The Sierra Club cup

 Someone told me about a website that offers recipes for meals that can be made in a Sierra Club cup.

The cup, named for the famous outdoors club or environmental group, was an icon, hanging from the belts of hikers of an earlier day. Perhaps it still is.

The steel cup had a shallow bowl with a flat bottom. It had a curved wire handle you could hang from your belt.

The cup was controversial 50 years ago, when I first saw one. Critics said the steel conducted heat too well. You’d burn yourself drinking coffee. Critics also said the cups were too small to cook in and that steel was too heavy for a serious hiker to fool with.

Aficionados praised the cup’s versatility. You could cook in one, and, if you’re hiking, carrying a Sierra Club cup beats carrying a drinking cup and a cooking pot.

Even back then, aficionados shared recipes tailored for Sierra Club cups. I remember hearing a discourse on a concoction involving dried beans, oatmeal and pemmican.

Having never owned a Sierra Club cup, I have no part in the argument.

I like the cup but could do without the icon.

What struck me 50 years ago still strikes me now: How people — perhaps Americans, especially — can turn the experience of the outdoors into something that involves products, consumer ratings, status. It seems far afield for those who love to go far afield.

One clue that it's good

 You find yourself wanting to go see something you’ve seen many times before because you suspect you might see it in a new light.

It’s one clue that the book you just finished is a good one.

Nan Shepherd, in writing about the Cairngorms in Scotland, points out that the alpine flora is Arctic. That means that those plants that cling to rock faces were around when ice sheets covered Europe.

 

I can imagine the antiquity of rock, but the antiquity of a living flower — that is harder. It means that these toughs of the mountaintop, with their angelic inflorescence and the devil in their roots, have had the cunning and effrontery to cheat, not only a winter, but an Ice Age.

 

I read that passage and thought of the elf-orpine that seemingly grows out of the rock at Arabia Mountain. Elf-orpine is a primitive little plant. It’s pollinated by ants, having evolved before bees did.

In February, we went to see the little plants turn from green to red. A month later, we saw them put on little white flowers.

It’s summer, and I want to see what they’re doing. I just want to see them again.

• Source and notes: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025, p. 59.

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

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

  

Roundup

 Two hawks — young redtails — lit on the woodlot fence. They watched for a minute and then swooped down on the forest floor, which until recently had been covered in English ivy.

As I watched from an upstairs window, another hawk appeared from behind a tree, hopping along the ground. Then another appeared.

A swale runs through the woodlot, and something was in the swale. The four raptors were like cowboys that had cornered a stray.

Hawks, so graceful in the air, are awkward on the ground. The chase went behind big trees into a place I couldn’t see. I waited, but the hawks were gone.

I went to look, hoping to find the remains of a fresh kill. The Wise Woman, who had watched part of the drama with me from an upstairs window, hypothesized that the hawks had found a snake. She made me put on my boots.

I searched the woodlot but didn’t find a clue. 

What were the hawks after — a snake, a squirrel, a cat? Did it escape? Or was it carried off like lunch from the drive-through?

This happens often if you are interested in the natural world: You seek but don’t always find. You are left with a mystery.

A remarkable one-night read

 I’m going to have to revise my list of one-night reads, the books that can be read in one night. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain deserves a place of honor.

A reviewer for The Guardian called it “the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain.” That judgment is straightforward but strikes me as unfortunate.

First, some other outstanding writers have been interested in Britain’s landscape. To take a few examples from contemporaries, Robert Macfarlane, Ronald Blythe, Roger Deakin and Alice Oswald have written some wonderful things. I wouldn’t know how to compare them to Shepherd’s book.

A more serious problem with “the finest book ever written” judgment is that I know biologists — naturalists who are also scientists — who wouldn’t like The Living Mountain. 

The book has some wonderful descriptions of landscape, plants and wildlife, but it’s not a biology book, not a scientific book. It doesn’t have a catalog of the flora and fauna of the Cairngorms. It contains no great ecological insights. It’s about how getting familiar with a place changes a person. It’s a book about human nature and the place of a person within the cosmos.

I love The Living Mountain because it made me think about some questions that I’d only sideswiped or had somehow managed to avoid. Here are two examples:

• “I’ve been the instrument of my own discovery,” Shepherd says, and she wonders what she’s done about cleaning and sharpening her own instruments. She makes a case for paying attention and noticing things. But she also makes a case of experience a place in repose, when you’re not focused, not trying to capture ever detail. She makes a case for sleeping on the mountain, relaxing in it, finding out what the place is like when you’re not vigilantly trying to wring every lesson out of the experience.

• She also makes the case, unapologetically, for seeing things that the scientist doesn’t see, or at least doesn’t talk about. Watching an eagle hunt, she points out that you can see a scientific reason for the bird’s power and speed. But what do you say about its gracefulness?

The Living Mountain poses some deep questions but is mercifully brief. I think we can call it a one-night read. It’s 108 pages in the new edition — Macfarlane estimates 30,000 words. It took me more than one night, but I’m a slow reader.

• Source and notes: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025.

If you’re curious about one-night reads, see “The notion of one-night reads at 20,” Oct. 28, 2021. A five-part list of my favorites ran from Oct. 29 to Nov. 2, 2021.

‘The Living Mountain’

 If you’re interested in the notion of place and in natural places, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is excellent.

Shepherd, who taught at a college for teachers in Aberdeen, Scotland, walked the Cairngorms, a plateau with several peaks, for decades. She wrote The Living Mountain during World War II but, apparently discouraged by some remarks from a friend, put it in a drawer for 30 years.

The book was published in the 1977. It took off when Robert Macfarlane, who writes a lot about place, championed it and wrote an introduction to an edition published in 2011.

Macfarlane has a lot of interesting things to say about the book. Two remarks convinced me to read it. Macfarlane said the book had changed how he sees the world. He also said he sees something new in the book each time he reads it.

A sample of what the book is like would be more helpful than a summary of its argument.

The first impulse, in exploring mountains, is to go from peak to peak. Shepherd said she was cured when an experienced walker took her to Loch Coire an Lochain, which sits on ledge below a peak. You can’t see the lake until you’re on it. The lake, with waterfalls feeding and draining it, catches water that has run off granite. The water is clear, and so is the mountain air. The lake shines with light.

Shepherd returned to the lake with another friend, a woman, and they waded into the shining water.

 

Then I looked down; and at my feet there opened a gulf of brightness so profound that the mind stopped. We were standing on the edge of a shelf that ran some yards into the loch before plunging down to the pit that is the true bottom. And through that inordinate clearness we saw the depth of the pit. So limpid was it that every stone was clear.

 

In Shepherd’s telling, the natural world is full of elemental things: wind, light, water, mist, snow, heather, birds, deer. Those elemental things we find on the mountain can somehow awaken the elemental things within ourselves.

• Source: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025, pp. 12-13.

The other questions

 In the age of AI, perhaps we’d be better off with IE. Instead of turning to artificial intelligence when we ask questions, what if we relied on informed enthusiasm?

The phrase comes from Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. Shepherd, a teacher of teachers, walked the Cairngorms in Scotland for decades before writing her wonderful book during World War II.

The mountains are a fascinating but forbidding place: high winds, the possibility of snow 12 months a year, sudden changes in weather, difficult trekking. Even experienced walkers sometimes die.

In the middle of nowhere, Shepherd ran across two boys bedecked in photography gadgets. They asked directions to the most difficult peak.

The teenagers were city boys, railway workers from England. They’d gotten interested in photography and had made it their ambition to photograph a golden eagle.

They’d read everything they could find on eagles. They knew their habitat and their habits. The young photographers were looking for ledges along the higher peaks.

Shepherd feared for their safety but didn’t try to dissuade them.

 

Their informed enthusiasm — even if only half informed — was the way in.

 

This is not a rant against technology but a reminder that our attitudes about technology, our approach to it, might need attention.

Perhaps I’m just an old man, but it seems to me that we have become so used to instant answers to so many of our questions that we forget that there are questions of another kind. Those questions require a part of our lives: an investment in research, yes, but also a commitment to walking into the wilderness, living life — even for just a day or two — in a way we haven’t lived before.

To forget about those questions seems tragic to me. To think they can be resolved by looking at a computer screen seems tragically wrong.

• Source: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025, p. 64.

Solstice

 We’ve had a series of storms rolling in from the west. I had to work to cut the grass between storms. The grass was wet and clogged the rains. It was slow going.

We had more than 4 inches of rain in two weeks.

When we first came to Georgia from Texas, that’s what I saw: the almost unbelievably lush growth of the forest made possible by so much water. The average rainfall at our old place was about 25 inches. In Stone Mountain, it’s about 50.

When we arrived, it seemed as if we’d moved into a rainforest.

I’m now getting a sense of how the early settlers must have seen Georgia. I’m told that a lot of the ordinary folks who came were agricultural workers from East Anglia, fleeing economic hardship. The average rainfall in that part of the world is about 25 inches.

Butternuts

 We walked through the woods south of Stone Mountain after a storm. The Wise Woman communed with the mountain, while I searched the ground to see what the blow had knocked down.

Sweetgum balls fall year-round. (The spiky seed pods are always called “balls.”) After a storm, you see last year’s balls, which are black, next to green balls, which always come down with twigs and leaves. The fall beneath sweetgum trees is impressive, but I think the tulip trees are the champion shedders, a title held by pecan trees in Texas. Tulip trees are spectacular but brittle. After every blow, I find limbs, twigs and leaves on the ground.

The surprise was a scattering of butternuts. They were green and thus inedible, a shame since the nuts of Juglans cinerea are said to be best of the Southeastern forests.

I’d never noticed these trees, which look like black walnuts, J. nigra.

It’s a sad story. J. cinerea is imperiled in Georgia because of a fungus called butternut canker. It appeared in the 1960s and has killed more than 75 percent of the butternut trees in the Southeast.

• Source: The Georgia Biodiversity Portal has information on the butternut here:

https://georgiabiodiversity.org/portal/profile?group=plants&es_id=20809

A case for Tobias Wolff

 Julian Girdham of The Fortnightly reports that the critic John Self has argued to British readers that Tobias Wolff is the greatest living American writer.

It’s not my argument, but it reminded me that I’ve been stopped cold in astonishment by things Wolff has written.

Take, for example, “Coming Attractions,” a story about a teenaged girl who is apparently shallow and definitely manipulative. She’s not a likeable heroine. But then, when it comes to getting something her little brother values, she does something that lets you see a young woman emerging — a young woman who is strong and who will not be stopped by anything, including her own fear.

It’s as astonishing as seeing a butterfly emerge from a cocoon.

If you are a noter of birthdays, Wolff is 80 today.

• Source: Tobias Wolff, Back in the World; New York: Vintage Books, 1996, pp. 1-16.

Juneteenth

 During World War I, Congress approved the Espionage Act, which made criticism of the president during wartime a crime. It was illegal for Americans to express opinions that violated the dignity of the president.

The attorney general saw the law as an opportunity to shut down any criticism of the White House. The law meant that an expression of an opinion could be prosecuted. Reporters who questioned the president’s representation of the facts could be arrested. Newspapers that stood behind their reporters could be shut down.

I think the current occupant of the White House is a threat to the democracy. But I also think we Americans have a dim sense of our own history. Our democratic institutions have been outraged before. The rights of human beings have been trampled before. Native Americans were nearly exterminated. African Americans were enslaved and then subjected to Jim Crow. Time and again, we Americans have failed to live up to our ideals.

The longer I live, the more I appreciate and celebrate Juneteenth. The holiday captures the peculiar disparity between ideals and performance in the American experiment, the difference between what’s practiced and what’s preached.

This holiday seems particularly important, especially valuable, today.

Vines

 Man-of-the-Earth is blooming. Ipomoea pandurate has many common names. I’ve read, but never heard, “manroot.” I have heard “Indian potato,” “wild potato,” and “wild sweet potato,” which is what I grew up with. The roots might remind you of sweet potatoes.

But I like Man-of-the-Earth.

The North Carolina Extension Service says the vines can reach 30 feet. The flowers are shaped like funnels. The blooms are white with dark purple eyes. I’d say oxblood, although I’m not good with colors.

I’m thinking of vines because I’ve been removing English ivy from the woodlot, getting into poison ivy along the way. When I started, the English ivy was ankle deep. I’ve thinned it out, and I’m finding native vines.

Muscadine, Vitus rotundifolia, grows everywhere in the Piedmont. With the English ivy knocked back, it seems to be taking over the woodlot. But I’ve also found American hog-peanut, Amphicarpaea bracteata; Virginia creeper, Parthenocissus quinquefolia; and laurel greenbriar, Smilax laurifolia.

I’ll be removing English ivy till kingdom come, but I’m done for the season. The poison ivy has too much sap, and it’s too hot to wear coveralls for protection. I’ll get back to work this fall.

A suggestion for the Q&A

  I like to read interviews in which authors are asked to imagine a dinner party with a few other writers, living or dead. The question gets at the neglected topic of compatibility between writer and reader.

I think a more telling question would involve having a drink at a bar. In some cases, the sensibilities of writers and readers are so incompatible you’d have to worry about fistfights.

I’m willing to concede that F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot belong in the canon, but it would be ill-advised for me to have a drink with any of them.

Q: What great writer who unquestionably belongs in the canon would you be afraid to have a drink with on the grounds that the conversation might lead to something unseemly?

Can we start with a conversation?

 Many writers have said it: Writing is a conversation with readers.

It seems to me that a student — a relatively new reader of literature — would do well to start with diaries, letters and memoirs. He or she could tackle poetry and fiction later.

The advantage in starting with the straightforward stuff is that it’s obvious that the personalities of the writer and reader play a role in whether they can have a conversation.

I can read Thoreau’s journals by the hour. Fifteen minutes with Queen Victoria’s diary is more than enough. The consequential difference is not in the craft or the artistry of the writing. It’s in the type of people Thoreau and Queen Victoria were, the kind of thoughts they thought, the kind of interests they had.

That’s so obvious it wouldn’t be worth noting — except that the matter of compatibility tends to get lost when we’re talking about poetry or fiction, the kind of literature that can be called art.

Had Queen Victoria written a great work of fiction, I’d have trouble reading it for the same reasons I have trouble reading her diary. It’s not a question of art or artistry. Even if she were the master of the art of the novel, she’d still be Queen Victoria and I’d still be me.

We could exchange polite pleasantries perhaps, but that’s not a conversation.

Ingredients of a village

 If you’re interested in the notion of “place,” Ronald Blythe is worth reading. He says that when English people look at a village, they are looking for evidence of the good life.

Here’s the checklist:

• a tall old church on the hillside

• a pub selling the local brew

• a pretty stream

• a football pitch

• a handsome square vicarage with a cedar of Lebanon shading it

• a school with jars of tadpoles in the window

• three shops with doorbells

• a Tudor mansion

• half a dozen farms and a lot of quaint cottages.

When people live together, what they choose to build, preserve and support defines the place. “Place” is not just what’s there.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Akenfield; New York Review Books, 2015, p. 16.

Wolff on the short story

 Tobias Wolff, asked why he loves to write short stories, replied that he loves to read them.

That’s the best answer a writer can give, I think. Writers, before they are writers, are readers.

Wolff said he liked the challenge of writing that does a lot of implying, rather than a lot of explaining.

• Source: Teresa Miller interviewed Tobias Wolff for the program “Writing Out Loud” on April 20, 2013. The program, produced by Oklahoma State University, featured 30-minute interviews with writers. The recording with Wolff is here:

https://youtu.be/oHO7wL_2OxM?si=NcJX7Q-x_2V8fmVU

After the gangsters

 As a young man, Wittgenstein fought with the Austro-Hungarian army. He finished Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in an Italian camp for prisoners of war.

The young Wittgenstein could go on about the achievements of German-speaking artists, logicians, mathematicians, scientists and engineers. He loved music and spoke of the great German-speaking composers. Then came the 1930s, and he told a friend:

 

Just think what it must mean when the government of a country is taken over by a set of gangsters. The Dark Ages are coming again.

 

As historian Heather Cox Richardson has suggested, those who don’t learn from history are not doomed to relive all of history — just the worst parts that they didn’t learn from.

Wittgenstein wondered what would follow the public adulation of gangsters. Perhaps, he said, people would take up witch burning again.

• Source: Recollections of Wittgenstein, edited by Rush Rhees; Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 138.

Dr. Drury's talks with Wittgenstein

Norman Malcolm’s memoir of Wittgenstein is one of the little masterpieces of the 20^th century. It’s clear and brief. It gives you a sense of one of the world’s great thinkers.

Maurice O’Connor Drury also wrote memoirs of Wittgenstein — two, in fact. The first is short: 20 pages in the edition I have. The second is about 75 pages, approaching Malcolm’s in length.

Both memoirists studied with Wittgenstein. Malcolm, an American, was interested in philosophy and became a professor. Drury was interested in the notion of what it meant to live a good life. He went to Cambridge planning to be an Anglican clergyman. At least partly under Wittgenstein’s influence, Drury switched from theology to medicine. He became a psychiatrist.

Malcolm’s little book is a straightforward narrative of his time with Wittgenstein. Drury and Wittgenstein continued to have conversations until Wittgenstein died in 1951. The two friends talked most interestingly about good life, ethics and religion. After each conversation, Drury made notes on Wittgenstein’s remarks.

These two intrigue me:

 

Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.

 

I’d have argued that the idea of a private religion is like the idea of a private language: incoherent. When we use the word “religion,” most of us are talking about an activity with common features: shared beliefs, shared rituals, shared values. But Carlyle talked about religion as something that is distinctly one’s own. Wittgenstein did too.

 

If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn’t be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different.

 

Wittgenstein thought he could live a useful life by being a good engineer, gardener, elementary-school teacher, hospital worker or philosopher.

The kind of work he did could change. The kind of attention he paid to his work — the kind of devotion he extended to it — did not.

• Sources: M. O’C. Drury’s two memoirs, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein” and “Conversations with Wittgenstein” are in Recollections of Wittgenstein, edited by Rush Rhees; Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 76-96 and pp. 97-171. The quotations are from the second memoir, pp. 102 and 114.

Norman Malcolm: Wittgenstein: A Memoir; Oxford University Press, 1977. For an earlier note on Malcolm’s wonderful book, see “Malcolm: ‘Wittgenstein: A Memoir,” April 26, 2023.

The pattern of Wittgenstein’s life

 Wittgenstein said that while he was not religious, he couldn’t help looking at the world from a religious point of view.

What does that mean?

This is as close as I can get:

Wittgenstein held that we can’t talk about ethics. Ethics must be lived. To understand someone’s ethics, look at the pattern of that person’s life.
If you look at the pattern of Wittgenstein’s life, two features stand out:

• The first was a kind of subtraction or renunciation. Although he was born into one of Europe’s wealthiest families, he lived a spartan life. The idea was to avoid distractions so that he could do useful work.

• Wittgenstein’s notion of useful work changed with the circumstances. For most of his life, he thought the most useful thing he could do was try to unsnarl philosophical problems. After the publication of the Tractatus, he thought he’d solved those problems. He worked as a gardener and as an elementary-school teacher until it dawned on him that the Tractatus was not entirely successful and he returned to philosophy. During World War II, he abandoned his work on philosophical problems and took a job at a hospital. The point is that a person finds his or her way toward useful work even when circumstances change. If you’re not distracted — see Point 1 — you simply do what needs to be done.

It seems to me that the Wittgenstein’s religious point of view involved the step of deliberate subtraction — living a chosen life to the exclusion of all others. He renounced other things to focus on the job at hand.

‘The Way to Rainy Mountain’

 N. Scott Momaday’s book is about place. More precisely, it’s about a journey through a place.

And the journey is an evocation of three things in particular: a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures.

 

In Momaday’s telling, each journey is new. It’s a new appreciation of the land, a reimagining of the people and other living things that are gone, and a reconsideration of the human spirit.

In thinking of place, I tend to look at the landscape.

Momaday makes me think I’m seeing a-third of what’s there. 

• Source: N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain; Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1984, p. 4.

The remembered earth

 N. Scott Momaday wrote a little book with a vast sense of place, The Way to Rainy Mountain.

It’s about the journey of the Kiowa people. They were a people who hunted on foot in the woodlands of what is now Montana and Wyoming. They became a people who hunted on horseback on the plains.

The journey of the people is about their stories, and Momaday retells them. It’s also about their place — the vast plains and its edges — and the many landmarks within. The place that was most important to Momaday was Rainy Mountain, in Oklahoma. His grandmother, a storyteller, lived there. 

 

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

 

• Sources: N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain; Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

The quotation is from Momaday’s essay “An American Land Ethic,” which was collected in The Man Made of Words; New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997. It’s here: 

https://www.mountainrecord.org/earth-initiative/an-american-land-ethic/

Blackberries

 The blossoms that we saw in the woods in May are gone, so the accent colors we see now come from blackberries, Rubus occidentalis.

They’re mostly red. I found a few that had turned black, but they were sour. I’d guess another two weeks, if you’re a picker.

Grandmother Taylor, a Tennessean, was a great maker of biscuits and blackberry jam. To celebrate jam-making season, she sometimes served a platter of biscuits and jam for supper. The 12-year-old version of me thought it was perfect, like having dessert for dinner.

The authorities say the common name for R. occidentalis is “black raspberry,” but I’ve never heard a Southerner say that. 

What people believe

 Lucas, the ancient cat, cleaned both ears before bedtime.

His diligence reminded me of my college days. One of the odder courses I took was in demographics.

It was taught by a historian who was interested in medieval tax records. He was convinced they shed light on the way people thought about themselves when nationalism — the idea of living in a nation, rather than in a neighborhood — was an emerging idea.

I got interested in diaries from the era that I called the Age of Enlightenment. I was surprised to find that people who were interested in the new sciences believed in witches.

I came away with the conviction that we know little about what our ancestors were thinking. We overestimate the amount of reasoning they did. We underestimate the social forces that shaped their beliefs.

The Rev. James Woodforde, whose The Diary of a Country Parson, is still read, had university degrees and believed in vaccinations. He also believed that if a cat cleaned both ears the weather was about to change.

• Source: Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries; New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984, p. 13. For an earlier note that mentions the college course, see “A portrait of a friend,” Oct. 19, 2024.

On the bench in the woodlot

 I’m back in the woodlot after a case of poison ivy. I told myself I’d be off for a few days, but three weeks passed.

I’m pulling up English ivy, which is ankle- to shin-deep. The poison ivy lurks beneath.

In the winter, I wore coveralls, and was proud of them, as my grandfather would say. In June — in Georgia — coveralls are awfully warm.

But I have to have them. I’m good for just an hour or two a day.

As I was sitting on the bench in the woodlot, taking a break and listening to the crows complain, I was grateful for the work. My friend Melvyn, who was a physician, said many people have trouble sleeping as they age. He was among them. I wondered how he would have fared if he’d had a woodlot.

Sound sleep is not the only benefit. When I’m working in the woodlot, I’m less cranky, less impatient, less prone to get exasperated reading the newspaper in exasperating times.

I think that is true, though I don’t know why. And the Wise Woman would scoff at any self-reporting on crankiness.

Still, I wish medical researchers would study woodlots.

• Note: For the original misadventure, see “Ivies: English and poison,” May 9, 2025.

The picture that illustrates the concept

 When I think of diversity, I picture plants of different species together. I think of wildflowers in a meadow — Indian blankets, bluebonnets, coreopsis, Indian paintbrushes, sunflowers and phlox. 

In the forest just south of Stone Mountain, I see stands of plants. I see perhaps a thousand pawpaws, a cloning plant, within the footprint of a house. I see a few willow oaks in that stand, but they are crowded and perhaps will be crowded out.

I also see stands of mountain laurel and wild azalea. I don’t see many individual mountain laurels mixed with other species. When I see a mountain laurel, it’s usually part of a stand.

Similarly, the fern banks along the creeks are dense. The forest floor seems to be carpeted.

We use concepts in understanding the world. They are wonderfully useful. But when we picture a concept, we should proceed with caution. Sometimes, the picture we have in mind does not match what we see.

The wonders of the little pyramids

 The thimble-sized pyramids on the witch hazels are galls made by an aphid in genus Hormaphis. I’m guessing the ones I saw were H. hamamelidis.

Inside the gall is a witch-hazel cone gall aphid. She — the aphid is female — hatched from an egg a couple of months ago and irritated the host plant until it surrounded her with gall tissue. She’ll reproduce by parthenogenesis inside the cone. It will fill up with dozens of offspring, all female. 

The second generation has wings. The aphids will find other witch hazels. Their offspring — the third generation in this year’s cycle — will include males. This last generation of the season reproduces sexually. The females will lay eggs in the bark of witch hazels. Those eggs will hatch next year.

But I’m guessing about the species. The aphids I saw might be H. cornu. If that’s so, they’ll go through seven generations, rather than three, this year. And they will lay eggs on river birch as well as witch hazel.

Friends who have been to Egypt tell of the feeling of wonder they experienced when they saw the pyramids. I have’t seen the big ones, but the little ones fascinate me.

• Source: The University of Georgia has some images here:

https://www.forestryimages.org/browse/subject/62381?tab=view-images

A warning wise but unheeded

 Ronald Blythe warned that we’d better keep the diarists and letter writers on the top shelf, out of the way, if we wanted to get any work done. Unfortunately, that reminded me how much fun it is to read the letters of Roy Bedichek.

His off-the-cuff remarks on literature often make me grin:

 

There is in Marlowe something of the ‘gong and cymball’s din.’ It’s a little noisy.

 

Churchill is an artist rather than a statesman. He is often wrong about the right policy but never about the right word.

 

Bedichek was suspicious of the medical profession and hostile to the pharmaceutical industry. He worked for the University Interscholastic League in Texas, a position that kept him neck deep in the worst kind of politics. He preferred Gibbon to sleeping pills.

 

When I used to get perturbed over League disputes and was subject to telephone calls any time of the night, I kept a volume of Gibbon by my bed for its somnolent virtue. It first interested me, took me away from the immediate annoyance, and then lulled me into repose.

 

Bedichek thought it was the “long sea-swells of his sentences.”

• Sources: The Roy Bedichek Family Letters, selected by Jane Gracy Bedichek; Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1998, pp. 116, 246, 338.

A daily dose of solitude

 The British psychiatrist Anthony Storr complained that in the late 20^th century psychology was all about relationships.

If a person came for help, a therapist would begin with relationships. How did the patient get along with mom, dad, the significant other?

Storr argued that we are not the sum of our relationships. We also have our own interests, which we cultivate in solitude. If you’re an artist, you create things, and you don’t typically do that by convening a committee. If you’ve ever written anything, you know what it’s like to be in a world of your own.

Roy Bedichek, a Texas writer I admire, often traded notes with friends about how to live a whole life, a healthy life. He talked about his routine, his diet, his sleeping habits. He made it a point to spend time alone.

 

I’m one of those physicians who believes in the therapeutic values of absolute solitude. Here at home I can take a dose every day and I know it does me good. While I can’t get the religious comfort that many do out of solitude, I do get, it seems to me, a sort of stability that is firm ground to stand on while dealing mentally with the natural trials and tribulations which come to us all.

 

I like that word “stability.” I’m no psychologist, but the people I have known who spent little time alone thinking their own thoughts did not strike me as stable.

• Sources: The Roy Bedichek Family Letters, selected by Jane Gracy Bedichek; Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1998, p. 402. Whenever I think of the diaries, letters, essays and memoirs, I think of Bedichek.

Anthony Storr, Solitude; New York: Free Press, 1988. 

A short passage on solitude

 Does it matter if a diarist is a fictional character?

In my mind, one of the world’s great bits of literature is about the human need for solitude. The passage is in a notebook, a combination commonplace book and diary.

The Note Books of a Woman Alone appeared in 1935. The editor tells us the notebooks were kept by Eve Wilson, the pseudonym for an Englishwomen who fell into poverty after her parents died. 

The book was edited by a real person, Mary Geraldine Ostle. Ostle informs us that Eve is a pseudonym, but the details of Eve’s life are provided by an acquaintance, Geraldine Waife. The name appears to have been another pseudonym for Ostle.

The puzzle interests scholars. If I were among them, I’d at least be entertaining the notion that the whole thing is a work of fiction.

I wish the editor had given a straightforward account, but I’m still interested in the character. Eve had a comfortable childhood but had to make her own way. She found work at 17 as a governess. She had a job but no privacy, no place to think. At 27, she found an office job that that allowed her to rent her own room.

 

I cannot think any woman is happier than I am tonight. I have at last got work which means making my own home away from the business place. What care I that it only thirty shillings a week, that my room will only be a bed-sitting room, that baths will be a luxury, that my food will be bread, eggs, and cheese? It is all going to be my own. I can change when it is too uncomfortable, and yet not lose my work. And if the work is lost I have, anyway while my savings last, a place in which I have the right to stay, to be able to move about without the criticism of other people.

I wish I knew if other women feel as I do. I don’t think it is entirely the result of ten years earning my bread, sometimes with lots of butter, in other people’s homes. I think I have always wanted alone-ness as a drunkard wants drink. How can I explain to these mothers, these employers of home-workers, that a room alone, a warmed one to which the employee can go, is a necessity?

 

Through the years, I’ve read and reread that passage. If you’re the kind of person who “wants alone-ness as a drunkard wants drink,” you might like it too.

• Sources: Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries; New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984, p. 273.

Ella Ophir and Jade McDougall prepared a critical edition of text of The Note Books of a Woman Alone, which is available here:

https://drc.usask.ca/projects/notebooks/introduction.php

Diarists and letter-writers

 Ronald Blythe had a rule for organizing his bookshelves. 

The diarists and letter-writers squeeze against each other on the top shelves otherwise where would I be? Glued to their confessions and not working a minute.

 

I’m of like mind. I read fiction, but the literature I talk about was usually written by diarists, letter-writers and memoirists. I’d include essayists like Montaigne and Lamb in that group; their essays read like letters to friends.

I’d put Blythe himself in that group. His essays were weekly newspaper columns. He had a standing spot on the back page of The Church Times.

He described the column as a kind of diary. Each installment contains a line about the weather and the season. He goes on to say what people in the village of Wormingford were doing, thinking about, talking about. Many columns contain a note about one of his cats.

I’m a child of Texas who is learning to live in Georgia. I’ll never get to live in the English countryside. It astonishes me that I have some sense of what it’s like. 

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 447.