Monarch butterflies and naturalists

 An interesting scientific paper suggests that Monarch butterflies are not arriving earlier in the United States but are staying longer in late summer before heading back to Mexico.

If you’ve been wondering about how the Monarch’s migrations have been affected by climate change, you’ll like the paper. The lead author is Diane M. Debinski, an ecologist at Montana State University.

But the heart of the paper is a set of data compiled by Harlan Ratcliff, who was an environmental engineer at Camp Dodge, headquarters for the Iowa National Guard. He compiled the data as an amateur on his lunch hour, using a technique called a Pollard walk. The technique was devised with amateur naturalists in mind.

The basic idea is to imagine that you, the observer, are in a 5-meter cube or box. You walk along a set course — the technical term is a transect — repeatedly on a schedule and record the species of interest you see in your box. Ratcliff’s findings were remarkable because they run from 2003 to 2019. The data suggests that Monarchs were staying nine days longer. The warmer temperatures in autumn extended the season for milkweed.

Sadly, Ratcliff died in 2022. But his blog, The Roused Bear, is online. If you want to get an idea of what a naturalist is like, it’s a good place to start.

• Sources: Diane M. Debinski, Norah Warchola, Sonia Altizer, Elizabeth E. Crone, “Implications of summer breeding phenology on demography of monarch butterflies”; Journal of Animal Ecology, 17 Feb. 2025, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70004

It’s here:

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2656.70004

Harlan Ratcliff’s blog The Roused Bear is here:
https://therousedbear.wordpress.com/

Inner resources

 Yesterday’s note on Doris Grumbach’s Fifty Days of Solitude should have included an example of the kinds of items that make up the book. Here’s an excerpt from an entry long enough to be an essay: 

Inner resources: What are they? Are they like mineral resources, so deeply buried they require a mining operation to raise them to the surface. Or are they simply there, so that they can simply be used at will, like the ability to follow a line of thought to its conclusion, as the young Valéry trained himself to do, or like the rich muck of memory that yields useful parallels and evidence for one’s ideas at the moment they are required, or like the ability to lose oneself in books and be comforted and interested in music and live in paintings, to be able to forget the world and remember only the faint shadow of the inner being one is searching for.

 

I’d have put a couple of question marks in there, but Grumbach did not. I take the sentences as questions. Instead of either-or, I’d say both possibilities are sometimes true. Some resources can be tapped only with discipline, which is why some of us are interested in the routines and disciplines of other writers and artists. Some resources seem to require almost no discipline, although I suspect that’s an illusion — that we are simply missing something.

If you saw a course in a college catalog that promised to cultivate “the ability to follow a line of thought to its conclusion,” wouldn’t you take it?

I would. I would take that course first, before all others.

• Dorus Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, pp. 95-6.

'Fifty Days of Solitude'

 In the winter of 1993, Doris Crumbach spent 50 days in solitude.

Her partner, Sybil, was on a long trip. Grumbach, at 75, wanted to get away from the distractions of a full life and think. She holed up at their home on the coast of Maine with her books and music. She took walks but tried to avoid company.

I’d say it was mostly solitude.

Like Thoreau, Grumbach was trying to get far enough away from other people to front only the essential facts of life. She kept a notebook, the basis of Fifty Days of Solitude.

It’s a short book, about 30,000 words.

It’s divided into 79 sections. Some are just a few sentences. Some run several pages. An average entry is 400 words. An older reader, like me, might spend some time wondering whether these entries are notes, remarks or essays. A younger reader would see a series of blog posts in print.

Many of the entries are about aging. Writers are supposed to keep up with things, including the news. But at a certain age, is it OK to retreat and look at questions that don’t involve the news? Is it presumptuous to call them more important questions?

Many of the entries involve the tension between being a part of the larger world and being creative, which means being alone. Being a responsible member of society involves working with other people. Writing involves bolting the door and shutting others out.

We learn what Grumbach makes of the tension. We also learn about the people who’ve influenced her thinking. We learn that if she could take one novel to the proverbial deserted island it’d be Middlemarch.

What emerges is a picture of one writer’s mind. Whether you like her book might depend on whether you like people who like Middlemarch. I do.

I think the book is a good model for writers who are thinking about their own work. Recently, I posted some notes about the routines of writers and other artists. A friend sent me a note about the novelist Terry Pratchett, whose one rule was to write 400 words a day.

If you followed that rule from 80 days, you’d have something that looked like Fifty Days of Solitude, at least in form. The possibilities are interesting.

• Dorus Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

A naturalist in the garden

 I’m not the gardener in the family. I just dig the beds with a shovel, turn the soil with a fork and follow orders with a smile. The orders are to weed the garden and prepare the beds for fall plantings.

When biologists talk of “disturbed” soil, they are thinking of me — a fellow with a shovel and with a wife who dreams of gardens. Two of the native plants that take advantage of disturbed soil are partridge pea, in genus Chamaecrista, and rhomboid mercury, Acalypha virginica. I’ve pulled and dug hundreds of them out of the vegetable beds. Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, comes in a distant third.

Of the trees: sweetgum, tulip trees, pines and oaks put out seedlings in the broken ground. They are listed by order of frequency. There were more little sweetgums than all the others combined. I found one winged elm,Ulmus alata, which has a new home in the woodlot.

The other equinox

 I marked the equinox on Monday, of course, but there’s another one: the day when you get 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of night. That day is near the astronomical equinox, not on it. The variance is attributable to the fact that sunlight is refracted as it travels through the atmosphere and comes from an enormous astronomical body, rather than from a point.

Today’s that other day. Daylight and dark are balanced. 

Some recent sights to mark the season:

• After a month with little rain, even the goldenrods looked ragged. But the forest sunflowers were radiant. When we finally got a light shower, all the plants looked happy except the sunflowers. They were drooped and bedraggled. I love sunflowers and have been told I am a contrarian.

• A light rain after a long dry spell knocks dried pine needles to the ground. The pines shed year-round, but old needles stay aloft until we get a blow. The trail was covered with a thick layer.

• A flight of Canadian geese went by, noisy as a train. On the pond south of Stone Mountain, we saw one mottled duck. It was gone the next day. No ducks stayed on the pond this summer, and if mottled ducks were heading south, I can’t imagine why we saw just one.

• I’ve been watching for Ruby-throats at the hummingbird feeder. I haven’t seen any for a week. I saw one on Oct. 12 a couple of years ago. The date  now strikes me as kind of late in the season, although that’s just a guess. Terry Johnson, a naturalist who lives in Central Georgia, says Ruby-throats travel about 23 miles a day as they head south. 

• Source: Terry Johnson’s Backyard Wildlife Connection is here:

https://backyardwildlifeconnection.com

A trapped mantis

 The mantis was caught in a spiderweb.

It was a sight I’d never seen, so the garden project came to a halt.

Mantises have powerful forearms — so strong they can catch and kill hummingbirds. I’d assumed that a mantis could tear through any web it blundered into. What was going on?

This mantis appeared to have fallen, rather than blundered, into the web. He appeared to have been snagged by the back. Perhaps the mantis could not get to the web with those powerful forearms.

Then again, the web was the work of a Joro spider. These spiders, recent immigrants from Asia, build strong webs. When I run into one, I marvel at spiders that spin webs that feel like fishing line. I wondered whether this was a case of strength vs. strength — a strong web builder vs. getting the better of a strong web cutter.

This little drama was interesting biologically but troubling ethically. I try not to kill living things. The Wise Woman smiles when I evict — rather than kill — spiders, centipedes and other creatures, even those that bite and sting.

The exceptions are the killers. I leave poisonous spiders and snakes alone unless they’re in a place where they could do harm.

This mantis, alas, was too near the hummingbird feeder.

To imagine a language

 Imagine a band of ancient foragers in a forest in Asia. The people have a language, but they use it infrequently. People speak less as they get older. By the time people turn 40, they are silent. If an older person speaks, people know something’s wrong. If an old person speaks routinely, the presumption is that something is wrong with him.

We — especially those of who are older — can barely imagine it. We don’t recognize the form of life.

But consider that these people were hunter-gathers. They did not send their kids to college. The kids did not need help with homework or advice on careers. The children needed instructions on basic survival techniques, and they learned early. They went through rites of passage at 8. They were independent by 13.

Parents and other adults talked to children to teach them. But it was considered bad form to tell another person what to do. Children heard much less from adults when they turned 8. They heard hardly anything when they turned 13.

Older people, like everyone else, had to hunt and gather. But when the kids were out of the nest there was no need for them to say anything, so they didn’t.

This is not the outline of a science fiction story. It’s a comment on a line from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:

 

And so to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

 

How hard is it to imagine a different form of life?

As hard as it for an old guy like me to imagine shutting up.  

• Source: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §19. 

A stand of beeches

 One of my regular stops is a stand of beech trees just south of Stone Mountain. The trees are lovely. I tend to go on about beech trees.

Now when I look at them, I find myself looking for signs of beech-leaf disease. The first cases were reported in 2012 in Ohio. The disease, carried by a microscopic nematode, spread. It has reached North Carolina, a neighboring state. Foresters say it’s just a matter of time before it reaches here.

When I was a boy, I used to climb a magnificent chestnut on my grandmother’s place in Tennessee. It was the only chestnut that anyone knew about, and old timers would sometimes stop by, just to look. The chestnut was a prized tree. The nuts were tasty, and the wood was valued by furniture makers. In 1904, someone noticed that something was killing the chestnut trees at the zoo in New York City. By World War II, something like 9 million acres of chestnut trees were gone.

When I go to the beech stand by Stone Mountain, I still am struck by its beauty. But now a little worry has mixed with the wonder.  

• Sources: “Beech leaf disease: An emerging forest threat in Eastern U.S.”; U.S. Forest Service, Sept. 15, 2023. It’s here:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/delivering-mission/sustain/beech-leaf-disease-emerging-forest-threat-eastern-us

Margaret Roach, “A Race to Save a Signature American Tree From a Deadly Disease”; The New York Times, Aug. 13, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/realestate/beech-leaf-disease.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Marsh dewflower

 The delicate flowers in the wetlands are Murdannia keisak. The Marsh dewflower is a spiderwort, an Asian species.

The flowers are white with tints of blue, purple and pink. They remind me of Japanese watercolors. I found a stand near a pond southwest of Stone Mountain.

It grows thick, choking mats in wetlands. Biologists fear the invasive species will crowd out the natives.

A lot of the invasive species on public lands escaped from gardens. But this one didn’t. The prevailing theory is that it came to North America as a weed in rice imported by farmers in South Carolina.

• Source: For the truly curious, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s “Marsh Dewflower (Murdannia keisak): Ecological Risk Screening Summary, published April 11, 2024, is here:

https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2025-01/ecological-risk-screening-summary-marsh-dewflower.pdf

Instead of a review

 Nicholson Baker decided that he should try a new writing routine with every new book. 

What I’ve found with daily routines,” he said recently, “is that the useful thing is to have one that feels new. It can almost be arbitrary. You know, you could say to yourself, ‘From now on, I’m only going to write on the back porch in flip flops starting at four o’clock in the afternoon.’

 

I think this might be the most useful suggestion in Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. Routines can fossilize. If you’re stuck, some playful experimentation might help.

Instead of a review, a couple of remarks:

• The strongest overall impression: A lot of creative people have simple routines. “A thousand words before breakfast” might be all you need to know about Margaret Mead’s process.

• The passage that might make you question why you write: When Joseph Heller was writing Catch-22, he decided to give up. It would be better, he thought, to watch TV with his wife. After watching TV, Heller went back to his novel. He wondered what Americans were doing at night if they weren’t writing novels.

• Source: Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025. The quotation is on p. 68. Material on Margaret Mead is on p. 72. Joseph Heller’s crack is on p. 133.

A walk before the equinox

 The woods at Panola Mountain are purple with beautyberries and yellow with crownbeard.

American beautyberry, Callicarpa americana, always produces berries. This has got to be a bumper crop.

Yellow crownbeard, Verbesina occidentalis, looks like ragged sunflowers. 

We also saw some Agalinis tenuifolia, which people allegedly call slender false foxglove. I’ve never heard that name. The little lavender flowers were growing around an outcrop. They seemed to be coming out of the granite.

Porter’s sunflower, Helianthus porteri, also seems to grow out of the rock. It loves the thin — almost nonexistent — soil around the outcrops.

Kant on character

 Several passages in Daily Rituals are worth the price of the book. This remark about the philosopher Immanuel Kant is wonderful:

Character, for Kant, is a rationally chosen way of organizing one’s life, based on years of varied experience — indeed, he believed that one does not really develop a character until age forty. And, at the core of one’s character, he thought, were maxims — a handful of essential rules for living that, once formulated, should be followed for the rest of one’s life.

 

I like the passage for several reasons. First, it seems to me that’s the way we make ethical decisions. Often, we must make a snap decision — to run toward or away from gunfire, for example. It would be nice if we had the time to go through elaborate calculations about the greater good before making those decisions. But the model suggested in Kant’s discussion of character seems truer to life, at least as I’ve experienced it.

I wish we had Kant’s own maxims. I would guess that a good Kant scholar could come close to recreating them.

It also seems to me that this remark would be useful to short-story writers: Could you deduce from your hero’s actions the handful of maxims she lived by? 

• Source: Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025, p. 78.

Arabia Mountain, September

 The canopy of the forest is fascinating this time of year. We were out early after a light rain. The trail was dry under the canopy. It was wet in the clearings. The canopy has its limits as an umbrella. I’m guessing the rain was about a tenth of an inch. A heavier rain would have soaked through.

The canopy is getting thinner. Leaves are beginning to fall. The muscadine vines are turning, so you see streaks of yellow in the green canopy. Under the vines, the trail is mushy with ripe grapes and smells like a wine vat.

I saw a red tint in the crown of a maple on Sept. 8. The larger patches of red in the forest are sourwood and Virginia creeper.

How do artists work?

 Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work gets at the question by looking at the routines of 161 people.

Each person’s routine is treated as a case study, admirably brief. I’d guess the average case is 350 words.

Everyone, of course, does it differently. For every Auden declaring that only Hitlers work at night, there is a Thomas Wolfe putting in his best hours from midnight to dawn.

I found myself making a grid with some of the obvious variables in the routines. 

There are several ways to think about time. We all know morning people and night owls. But some writers are done by lunch, while others write in two or three sessions, using meals, walks or reading as breaks. I’m looking for clues on how these folks get their second wind.

I’m also interested in another aspect of time: duration. Some writers work for hours and can’t sit down to write unless they have a big block of time. By contrast, Gertrude Stein said she was good for about 30 minutes a day.

That raises the question of the creative work that goes on before an artist sits down with her materials. People read, take walks, have coffee with friends. Something creative is going on that often ends up the art.

• Source: Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.

Lee Child at work

  This is Dorian Lynskey’s description of Lee Child’s writing routine: 

He would start writing on 1 September every year with a vague premise but no outline. Each day he would start work after lunch, fuelled by cigarettes and coffee (his record is 36 cups). He’d lie on the couch dreaming up the next plot development, then write five or six pages. Ninety working days later, he would have a perfectly plotted 500-page novel. He would then return to the sofa, smoke a joint, and read the manuscript just once, eliminating dead wood but never tweaking the story. Remarkably, this improvisational strategy never failed.

 

I’d like to believe it’s true — that someone out there can write like that.

Among the many things to admire about Child’s routine is his sense of balance. After three months of work, he would take a nine-month vacation. Wouldn’t you agree the proportion is about right?

I’m interested in routines, practices and rituals. I recently started Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. Thanks to Michael Leddy for recommending it.

• Sources: Dorian Lynskey, “Lee Child: ‘I’d rather be a multi-millionaire than a credible author’”; The i Paper, Sept. 4, 2025. It’s here:

https://inews.co.uk/culture/books/lee-child-rather-multi-millionaire-than-credible-author-3885891

I heard about it from Julian Girdham’s newsletter, The Fortnightly.

Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.

The longest distance in writing

 The longest distance in writing is between the period of the last sentence and the subject of the next one.

Verlyn Klinkenborg made that observation in a famous book published in 2012. But a lot of people have  warned of the dangers of introductory clauses.

One of the funniest sentences I ever read went something like this:

 

Because he urinated on the floor of City Hall, the mayor said he would no longer bring his dog to council meetings.

 

I think readers are entitled to assume that the subject of an introductory clause is the first noun that follows. Had that sentence gotten into print, I think the mayor — not his dog — would have had a claim that he’d been falsely defamed.

I tried to convince young people who wanted to be newspaper reporters that they should have a prose they could control, as Klinkenborg put it. If you keep making mistakes with introductory clauses, don’t use them.

My attempts to improve the English that appeared in a few newspapers were mostly unsuccessful. I couldn’t convince writers they’d do better if they went back over their stories and cut half the introductory clauses.

I had three beefs:

• Introductory clauses are minefields for grammatical mistakes.

• Clauses generally make sentences longer. They slow readers down. They often make reading harder.

• Newspaper writers are susceptible to a certain kind of clause that undermines the credibility of everything they write. An example would go something like this:

 

In a move that was largely criticized by experts as an unprecedented effort to undermine democracy, President Trump ….

 

The writer has spent 16 words and hasn’t told readers whether the current occupant of the White House  bugged the homes of political opponents or ordered the Air Force to bomb the capitals of unappreciative NATO allies. The sentence makes a longish demand on the reader’s attention before giving her the news. If the reader is constantly subjected to this, she will conclude that the reporter thinks the most important thing is not the news but the context of the story. The reader will wonder whether that’s a kind of bias.

You can lose a reader’s trust in many ways. It seems to me that a lot of them show up in introductory clauses.

• Source: Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several short sentences about writing; New York: Vintage Books, 2012, p. 11.

‘A prose you can control’

 Long, long ago, a bunch of newspaper editors were inexplicably herded into a conference room and forced to sit through a lecture delivered by me. The topic was good writing.

I projected the opening sentence of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici onto the screen. I pointed out that Religio Medici is one of the great works of English literature and that its opening sentence is a showstopper. It’s also 204 words long.

I stopped talking and gave the editors three minutes of silence to contemplate the sentence. When it became evident that more time was needed for the editors to grasp what Sir Thomas was saying, I added a couple of minutes of extra time, as they do in soccer. When it became evident that yet more time was needed, I made a plea for short sentences.

Years later, Verlyn Klinkenborg made the case far better than I did that day.

 

Why short sentences?

They’ll sound strange for a while until you can hear

what they’re capable of.

But they carry you back to a prose you can control,

To a stage in education where your diction — your

vocabulary — was under control too.

 

For the truly curious, here’s Sir Thomas’s sentence:

 

For my Religion, though there be severall circumstances that might perswade the world I have none at all, as the generall scandal of my profession, the naturall course of my studies, the indifferency of my behaviour, and discourse in matters of Religion, neither violently defending one, nor with the common ardor of contention opposing another; yet in despight hereof I dare, without usurpation, assume the honorable stile of a Christian: not that I merely owe this title to the Font, my education, or the Clime wherein I was borne, as being bred up either to confirme those principles my Parents instilled into my unwary understanding; or by a generall consent proceed in the Religion of my Countrey; but that having in my riper yeares, and confirmed judgement, seene and examined all, I finde my selfe obliged by the principles of Grace, and the law of mine owne reason, to embrace no other name than this; neither doth herein my zeale so farre make me forget the generall charitie I owe unto humanity, as rather to hate then pity Turkes, Infidels, and (what is worse) the Jewes, rather contenting my selfe to enjoy that happy stile, then maligning those who refuse so glorious a title.   

 

Sir Thomas probably wrote that sentence in 1636. He often was thought-provoking, disturbing, outrageously wrong and interesting. I think he could control a 204-word sentence. Most of us cannot.

• Sources: Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several short sentences about writing; New York: Vintage Books, 2012, p. 9.

Sir Thomas Browne, Selected Writings, edited by Sir Geoffrey Keynes; The University of Chicago Press, 1970, p. 7.

Thom Gunn and the good life

The poet Thom Gunn wrote to a friend: 

I can hardly imagine a life more to my taste than mine.

 

I love that remark. When you’re talking about a good life, taste is important. A lot of what made Gunn’s life good for him would not make life good for me. 

I admire Gunn’s drive to live a life in accord with his own values. It seems to me that’s a large part of what a good life is: living by one’s own values, rather by someone else’s.

What’s blurry to me is the distinction between taste and other kinds of values. I understand that some people can made a kind of culture out of motorcycles. But I can’t, and it doesn’t seem to me that’s just a matter of taste. I’d have to be a different person — have a different temperament, a different personality — to pull that off.

I almost want to talk of human natures, rather than human nature.

• Source: Dwight Garner, “In ‘The Letters of Thom Gunn,’ an Unusual Mix of Pleasures”; The New York Times, May 16, 2022.

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.