no interest in getting ensnared in the adventures of Mom and her new mate. Mikey’s wife has left him, taking the kids, and married a new guy named Evan.

Here are Mikey and Evan discussing when and on what terms Mikey can see the kids:  

 

“Tomorrow?” I said.

“Would that be okay for you?” he said. “After I get home from work?”

I saw we’d agreed to play it reasonable. One way we were playing it reasonable was saying everything like a question.

 

Saunders is good at getting at the shallowness of American culture. He’s good at catching the demands  we put on each other that might cause a reasonable person to snap.

• Source: George Sanders, Tenth of December; New York: Random House, 2013, p. 186.

You should see the calico bushes

 Mountain laurels are blooming in the woods south of Stone Mountain. Kalmia latifolia is a wonder to me, partly because it’s different from the mountain laurel I knew in Texas, Sophora secundiflora.

The blooms weigh down the bushes and small trees. The blossoms are white, flecked with red. I like one of the common names: calico bush.

It’s a wonderful time to be in the woods. The wild azaleas in genus Rhododendron are blooming. I’ve also seen wood sorrel, genus Oxalis, with large magenta flowers. I love the lavender blooms of lyreleaf sage, Salvia lyrata. 

The enormous dog and I disturbed a red-bellied snake, Storeria occipitomaculata.  Red-bellied snakes have been known to play possum, but this one was trying hard to get out of our way. This little fellow, about 5 inches long, was gray with a brown spot at the base of its skull. Red-bellied snakes eat slugs.

• Note: For those interested in the other mountain laurel, Sophora secundiflora, see “Mountain laurels here and there,” April 14, 2023.

Bertrand Russell on free thought

 Bertrand Russell thought it was outrageous for a democratic state to impose legal penalties on people for either holding or failing to hold certain opinions.

Russell was imprisoned for expressing two controversial opinions. He held that involvement in World War I was wrong and that nonresistance to evil was better than bloodshed.

Russell was not locked up for his opinion that the world would be better if all religious belief died out. At the time, that opinion also was illegal.

Russell pointed out the logical difficulty:

 

In England, under the Blasphemy Laws, it is illegal to express disbelief in the Christian religion, though in practice the law is not set in motion against the well-to-do. It is also illegal to teach what Christ taught on the subject of non-resistance. Therefore, whoever wishes to avoid becoming a criminal must profess to agree with Christ’s teaching, but must avoid saying what that teaching was.

 

I spent years as a referee, trying to encourage the responsible exercise of free speech on the opinion pages of a newspaper. I was booed more frequently than a basketball referee in the Big East Conference, known for its spirited fans. In my case, much of the booing was deserved. I blew many calls. But this is still worth doing.

It’s possible to express strong views without accusing your opponents of committing crimes and without inciting mobs to harm them.

• Source: Bertrand Russell, “Free Thought and Official Propaganda,” a lecture delivered at South Place Institute on March 24, 1922. Project Gutenberg has it here:

https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/introphil/chapter/bertrand-russell/

Russell: ‘How to Grow Old’

 The philosopher Bertrand Russell left some instructions on how not to grow old, in the sense of being tired and tiresome, as we grow old, in the sense of being ancient.

He thought we ought to let our interests get broader as we age. As a young man, Russell wrote on the problems of logic and epistemology. As an old man, he wrote on broader topics, including this one.

You can see the broadening of interests in his life and in his essay “How to Grow Old,” which includes this metaphor:

An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

It’s a striking metaphor. While I admire it, it doesn’t seem right to me. I’m still engaged in some of the narrow interests that fascinated me when I was young. And some of my interesting old friends have their own narrow interests that continue to fascinate them.

I think human beings constantly search for better metaphors, for better ways of understanding the world. I’d love to have a better metaphor for “an individual human existence.”

• Source: Bertrand Russell, “How to Grow Old,” was published in Portraits from Memory and Other Essays; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956. I found the essay online here:
https://www.organism.earth/library/document/how-to-grow-old

Alan Seeger as a war poet

 When war poets come up, I  think of those like Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg who wrote about its futility and cruelty.

Few people who saw battle had anything good to say about it. Alan Seeger, an American who died fighting for France in World War I, was one of the few.

When both world wars broke out, public opinion in the United States was against getting involved. Seeger was exasperated. He thought Americans should be willing to fight to defend the wronged.

His “Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France” argues that there are worse things than fighting and dying.

 

But by the death of these

Something that we can look upon with pride

Has been achieved, nor wholly unreeled

Can sneerers triumph in the charge they make

That from a war where Freedom was at stake

America withheld and, daunted, stood aside.

 

The lines seem strange to me, but I’m interested in a personality that, rather than being crushed by the experience of warfare, was fighting and still relishing the fight when he died.

• Sources and notes: Alan Seeger’s “Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45080/ode-in-memory-of-the-american-volunteers-fallen-for-france

His nephew Pete Seeger, the folk singer, also wrote some lyrics that seem strange to me for different reasons.

This line of thought started with Alice Winn’s “The Sex Lives and War Deaths of Soldier Poets,” a review of Michael Korda’s Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets in the April 15, 2024 edition of The New York Times. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/books/review/muse-of-fire-michael-korda.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=highlightShare&ugrp=m&sgrp=c-cb

A writing tip from Sophocles

 Someone said that the first Greek philosophers were not the philosophers but the tragedians.

I think that might be true in the same way that some people see Existentialists as philosophers, while others don’t. Some would say we’re talking about a point of view, rather than philosophy.

If you’re an Existentialist, the human condition is absurd, meaningless until someone makes it meaningful. If you were a tragedian, the human condition is tragic, not absurd. Human beings simply don’t know about themselves and their position in the cosmos to avoid hurting themselves and others.

If that orientation makes sense to you, this writing tip from Sophocles might also make sense: That tragic conception is the razor with which you cut a drama out of your culture’s mythic material.

Sophocles left interesting details about the mythic characters on the cutting floor. He resisted the temptation to develop characters solely because they were interesting.

If a delicious detail did not contribute to his tragic conception, he cut it. He was ruthless.

• Source: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. 

Practice makes perfect

 Anders Ericsson, a psychologist who studied excellence and expertise, made a distinction in the way people practice. Some practice naïvely, others deliberately.

I claim to practice hitting golf balls deliberately. But if that were true, I’d have improved.

A player who practices deliberately defines goals, pays attention to technique and results, experiments and gets constant feedback on performance. If the player is not failing 20 percent of the time, she’s probably not challenging herself.

Ericsson, who was a professor at Florida State University, said on average experts spent 10,000 hours reaching their peak. There’s no rule. Averages in different fields vary. But his point was that if you want to be an Olympic athlete or a piano virtuoso you need to practice deliberately for years.

Ericsson’s views have been criticized, and I’m just starting to read about the debate.

Fifty years ago, I began to read some of the ancient Greek thinkers who wrote about arete, which is usually translated “excellence” or “virtue.” It’s what makes a human good. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to wonder what psychologists had to say.

• Sources: Here are two articles available online that intoduce Ericsson and his work:

K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely, “The Making of an Expert”; Harvard Business Review, July-August 2007.
https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert

Steven Kurutz, “Anders Ericsson, Psycholgist and ‘Expert on Experts,’ Dies at 72”; The New York Times, July 1, 2020.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/science/anders-ericsson-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.kU0.Rs54.emdwTo5T7PSY&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=m&sgrp=c-cb

Why we watch

 The Texas naturalist Roy Bedichek often talked about watching wildlife. Of course you try to identify the species, he’d say. But that’s just a small part of it. He watched because he curious about what the individual was doing.

I thought of that while watching a squirrel carrying a tiny baby across a path and up a tree. The kit, dangling from its parent’s mouth, was tiny. Had the kit fallen out of the nest and survived by landing in the deep leaf litter? Was the parent having to move to a safer, less crowded place?

The Eastern gray squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis, was easy to identify. Its intentions are a mystery to me.

Sophocles: 'Philoctetes'

 Philoctetes, who owned the wondrous bow of Heracles, was headed for Troy with the Greek army when he stumbled into the unmarked shrine of a god and was bitten by a snake. The wound wouldn’t heal. The odor and the cries of pain made him an outcast.

He had done nothing consciously wrong. But his shipmates wanted nothing to do with him and left alone him on the island of Lemnos. It’s convenient, when you are trying to get away from people who need help, to believe that they’ve offended the gods and brought wrath down on themselves.

Odysseus was the trickster who engineered the abandonment Philoctetes. Almost 10 years later, Odysseus was sent to get him back when a prophecy came down that Troy would not fall without the magical bow. The prophecy said the gods would arrange for the healing of the wounded bowman.

Since Philoctetes naturally wanted to put an arrow in Odysseus, Odysseus recruited young Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, to help. The lad was ordered to trick Philoctetes onboard a ship.

The story is how Neoptolemus, in trying to obey orders, came to see the cruelty inflicted on the outcast. He saw that Philoctetes was so wounded he was unwilling to resume normal life — the life of a social animal among other human beings.

David Grene, the translator, said this in his introduction:

It is perhaps the most modern in feeling of all Sophocles’ tragedies, and Sophocles is the most modern, the nearest to us, of the three Greek tragedians.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, says this is New Tragedy — something closer to the realism of modern drama.

The action of the drama is invested with a new reality; it is being made for its own sake: there is no tragic background of Unwritten Law or the frailty of man to colour the scene. The Philoctetes is not precipitated out of some universal tragic concept. Sophocles is now interested, not possessed; his creations are not symbols … but figures whose importance is strictly limited to the play in which they appear.

The poetry is wonderful. Here’s Neoptolemus arguing that Philoctetes must give up his anger and return to society:

The fortunes that the Gods give us men

we must be under necessity.

But men that cling willfully to their sufferings

As you do, no one may forgive or pity.

Your anger has made a savage of you.

And here’s Philoctetes, explaining why he will never go back:

It is not the sting of wrongs past

but in what I must look for in the wringers to come.

Men whose wit has been mother of villainy once

have learned from it to be evil in all things.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Philoctetes is on pp. 315-26. The quotation is on p. 318.

Philoctetes, 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. 189-254. The quotations are on pp. 190, 248 and 249.

Piedmont, early April

 A cloud of yellow butterflies, swallowtails, over the Yellow River. You can see such things in spring if you leave that comfortable chair.

Among the other sights:

• A red-tail hawk, big enough to be an eagle.

• Mountain laurel, Kalmia latifolia, just beginning to put out blooms.

• Carolina sweetshrub, Calycanthus floridus, a beautiful plant whose blooms look like the bud of a dark red rosebud on top of dusty red sunflower petals.

The Wise Woman found a feather from a barred owl on the trail. The next day, I found the remains of a small rat snake. People kill snakes indiscriminately, and I mourn when I find their carcasses. But this was the work of a surgeon who filleted the snake perfectly and cleaned every scrap of meat from the skin. I’d guess an owl.

Delmore Schwartz on love and anger

 A new edition of Delmore Schwartz is out. I know the poet only from Hayden Carruth’s anthology, The Voice That is Great Within Us. But “For the One Who Would Take Man’s Life in His Hands” strikes me as the work of a gifted poet.

The poet says that Samson, Othello, Christ and others were broken by love or by anger. An act of love caused Troy to burn. There are no pure acts. Every act carries with it the seeds of its own downfall.

            You cannot sit on bayonets,

            Nor can you eat among the dead.

            When all are killed, you are alone.

            A vacuum comes when hate has fed.

The poets says that Socrates took both sides of the argument. He was a soldier and a lover. He embraced love and war, not the either-or.

What do all examples show?

What can any actor know?

            The contradiction in every act.

            The infinite task of the human heart.

The book on Schwartz is that his early promise collapsed into alcoholism and mental illness. Dwight Garner, writing in The New York Times, says that people know him today from James Atlas’s biography, which is almost 50 years old, or Saul Bellow’s fictional portrait in Humboldt’s Gift.

Not me. I owe Carruth.

• Sources: The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, edited by Hayden Carruth; New York: Bantam Classics, 1983. “For the One Who Would Take Man’s Life in His Hands” is on pp. 366-7.

The site All Poetry has it here:

https://allpoetry.com/For-The-One-Who-Would-Take-Man's-Life-In-His-Hands

Dwight Garner, “Delmore Schwartz’s Poems Are Like Salt Flicked on the World”; The New York Times, April 8, 2024. It’s a review of The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.

Sophocles: ‘The Women of Trachis’

 Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, points out that Deianeira, wife of the hero Heracles, might have become a fully developed human being. Her culture made her a prize of battle.

As a young woman, she was courted by the river god, Achelous, who had three forms: bull, snake and man with a bull’s head, with a beard that gushed like a fountain. Deianeira, contemplating her wedding night, prayed for death.

Heracles won her by killing her suitor. Deianeira was ecstatic. But being married to a hero came with a price. He was always away. He saw their kids occasionally, between adventures.

If you are a hero, you know that some traits come with the hero personality: you are willing to sacrifice anything for your own projects, your own vision of yourself as hero. Wives and kids — in fact all other people — are just not important. Sophocles could paint a narcissist. 

When Heracles sent Ione, a young woman he won in battle just as he had once won Deianeira, home as a trophy, Deianeira snapped. She remembered a potion that Nessus, a centaur, had given her.

When Deianeira was a new bride, Nessus ferried her across a river. When he put his lusty hands on her, Deianeira cried out. Heracles put an arrow into the centaur’s chest. As he died, Nessus gave Deianeira some of his blood and told her to save it as a potion. It was a love potion, the centaur said, and would prevent Heracles from loving another woman as he’d loved her.

You can see where this is going. A centaur’s blood is poison.

Sophocles could handle irony. The great hero is undone by a woman, not a rival hero. His undoing is done innocently, not by scheming. The great hero was killed from beyond the grave by the blood of a creature who, like Heracles, thought of women as prizes to be won or taken by force.

I couldn’t read The Women of Trachis without thinking of the scoundrels we’ve turned into folk heroes today.

Sophocles has many good lines of poetry. My favorites, spoken by Hyllus, Heracles’s son, are at the end:

 

You have seen a terrible death

and agonies, many and strange, and there is

nothing here which is not Zeus.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Woman of Trachis is on pp. 304-15.

The Woman of Trachis, translated by Michael Jameson, 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. 64-119. The quotation is on p. 119.

What's good in nonfiction

 One of the first lines I learned to read in ancient Greek was “Big book, big evil.”

The speaker was Callimachus, a librarian at Alexandria. One explanation is that scrolls in ceramic jars weighed a ton, and organizing the stacks was a bit like hitting the gym.

But my professor was pretty sure Callimachus was just making a point about brevity. Ancient books tended to be shorter. It was assumed most topics could be covered in a short book.

I mentioned reading Pico Iyer’s The Art of Stillness, a TED Book, published by Simon & Schuster. I’d guess it’s about 15,000 words. Most novels are five times that long.

Iyer’s book has about 80 pages, including 18 pages of photographs by Eydís Einarsdóttir. Iyer said it was written to be read in one sitting.

I’m a fan of Very Short Introductions, a series published by Oxford University Press. I loved the old Pelican paperbacks that provided introductions to subjects and the Modern Masters series. 

Brevity is a good thing, and I wish publishers of novels agreed. Some seem to think that no one would buy a short novel. That’s an idea, I suppose, but I can barely grasp it.

Being still

 From Pico Iyer I learned that there is something called interruption science and that its researchers have found that it takes 25 minutes to recover from a telephone call, while phone calls and other such interruptions occur, on average, every 11 minutes.

I get few calls these days. But I made up for it with a lifetime in newsrooms, where the telephone ringing every 11 minutes would have been a slow day.

But that’s not the point of Iyer’s story. The point is that we busy ourselves into a state where we never recover our sense of stillness, calm, sanity.

• Source: Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness; New York: TED Books, 2014, p. 41.

The art of booking

 I subscribed to The Washington Post just to read Michael Dirda. There’s far more to The Post than its interesting book section, but I’m a Dirda fan, and he lured me into the fold. It was a delight to see his essay on booking, shopping at used-book stores.

I love to browse. I always come out of a good bookstore with spirits elevated, reaffirmed in the belief that the world is endlessly fascinating and that I have much to learn. It helps me shake off the blues or the blahs and get on with the business of learning.

If I’m stuck on a piece of writing, it’s the best way I know to get unstuck.

One curious thing about Dirda’s essay: He didn’t mention having a list. He likes to go and explore, to find out what he next wants to read. I’m sympathetic, but I also like to have a few things I’m specifically looking for.

In my notebook, I have a standing page with the heading “Books I’d like to read.” I list titles as I come across interesting things in my reading. When the page has 10 items, it’s time to go.

• Source: Michael Dirda, “How to shop in used-book stores: 14 tips from a bibliophile”; The Washington Post, April 5, 2024.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/04/05/used-bookstores-guide/

‘Lord Royston’s Tour’

 I admire Lydia Davis’s short story about Marie Curie. It’s a peculiar blend of biography, essay and historical fiction. But she also did a similar kind of piece that might be even better. “Lord Royston’s Tour” is a short story based on Philip Yorke’s journey through the Russian Empire.

Lord Royston was 21 when he set out in 1806. He endured plague, fevers, famine, heat exhaustion and frostbite, driven ever further by his curiosity. He died in a shipwreck while coming home in 1808.

He was a classics scholar, the kind that left Greek anapests in albums at country inns.

He saw the touristy sights — the skin of the horse that had carried Gustavus Adolphus in the battle of Lutzen, was a draw in his day. But he traveled mainly to answer his own questions.

When the archbishop of Archangel, who was fluent in Latin, didn’t know whether the Samoyeds in his archdiocese were pagan or Christian, Royston acquired three sledges and 12 reindeer and set out to the Arctic Circle to find the answer. Pagan.

It was 70 degrees below freezing. The trip was not easy.

Along the way, he acquired a friend, Mr. Poinsett, a South Carolinian. Royston said Poinsett was one of the few literate men to come out of the woods of the New World.

It’s hard to picture the world at that time. Here’s a snapshot of Royston’s party as it leaves the court of a Tatar prince in the desert near the Caucasus Mountains.

 

He sets out for Derbend with an escort. The caravan is very oddly composed: he and his American companion, a Swiss, a Dutchman, a Mulatto, a Tartar of Rezan, a body of Lesgees for escort, two Jews, an envoy of one of the native princes returning from St. Petersburg, and three Circassian girls one of the guides has bought in the mountains and is taking to sell at Baku.

 

A lot of us would have trouble finding these places on a map. This kind of fiction is a way of finding that world and that time in our imaginations.

• Source: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; New York: Picador, 2009. “Lord Royston’s Tour” is on pp. 216-40. The quotation is on p. 229.

For notes on her biographed story, see “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman,” April 1, 2024.

It’s called sticky mouse-ear chickweed

 The woods at Panola Mountain are just turning green. Dogwoods are putting out sprays of white flowers, and the wild azaleas we saw were pink and white. It’s a beautiful time of year in the Piedmont.

On the forest floor were violets, genus Viola, and buttercups, genus Ranunculus.

Among the less showy flowering plants were stands of sticky mouse-ear chickweed, Cerastium glomeratum. These little annuals have white flowers with five petals that are deeply notched at the tip — it almost looks as if there were 10 petals.

The capsules of the sticky mouse-ear chickweed are cylinders, almost like a section of pipe. In common chickweed, Stellaria media, the capsules are shaped like eggs.

These two “chickweeds” are in different genera in the carnation family, Caryophyllaceae. If you’re wondering about the common name, farmers noticed that chickens were fond of the plants.

I saw the sticky mouse-ear chickweed mixed in with a stand of lesser hop trefoil, Trifolium dubium, which might be what you picture when someone mentions Irish shamrocks.

Antisthenes’ proposal

 Antisthenes told the Athenians they should use their donkeys to plow their fields.

The Athenians replied donkeys were not born to that. Horses were. It's a question of ability or capability.

Antisthenes asked if incompetents were born for high office.

It was election season in Athens when Antisthenes made that crack, and it’s election season in this country now. As the old bluesmen used to say, sometimes I’m overcome thinking about it.

• Source: I came across the story in “On the art of conversation” in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 1059-60.

An unusually good library

 Among the cities I’ve called home, the one with the finest public library was Galveston, Texas.

I’ve enjoyed public libraries all my life. I’m grateful for all of them. But Galveston’s was the best.

Library lovers in Galveston were fortunate in three ways:

First, Henry Rosenberg, born in Switzerland in 1824, came to Galveston as a scruffy teenager while Texas was still a republic. He got a job as a store clerk. It turned out the unpromising young man had a flair for business. He became a tycoon. When he died in 1893, he left money in his will for a fabulous library, a gift to his adopted city.

Second, when the library was established in 1900, the city earmarked a nickel on the property-tax rate — 5 cents per $100 of assessed value — for the library. It was a modest amount in horse-and-buggy days. But with the city’s tax base approaching $9 billion, “the library’s nickel,” as islanders call it, is significant.

Third, the library has always had public support. I don’t know whether people who live on islands love books and libraries more than others. But at times it seemed like it. If there was an event at the library, people showed up.

I love public libraries, even — and perhaps especially — the poor, struggling ones. But most of the education I have came from libraries, rather than from schools. When I enter a library, I wander through the stacks and ask: Could I get an education here?

The collection in Galveston’s library was excellent. If you lived on the island, you almost had to read good books. Everyone else did.

• Note: We’re coming up on National Library Week, April 7-13. It’s a good time to write a thank-you note to a librarian.

First thing after Pearl Harbor

 After World War was safely won, conservatives peddled the notion that a liberal press had always been in bed with FDR. How else could you explain why the public image of such a scoundrel was so rosy?

But the story that the press loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt and that Roosevelt loved the press is bilge.

Throughout the last century, the American press was largely conservative. Three of four  newspapers opposed Roosevelt. The big newspaper chains loathed the New Deal. On their editorial pages, they debated whether Social Security was creeping socialism, outright socialism or communism.

They blistered FDR. FDR responded in kind.

But in wartime, people who don’t like each other sometimes cooperate.

After Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt spoke to journalists about the dangers of rumors and the enemies’ use of disinformation. He reminded the public — through newspapers and radio — that there was a science of propaganda, and that our enemies were actively engaged in using it to hurt the United States.

Disinformation is not a mistake. It’s intentional. It’s a weapon.

Those press conferences were remarkable. The democracy was fighting for its life. But Roosevelt took the time to talk to people about the difference between free speech and disinformation.

Counterintuitive, maybe. A lot of people thought there were more important things to talk about.

I think it was a stroke of genius: that topic was — and still is — something that democracies had best get right from the start.

‘Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman’

 I love a particular kind of short story. Bernard Malamud called them “fictive biographies” or “biographed stories.” They are biographies compressed into short stories.

In my mind, Guy Davenport was a master. His short fictions were superbly researched. Readers know that only a fiction writer could raise a historical character from the dead. But it’s hard to tell what’s fact and what’s simply the writer’s imagination.

Lydia Davis wrote a masterpiece in this form, “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman.”

The story is in 45 sections. Three sections are one-sentence observations. Some are vignettes. Some are anecdotes. Here’s the first sentence of the section on “Character”:

 

From birth, Marie possesses the three dispositions that make brilliant subjects, cherished by professors: memory, power of concentration, and appetite for learning.

 

She leaves Poland to study in Paris. We see her poverty and the austerity she adopts as a defense:

 

She sometimes faints from having fed herself exclusively on radishes and tea.

 

Marie is courted by Pierre Curie, who brings her a scientific paper instead of chocolates. Academic types, especially those in the sciences, weren’t paid well. But the couple’s devotion and their almost religious pursuit of scientific inquiry attracts fellow workers.

They win a Nobel together. Then Pierre, the absent-minded professor, wanders into the path of a freight wagon.

 

It is the back left wheel that crushed Pierre’s skull.

 

Marie won’t allow his name to be spoken, especially in front of the children. Then the letters start.

 

She beings to write to Pierre, a sort of laboratory notebook of grief.

 

Her research finally received financial support from Andrew Carnegie. She won a second Nobel. Everyone knows that the radiation she passionately studied killed her.

I love history. I love nonfiction. But I spent an hour in the presence of Marie Curie the other day. I felt her personality, not just her historical significance.

I say that kind of fiction has to be a magical art.

• Sources and notes: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; New York: Picador, 2009. “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman” is on pp. 404-22. The quotations are on pp. 404, 406, 413 and 414. For more on these kinds of stories see “Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner,’” Nov. 22, 2022, and “Malamud: ‘In Kew Gardens,’” March 20, 2024.