Osler: “A Way of Life’

 Sir William Osler was a teacher of physicians in an era when the profession was being re-established by scientists. Osler taught the new methods, based on experiment and clinical trials. But he thought that a medical education required more than technical competence.

The practice of medicine, then as now, was not an exact science. Patients would die despite a doctor’s best efforts. Sometimes the best doctors would make mistakes.

A medical education needed to face those facts, and so Osler urged his students to live life in day-tight compartments. Osler borrowed the metaphor from sailors. When a warship is at sea, each watertight compartment is sealed off. If a torpedo strikes, the sea floods one compartment — not the entire ship. The ship sails on.

Osler urged his students not to get too high with any day’s success or too low at any day’s failure. He urged them not to let the evils of the past spill over to the next day. Likewise, he urged them not to spend the good day before them dreaming of what might be in the future.

I’ve been thinking about people who have practices — small habits that somehow add up to a distinctive way of life. Osler strikes me is a fine teacher of practices and practitioners. He was also a fine essayist, and I wish I’d read his “A Way of Life” before I thought about college.

Osler recommended two other practices that I admire:

He urged his students to spend some time, but not the whole day, in silent concentration. He quoted Goethe’s line: A talent forms itself in silence.

He also urged his students to spend some part of the day with the best literature of the world. Your soul is dyed by your thoughts, he said, so choose the writers you read wisely.

• Source and notes: Sir William Osler, Osler’s “A Way of Life” & Other Addresses with Commentary & Annotations, ed. by Hisae Niki, Shigeaki Hinohara and Sigeaki Hinohara; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. For another note on Osler, see “A physician talks of habits,” June 3, 2023.

Practices

 I am interested in practices. I don’t intend to use the word in a mysterious or profound way.

I make it a practice to get up before the house wakes up and spend some time drinking coffee and thinking. I make it a practice to walk in the woods.

I had a teacher who made it a practice to read a passage of ancient Greek every day. My grandfather, who hated banks, made it a practice to pay cash. He was not wealthy, but he would not buy anything on credit, a fact that astonished car dealers.

Small, habitual behaviors can be telling. My grandmother had little education but read two newspapers every day and could tell you the name of every member of the school board and city council and how they were likely to vote. I realized what a difference that small practice of reading a newspaper made years later, when I was asked by a prominent physician if Texas were having an election. It was indeed Election Day.

The flummoxed doctor was a wise and learned man, but his practice of medicine focused his attention. He concentrated on one thing to the exclusion of others. Practices are like that.

As I get older, I’m less interested in accounts that people give of their religious or spiritual lives. I’m more interested in their practices.

A writer speaks of characters

 Jimmy Breslin, a wonderful storyteller, thought Damon Runyon was a wonderful storyteller.

Runyon had an instinct for finding good characters. Breslin said writers ought to think more about their characters because it’s impossible to write a good story about an uninteresting character. That’s why, Breslin said, you can’t write a good story about politicians: “They’re all hollow.” (I met Breslin once, in 1992, just after he’d covered the Republican National Convention in Houston.)

Breslin thought Runyon’s characters were “outrageously funny.” I tried a couple of Runyon’s stories recently and thought Joe the Joker and Rusty Charley were outrageous, rather than funny. But I read to the end.

I was struck by the way Runyon told a story:

• The story is told in present tense.

• There are no contractions.

• The narrator is just an ordinary guy on the street.

• The dialog doesn’t push the story forward. When Joe the Joker says something, he’s trying to throw you off, hide the truth. He’s certainly not trying to enlighten you or make it easier for the cops.

It’s been a while since I’ve read a short story told in present tense. You could say Runyon’s stories are out of fashion. But Breslin had a point about the characters.

• Sources: Jimmy Breslin, Damon Runyon: A Life; New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1991.

Breslin was interviewed by Brian Lamb for C-Span’s Booknotes program. It aired on Dec. 29, 1991, and is archived here:

https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/23574-1

A pond becomes a place

 If you go by Wallace Stegner’s definition, a bit of land, a spot on the map, doesn’t really become a place until a couple of poets have sung about it.

Benthal’s Pond was too small to be a proper pond, but my father, who was a storyteller, turned it into an important place.

When he was a boy during the Depression, my father took a treasured BB gun to the pond, hoping to shoot a bullfrog. Money was tight, and my father was sure his widowed mother would be delighted to have frog legs, a delicacy served at the hotel in town. My father, who was 7, fired a shot that ricocheted off the bullfrog’s skull. My father gave the bullfrog a whack with the butt of the gun and went home in triumph.

The fact that the bullfrog was stunned, not dead, was discovered only when it began to hop around the kitchen, accompanied by screams, but not of delight.

When I was growing up, I knew which willow my father had hidden behind to bushwhack the bullfrog. The little pond was a large place in my imagination.

Stegner: ‘A Sense of Place’

 Wallace Stegner made a distinction between those who settled in a place and tended to it and those who were more migratory — people who used a place for its resources and then moved on. This is from his essay “A Sense of Place”:

The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that it wasn’t created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what the members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it — have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.

 

My sense of place is like that — and my approach to writing about a place is like that: note by note, collected over many seasons in different kinds of weather.

• Source: I found parts of Wallace Stegner’s “A Sense of Place” here:

https://faculty.bennington.edu/~kwoods/classes/local%20landscape/readings/The%2520Sense%2520of%2520Place.html

A modest proposal on immigration

 In 1871, the Texas Senate was considering an immigration bill. The idea was to spend public money to send two agents to Europe to recruit immigrants. Then as now, Texas needed labor.

One of the agents was to go to Great Britain and the other to Germany. The Texas Senate wanted a specific kind of immigrant.

Sen. Matthew Gaines, an African American, proposed amending the bill to send an agent to the ports of Africa.

In 1871, 30 percent of the people in Texas were of African descent. They’d worked to build the state’s infrastructure. Why tax them to recruit immigrants who would immediately get rights — the right to attend public schools, for example — that African Americans were denied?

Today this country’s immigration policy is ugly, unethical, unfair and inhumane.

Sen. Gaines’s speech is a reminder that this kind of injustice has been part of our history for ages.

• Source and note: A copy of the speech is in the East Texas Research Center at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches. Thanks to my friend Sam Collins for sending me a copy.

A puzzle in the forest

 At first glance, I thought they were walnuts, still in their green hulls, growing curiously low to the ground. I was looking at unripe oranges from Citrus trifoliata, a native of China.

This plant was a shrub, rather than a tree. Its thorns were impressive.

I couldn’t imagine what an orange tree from Asia was doing in the forest near Panola Mountain. I would guess that a bird brought a seed from someone’s garden to this spot, but that’s only a guess.

I recently came across a blooming kudzu vine deep in the forest. (There are several species within genus Pueraria.) Kudzu vines can grow a foot a day. If you look for information on how this invasive species spreads, you’ll find a lot about how it expands its range vegetatively. You won’t find nearly as much about what kinds of birds and animals are likely to take a seed from one plant and carry it miles to an isolated spot, starting a new vine.

I’d like to know more about how these invasive plants are spread by wildlife.

An article published in 2020 that had a nice review of the literature on invasive species reported these figures:

• Number of invasive species introduced into the United States in the past 100 years: 50,000.

• Annual economic costs: $120 billion.

• Annual economic costs of kudzu alone: $100 million.

“Economic costs” reflect lost productivity and the cost of treating infested land with herbicides. That can be a lengthy process — typically five years in treating commercial timberlands.

I’m not sure that the costs of getting rid of invasive plants are worth it. I’m thinking less about the dollars spent and more about the poisons used.

I’m also leery of laws that can’t be enforced. I don’t think you can compel gardeners to stop growing orange trees from China. I think you might be able to persuade them that growing natives is best.

• Source: Paulina Harron, et. al., “Predicting Kudzu (Pueraria montana) spread and its economic impacts in timber industry: A case study from Oklahoma”; PLoS One. 2020 Mar 16;15(3):e0229835. It’s here:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075552/

'Everything Potent Is Dangerous'

 The beloved country has been through dark times before. In the early 1950s, Edward R. Murrow, a broadcast newsman, produced a show for CBS called “This I Believe.”

He asked all kinds of people for an essay on what they believed. It had to fit within five minutes. If you think as a writer, rather than as a broadcaster, that’s about 650 words.

Wallace Stegner, a writer and teacher of writers, made a plea for moderation that I admire. The essay, “Everything Potent Is Dangerous,” includes this:

 

Passionate faith I am suspicious of, because it hangs witches and burns heretics, and generally I am more in sympathy with the witches and heretics than with the sectarians who hang and burn them. I fear immoderate zeal — Christian, Muslim, Communist, or whatever — because it restricts the range of human understanding and the wise reconciliation of human differences and creates an orthodoxy with a sword in its hand.

 

I think “an orthodoxy with a sword in its hand” is exactly what the Founders sought to prevent. I think today’s version of that orthodoxy uses the National Guard to intimidate cities and the FBI to harass critics.

Murrow said he began the series at a time when many Americans were confused — and fearful. In that climate, it must have been wonderful to hear serious people think aloud — with honesty and integrity — for a few minutes.

If our own times have you down, you might try listening to a broadcast or two.

• Sources: The introduction to the series is here:

https://thisibelieve.org/essay/16844/

Wallace Stegner’s essay is here:

https://thisibelieve.org/essay/17017/

August, Stone Mountain

 Temperatures were in the low 70s during the morning walks. It was just a little front, but the cool weather made us think about fall.

You can see signs that the seasons are changing. Sparkleberries, Vaccinium arboreum, are a source of black fruits that attract wildlife in the fall. The plants have put on fruits, but they’re green, still ripening. Goldenrods, in genus Solidago, began putting out their first flowers early in August. They aren’t plentiful yet. If you’re allergic to them, much worse is to come.

Among the wonders of late summer:

• Muscadine vines, Vitus rotundifolia, cover much of the Georgia Piedmont, and the muscadines are ripe. You see the remains of black and dark purple grapes everywhere.

• Bonesets, in genus Eupatorium, are putting out delicate little white flowers. Native people used the plants to make poultices when setting broken bones.

• Partridge peas, in genus Chamaecrista, are everywhere. The flowers are loved by people (like me) who believe that too much yellow might not be possible.

• Clematise terniflora, a perennial vine, drapes itself over underbrush. The vines are loaded with white flowers, each with four petals. C. terniflora is invasive, and so is kudzu, Pueraria lobata. I saw some gorgeous purple-magenta blossoms deep in the woods near the South River. There were no other kudzu vines near this isolated place. 

• Ivy-leaved morning-glory, Ipomoea hederacea, is a native of the Americas, but it’s from the tropics, rather than from around here. In the eyes of cotton farmers, it’s one of the worst invaders. The leaves are deeply lobed, so the vines look a bit like ivy. The flowers are lovely. Usually, you hear of white, pink and blue. The flowers I saw were purple.

Fire and yellow crownbeard

 The experts say that yellow crownbeard, Verbesina occidentalis, often grows in areas that have been disturbed. When talking of “disturbed” land, the experts are talking about humans — our love of roads, plowed fields and strip developments. I’m wondering whether fire counts.

We were walking through an area near Alexander Lake that the rangers had burned a couple of years ago. The idea was to clear the pine straw and underbrush. The forest floor was impossibly green in May. Native muscadine vines and invasive Japanese stilt grass were growing among the pines and hardwoods. 

Since then, yellow crownbeard has taken the place. The plants were as tall as 8 feet, and the stands were thick. You’d go around — not through — them. I’m expecting to see a sea of yellow blooms in about three weeks.

Larry McMurtry's eloquent complaint

 I recently complained that the perception of the American West has more to do with show business than reality. I should have deferred to Larry McMurtry, whose complaining is more eloquent than mine.

McMurtry contended that “the selling of the West preceded the settling of it.”

Wild West shows were everywhere. When Henry Adams and his friend John Lefarge headed for the South Seas in 1890, they shared a ship with a troupe headed for Australia.

McMurtry reminds us that the Miller brothers, owners of the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma, had a big show that was going to tour Europe in 1914. The Millers arrived in England as World War I broke out, and most of their Mexican ponies were requisitioned and shipped to France.

 

Somehow the Millers got everybody home, including, even, a band of Oglala Sioux who had been farmed out to a circus and happened to be in Germany when war broke out.

 

I can barely imagine it. I wonder what stories the Native Americans told when they got home. Wouldn’t you love to read their memoirs?

• Source: Larry McMurtry, “Inventing the West”; The New York Review, Aug. 10, 2000. It’s here:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/04/24/a-mighty-theme-larry-mcmurtry/

A story about the mind

 My friend, who is as old as I am, was trying to remember an idea that occurred to him while he was on a walk. The idea hit him, and it was so important he thought he would remember it. But it vanished.

My friend fussed at himself and groused about getting older. That didn’t do any good.

On another walk, he returned to the place where the idea had occurred to him. The idea returned.

In an earlier day, I’d have said it was magic. Now, I just concede that I have no idea how memory works.

The parable of the nice aliens

 The philosopher Daniel Dennett used to tell a story about space aliens. Instead of invading and terrorizing, these aliens wanted to learn about the planet and about us. They were nice.

They were so nice, all the human kids wanted to be around them. The aliens showed them new technologies and new pastimes. Soon the kids had forgotten all about music, whether it be country, classical or rock’n’roll. They forgot about baseball and football.

It was all too much for their parents, who didn’t care how nice those aliens were.

Dennett told the story to remind fellow atheists what a century of secularization had done to the psychological wellbeing of traditionally religious people. It seems to me that the cultural changes we have seen in the past 70 years or so were broader than that. Many people abandoned more than traditional churches — family farms and brick-and-mortar stores, for example.

It’s a lot of change to absorb, and many people are struggling. Dennett’s parable is a reminder that losing patience with the strugglers doesn’t help.

• Source: Dennett’s parable appeared in Breaking the Spell, but he told it often. I found it in Daniel James Sharp’s “Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett” in The Freethinker, Dec. 18, 2023. It’s here: 

https://freethinker.co.uk/2023/12/consciousness-free-will-and-meaning-in-a-darwinian-universe-interview-with-daniel-c-dennett/

A serious look at the old place

 Wittgenstein used the word “serious” in an ethical and aesthetic sense. I’ve come to think that if a country lacks serious people, it can’t expect to have a serious culture.

One symptom that might indicate that American culture is not entirely serious: When thinking of the West, most Americans would think of John Wayne before R.B. Marcy. They’d think of an actor before they’d think of an explorer.

In 1854, Randolph B. Marcy, then a captain in the U.S. Army, led an expedition through West Texas, looking for the sources of the Brazos River. It’s rough country — a place where it’s possible for some explorers to die of thirst while comrades die in quicksand.

When most of the explorers got back to civilization, they reported that the place was unfit for human habitation — though they conceded it might make a good penal colony. W.B. Parker, the chronicler of the expedition, called the place “the wilds.”

 

Destitute of soil, timber, water, game, and everything else that can sustain or make life tolerable, they must remain as they are, uninhabited and uninhabitable.

 

He’s describing the place where I was born, the wilds around Abilene, Texas. I still see those landscapes in dreams.

As far as I know, there are no statues of Marcy. But he blazed trails and wrote the how-to book for pioneers who wanted to settle in the West. (California and Oregon got better reviews than West Texas.)

In a way, it’s funny that we know John Wayne and don’t know Randolph B. Marcy. But the beloved country is suffering horribly these days, and at least some of that suffering is because Americans have trouble seeing themselves in a realistic light.

• Sources: W.B. Parker, Notes Taken During the Expedition Commanded by Capt. R.B. Marcy, U.S.A., Through Unexplored Texas, in the Summer and Fall of 1854; The Texas State Historical Association, 1984, p. 173. This is a reprint of a book published in Philadelphia by Hayes & Zell in 1856.

Randolph B. Marcy, The Prairie Traveler: A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions, has been published by Project Gutenberg. It’s here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23066

‘Epistemic virtues’

 I remember, from student days, lectures about logical rigor. I don’t remember hearing the term epistemic virtues. Here’s Julian Baggini’s explanation:

One of the main things one should do is cultivate epistemic virtues. Forget critical thinking skills — you need epistemic virtues. You need to be ruthlessly honest with yourself about your own reasons and motivations for why you might believe what you believe. You’ve got to really pay close attention to whatever evidence you’re looking at and not just accept it at face value. So I think people need to focus more on the virtues of a good thinker rather than on any particular critical thinking skills or taking any kind of course.

 

It seems that we are living in the golden age for carnival-barking hucksters. The current occupant of the White House is a preposterous liar. People in charge of public health are scientifically illiterate. Scam artists are so busy they must resort to automated call systems.

But the marketplace of ideas has always been full of awful stuff. As Plato observed, some arguments, like some men, are pretenders. 

I like the notion that the effort to think clearly is an ethical matter.

• Samuel McKee, “Cultivating epistemic virtue; interview with Julian Baggini”; The Free Thinker, Feb. 12, 2025. It’s here: 

https://freethinker.co.uk/2025/05/cultivating-epistemic-virtue-interview-with-julian-baggini/

Morality, vision and law

 The ancient Athenians had the basic laws written down for public display. They fit on wooden tablets attached to rotating devices, kind of like lazy Susans. The idea of a law library, with every law written down and put into books, would have astonished them.

To them, law was custom. Their word nomos covered both ideas: law and custom. To them, it was same idea.

A lawless person had no respect for custom, the mores of the community. His vision of the world was at odds with the community’s. The idea is similar to one championed by Iris Murdoch.

I’ve been following the news of Alex Jones and his business Infowars, which is being liquidated to pay damages to people it harmed. The courts set damages at $1.4 billion, which reflects a lot of harm done, repeatedly and recklessly.

Traditionally, U.S. courts have allowed people to hold silly, crazy and harmful ideas because every human being, at one time or another, holds such ideas. The law steps in only when someone acts on those ideas and harms others.

The problem with the traditional thinking is that it’s now possible to make millions by publishing poisonous visions of how the world works. It’s also possible to do so much damage that the line between civil and criminal acts get blurry. How much damage does one have to do before an act becomes a crime, rather than a cause for civil action?

I’m trying to imagine what the ancient Athenians would have done with someone like Jones, someone whose vision of the world is so far removed from those of most citizens.

The Athenians had various procedures for exiling people, which intrigues me. Of all the immigrants that federal officials are rounding up and deporting, I haven’t heard of one who has been found responsible for so much harm as a fellow who claims to be a patriot.

A way of looking at morality

 Iris Murdoch thought that your moral sense is your vision of the world. As you think, so you do. If your view of the world is shaped by love, you will treat other people well without having to do a lot of calculating. If your view is shaped by greed, fear or hatred, you will treat others less well.

Each of us looks at the world and sees something different. Each constructs a worldview that helps make sense of the bewildering complexity we encounter. The worldview makes assumptions about others — whether they are to be treated as equals or whether they are to be exploited, for example.

Murdoch’s point is that each of us constructs that vision of the world and each of us is responsible for it.

I’ve been enjoying a good conversation with a friend about how we make moral decisions. Most of the classical philosophical writings presume that a polis, or community, is made up of people who mostly share values. They share a common vision about the way the world works. What’s striking about this country now is the disagreement in basic visions about the way the world works. We Americans can’t even agree on whether vaccines work or whether teaching history in schools is a good thing.

• Cathy Mason, “Why love matters most”; Aeon, 12 August 2025. It’s here:

https://aeon.co/essays/for-iris-murdoch-morality-is-about-love-not-duties-and-rules

Above plot, character development, theme

 This strikes me as a basic human impulse: A person sees something and, returning to friends, tries to describe it.

Patricia Hampl, who loves a good description, studied Henry James and talked about his tendency to carry on.

 

Carrying on, I was discovering, is what it is to describe. A lot. At

length. To trust description above plot, past character development,

and even theme. To understand that to describe is both humbler

and more essential than to think of compositional imponderables

such as "voice" or to strain toward superstructures like "narrative

arc." To trust that the act of description will find voice and out of its

streaming attention will take hold of narration.

 

That paragraph says a lot about a certain kind of reader. Why, for example, a reader like me would think Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain was one of the great books.

• Source: Patricia Hampl’s “The Dark Art of Description” was presented as the keynote address at the Bedell NonfictioNow Conference on Nov. 1, 2007 and published by the Iowa Review:

https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/iowareview/article/16503/galley/124902/view/

An old writing exercise

 Some writers seem to be able to capture experiences that are mysterious — moments that could be called mystical experiences.

Mystics tend to describe those moments by saying that the sense of self falls away. Spiritual teachers set out exercises to help students find that experience for themselves.

It seems to me something similar happens when you pay attention to the details of a place — a stand of camphorweed, for example. Patricia Hampl, a writer and teacher of writers, makes a case for the old-fashioned exercise of writing descriptions.

 

Description in memoir is where the consciousness of the

writer and the material of the story are established in harmony,

where the self is lost in the material, in a sense. 

 

Each person is different. I admire those who search with spiritual exercises and who are devoted to the discipline of the mediation mat. I do better with the pen and notebook.

• Source: Patricia Hampl’s “The Dark Art of Description” was presented as the keynote address at the Bedell NonfictioNow Conference on Nov. 1, 2007 and published by the Iowa Review:

https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/iowareview/article/16503/galley/124902/view/.

Hampl has appeared in this collection on online notes before. For a sample, see “Thinking,” July 5, 2024.

Norris: ‘Being Home’

 Gunilla Norris’s Being Home is about being in a place. The idea of place is one of the recurring themes in this online collection of notes.

Being Home is the shortest book about place I’ve read. It strikes me as a model for those thinking about writing a book. Here’s an outline:

• It contains 40 items, variously described as meditations, prayers and poems on the everyday activities that make up our lives. I like the word poem in the Greek sense of “a made thing.” The poems are about activities: waking up, getting dressed, making breakfast.

• Each poem is page or two or three. The 40 poems are on 71 pages in my edition.

• Norris is good, in a way that I am not, at getting her finger on a paradox: Sometimes, in doing the simplest, most routine things, we bump into a mystery. We all live in a place, but if we tend to it, pay attention to it, we at least become aware that we bump into things that are mysterious, that baffle us. (I can get lost in thought while sweeping the steps.)

One of my favorite poems in this series is about dealing with paperwork, something that I don’t like to do and don’t do well. I love these lines:

 

I know there is an order here

But it will not show itself.

 

When I go through my papers, I want to impose order. I don’t want to make discoveries. But it works better if I simply pick up each bit of old paper and see what connection it has to the life I live now in this place. The new order gradually becomes clear.

• Source: Gunilla Norris, Being Home; New York: Bell Tower, 1991, p. 47.

Mystery’s way

 Standing in a patch of camphorweed, I somehow forgot about the beliefs and assumptions and concepts that usually organize my disorganized mind. It was just the experience of being in a stand of yellow flowers, nothing more. If the “I” that usually tags along was there, I missed him, at least for a minute.

I don’t have the personality or temperament to be a mystic, but I’m sometimes aware when I bump into mystery. I admire those rare people who can talk about it. Gunilla Norris is one:

 

Sometimes saying prayers keeps us from being prayers. Words come not in response to life but in substitution for it. We think the map is the territory and we are untouched by the smells and wonders of actual living. For me the orientation I want to embrace more and more is toward receiving my life, toward a continual intention to make room for Mystery’s way within me. I don’t think we can go deeply into ourselves — but Life seeking itself can go deeply in us. We can be infused, loved, and fathomed by it. And when we are, we cannot help but sing out our joy. We need that activity in us to be ourselves …

 

I went back to the Yellow River Sunday to see the stand of camphorweed again. I suppose you could say this is just a song of joy.

• Source: Gunilla Norris, Being Home; New York: Bell Tower, 1991, p. xix.

Robert Hayden: 'Stars'

 Sometimes, a poem can be just a whiff of a suggestion. Robert Hayden’s “Stars” made me wonder what it was like for the ancestors, looking up at the sky, eons ago, wondering. 

How shall the mind keep warm

Save at spectral

Fires — how thrive but by the light

Of paradox?

 

Long ago, ancestors who hunted with spears imagined the constellations as men who hunted with spears. Not so long ago, ancestors who were enslaved followed the stars to freedom.

The poem is just a suggestion, almost a passing thought, about how the stars must have talked to those who came before.

How they thought of themselves

 Laura Spinney, in her new book on Proto-Indo-European, made a remark that would make a good epigraph on any book on history:

We know that ancient people looked at themselves in mirrors. We don’t know what they saw.

 

We want to think that human nature is fixed, that the people of today are like the people of the ancient world. And then we run across a comment or attitude — a remark about slavery or about women’s role in society, for example — that is astonishing.

We forget how strong social forces are, how elevating, how damaging.

• Sources and note: Laura Miller, “Mankind’s Greatest Invention”; Slate, May 20, 2025. It’s here:

https://slate.com/culture/2025/05/english-language-origin-proto-indo-european-laura-spinney.html

The article is a review of Laura Spinney’s book Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, now on the list of books I want to read. Thanks, Christopher, for the link.

Oh that smell

 A thick stand of camphorweed, Heterotheca subaxillaris, grows along the Yellow River just south of the Rockbridge. You can’t miss the identification. Break off a twig, and the odor will put you back in grandmother’s medicine cabinet.

Camphorweed grows across North America, often in sandy places. In Texas, you see it near the beaches on the coast and in the uplands where longleaf pine grows. In Georgia, the Yellow River moves sand around, creating some nice habitats.

The stand I saw was blooming — loads of yellow flowers on dusty green, belt-high plants.

Campho-Phenique, a combination of camphor and phenol, has been around since 1884. My mother and grandmother used it for general first aid, covering everything from fever blisters to bug bites. I spent a good part of my childhood slathered in it.

Distinctions, judgments and doubt

 J.L. Austin thought that usage provides clues that could help us unsnarl philosophical problems, including the thorny problems involving the mind. Austin thought that philosophers should pay attention to the usage of any natural language.

Consider diakrino, an example from ancient Greek. English speakers are used to active and passive voices. Greek has a third‚ the middle voice, for actions that one does for oneself or one’s own benefit.

Diakrino is an interesting case showing the workings of grammar on a concept. In the active voice, it means to make a distinction or to differentiate. In the passive voice, it means a judgment, a distinction made for or about you by others. In the middle voice — all these distinctions being made in your own head — it means to dispute or argue. And, if you’re arguing with yourself, you can be talking about doubt.

In our society, doubt — what a person doubts and why — often is a question of psychology; an inquiry might be handled with the tools of psychological analysis. 

In the account of diakrino, there’s no psychology in the modern sense of the word. The road to doubt, as described above, is just a question of how language was once used.

I can’t help thinking of Seneca’s aphorism: “The doubting pleases me as much as knowing.”

Back to school

Students are back in school in Stone Mountain. It seems early, but I grew up in a different time and a different place. The old Texans didn’t like to see kids in the schoolyard while crops were still in the field.

Montaigne pointed out that agriculture and education are similar. Whether it be cabbages or human beings, the problem isn’t planting them. The myriad cares come later.

Montaigne was an advocate of letting children find their own interests, but he thought good teachers could help.

A poor teacher loads the student’s memory like a pack mule, while a good teacher asks questions that help each student find his own questions. A poor teacher focuses the pupil’s attention on making a living, while a good teacher inspires her to think about what she could contribute to her community.

Montaigne’s principle:

 

We should always guide them toward the best and most rewarding goals.

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 168. 

A small practice

 I subscribe to American newspapers. I believe we should keep informed, especially given the threat to the democracy.

But reading American newspapers comes with a risk: You could get the impression that the entire world is about the Current Occupant of the White House.

As an antidote, I’ve made it a practice to spend a few minutes a day with a Mexican newspaper. My Spanish is laughable or tragic, perhaps both, so this practice is laborious. I plod along with a dictionary.

Does this practice do any good?

I’ve learned that archeologists think they’ve found The Land of the White Jaguar, the home of a Mayan group that held out against the Spanish for more than a century. (It’s in Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala.)

I’ve also learned about Juan Pablo Contreras, a young composer whose music I like. (His “Mariachitlán,” performed by the National Youth Orchestra, is a delight, and his “Pirámide del Sol” is thorny but intriguing.)

This small practice helps me connect to parts of the world that have nothing to do with the Current Occupant of the White House. Maybe it will help me to keep a sense of proportion.

Traherne: ‘Shadows in the Water’

 The poet Thomas Traherne pictured a child looking at reflections in a puddle. Perhaps the child’s imagination ran a bit wild. That happens to adults too.

I like the poem as a gentle meditation on what we think we see.

 

         I my companions see 

         In you, another me. 

They seemèd others, but are we; 

Our second selves these shadows be. 

 

It’s a reminder that the difference we think we see between ourselves and others can be illusory.

Traherne was a 17^th century poet whose poems were lost for a couple of centuries. Lovers of literature in the 20^th century knew him. People in the 18^th and 19^th centuries did not.

Traherne also reminds me to talk about poets who should not be forgotten.

• Source: Thomas Traherne’s “Shadows in the Water” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50448/shadows-in-the-water

What slow reading is like

 Yesterday’s note on Lorenzo Da Ponte was prompted by a remark in David Markson’s Reader’s Block: 

Lorenzo da Ponte ended his days teaching Italian at what would later become Columbia University.

 

It was just a remark, something that came out of the narrator’s memory. (The narrator is called the Reader.) That one line alone did not send me down the rabbit hole. The line hit me because I have been having a conversation with a friend about tolerance — how we behave ethically toward one another even when our values aren’t completely shared. In the context of that conversation, Markson’s line sent me after the rabbit.

I read 15 words in a book Markson calls a novel and spent an hour thinking about implications and possibilities.

That is not the way most novels work. But isn’t that the way conversations with interesting friends work? Isn’t that the way reading works — at least good reading?

It’s slow reading. It’s also delicious fun.

Not long ago, Orange Crate Art had some links to some earlier posts on reading, including one that quoted Zadie Smith. Smith said that we now think of reading as something like going to the movies: we tune in and are entertained. We are passive. She said the classical analogy was that reading was like reading music: you brought your instrument, your attention, your best abilities to the text and tried to play the music an earlier mind had imagined.

It might take me the rest of the year to get through Reader’s Block. I’m in no rush.

• Sources: David Markson, Reader’s Block; Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996, p. 61.

Michael Leddy’s note “Zadie Smith on reading,” Orange Crate Art, Nov. 10, 2006, is here:

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2006/11/zadie-smith-on-reading.html

What comes in with immigrants

 If you can name the first person on the faculty of Columbia who was raised Jewish, you can name the first faculty member who was a Catholic priest.

They are the same person, Lorenzo Da Ponte. He’s less well known as an academic than as a librettist. He wrote the books for Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Casi fan tutti. He collaborated with several composers on 28 operas.

Any account of how opera came to this country would have to include Da Ponte. But any account of his life would have to mention how he was banished from the Republic of Venice. While serving as a priest, he was accused of living in a brothel, where he staged shows. Casanova was a carousing buddy.

Da Ponte left Venice with his mistress and their children. He found fame in Vienna.

Da Ponte was a colorful, notorious and brilliant. I don’t know what the equivalent of “Mozart’s collaborator” would be on an academic resume today, but I imagine it would be impressive.

I’ve been thinking about Da Ponte because I’ve been thinking about tolerance in democratic societies.

Da Ponte was in his 50s when he came to this country and became a citizen at 79. At 84, he was behind the construction of the country’s first real opera house.

This was the 1830s, the days of Jacksonian Democracy, a period when Jews, Catholics and immigrants were persecuted, when Native Americans were set on the Trail of Tears, when slavery was defended and expanded.

It was a famous age of intolerance, a period when the country was focused on what it could keep out, rather than the good it could let in.

Lessons of history

 Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to pick up a chainsaw and wander into the woodlot to do some small chores, forgetting that it’s prime time for yellowjackets.

Just five stings this time, not nearly as bad as Saturday’s fiasco.

The bad news: The Wise Woman, a teacher, sees no evidence of a learning curve.

The good news: I didn’t have to go see the nurse again. I had plenty of antihistamine and steroids left.