Dia de los Muertos

 The day, of course, is Nov. 1. But there is more than one day, because there is always more than one tradition to be reckoned with when you’re talking about Mexico.

Had I been on my toes, I would have marked Oct. 28 as a day to remember those who were assassinated or otherwise died violently. The festival runs over several days. In my mind, Halloween has been absorbed.

I have, at times, been a worker of newspaper puzzles. But a recent change in subscriptions prompted me to start reading El Sol de Mexico. I don’t read fluently, and my short daily puzzling over the beautiful language has replaced crosswords and other puzzles.

From el diario I learned why those who died in the past year don’t appear during the festival. The spirits must ask permission to participate. Permissions involve bureaucracies. It takes time.

Euripides: ‘Helen’

 In this play, Helen is not the hussy who ran off with Paris, starting the Trojan War and bringing misery to mankind. That was an image of Helen, cooked up by the goddess Hera. The real Helen was flown to Egypt where Proteus, saintliest of kings, protected her until her husband could claim her.

As Professor H.D.F. Kitto said, mythology is a kind of make believe, and we are now into alternate make believe. We’ve gone from the stuff of tragedy to the stuff of tragi-comedy. Kitto says we’re close to comedy.

Proteus dies, and his son, Theoclymenus, is as lusty as his father was righteous. As he pursues Helen, the chaste and noble one, Helen’s husband Menelaus shows up, having been shipwrecked. His ship’s lost, but his crew and the other Helen are hiding from the Egyptians, who are known to kill Greeks.

After the obligatory recognition scene — it’s been 17 years — Menelaus has to expand his consciousness. The Helen he dragged away from Troy was an image, an illusion. The universal narrative that his wife was faithless and brought untold suffering on mankind was false. His wife has been true all along.

At first, he just can’t accept it.

 

I trust my memory of great hardships more than you.

 

Once he accepts that he is, indeed, in an altered reality, there are difficulties to overcome and escapes to be made.

The chief difficulty is Theoclymenus’ sister Theonoë, a seer. She must be persuaded to keep silent — to side with Helen and Menelaus against her brother.

The escape is based on a ruse: Helen tells Theoclymenus that Menelaus is just a shipwrecked sailor bringing news of Menelaus’ death at sea. She says she’s willing to marry Theoclymenus — but first she must have a funeral for her old husband. And since the Greek custom is to have funerals for those who died at sea out on the open sea, can she borrow a ship?

The conversations between Helen and Theoclymenus are ironic. She tells him:

 

You shall have me in your house, as wife, to the degree

that you deserve.

 

Menelaus sometimes joins in. It is, as Professor Kitto says, on the edge of comedy. All ends happily — except for the Egyptian seaman who are slaughtered by the Greeks who take over the ship and sail off to Hellas.

Helen’s brothers Castor and Polydeuces, who have become immortal, make an appearance to tell Theoclymenus that it’s all the will of heaven. He’s advised to get over it and stop threatening his sister.

It’s all good fun, I suppose. As always, there’s good poetry even in the asides.

I’m tempted to see a lesson about our willingness to believe in illusions even when reality is staring us in the face. Maybe it’s because it’s an election year. As one of Theoclymenus’ servants says:

 

Man’s most valuable trait

is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The chapter “New Tragedy: Euripides’ Tragi-Comedies” is on pp. 327-47. Helen, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Euripides II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 189-260. The quotations are on pp. 215, 249 and 256.

Euripides: ‘Ion’

 When she was a girl, Creusa was raped by Apollo. The Athenian princess had her baby in a cave and left him in a cradle full of her things, hoping the god would take him. Apollo did, and the boy grew up in the god’s temple at Delphi.

Creusa married Xuthus, an ally who helped Athens in a war. They were childless and came to consult the oracle.

Xuthus was told that the first man he met on leaving the temple was his son. Of course that man was the lad known as Apollo’s servant, Creusa’s lost child. Xuthus named him Ion.

As the men reveled, Creusa thought she was being pushed out of her kingdom by Xuthus and his heir. She planned to murder Ion with a drop of Gorgon’s blood. But Ion poured a libation. When a dove drank from the spilled wine and died, the plot was exposed.

Creusa took refuge at Apollo’s altar. Ion, once a pious temple lad, was about to kill her anyway when Apollo’s priestess came in with the cradle that Ion had been found in. It was filled with trinkets, the kind a girl might make and value, and Creusa could describe everything in it, sight unseen.

Athene arrived with a message from her brother Apollo, confirming what mother and son know. The goddess said Ion would found a race, the Ionians. Creusa And Xuthus would have sons who would become the fathers of the Dorians and Achaeans. 

For a play with happy ending — tragicomedy, rather than tragedy — this play strikes me as serious and dark. Euripides relentlessly points out the two standards of justice for men and women — and of course two standards of justice is the definition of injustice.

Most of the great lines are from Creusa, who rails against the “ungrateful betrayers of women.”

But I like this passage, spoken by a chorus of women who are serving Creusa:

 

Of women, see how much we surpass

In virtue the unrighteous race 

Of men. Let a song of different strain

Ring out against men, harshly indicting

Their love. 

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The chapter “New Tragedy: Euripides’ Tragi-Comedies” is on pp. 327-47. Ion, translated by Ronald Frederick Willetts, is in Euripides III in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 177-255. The quotations are on pp. 222 and 232.

Euripides: ‘Iphigeneia at Tauris’

 Iphigeneia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, was told she was going to Aulis to be married to the champion Achilles. But when she arrived, her father, leader of the Greeks who sailed against Troy, tossed her on an altar and put a knife to her throat. She was just a sacrifice for favorable winds.

All the Greeks thought she died. But in this story — you know tragicomedy and an alternate world of make believe is coming — the goddess Artemis substitutes a deer for the princess at the last instant. The goddess whisks Iphigeneia off to Tauris, now part of Crimea.

The people of Tauris are wild and barbarous and sacrifice foreigners to a wooden statue of Artemis, the Statue that Fell from Heaven. Iphigeneia becomes a priestess of the goddess, preparing victims for sacrifice. She’s miserable.

Meanwhile, her brother Orestes is pursued by the Furies for killing their mother, Clytemnestra, who had killed their father, Agamemnon. Apollo told Orestes that the only way to get rid of the Furies would be to go to Tauris and steal the Statue that Fell from Heaven.

You can see where this is going.

Orestes is accompanied by Pylades, his friend, sidekick and brother-in-law. They are captured, and when the victims are being prepared for sacrifice, lo and behold.

The Greek poets wrote many wonderful lines about friendship. Some of the best are in this play.

But my favorite parts of the play show Iphigeneia trying to make sense of Artemis. She’s devoted to the ideal of a goddess who saved her from barbaric superstition. She’s appalled by the cruel customs of the cult of the same goddess. Her brother, who had his own problems with gods and Furies, spoke these lines:

 

The wisest men follow their own direction

And listen to no prophet guiding them.

None but the fools believe in oracles,

Forsaking their own judgement. Those who know,

Know that such men can only come to grief.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The chapter “New Tragedy: Euripides’ Tragi-Comedies” is on pp. 327-47. Iphigeneia at Tauris, translated by Witter Bynner, is in Euripides II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 116-87. The quotation is on p. 145.

Euripides: ‘Alcestis’

 When Death come for him, Admetus, king of Thessaly, is terrified. Apollo cuts a deal on his behalf: someone else can take his place. Admetus is not greatly loved. His aged parents decline to stand in for him. Only his wife, Alcestis, will go in his stead.

Admetus makes a great show of caring for his wife. His “care” is ironic. When the chorus says, “Surely, he must be doing all he can for her,” we are choking on irony.

Irony is one of the hallmarks of tragicomedy, and we are in neck deep.

It takes Admetus a long time to see that he’s lost himself along with his wife. When he confronts his father and calls him a coward, old Pheres lets him have a look in the mirror.

Heracles, an ill-timed guest, arrives, and Admetus doesn’t have the heart to tell him that it’s Alcestis who has died. Heracles gets tipsy and is a terrible guest. But when he discovers the truth, he goes and gets her back by brute force.

Among the good lines in the play, I like one from the opening scene, where Apollo is arguing with Death, saying he should wait until Alcestis is old. We don’t expect Death to be deft with words. But Euripides’ Death is, prompting Apollo to say:

 

What is this? Have you unrecognized talents from debate?

 

(A freer translation, suggested by Professor H.D.F. Kitto, might be: “And so you’re an intellectual now?”)

When Death comes for me, I hope I remember that line.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The chapter “New Tragedy: Euripides’ Tragi-Comedies” is on pp. 327-47. Alcestis, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Euripides I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 1-53. The quotation is on p. 9.

From tragedy to tragicomedy

 Can a tragedy have a happy ending?

It’s a philosophical question, and ancient philosophers and critics wrestled with it, at least those who wondered what Euripides was doing.

It’s hard to miss the happy ending in Alcestis. People also noticed that the play was so loaded with irony it almost was satiric, and satires are not tragedies.

I’m reading the Greek tragedies in 2024, and the classic tragedies are behind us. We’re coming up on a string of four — Alcestis, Iphigeneia at Tauris, Ion and Helen — that the ancient critics had trouble classifying. Alcestis is almost a satire, and Helen is almost a comedy.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the tragedies, said that all the ancient dramas, with their gods and heroes, involved things that aren’t real. But tragedy seems real, while tragicomedy is another step away from reality.

For example, the next play in line, Alcestis, begins with the premiss that a wife will take the place of a husband who is fated to die. Within that wildly unrealistic premiss, everything makes sense. But we know from the start that we’re in a world of make believe.

In Kitto’s account, tragedy is to tragicomedy what fiction is to science fiction or fantasy.

In classic tragedy, the play is built around a tragic conception, a mythos — an account of the “terms and conditions of human life,” as Kitto puts it.

Euripides famously worked out his idea of the human tragedy at the expense of his plots and characterizations. Sometimes, his scenes were interrupted by long philosophical discourses.

In the tragicomedies, the tragic conception is gone, so there’s no need for philosophical interruptions. As Kitto says, the door was wide open for elegant plots and neat characterizations.

The aesthetic of tragicomedy was simply different. A good play was not one that carried a profound moral sense. It was one where all the elements of the dramatic arts — plot, dialog, poetry — were good.

It was art for art’s sake.

• Source: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The chapter “New Tragedy: Euripides’ Tragi-Comedies” is on pp. 327-47.

Euripides: ‘Heracles’

 Heracles has gone off to Hades on his last labor and is presumed dead. The tyrant Lycus has overthrown the king of Thebes and plans to kill Heracles’ wife, Megara, and their three sons. Lycus might kill Heracles’ father, Amphitryon, although he’s too old to be a threat. It all seems hopeless. The family is awaiting the executioners.

 

Megara

So tell me now if you have a plan,

or if you have resigned yourself to death.

 

Amphitryon

My child, I find it hard in such case

to give advice offhand without thought.

We are weak, and weakness can only wait.

 

Megara

Wait for worse? Do you love life so much?

 

Amphitryon

I love it even now. I love its hopes.

 

Megara

And I. But hope is of things possible.

 

Later, Amphitryon, gets his wits about him and says:

 

To persevere, trusting what hopes he has,

is courage in a man. The coward despairs.

 

I think Euripides’ connection of hope with courage is marvelous. But I’m not sure I believe it, which is why I keep reading this play.

The play is in three parts, and this is the first. Heracles, mankind’s “greatest friend,” comes home and is dismayed by what he sees. People have forgotten what he’s done for humanity. Instead of taking care of his family members while he’s off laboring for the common good, they’ve abandoned them, fearful of a petty tyrant. Heracles says farewell to his labors and decides his attention should be with his family.

When Lycus and the executioners arrive, Heracles is waiting.

For a minute, all seems well with the world — villains vanquished, family reunited. But Iris, the female messenger of the gods, arrives with Madness in tow. Madness, also known as Frenzy and Lyssa, protests but must do her duty.

Heracles, thinking he’s in the house of Eurystheus, the man who set him on his thankless labors, starts killing. In his madness, Heracles thinks he’s killing Eurystheus’ wife and children. In fact, he’s killing his own.

When sanity returns, the question is what to do after you have suffered a catastrophe you can’t recover from. Fortunately, a friend arrives to keep Heracles company in his grief.

Heracles had rescued Theseus, king of Athens, from Hades. Theseus stands by Heracles when no one else will, and the two friends discuss the choice Heracles faces. The choice is suicide, which ends the unbearable suffering, or life. 

The courageous choice is to go on, even when you can’t fathom how that’s possible.

Most critics say the best lines in the play are here, in that discussion about what to do.

No one really believed that Heracles, a man of godlike power, was the son of Amphitryon, a mere man. People believed Zeus had crawled in bed and fathered Heracles. That enraged Zeus’ wife, Hera, and everyone believed that the jealous Hera set out to punish Heracles.

Heracles, alone, doesn’t believe the “poets’ lies” about the gods. If gods exist, they must be perfect, he says. The source of his suffering, the source of his grief, must be elsewhere.

It is an astonishing passage. The critics say the play has survived because of this remarkable dialog and the dramatic madness scene.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my honored guide to the tragedies, says he can’t imagine that many people have reread the first 500 lines of the play for pleasure.

I’m the contrarian. The lines quoted above may be in the weakest part of the play, but they haunt me. 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Heracles is on pp. 248-61. Heracles, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 43-115. The quotation is on p. 64.

A trip to South River

 We recently took a new path at Panola Mountain and crossed the South River on a footbridge.

The river was wild during the Hurricane Helene three weeks ago, but the water receded quickly, leaving logs, debris and some old tires scattered over the bottom. The river has white sand beaches at the crossing.

From Alexander Lake, the walk to the bridge and back is about 3.5 miles. The path goes through a part of the forest that was burned — I’d guess a couple of years ago. Some of the scorch marks on the pines are taller than I am.

One of the first plants to come back after a fire, is fireweed, Erechtites hieraciifolius. It’s sometimes called American burnweed and is in the aster family. It’s one of the plants that benefits from fire, and we saw strong stands of it about 8 feet high.

I grew up believing that the Southeast was one giant forest before Europeans arrived. But vast prairies broke up the forest. Lightning would set the woods on fire. So-called pioneer species like fireweed would spring up in the clearings, and tall grasses would grow. The buffalo, pursuing the grass, would trample the tree seedlings, keeping the forests at bay.

On this walk, we saw such a prairie. To look over it — to really see it — you’d have to be on a horse or a ladder. Every plant seemed to be a 6-footer.

Euripides: ‘Andromache’

 Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, says Euripides’ Andromache is not about the universal human tragedy but about the shortcomings of Spartan culture. I think of it as the first critique  of Western nationalism, albeit before European nations were invented.

As Kitto says, Euripides didn’t spin narratives — he worked out ideas. His idea in this play was that the Spartans, with their Sparta First politics, spread misery and suffering throughout any part of the world they touched. Since it’s not a universal human tragedy but a screed against the Spartans, the story focuses on what the Spartans did to one character — and it’s not Andromache. It’s Peleus.

In this story, Peleus is an old man. But when he was young, he was in love with the goddess Thetis. Achilles was their son.

Here’s the progression of what the poisonous politics of the Spartans did to Peleus:

• Arrogance. Spartan arrogance led to the Trojan War, which cost Peleus his beloved son, Achilles. The Spartan Menelaus lost his wife, Helen, to a Trojan prince, and everyone suffered.

• Cruelty. When Troy fell, Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, was allotted Andromache as a slave, a “spear bride.” She had been the wife of the Trojan hero Hector. She had a son by Neoptolemus, but Neoptolemus married Hermione, Menelaus’s daughter. Hermione accused Andromache of using herbs and magic to make her barren and unloved, not grasping that her Sparta First personality made her unlovable. When Neoptolemus went to Delphi to consult the oracle, Hermione plotted to kill Andromache and her child. She saw them only as threats to her marriage.

• Treachery. When Andromache hid the boy and took sanctuary in the temple of Thetis, Menelaus came to help his daughter. He found the boy and told Andromache he’d kill him unless she left the sanctuary. When she agreed to exchange her life for her child’s, Menelaus ignored the deal.

• Stupidity. Menelaus’s purpose in intervening was to help his daughter save her marriage. When old Peleus arrived — just in time to save his great-grandson and Andromache — he was outraged. As the words between the two kings flew, Hermione could see that, whatever else she and her father had been thinking, this was not a sound plan for saving a marriage.

Menelaus, baffled that an old man had stood in his way, said he’d come back later and take the matter up with Neoptolemus. But Hermione could see the writing on the wall. With her father gone, there was no one to protect her. She feared that when Neoptolemus returned, he’d either kill her or disgrace her by putting her out on the street.

Fortunately for her, her cousin Orestes appeared. It was not by chance. He had plotted to murder Neoptolemus. He planned to take Hermione back to Sparta, where he would marry her and play a role at the palace.

That’s the cycle: Arrogance leads to cruelty, which makes treachery easy, and then you get so used to bullying and steamrolling people that you do it routinely and mindlessly, until you eventually make a mindless, stupid mistake.

The ancient Greeks, of course, thought in terms of poleis, rather than nations. But I think if they could look at the nationalism sweeping western democracies today, they’d recognize it.

You’ll always find quotable poetry in Euripides. I like these lines, spoken by Andromache to Menelaus, about reputation:

 

Repute! repute! Repute! how you’ve ballooned

Thousands of good-for-nothings to celebrity!

Men whose glory is come by honestly

Have all my admiration. But imposters

Deserve none: luck and humbugs’s all they are.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Andromache is on pp. 240-7. Andromache, translated by John Frederick Nims, is in Euripides III in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 69-119. The quotation is on p. 86.

A taste for epigraphs

 Epigraphs are a matter of taste. I like them. I also realize it’s pointless to argue with those who do not. Reasoned arguments have and will fail to give me a taste for chicken livers, widely considered a delicacy in my part of the world.

To me, those quotations at the beginning of a book or essay set a tone. They also remind the reader that the theme has been considered by other thoughtful people and is part of an ongoing discussion.

You can tell that’s just a matter of taste by how quickly the argument sinks to rhetorical questions.

What kind of writer needs help setting the tone of his own essay?

What kind of writer would refuse help?

I like fried okra, fried green tomatoes and black-eyed peas, which a surprising number of people in my part of the world think they should consider delicacies but don’t really like.

Arguing doesn’t help.

• Source: Tajja Isen, “What’s the Point of Epigraphs Anyway?”; The Walrus, Oct. 9, 2024.

A line on grief

 On second thought, it’s criminal to talk about The Suppliant Women without mentioning what Euripides said about grief.

Evadne, the widow of one of the Argive champions killed at the gates of Thebes, is about to jump on the funeral pyre. Her old father, Iphis, sees her and can’t comprehend it. He asks:

 

My child, what wind has blown you here? What errand?

 

One of the recurring themes of this collection of notes is the inexplicable nature of grief. That one line from Euripides suggests that a grief-stricken person has lost something — a husband, in this case, but also something inside. Perhaps her reason. Perhaps hope.

• Source: Euripides, The Suppliant Woman, translated by Frank William Jones, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 96.

Euripides: ‘The Suppliant Women’

 This is the story about the world’s stupidest war. Maybe only a person like Euripides could tell it, a person who believed that the human tragedy is having the capacity to reason — the intelligence to avoid suffering — and yet letting that capacity be undermined by fear, superstition, custom and other goblins.

The story picks up after the disaster that we know as the Seven Against Thebes.

Adrastus, king of Argos, was dazzled by a weird oracle telling him he should marry his daughters to a lion and a boar. Oddly, he was certain he understood what it meant. Shunning advice, he married his daughters to two ruffians, one of whom was Oedipus’s son Polyneices. When Polyneices wanted to lead an expedition against Thebes to get what he saw as his kingdom back, Adrastus backed him.

It was a disaster.

The Argives were slaughtered. Creon, king of Thebes, decreed that none of the dead would be buried.

In this play, Adrastus goes to Theseus of Athens and begs him to get the bodies back. He’s accompanied by the mothers of the dead champions, who make up the chorus. They appeal to Aethra, the mother of Theseus, to persuade her son.

The play has a side story. Evadne, the wife of one dead champion and the brother of another, tags along with the suppliant women. When Theseus and the Athenians bring the bodies back to Athens, she leaps on the funeral pyre, unwilling to live without her husband.

Her father, Iphis, who had come to collect the bones of his son, tries to talk her out of it but fails.

Euripides’ decision to tack on the tale of Evadne and Iphis is one of the criticisms of the play. 

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, who has been my guide to the tragedies, says Euripides theme is that war is generally stupid, and that the stupidity brings suffering on the entire community. Euripides makes the point twice: with an account of the general suffering of the mothers of the dead champions, and then an account of the intense suffering of one individual.

In the final scene, Athene appears, ex machina, and reminds Theseus to exact promises from Adrastus, binding Argos to Athens. But she also tells the sons of the dead champions, who are carrying their fathers’ bones back to Argos, that they will one day get revenge.

It’s not a great thing to tell little boys. If you were hoping that reason would prevail over folly, you had the wrong playwright.

This play drives some critics crazy. In addition to the complaint about the Evadne-and-Iphis story, critics have objected to a long funeral speech and digressions about democracy vs. autocracy. But the play also has quotable lines on dozens of topics.

The most quoted are those on the folly of war. But I like the lines about the folly war stories. Theseus is speaking:

 

Vain

To tell or hear such tales — as if a man

In the thick of combat, with a storm of spears

Before his eyes, ever brought back sure news

On who was hero.

 

We suffer from war, in part because we can’t even talk about it.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Suppliant Women is on pp. 232-40. The Suppliant Woman, translated by Frank William Jones, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 51-104. The quotation is on p. 89.

A portrait of a friend

 I can’t pass a cemetery without thinking that we should move on from headstones and monuments and leave behind short accounts of our lives. I suspect there are lessons to be learned in those stories.

One of the lessons I learned in college came from a history professor who was interested in demographics. While teaching us to mine statistical data from old records, he made us read primary sources. In studying the 17^th century, I read hundreds of pages of diaries, letters and reports.

I was surprised, in my journey through the Age of Enlightenment, to read about the terror of epidemics with little thought about prevention. Ordinary people didn’t worry about germs because they didn’t know about them. I was surprised that people with university degrees worried about witches.

You can get at the facts of history — the names of the kings and queens and the dates of the battles — relatively easily. The hard part is grasping what people were thinking.

Getting an appreciation of how people of an earlier age thought is hard. It’s baffling to look back at how we Americans thought about slavery and segregation. That inability to see the past clearly haunts us today as we think about race.

Those primary sources are invaluable, and my friend Michael Vita, 84, reminded me that oral histories should be included in those records.

He recorded an interview with the Stonewall National Museum that shows what the life of a gay man who grew up the ’50s and ’60s was like. You can listen to the interview to find out what it was like to grow up in New York, what it was like to perform on Broadway, what it was like to have friends die of AIDS.

I was interested in how Michael overcame the brutal teachings of religious people. In my mind, Michael compiled his own scriptures — writings that mean something to him. He says he tries to live by two sayings:

 

Life can only be understood backward but must be lived forward.

 

Retirement is leaving the sphere of accomplishment and entering the sphere of appreciation and enjoyment while living in the wonder of it all.

 

The first is from Soren Kierkegaard, and the second he attributes to Joseph Campbell.

The interview is a good portrait of my friend. I’m glad it’s there and that a museum has decided to preserve it. I wish we had a museum or archive that served as a repository for all such records — a kind of National Portrait Gallery, with “portraits” conceived broadly.

If I get my wish, and someone builds one, I hope you’re ready. Are you working on your own portrait?

• Source: You can find the interview with Michael Vita here:

https://youtu.be/koTWGQgVi3I?si=QdLoMlC4Zn0chB2f

A wonder and a word for it

 Driving down a road north of Panola Mountain, I noticed light glinting from spiderwebs spun between two powerlines. The webs appeared to be continuous for almost a half mile.

I already was convinced that Georgia provides better habitat for spiders than Texas. In my mind, there’s no question: Georgia has more spiders, more webs.

But the sight impressed me. I checked Macfarlane, to see if he had a word for it. This word’s from Devon:

 

glossamer — shining filaments spun across huge areas of landscape by small spiders in autumn, usually perceptible only near dawn or dusk when the light is slant.

 

• Source: Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016, p. 362.

A thought and its source

 One of the quotations attributed to the naturalist John Muir is not in any of his books: 

Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.

 

The sentence was written by Muir in the margin of one of Emerson’s books.

Dan Styer, an emeritus professor of physics at Oberlin College, wrote a short essay on how he began looking for the source of the quotation and found that the answer was in Vol. I, p. 55 of Emerson’s Prose Works in Beinecke Library at Yale.

I like the essay. It shows how one mind can be influenced by another. In this case, a voice that strikes me as quintessential Muir is Muir responding to another interesting thinker.

I also like the way Professor Styer kept at it. He was interested in Muir’s thought and was willing to track down one interesting thought to a not-so-obvious source.

• Sources: Dan Styer, “The Quotable John Muir,” Jan. 8, 2013. It’s here:

https://www2.oberlin.edu/physics/dstyer/Muir/QuotableJohnMuir.html

I came across the story in Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016. The Muir quotation is on p. 315, and the story behind it is in a note on p. 410.

Euripides: ‘Hecuba’

 Euripides’ Hecuba is one string of misery, all falling on the queen of the fallen city of Troy.

Hecuba, enslaved with the other Trojan women, is powerless and endures two crimes.

The Greek soldiers vote to sacrifice her daughter Polyxena over the grave of their champion Achilles. It’s a barbaric, superstitious custom, but the Greek leaders, not wanting to buck the majority, follow along. They shrug and tell Hecuba it’s political necessity — it can’t be helped.

Hecuba protests to the Greek hero Odysseus, whose life she once saved. Odysseus acknowledges he owes her but falls back on a technicality: he would intervene to save Hecuba’s life, but not her daughter’s. The decision prompts one of the great tirades against politicians in literature.

As Hecuba is reeling from this tragedy, one of the enslaved women finds the body of Polydorus, the one child Hecuba thought was safe. Fearing Troy might fall, Hecuba and her husband, Priam, had sent Polydorus to grow up under the guardianship of Polymestor, a Thracian king. When Troy fell, Polymestor killed the boy and pocketed his money.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, points out that the first crime is the key. Euripides isn’t so interested in what the crime did to the victims — to Polyxena and Hecuba — but what it did to the Greeks.

The Greeks thought of themselves as civilized people — not barbarians, like Polymestor.

Civilized people are not cruel people. But in Euripides’ telling, they do cruel things out of political expediency, catering to the superstitions of the majority.

The cruel abuse was heaped on Hecuba until she snapped. She couldn’t overpower the conquering Greeks, but she could lure the greedy Polymestor into her tent — urging him to bring his two little boys — with promises of more money. It shocked the Greeks when she blinded Polymestor and killed his sons.

There are many wonderful lines in the play. I like this one, spoken by King Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks, as he grapples with the question of who is culpable:

 

Then no man on earth is truly free.

All are slaves of money or necessity.

Public opinion or fear of prosecution

forces each one, against his conscience,

to conform.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Hecuba is on pp. 225-32.

Hecuba, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides III in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 1-68. The quotation is on p. 46.

A smile on my face

 Oct. 15 is the first day of early voting in Georgia. We got out in the morning and were delighted to see crowds at the polls.

When I got out of the fleet at 20, I promised myself I would never miss an election. I don’t think political campaigns are good for our collective mental health. But voting is. Casting a ballot was a delight.

The notebook as a teachable skill

 I think that a lecture on keeping a notebook should have been part of my education. I probably needed several. Maybe one when I started high school. A remedial lecture when I started college.

I remember one lecture on the topic. It was presented by a scientist to a group of limnology students who were advanced enough to help the professors with research. The lesson was on how to keep a laboratory notebook. It was heavy on chemistry. (At one remote point in my life, I was proficient at the Alsterberg azide modification of the Winkler method for determining levels of dissolved oxygen in samples of water.)

I remember coming away from that lecture with a sense of clarity. I knew what the professor wanted. I had an example of how a gifted scientist went about his work.

I wish I’d had a similar lecture from someone in the humanities.

Sometimes I think this collection of notes is an attempt to fill in that gap.

Autumn in the Piedmont

 The Yellow River was green Sunday. It looked like a stream in Central Texas.

We’ve had no rain since the hurricane sideswiped us in late September. The mudline on the vegetation in the river bottom is still there. The floodwaters, of course, are long gone. The stream is shallow, clear and green.

We are still finding new trails. Another walker said he’d seen a herd of 10 deer on a hill, so we left the riverbank and went into the uplands. The little herd had broken up, but we saw two doe.

I’ve mentioned a stand of ironweeds, dogfennel and beggar ticks that is a magnet for bees, butterflies and wasps. The ironweeds have stopped blooming. The beggar ticks were still flowering. The dogfennel plants were bowing, heads heavy with seed and dew.

The seasons are changing in the Piedmont. Around the house, we’ve put in our first load of firewood. I’ve started wearing sweatshirts on the morning dog walk.

The other morning, I fed Lucas, the old cat, and opened the door to let him out on the porch. He paused at the sill, looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, and scampered upstairs toward the cot in my study. The migratory birds are moving south. The migratory cat is moving toward a warm bed.

What Mr. Jefferson said

 In college, when I should have been studying my textbooks, I read some of Thomas Jefferson’s letters. I was trying to get a sense of the cast of his mind, the shape of it, the way it worked.

If Jefferson could watch the news today and listen to the rhetoric of the presidential campaign, I don’t think his first remark would be about policy. I think he’d notice the heat of the campaign, the emotion.

In 1818, a friend sent Jefferson a stack of religious pamphlets. Jefferson was interested in public opinion and mass movements, including the movement we call the Great Awakening. Jefferson read the pamphlets and returned them, with a note saying:

 

… as usual, those whose dogmas are the most unintelligible are the most angry.

 

I live in the swing state of Georgia, and I’ve been bombarded with campaign fliers. We are still arguing about the candidates. But there’s no question about which one is the angriest.

• Source: Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Salma Hale, July 26, 1818, is at the National Archives and is available here:

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-13-02-0173

Thinking on paper

 Michael Dirda recommends Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. I’ll have to read it because thinking on paper is what I like to do.

I’m a keeper of notebooks. I found one recently I kept in college. On the first page were two quotations from Eric Hoffer:

 

That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor these flashes, we are without growth and without exhilaration.

 

Hoffer captured those flashes on notecards and in pocket notebooks. Then he rewrote his notes, over and again. It was a digestive process. He compared it to a cow chewing her cud. Slowly, the grass becomes cow, and not the other way around, he said. 

If that sounds like work, it might be. But here’s Hoffer again:

 

But I remember how that day I got started on a beautiful train of thought ….

 

Those flashes, those flights of thought, are hard to beat.

• Michael Dirda, “The surprising history of the humble notebook”; The Washington Post, Oct. 4, 2024. It’s here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/10/04/notebook-history-roland-allen-review/

Organizing the curiosity cabinet

 I wish that curiosity cabinets were back in style. It seemed that everyone in the Renaissance had one.

Athanasius Kircher, who kepts the independent scholars of the 17^th century in touch, used to go on tours to examine the curiosity cabinets of interesting thinkers. Kircher would then write letters, reporting to his network of correspondents on who was studying what. That network strikes me as a vital. It was not just a general interest in empirical or experimental knowledge. It was the idea that sharing information that can be verified helps researchers who are interested in different fields.

I got interested in cabinets of curiosities through Sir Thomas Browne, whose own “cabinet of rarities” contained wonders.

I think this sort of things appeals to a certain cast of mind. If you tend to collect things, you’re interested in collecting. And part of collecting is organizing. 

Macfarlane filled in a detail about how the cabinets were organized:

• Naturalia — items from nature.

• Arteficialia — ingenious items made by humans.

• Scientifica — scientific instruments.

• Exotica — wonders from afar, often from the New World.

• Mirabilia — things that just seemed miraculous.

It was kind of a Dewey Decimal Classification of the day.

• Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016, p. 216.

Finding specimens

 If you walk with a dog, you must clean up after him, and it was while performing this usually unmentioned duty that I discovered a wasp gall.

The gall was on the leaf of a white oak sapling and looked like a fuzzy marble, almost as big as a taw. The gall will soon fall with the leaf to the forest floor. In the spring, a wasp will emerge.

It seemed to be Druon quercusflocci. If I were a certain kind of naturalist I’d put the gall in a sheltered spot in the garage, wait for it to emerge in the spring and try to identify the adult. But the Wise Woman would object, so I proceed with doubt.

But the greater question, it seems to me, is how anyone who doesn’t have a dog finds these little specimens.

A particular kind of friend

 I think it’s important to have one or two friends that will examine questions with you. I’m talking about open questions — the questions you don’t know the answer to. I’m not talking about finding someone who will reinforce existing views.

Melvyn was such a friend. I asked him what he thought “religion” was and why it is a feature of most — but not all — human cultures. 

Melvyn, a physician and a teacher of physicians, came at such problems mostly — but not entirely — as a man of science. Medicine had been Plan B.

He’d gone to the University of Texas to become a concert pianist. He said that the university had taught him, in his freshman year, what a real musician was. He had been forced to cast about for another career.

In those days, you went to medical school after your junior year — you got on with your “real” studies without wasting time on electives. Melvyn spent his life making up for that year. He read literature and took every literature course offered at three colleges. He played piano and had a collection of opera recordings. He painted — I admired his watercolors — and visited the world’s art museums.

Many philosophers think “religion” entails a belief in a supernatural being, an idea I can’t grasp. I don’t know what the ancient Greeks believed about the gods, but I think the religion of a polis was one of the things that made communal life possible. Carlyle’s idea that religion is “the thing a man does practically lay to heart, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there” makes more sense to me than talk of supernatural beings.

Melvyn could see the question was open for me, so he took the time to examine it with me, even though he thought it was risky. He came along as if I’d invited him to a convention of grifters, pickpockets and swindlers. But he came along.

Melvyn had profound respect for his Orthodox parents and had attended Hebrew school, but he shed conventional religion as a teenager. He delighted in telling how his little granddaughter had introduced him to a friend: “This is my grandfather. He’s a terrible atheist!”

But Melvyn had a practice, within his practice of medicine, that got at the question we were investigating. By the time we’d meet for lunch, he might have read 125 X-rays that morning. Before reading each one, he’d say the name of the patient, quietly, but aloud. It was a reminder that he was dealing with a person, not a case. And then for a moment or for an hour, whatever was needed, he paid attention.

The science of the matter on the X-ray was a vital part of the story, and Melvyn’s ability to focus attention was remarkable. But that little practice of reading the name of each patient, so small that most people didn’t notice it, was also a part of the story.

It was my lot in life to have a friend like that. I was lucky.

Dr. Melvyn Schreiber

 My great friend Dr. Melvyn Schreiber died at 93.

He retired as a radiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in January. If you’re wondering about a 92-year-old man practicing medicine, Melvyn read images — X-rays and the alphabet soup of scans. He said it was a matter of experience — and a bit like solving a crossword puzzle. You learn what to look for and what to ignore. You learn how to recognize things that look bad but aren’t.

In a discipline that favors experience, it’s hard to beat 60 years. Melvyn was good. More than once, I was with him when a prominent doctor at a famous medical school in another state called and asked him to look at a scan — just in case.

On May 4, 2010, Bill Hynek of Galveston asked Melvyn and I to lunch. It became a weekly event. Another professor, Bill Winslade, often joined us.

We warned each other to stay away from the complaints of old men — lunatics in politics and our own aches and pains. We talked about ideas that interested us and books we were reading.

After we left Galveston, Melvyn and I kept up the conversation with old-fashioned letters.

One of his daughters contacted me and let me know she’d found his last one and had put it in the mail.

• Notes: Melvyn appears in many of these notes. For more on our correspondence, see “These letters require stamps,” Aug. 20, 2023. He was a fine essayist; for a sense of what his writing was like, see “Another physician, another small habit,” June 4, 2023.

Learning to walk on public land

 Perhaps yesterday’s account of the Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge sounded terrifying — at least uncomfortable. So a second thought:

Do you remember how scary it was going to school on the first day? Aren’t you glad that you didn’t let the fear stop you?

Almost all the things I’ve done that ended up being important — stepping foot on a college campus, starting my first job, asking a pretty girl for a date — were terrifying or at least uncomfortable.

I think learning to walk on public land is important. Learning to do that is part of being as citizen, like going to school.

We humans are destroying the natural world and will continue to do so if we don’t learn to get out in it, try to understand it, at least learn to respect and appreciate it. I think we’re destroying the natural world because most of us can look at it and see nothing. The land means nothing to us, and that lack of meaning is far more destructive than pesticides and bulldozers.

The best antidote is for each of us to find some public land and learn to walk on it until we get to know it, to see the plants and animals that live there, to see the connections among them.

We all have our limitations as observers, and some of us will get more out of walking on public land than others. (I’m among the poor students. This online collection of notes if filled with laments about my  shortcomings.)

Some of us get more out of a public education than others, but all of us ought to try.

I started school before the legislature decided to pay for kindergarten in Texas. As I considered first grade, I told my mother that I’d thought it over and didn’t think it was a good idea. She told me it would be worth it.

If you are worried about ticks, chiggers, snakes and mosquitos and are confident that you’d be more comfortable in the recliner, forget about being comfortable. Get outdoors. This is worth it.

Books that change your life

 Many of the books that have influenced me are not on anyone’s list of great books in the Western canon.

I read The Whole Earth Catalog, in its many editions. It’s closer kin to the Sears Roebuck & Company catalog than to Plato’s Dialogues. My knowledge of the Whole Earth Catalog was never rewarded in the classroom. I don’t quote from it, but the ethos of learning to use tools so that you can do things for yourself made an impression on me. It influenced my life.

A lot of my life has been spent tramping around in wild areas. The writer who got me moving was not John Muir, whose books are routinely taught in classrooms, but Colin Fletcher, whose The Complete Walker, is not.

The idea of a canon makes sense to me. I’m probably more enthusiastic about the Great Books programs at places like St. John’s College than the average college professor. 

But someone raised the distinction between great books and the books that change your life. I had to admit that a lot of the books that had influenced me weren’t in the canon, weren’t even in the neighborhood.