Writers and letter writers

 I’m a fan of letter writers. I think Roy Bedichek’s letters are among the minor wonders of literature. And I hope, before long, to at least dip into the letters of Oliver Sacks.

Sacks surprises people in many ways. The number of his letters surprised me. He wrote something like 35,000. His editor estimated they ran to 200,000 pages.

I’ve heard people talk of writer’s block as if it were a universal affliction, something experienced by every writer at some point. I think letter writers might be exempt — at least some of them.

• Sources: William M. Chase, “Tumult and sympathy: The letters of Oliver Sacks”; Commonweal, Aug. 7, 2025.

Oliver Sacks, Letters, edited by Kate Edgar; New York: Knopf, 2024.

A poem that was also a brief

 One of the strangest poems in American literature is “My Case.” It’s a poem but also a legal brief. It’s by Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President Garfield in 1881. It begins: 

Today, before my God

I stand,

A patriot and a Christian man;

Condemned, by men to die;

For Obeying,

God’s Command.

 

As a legal brief, “My Case” failed. Guiteau was executed.

I don’t think “My Case” is successful as a poem either. But saying that a poem failed requires one to say what bit of work the poem should have done. Saying what a poem is — or saying what work it does — is a notoriously difficult task.

Still, if I were ever asked to teach a course on poetry, I think I’d start here. I’d begin with a failed poem, a poem that didn’t work — in my judgment.

To me, this poem has a defect: It’s not convincing. That, at least, is a place to start an inquiry about what sort of things a poem must try to do.

I never heard “My Case” discussed as a work of literature or of jurisprudence. As a historical footnote, I wish it were better known. Although Guiteau was mentally ill, he was able to buy a gun, a Webley .442 revolver. Although Guiteau was mentally ill, the courts found that justice would be served by executing him.

The alert historian might detect some recurring themes.

• “Charles Guiteau’s reasons for assassinating President Garfield, 1882” is available at the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History:

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/charles-guiteaus-reasons-assassinating-president

A transcription of the poem is here:

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/t-06319.pdf

Toccoa Falls and Currahee Mountain

 The Wise Woman and I are markers of special occasions. Years ago, we made trips to the opera and symphony. Now we’re more likely to visit natural wonders. We stayed in Toccoa, a town of about 9,000 in northeastern Georgia, not far from the South Carolina line.

The falls on Toccoa Creek drop 186 feet into a pool. We sat and listened for a long time. Turkey vultures were roosting in a dead tree on the bluff. They’d take off from the tree and achieve soaring altitude immediately. It was wonderful watching them climb into the clear sky almost effortlessly, floating on the currents.

Currahee Mountain, just south of town, was the site of Camp Toccoa, where Col. Bob Sink trained airborne troopers during World War II. If you’ve read or seen Band of Brothers, you know about the camp at the base of the mountain and the long road up. Sink used to say, “Three miles up; three miles down.”

We decided half the route would be enough for us, so we missed the summit. We parked by the few barracks that remain and headed up the mountain, moving much slower than the soldiers of my father’s generation. The wind was blowing, as wind tends to do on mountains. We listened as we walked.

The small ways we practice

 I like to get up before the house wakes up. I like to drink coffee and think. 

I’m aware of the great traditions that teach students to sit correctly, to become aware of their breathing, to empty their minds. But I like black coffee. Instead of emptying my mind, I try to pay attention to what comes up, to see if anything of interest is caught in the current, floating down the stream.

I like these lines from Gunilla Norris:

 

Each of us must construct the small ways

that we scaffold our silence.

In the end we must simply practice.

 

• Source: Gunilla Norris, Inviting Silence: Universal Principles of Meditation; Goldens Bridge, N.Y.: BlueBridge, 2004, p. 46.

A great pastime

 You go into the library to browse. You pick up six books and head to a table. You thumb through the first four and are mildly interested. Then you open the fifth, and a part of the world that had seemed forbidding suddenly opens to you.

That’s the author-reader connection. Ray Bradbury called it the feeling that you are meeting someone you are destined to meet. It was destiny that led you, the reader, to this author. Bradbury chuckled at the idea, but I bet many readers will recognize it. One author speaks to you in a way nobody else does. Tolstoy was getting at something similar when he wrote that a work of art communicates in a profound way.

I’m interested in Bradbury in part because his interests, tastes and instincts were different from mine. But for all that difference, we were both graduates of the public library.

We’d agree on this: Browsing is one of humanity’s great pastimes. May there always be stacks to browse.

• Source: Ray Bradbury gave his lecture “Telling the Truth” at The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, April 2001. A recording is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W-r7ABrMYU

Ray Bradbury's advice on writing

 I wish I’d heard Ray Bradbury’s advice to young writers when I was young.

Bradbury suggested a curriculum: Read a short story, a poem and an essay every night for 1,000 nights. While you’re at it, write one short story a week.

I would go slower. I would read at the suggested pace until I found something I liked. Then I would slow way down.

While I wouldn’t follow his advice exactly, I do wish I’d heard it.

In a lecture to writers, he said: “I was a collector of metaphors.”

Bradbury read thousands of stories, essays and poems and learned to look for metaphors. The metaphors rattled around his mind. Eventually sparks flew.

I’m an odd one to be saying anything about Bradbury. I am somehow immune to the pleasures of science fiction. (Bradbury was popular with my schoolmates. But even as a schoolboy, I was baffled.) Later, his politics struck me as unfortunate.

But when he speaks of the questions writers should ask themselves, I’m with him. “Who am I?” is better than “What will sell?” 

• Source: Ray Bradbury’s lecture “Telling the Truth” was the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, April 2001. A recording is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W-r7ABrMYU

My kind of book

 I recently read Gunilla Norris’s Companions on the Way: A Little Book of Heart-full Practices. Several recent notes have been about the idea of practices. (If you’re interested, start with “Practices,” Aug. 30, 2025.)

But I also was interested in the form of the book. It’s just 45 pages. I’d guess it’s 6,000 words, with another 1,000 in introductions and notes to readers. Norris tried to get at the idea of what a practice is by suggesting 23. One — she calls it “the morning lope” — is one I know well. I make it a practice to walk through the woods to get in touch with the place that has somehow become my place. An earlier version of me walked along Zarzamora Creek.

I’m sure there are tomes that collect all there is to know about practices. But this brief book was what I was looking for.

Years ago, I was trying to understand what a ritual is — what we humans are trying to get at with ritual behavior and why we behave in that peculiar way. I consulted a massive book and learned a lot of facts about the long story of rituals without getting much closer to my original questions.

Norris’s book was published by Homebound Publications. One of its authors, Edward Anderson, said his Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances came in at 84 pages and about 10,000 words. The press was founded by Leslie M. Browning and seems to have several interests. One is LGBT literature. Another is “contemplative storytelling,” and I’d guess Norris’s book fits that category. Another is that a long essay works as a short book that fits into a pocket.

• Source: Gunilla Norris, Companions on the Way: A Little Book of Heart-full Practices; Pawcatuck, Conn.: Homebound Publications, 2017.

Cormac McCarthy's library

 Smithsonian magazine has an article that seeks to give us a glimpse of Cormac McCarthy’s mind by giving us a glimpse of his library.

With 20,000 books, you’ll find something to like. My favorite parts of the collection: a lot of books on Wittgenstein and the collected works of Charles S. Peirce.

I was pleased to learn that McCarthy annotated his books. Not everyone reads with a pencil. Not everyone gets most of his education by thinking with a book in hand.

I’m not a Cormackian. I read the article because I’m interested in the premise, the idea that some things — libraries, notebooks, lists — give us a glimpse of how a person went about thinking.

• Richard Grant, “Two Years After Cormac McCarthy’s Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library Reveals the Man Behind the Myth”; Smithsonian, September/October 2025.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/two-years-cormac-mccarthys-death-rare-access-to-personal-library-reveals-man-behind-myth-180987150/

‘Ladies in Lavender’

 William J. Locke’s short story about two women who take in a young man who washes up on the shore hit me as profoundly dated.

The story suggests that it’s possible to be enchanted by someone who is foreign to you in almost every way — if you open your door and let the stranger in.

The women are sisters in their 40s. They live in Cornwall, England before World War I.

The young man who washes ashore is Polish. The characters are divided by language, age and culture. But the sisters discover their guest is an enchanting musician.

Locke’s story was published in 1908. I make no claims for its artistry. But it made me wonder whether anyone could write a story about opening the door to a stranger today.

Today, one’s home is still one’s castle, but it’s always under siege.

You might recognize this pattern: A stranger appears at the door. People warn against letting the stranger in. The stranger turns out to be something horrible, and a lot of the suspense in the story involves what species of horrible we’re dealing with — sexual predator, chainsaw murderer, sadistic enslaver. In some stories, we fear that the stranger will be a serial killer, but he turns out to be a zombie.

When I discovered that the stranger at the door in Locke’s story was a talented violinist, I kept reading.

The story made me see that I’m beyond weary with one of the prevailing patterns in fiction.

I doubt I’m alone.

• William J. Locke, Far-Away Stories; New York: John Lane Company, 1919. Project Gutenberg has the story here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50479/50479-h/50479-h.htm#chap02

Devil’s walking stick

 This is a good time to see devil’s walking sticks in the forest. Aralia spinosa is a scrawny plant. It usually has one stalk and is usually branchless. It’s about the size of a broom handle, but it’s covered in thorns that rival cactus spines for ferocity. At the top of the stalk is a crown. Most of the plants I see are 10 or 12 feet high.

When you look at the crown, what you think you see is a bunch of small leaves on top of the scrawny stalk. But you are seeing leaflets, not leaves. If you trace the leaflets from branching stem to stem, you will gradually see that you are looking at one big leaf. These are the largest leaves in forest of the Piedmont. The ones I saw were about 4-by-3 feet.

Buckets of gold

 Rhus copallinum is blooming around Panola Mountain. The flowers are tiny but grow in panicles, which are stunning in the morning light. Imagine buckets of gold in a sumac bush and you’ve got the sense of it.

The common name “shining sumac” is apt now. In another month, I’ll call it by another common name, “flameleaf sumac.”

The gold panicles were spectacular, and the other flashy color in the woods now comes from American beautyberry, Callicarpa americana. The berries are ripening from green to purple — you see both colors in the same bunch this time of year.

The purple and gold are dazzling, but most of the blossoms in the forest at this time of year are white.

Late boneset is everywhere. The flowers are white and will remind you that they’re in the daisy family. We saw swarms of butterflies, including some big swallowtails, in the stands of Eupatorim serotinum.

The blooms that remind me of white sunflowers are frostweed, Verbesina virginica. It’s a plant that likes sun. I see it in clearings and at the edges of the forest.

The least impressive white blooms were on some little spurges, in genus Euphorbia. Twenty species live in Georgia, and I’m not a good enough botanist to distinguish them. I wish I were. The plant called Georgia spurge, E. georgiania, grows on granite outcrops, and Panola Mountain is a granite outcrop. I’d like to tell you I saw Georgia spurge. Perhaps I did.

The little flowers on the ankle-high plants were the least impressive of the many blooms. But they were the most intriguing. I spent hours trying to figure out exactly what I saw.

A bedside library

 I shouldn’t have ended yesterday’s note on Sir William Osler without mentioning his bedside library.

In Osler’s day, most medical students didn’t get much of a liberal arts education. Osler urged his students to read for half an hour before bed and for a few minutes in the morning. Get the education of a gentleman, if not that of a scholar, he said.

Osler died in 1919. His language and views are perhaps dated. But my friend Melvyn, who was a professor of medicine at the University of Texas, went to school in the era when medical students began training after their junior year in college. They skipped their senior year. Melvyn regretted that he had missed all those electives in subjects that interested him: literature, history, music and art.

Long after he was a tenured professor, he enrolled in courses at two local colleges. When he was in his 90s, he mourned that he’d taken all the English courses in both catalogs.

Melvyn said most medical students are still deprived when it comes to the liberal arts. He often started a class at the medical school with a discussion about a novel. He wanted to make the point that doctors should be able to talk about all kinds of ideas with their patients. Patients are people, not cases, he said. Doctors should be able to have a conversation.

If you’re curious, Osler’s bedside library had 10 books: The Bible, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Melvyn loved Shakespeare, but his list would have been lighter on the classics and heavier  on the modern novel.

• Source: 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, p. 371.