Resisting the prevailing trends

 Cornelius Eady will read a poem at the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York. I like to see people resisting the prevailing trends in American politics with poetry.

At the end of the first year of the current occupant’s first term, Eady chided poets who simply wail like Geiger counters. We need more: new ideas, inspiration and encouragement.

I’ve mentioned Eady before. I like him. I like his collaborator, Toi Derricotte. I like their foundation, Cave Canem. 

• Sources and notes: Cornelius Eady, “All the American Poets of Titled Their New Books ‘The End,’”; Poetry, December 2017. It’s here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/144825/all-the-american-poets-have-titled-their-new-books-the-end

Cave Canem is here:

https://cavecanempoets.org

For an earlier note on this poet, see “Eady: ‘I’m a Fool to Love You,’” May 10, 2025. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/search?q=Eady%3B

How places are known

 My grandfather’s farm was a place. It included many places, each marked by a story.

There was the place where the Joe the birddog killed the enormous rattlesnake. There was the place where my grandfather drove the tractor off a ledge overlooking the creek. It was not far from the place where he  found a grinding stone, marking a site where ancient people had lived.

Vine Deloria Jr. said that it’s natural for people to have an aesthetic feeling for a beautiful place. It’s natural for families to have stories about land they live on. But in our culture, those connections between land and people rarely last.

Tribal histories are like my family’s history — they are based on place. Every feature of the landscape has a story about it.

The difference is that the tribal stories evolved over countless generations. They are not the reflections of a poet or someone who has an eye for natural beauty or of a family with a gift for drama.

The Native American stories don’t reflect personal or family wisdom. They reflect communal wisdom.

• Source: Vine Deloria Jr.’s essay “Reflection and Revelation: Knowing Land, Places and Ourselves” is in The Power of Place, edited by James A. Swan; Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1993, pp. 28-40.

A character for the stage

 I wish a playwright would take a shot at Andrew Jackson as a dramatic character.

Marquis James began his “Andrew Jackson’s Famous Duel” with this:

 

On Thursday, May 29, 1806, Andrew Jackson rose at five o’clock, and after breakfast told Rachel that he would be gone for a couple of days and meanwhile he might have some trouble with Mr. Dickinson. Rachel probably knew what the trouble would be and she did not ask.

 

Jackson had married Rachel before her divorce was final. Charles Dickinson, a Nashville lawyer and a crack shot, had accused Jackson of cheating on a horse race. When the conversation got spirited, Dickinson had said some unkind things about Rachel.

Tennessee had a law against dueling, so the men met over the state line in Kentucky. Dickinson was faster and more accurate with a pistol than anyone. Jackson knew Dickinson would get off the first shot and that he would not miss. Jackson hoped he’d survive the wound long enough to kill Dickinson.

Jackson rode to Kentucky, regaling his friends with tirades about what a loser President Jefferson was. The men stopped at an inn on the night before the duel. Jackson’s friends reported he ate a hearty meal and was asleep within 10 minutes of getting in bed. Jackson slept soundly and had to be wakened in the morning.

The duel went as Jackson imagined. Dickinson fired first, and everyone saw the dust fly out of Jackson’s frock coat. Dickinson couldn’t believe Jackson didn’t fall and temporarily left his mark until he was ordered back by his seconds. Jackson took aim, but his pistol malfunctioned. He cocked it again and shot Dickinson.

While Dickinson’s seconds were tending to their mortally wounded friend, Jackson left the field, telling his friends to pay no attention to the wound in his chest. He didn’t want the Dickinson party to have the satisfaction of knowing he’d been badly hurt.

Jackson strikes me as having the right stuff for a dramatic character. He didn’t think about consequences. Wherever he went, the wake was mayhem.

The right stuff for a fictional character isn’t the right stuff for a president. As president, Jackson took no thought of the consequences of any of his actions. He was willful and thoughtless, the kind of man who defied court orders and did things that stained the country’s reputation forever.

But as a character on the stage, I see potential. Can you imagine what Aeschylus could have done with a character like that?

• Marquis James’s “Andrew Jackson’s Famous Duel” was in The Life of Andrew Jackson, published in 1933. It’s in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 477-80.

A case of self-destructiveness

 It’s a mark of a really good book: You keep seeing things in it.

I’ve mentioned Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These several times. But I’m just now getting the point that moral people can be self-destructive, and that self-destruction spills over to family members and loved ones.

The book is about a coalman named Furlong who sees a case of abuse and does something about it, even though his action is sure to offend powerful people.

You can read it as a heroic tale. But Keegan said the book began as short story about a boy who is making deliveries of coal with his father. They find another boy locked in a coal shed at a boarding school. The father simply locks the door back up and goes on without saying a word.

Keegan thought about what it must be like to carry that burden around — the burden of seeing a wrong and doing nothing. The coalman’s point of view took over the story. Small Things Like These became a vastly different story.

People who do the right thing sometimes don’t count the costs, and some of us are slow to see and talk about the reckoning.

• Sources and notes: Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These; New York: Grove Press, 2017.

“Claire Keegan on Small Things Like These: ‘I wasn’t setting out to write about misogyny or Catholic Ireland”; The Booker Prizes, Dec. 2, 2024. The interview is here:
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/claire-keegan-interview-small-things-like-these

For a sample of an earlier note on this wonderful book, see “Anatomy of a one-night read,” July 4, 2024.

‘Having it out with Melancholy’

 The poet Jane Kenyon is telling off Melancholy: 

You taught me to exist without gratitude. 

You ruined my manners toward God …

 

Kenyon suffered from depression. Her descriptions of it — and of the remedies suggested by physicians with drugs and friends with advice — are horrifying. Her poems suggest that the response is “ordinary contentment.” She relishes the small wonders that bring joy.

Kenyon’s line about ruined manners astonishes me. Although I wouldn’t put it that way, I do see an order in the cosmos and want to be part of the way it works, rather than oblivious to it and estranged from it.

Kenyon said things about gratitude that I haven’t seen in the traditional scriptures. I want to spend more time with her poetry in the coming year.

• Jane Kenyon, “Having it out with Melancholy”; Poetry, November 1992. It’s here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=161&issue=2&page=28
Kenyon has appeared in this collection of notes before, oddly around the holidays. See “A riff on the holiday blues,” Dec. 17, 2021.

‘Winter Hours’

 When Mary Oliver’s dog died, the grieving poet covered the dog’s tracks with leaves and bark, hoping they would last a little longer.

I love that image, particularly at this time of year.

• Source: Mary Oliver’s “Winter Hours” is in Upstream: Selected Essays; New York: Penguin, 2016.

Four means of education

 Edward Shils, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who studied intellectuals, was such an interesting character he appeared in Saul Bellow’s fiction.

Joseph Epstein wrote several pieces about him, mentioning Shils’s love of walking sticks, thick soups and green ink. Shils said there were four means of getting an education:

• Classrooms.

• Newspapers and journals.

• Conversation.

• Bookstores, especially those that sell used books. Shils crammed 16,000 books into his apartment.

That remark, reported by Epstein, has me searching for one of Shils’s books.

Shils held that there’s a social role for the responsible critic, and I’d like to learn the details. Anyone who samples our attempts at conversation online might sense the absence of responsible criticism.

• Sources: Joseph Epstein’s pieces on Edward Shils include “The Bookish Life,” First Things, November 2018; the poem “Edward Shils in Heaven,” First Things, August 2018; and Edward, Remembered; The Chicago Tribune, May 11, 1997.

‘Functional Poverty’

 Mildred Binns Young, a Quaker thinker, urged young people to adopt a life of “functional poverty.”

She argued that Americans had developed “a social system which can thrive only on victims.” The social order constantly finds new ways to exploit people. When indentured servants weren’t profitable enough, the society warmed up to the idea of enslaved servants. It later found ways to exploit successive waves of immigrants, forcing people to work long hours for inadequate wages.

During the Depression, Mildred and Wilmer Young helped organize the Delta Cooperative Farm in Mississippi. The co-op was integrated. It was organized to lift exploited sharecroppers — Black and white — out of exploitive conditions.

Mildred Young argued that thoughtless consumption made that kind of social system not only possible but inevitable. She urged people to do without “servants” — maids, housecleaners, lawn keepers. If your way of living is so complicated you can’t handle the maintenance, simplify.

The idea that the United States is a Christian nation is beyond troubling to me. I’ve been reading what  some American religious thinkers have said about what a better social order would look like.

• Mildred Binns Young, “Functional Poverty”; Pendle Hill Pamphlet No. 6, 1939. Pendle Hill is still publishing pamphlets at its bookstore. This one is in the public domain and can be found here:

https://inwardlight.org/witness/simplicity/functional-poverty/

A sense of place

 We were walking south, into the sun. We’d just observed the solstice the night before, so the sun was low in the sky, even at midday.

As we were going down the hill, the sun hit the ground directly, drying it out. Going up the northern slope, the direct light was blocked by the hill. It’s not as if you’re in a shadow, but the light is diffused. Without that direct sunlight hitting the ground, the soil is wetter.

The soil is the same on both sides of the hill. The rainfall is the same. But the northern slope is a little wetter. It’s where you’ll often find beech trees, which like a little more moisture than the oaks, pines and hickories.

A place is not just a set of Global Position System coordinates. A place has features that we humans are slow to notice. Only gradually do we come to a sense of it.

Religion — what it is

 I’ve complained that philosophers, in discussing religion, tend to leap into arguments for the existence of God. The place to start is with a discussion of what religion is. Kwame Anthony Appiah has done that.

His excellent article is at Aeon. I highly recommend it. Here are his main points:

• “Religion” is a category, not a single natural thing. (Philosophers speak of kinds. When we speak of a tree we are referring to a natural kind. When we speak of a marriage we are speaking of a social kind. But note that the tree is more concrete than the marriage, which means different things in different cultures and is, in our time, evolving. The reference to the social kind of marriage still works, but not in quite the same way as a reference to a natural kind.)

• To get to the modern category of “religion,” you need a category of “secular,” that is, a non-religious sphere. That didn’t emerge in the West until the 17^th century. Earlier understandings of the category “religion” aren’t the concept that we use today.

• The notion that the things that people take to be religious — rituals, practices, rites, superstitions, beliefs, etc. — can be lumped into a category that describes them all is like trying to put football, golf, poker, chess and solitaire into the category of “games.” Wittgenstein said that when you look for a common feature, there is none. Instead, there are vague family resemblances. (Chess is kind of like Monopoly in that it’s played on a board. But how is solitaire like tennis?) Appiah points out that the resemblances you notice depend on what you choose as a prototype. Start with Christianity as the prototype and you find one set of resemblances. Start with animism as the prototype and you find another.

Appiah has two conclusions. First:

 

If ‘religion’ endures, it’s because the word still does work, practical and theoretical. It orders law and policy, directs research, and shapes the inner lives of those who use it.

 

Although I complain about it, the word does some work for me. I am not a pacifist, but I think the republic should respect the rights of conscientious objectors. I think its record in dealing with religious objections to war has been shameful. In arguing that, I use “religion” to order my notions of law and policy. And, as you might guess, I use “religion” to direct my own humble research.

The other conclusion:

 

Whatever else it may be, ‘religion’ remains a category with too many stakeholders to be fired by fiat. When it comes to what the word means, no one gets to say, and everyone gets a say.

 

I suppose I like the essay because I agree — and I want my say, although what seems like religion to me doesn’t fit the category as portrayed in the dictionary. I don’t think that the term “private religion” is an oxymoron. I also don’t think that beliefs are a helpful way to look at religion.

But setting aside my own biases, I think Appiah’s article is important. If you are the kind of person who was exposed to something called religion as a child or who has thought about religion’s influence on American politics, it’s a topic that’s worth trying to think through, rather than avoiding. Appiah’s article is a good place to start.

• Source: Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Undefinable yet indispensable”; Aeon, 12 Dec. 2025. It’s here:

https://aeon.co/essays/the-word-religion-resists-definition-but-remains-necessary

The boys who don't leave

 A couple of days ago, I mentioned a passage in Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield about how village life in East Anglia made children resistant to the influences of the world outside. The passage reminded me of some of the kids I grew up with.

In Blythe’s book, the master of the Agricultural Training Centre describes some of the boys who never leave home, never go to the city looking for work, never seek a life of their own.

 

The village just absorbs these boys. They’ll hardly ever leave it. They’ll be “old Tom So-and-So.” They’ll never marry — the girls know their type and won’t look at them. They’ll live with their mothers, and then with an old sister, and then on their own. They’ll do all the odd jobs. They’ll be on the go until they die but they seem to take real care not to arrive anywhere! They are sly, private sort of people. Set apart.

 

Boys began attending the agricultural school at 16. The master lamented that was too late. By then their personalities were set.

 

You can scratch away but you can’t shape. It’s too late for that. You feel a terrible sense of waste.

 

• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Akenfield; New York: New York Review Books, 2015, pp. 206 and 207.

For the previous post, see “The village school,” Dec. 18, 2025.

Apple-howling

 Thoreau mentioned several winter celebrations in England involving fruit trees, especially apples. 

During the winter, farm folk would go to the orchards, armed with drink, toasted bread and song. They saluted the trees, pouring libations and offering blessings. The idea was to encourage the trees to be well and bear well. All this lyrical blessing was called “wassailing.”

Some people called the practice “apple-howling.” It seems like a good way to mark the winter solstice.

I like all trees, not just fruit trees. Maybe the pines in the woodlot would like a song on the longest night.

• Henry David Thoreau’s “Wild Apples” is in Essays, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 317-45.

A clean truck

 The writer Sue Bender was interested in how a person could care for her spirit in a world that had other concerns.

She told about watching her son, a gardener, wash his truck. It was an old truck, but it looked new. The young man cleaned it weekly. He worked slowly and carefully.

When he finished, Bender told him it looked like an act of devotion, rather than a chore.

The young man replied that he wasn’t sure he knew what devotion meant. But he said that having a clean truck said something about the way he went about his business. It said something about him.

Some people read a Sue Bender story and ask if that’s all there is. Other readers go off and think.

• Sources: Sue Bender, Everyday Sacred: A Woman’s Journey Home; New York: HarperOne, 1996.

Trip Gabriel, “Sue Bender, Who Wrote About Living With the Amish, Dies at 91; The New York Times, Dec. 18, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/books/sue-bender-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

The village school

 Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield paints a picture of a village school in East Anglia that hit me as eerily familiar.

The files in the school office contain a letter, dated 1916, stating that it was impossible to get the temperature of the classroom above 38 degrees. The official diaries are full of complaints about farmers pulling the children of hired hands out of class to work the fields.

East Anglia is a long way from home. But I grew up hearing similar stories from people in the South.

In Blythe’s book, an educator talks about the cost of this allegedly idyllic life on the students. The children are intensely interested in the village but not in things outside it. They don’t want things they can have only in imagination — toys, careers, studies, ways of life. Even small children have a remarkable power to resist influences from outside that small, narrow village.

I know that trait. It’s so common it’s hard to see. A lot of people would say it’s normal.

• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Akenfield; New York: New York Review Books, 2015, p. 179-87.

The concept of identity

 When I was a student, Schopenhauer was not taught. He was a crank, rather than a philosopher.

I gather that’s still the consensus among philosophy departments. However, the dissenters who thought Schopenhauer was an important thinker include Freud and Wittgenstein.

I can’t help anyone with Freud, and I am not a good enough scholar to know what Wittgenstein found interesting about Schopenhauer. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a single idea: Schopenhauer’s notion that individual identity is an illusion.

Schopenhauer’s reasons for that belief are bewildering. I doubt that Wittgenstein was interested in his reasons. I think Wittgenstein was interested that such a fundamental concept could be challenged.

Many common beliefs don’t have solid foundations. Often, the grounds for a belief change.

Consider the grounds for the belief that the world is flat.

The grounds, 5,000 years ago, might involve our own experience — and the limits of it.

The grounds, 2,000 years ago, might include our distrust of astronomers.

The grounds today might include too much time on the daffy side of the Internet.

You can see a change in the reasonableness of this belief.

In an earlier day, the claim that there’s something fishy about the concept of personal identity might have interested only a psychiatrist and a logician. 

Today, that claim might interest research scientists: biologists studying eusocial species, for example.

• Source: Schopenhauer is having a moment because of a new biography by David Bather Woods. The best review I’ve seen is here:

Terry Eagleton, “Pregnant With Monsters”; The London Review of Books, Vol. 47, No. 22, 4 Dec. 2025.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n22/terry-eagleton/pregnant-with-monsters

 

The big book binge

 A confession of ignorance: I’m just catching up with Jólabókaflóð, the Christmas book flood in Iceland.

Smithsonian magazine had an explanation of it. The short version: During World War II, when everything was rationed, paper was relatively plentiful, creating possibilities in the publishing business. Books were available as Christmas presents at a time when other things weren’t.

I kept reading because I’m interested in why this tradition of buying, giving and reading books in midwinter fit so well into Icelandic culture. What would have been a marketing stunt in the United States become something else in Iceland.

I’m still thinking about a comment from a Baldur Bjarnason, a writer who has studied the matter:

 

We are a culture that’s obsessed with storytelling. It’s a national pastime. Meetings in Iceland tend to go over because everybody starts to tell a story or an anecdote at the drop of a hat. When an Icelandic parent asks their kid what happened at school today, they’re going to get a story with a beginning, middle and an end, probably with a climax and a turning point somewhere. Storytelling is how we process life.

 

I’m wondering whether we in the United States could say the same thing, with the same confidence.

• Source: Lauren Oster, “Iceland’s Christmas Book Flood is a Force of Nature”; Smithsonian, Dec. 15, 2022.

Books you give

 I love book recommendations, and The Guardian has an interesting list. The paper asked 30 writers for a recommendation. It didn’t ask what’s cool and exciting. It asked what books the writers had given as gifts.

No one asked me, but if they had:

• Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These. The only recent work of fiction on this short list. It’s short, extraordinary and serious.

• Leo Tolstoy, Twenty-Three Tales. There’s a lot of Tolstoy in here, but there’s also a lot of Wittgenstein. This is one of the books Wittgenstein recommended to friends, and you can see something of his personality in a couple of these stories.

• Henry Beetle Hough, Country Editor. People have written a lot about what a responsible and ethical newspaper editor would look like without giving much thought to what a newspaper editor is. This is the best book I’ve seen on the subject.

• Source: ‘This extraordinary story never goes out of fashion’: 30 authors on the books they give to everyone; The Guardian, 13 Dec. 2025.

Reading the papers

 I do not have a gift for languages. Although I have no ability and struggle mightily, I make it a point to read Mexican newspapers, which is how I learned that Escobares, Texas, is the poorest community in the United States.

Household income is less than $15,000.

Mexican journalists liked the story because it’s a myth buster. Many Spanish-speaking people want to get to the United States because they have heard stories that aren’t entirely true. Given the reality, would you really want to go there?

It can be hard to make yourself do something when you are aware that you lack natural ability. But I read the papers, dictionary in hand, because I believe that a second or third language is part of a liberal education. I believe that plodding on can broaden your perspective.

As I thought about the story, I forgot about the news that the White House was claiming that consumer prices are falling. I forgot about the debate over “affordability,” although I’m not sure what that means. Instead, I thought about how a couple of parents with kids would get by on less than $290 a week in a country that talks a lot about equality, justice and opportunity.

A late bloomer

 A groundsel bush, Baccharis halimifolia, on the banks of the Yellow River still had a few blooms, although the white flowers had been burned by freezes.

B. halimifolia is a Georgia native. It’s a member of the aster family — the only species that gets big enough to be called a tree. The guidebooks say it can reach 12 feet. The one we saw was shoulder high. 

A week before the solstice, the season appears to be about over for pollinators. I saw a single yellow blossom on a little camphorweed.

We’ve had highs in the 50s and lows mostly in the 30s, with a couple of hard freezes. Winter is supposed to set in tonight. The forecasters say it’ll be in the teens when I get a fire going Monday morning.

Where did that idea come from?

 The idea of a Christian nation strikes me as such a horrible idea that I have trouble grasping that it emerged from an organized effort.

But there it is: People of an earlier generation thought it was a good idea. They tried hard to sell it.

During the Cold War, when psychological warfare experts advised the president, scholars of religion helped shape religious propaganda broadcast behind the Iron Country and to the developing world. The Cold War was portrayed not just as a struggle between superpowers but as a war of ideals between a deeply religious culture and “godless communism.”

Andrew R. Polk, a historian at Middle Tennessee State University, contends that Franklin Roosevelt started a program to push the idea that America was better than its enemies — and that there was no question which side God was on. Harry Truman accelerated the program with an address to the nation in 1949. Professor Polk’s summary:

 

That program … enlisted the aid of advertising executives, military public relations experts, and the government’s own professional propagandists to sell the American public on a common religious heritage in support of the White House’s preferred policies. As a result, both the civil religion identified in the 1970s and 1980s and the Christian nationalism so prevalent today are, in truth, the byproducts and lasting legacies of a decades-long program of religious propaganda. 

 

I’ve been reading an essay written in the 1940s by Elton Trueblood, a scholar who promoted the idea of a Christian nation. He believed that everyone should want to live in a more ideal society than the world had yet seen. He believed that churches would be the catalyst for change toward a better society: less greedy and less materialistic, more just and more equitable.

I’ve been reading with a mixture of fascination and horror.

To me, the separation of church and state is fundamental. Chipping away at it is as wise as chipping away at the foundation of your house.

• Sources: Andrew R. Polk, “Religious Propaganda and the Making of An American Religion”; Liberty,November/December 2021. It’s here:

https://www.libertymagazine.org/article/religious-propaganda-and-the-making-of-an-american-religion

Polk’s book on the subject is Faith in Freedom: Propaganda, Presidential Politics, and the Making of an American Religion.

D. Elton Trueblood, “A Radical Experiment,” was The William Penn Lecture in 1947, delivered at Arch Street Meeting House in Philadelphia. The lecture was published as a pamphlet by the Young Friends Movement. It’s available here:

https://quaker.org/legacy/pamphlets/wpl1947a.html

Holidays

 If our culture is making people sick, perhaps we should change it.

Seasonal Affective Disorder, known by the acronym SAD, used to be called the holiday blues. I’m not competent to discuss the psychology or the research, but this seems obvious: Since the holidays make a lot of people sad and depressed, perhaps we should find better ways to observe holidays. Maybe we should find better holidays.

I’m interested in the solstice and plan to observe it this year. It was widely observed in ancient times. I heard about Stonehenge and Norsemen around the Yule log before I learned of the observances of people closer to home in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. I’m catching up with traditions in other parts of the world.

Ancient peoples must have watched the ebbing of the light with concern. But they knew it would stop. They knew when the longest night would be. They marked it.

The ancient Greeks had a word, χάρις, which meant a kind of inexplicable gift or favor. They had a different word for gifts that followed some rational scheme, like reciprocal gifts or wedding presents. The passing of the longest night and the returning of longer days must have seemed like a strange gift to ancient people: undoubtedly good, inexplicable yet predictable.

I see my own life in that light. Much good has come my way that I couldn’t even understand. How could I possibly claim that I deserved it when I couldn’t even comprehend it?

It seems to me that some of that sentiment might have been behind those observances by the people of old. I’m going to see if I can connect with them this year.

Another academic purge

 When I was at the University of Texas 50 years ago, people were still talking about the conservative purge of the 1940s.

In 1944, the regents fired President Homer Rainey. Among the many complaints was that he refused to fire economics teachers who were discussing the 40-hour week and other features of the New Deal. In the 1970s, people remembered that some of the teachers the university was proud of had mixed feelings about the place. I’m a fan of the writer J. Frank Dobie. He taught a famous course on the literature of the Southwest before being run off in 1947. 

When I was a student, the university was still conscious of that blight on its record. It took a hands-off approach to what could be taught in the classroom. Those who say all the teachers were liberals then were cutting classes. I wasn’t. I heard an astonishing range of views.

At the time, people had confidence that the university would defend academic freedom. Teachers taught as they should — without looking over their shoulders.

I’m mourning the damage that’s being done today to the university — and many others.

It almost seems to be a natural law. State universities that have resources attract talent. Politicians notice the influence of learned people, see it as dangerous and try to dismantle it. 

It seems to happen in cycles: Every so often, people who can think are purged from public universities by people who can’t.

• Source: This has been a long-running story, but you can get a sense of it by reading Vimal Patel’s “The Conservative Overhaul of the University of Texas is Underway”; The New York Times, Dec. 10, 2025.

Improving the understanding

 I have been wondering what it would have been like to have had a good education. Montaigne, who had an unusual one, wondered about the same thing. Here’s his lament:

In truth the care and fees of our parents aim only at furnishing our heads with knowledge: nobody talks about judgment or virtue ... We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty.

 

Setting aside the troublesome sense of right and wrong for the moment, I’m wondering what he would say about improving the understanding.

I’m having a hard time imagining a better way than the course he took in retirement. He read what others had said and then tried to pin himself down — to find out what he thought.

The record of that struggle is The Essays.

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 153-4.

Ideas that come with the trade

 Trade dependency between native and colonial peoples is a controversial topic. I wonder if it might be a metaphor for thinking about some features of contemporary American culture.

The historian Alan Taylor gave an account of the concept that emphasized the mutuality of dependency among the French and the Native peoples in Canada in colonial times. Here are the highlights:

• Native people believed that the life of each animal had a spiritual value that must be considered with the overall health of the land. Waste was abhorred. Human beings took no more than was needed.

• The French brought luxuries that quickly became necessities. Native peoples who shunned the French traders could continue to skin carcasses with stone tools instead of metal knives. They could continue to use stone hoes to cultivate fields. But stone tools virtually disappeared from some Native populations during the 17^th century. What once were luxuries were soon necessities.

• To pay for them, Native peoples traded furs. The animals that produced good furs had been largely exterminated in Europe. To the French, the pelts were valuable, but they were commodities. To the Native people, that idea was initially abhorrent. But by the 1620s, the Huron people, who were middlemen trading with other Native peoples on the Great Lakes, were supplying the French with 10,000 to 12,000 pelts a year. It was business. People who once killed animals to feed and clothe themselves were killing animals to supply a market. The view of how the world works had changed.

It seems to me that you could make an argument that the current population of the United States has been influenced, not by invading hordes, but by an invasive collection of ideas. This snarl of ideas is based on a kind of capitalism that endows corporations with human rights and that increasingly makes commodities of things, such as public trusts, that traditionally were not. What ordinary people are willing to trade in return for wages and for necessities has changed.

In 17^th-century Canada, the revolution in the way humans lived together and how they lived on the land occurred without anything that looked like an invasion. In 1627, after almost 20 years of efforts to grow the colony, the French population in Quebec reached 85. The changes that occurred in Canada were not brought about by invading hordes, but by the influence of new ideas, new technologies, new ways of looking at things.

Not all the changes were healthy. I’d say the same about the changes that occurring in the United States today.

• Source and note: Alan Taylor, American Colonies; London: Penguin Books, 2002, pp. 94-102. Taylor is one of the historians who speaks on camera in The American Revolution, a film series directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. It premiered on PBS.  

Being serious, rather than good

 Wittgenstein was invited to meet with members of the Vienna Circle, an informal group of people who were interested in the philosophy of science. Many members were at least sympathetic to Logical Positivism, the view that only verifiable assertions have meaning.

A verifiable assertion is a hypothesis, something the scientists in the crowd liked. You can test a hypothesis and go with the evidence: thumbs up or thumbs down.

The Logical Positivists asserted that any assertion that was not verifiable was neither true nor false but meaningless. The arts were not revered in this crowd.

Wittgenstein liked hypotheses but thought that the scientific method was only one of many ways in which language can be used meaningfully. Wittgenstein often used the word serious in talking about people who did meaningful work. Instead of speaking of good and bad people, Wittgenstein spoke of serious people.

I was reminded of that when I ran across a line from Wallace Stegner: 

 

What anyone who speaks for art must be prepared to assert is the validity of non-scientific experience and the seriousness of non-verifiable insight.

 

It’s the same idea that Wittgenstein had, I think, in different language. Here’s the way Stegner put it:

 

There are questions that science not only cannot answer but doesn’t know how to ask.

 

Stegner was making the case that Americans shouldn’t abandon the arts and humanities in a headlong rush toward mathematics, science and engineering. Sadly, he was making the case in the 1950s.

I think speaking seriously about the arts and humanities is an important thing to do — an ethical thing to do in these times. Sadly, some discredited ideas hang around for generations.

• Wallace Stegner’s essay “One Way to Spell Man” appeared in The Saturday Review, May 24, 1958. I found it in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 137-42. The quotations are on pp. 140 and 138.

What Cdr. Fuchida was thinking

 Cdr. Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the air strikes on Pearl Harbor, commanded an elite force.

Six carriers launched 183 planes, which formed up in 15 minutes. That was something American air groups simply could not do in 1941.

Fuchida, one of the great air commanders of the war, was not a pilot. Although he was the plane’s commander, his bomber was piloted by a first-class petty officer. Fuchida, rode in the middle seat, behind the pilot and ahead of the radio operator, who also operated the tail gun. Fuchida navigated.

Fuchida corrected his route 5 degrees by listening to the Honolulu radio station. He was flying through heavy clouds and was relieved when the American announcer said the forecast called for partly cloudy skies.

The clouds broke as the formation approached the north shore of Oahu. Fuchida took the planes west to avoid being seen.

Tactically, Fuchida had one big decision: If his air groups surprised the Americans, the torpedo planes would attack first, followed by level bombers and then dive bombers. The fear was that the smoke would be too dense to see after the dive bombers struck. If the enemy was alert, however, the dive bombers would attack first to cause confusion. They’d be followed by the level bombers and then the torpedo planes.

Radio silence was strict. Fuchida would signal the formation with a flare pistol: One Black Dragon if surprise was achieved, two if it was lost.

Fuchida fired one flare, but the fighters, flying through clouds, missed the signal. Fuchida fired a second flare toward them when they emerged.

The ensuing confusion — was that one flare or two? — was the only glitch.

It didn’t matter. Fuchida was astonished that the only planes in the air were Japanese. They were five minutes early over their targets. The first bombs fell at 7:55 a.m.

It’s interesting to read the accounts of combat leaders to find out what they were thinking at pivotal points in history. Fuchida was thinking about many things, including the unfortunate problem with those flares.

• Source: Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. This is Vol. 1 of the Pacific War Trilogy.

Being sick

  I suppose it was a chest cold: cough, fever, headache. I was vaccinated. If it was the flu, it was a sneaky one.

But there’s this: the pleasure of staying indoors, not working, shirking chores guiltlessly.

If it was going to happen, the timing was good: all those Thanksgiving leftovers that could be heated up and eaten in bed.

The memories of being sick as a child: the lovely feeling of being left alone, not having to go to school, not having to do anything.

And, when the bug runs its course, the pleasure of that first day back: when you’re well enough to get up, sweep out the fireplace, bring in a load of wood, build a fire, fill the bird feeders. No hard work yet, but you can feel your strength coming back.

Now that the cough’s almost gone, it almost seems like it was worth it.

'The American Revolution'

 Twelve hours is a lot of film for me. Still, I’d recommend The American Revolution, the six-part series directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. My 2 cents — or 4 bits:

• First, even if you’re a historian, you’ll probably find something you hadn’t seen in quite the same light. I’d never been able to picture the thousands of enslaved people who sought shelter in British lines in the southern colonies. And I’d guess that if you asked which British colony was the first to be lost during the war, few people would come up with West Florida.

• Second, it’s good to be reminded that Americans have had trouble in governing themselves from the beginning. I’m talking about the problem of basic competence. How’s this for a low bar for judging competence? In an eight-year war, can you find anybody in America who can make sure that the soldiers are fed, clothed and paid? The answer: No.

• Third, the film has some weak points. The battle of Saratoga was a turning point in the war. The American victory led the French to intervene. I understand why Britain’s overly complicated plan for the invasion failed. I don’t understand why, after the fight at Bemis Heights on Oct. 17, 1777, the British army under John Burgoyne had to surrender.

• Fourth, the film’s weak points will make you go to the library. The best way to watch the film is with a pencil in hand. Burns and company interviewed historians for their viewpoints. Every time one of them said something interesting, I wrote down the historian’s name and promised to look for one of his or her books. My list has more than 20 names.

J.F. Powers

 I’ve been meaning to read J.F. Powers for years. He’s always described as a Catholic writer. When people told me about Powers, the implication was that I’d have to read him if I ever hoped to understand the thoughts and feelings that pop into the head of any person exposed to that form of nurture.

I finally found “The Valiant Woman,” which is about Father Firman and his housekeeper, Mrs. Stoner. Mrs. Stoner is a character. Father Firman sometimes wonders who, among all the priests he knows, has the most insufferable housekeeper. His brooding includes this memory:

 

She was a pie-faced girl then, not really a girl perhaps, but not too old to marry again. But she never had. In fact, he could not remember that she had even tried for a husband since coming to the rectory, but of course he could be wrong, not knowing how they went about it.

 

• J.F. Powers’s story “The Valiant Woman” appeared in Prince of Darkness and Other Stories; New York:  Doubleday and Company, 1947. I find it in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 521-8.

‘Blue Brick from the Midwest’

 The blockbuster poem in Kim Stafford’s Singer Come from Afar is “Blue Brick from the Midwest.”

When the poet’s father, William Stafford, was dying of a heart attack, he scrawled to his wife, Dorothy:

 

and

all

my

love

 

The shaky handwriting is reproduced, a stolen stanza, in Kim’s poem.

William, also a wonderful poet, was stoic, principled, granite in grief.

But the blue brick in the poem is a block of love letters from Dorothy, written during their courtship, hidden at the bottom of his desk.

My favorite lines:

 

His way was trenchant, oblique. He mistrusted those who

talk about God, preferring to honor the holy with a glance,

a nod, or silence.

 

• Source: Kim Stafford, Singer Come from Afar; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2021, pp. 112-13. Several notes on this book appeared in November.

The bones of our story

 I’m enjoying conversations with friends about Ken Burns’s new series on the American Revolution.

We Americans are so swamped with the received text of this story — layers and layers of self-serving myth — that it’s hard to find bedrock for a foundation.

I’d suggest this: Imagine you’re a biologist looking at how life changed on the continent from 1492 to 1776. Imagine all the new plants and animals that arrived on ships — crops grown in North America for the first time, new livestock, new pests. Imagine the weed seeds that hid in sacks of grain, giving North America new thistles as well as new wildflowers. And of course there are new microbes, including smallpox.

A biologist might say that the environment itself had changed.

Let’s say the place changed.

Now imagine that you’re doing a population survey on one species: homo sapiens.

• The part of the story we are told: Myriad Europeans — English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German — came in waves to settle a new land.

• The part that we gloss over: The waves of enslaved Africans were even bigger. Africans were dragged from their homeland to be exploited because few wealthy Europeans wanted to pay workers the market rate.

• The part we can’t grasp: From 1492 to 1776 the total population of North America declined. All those waves of immigrants, willing and enslaved, couldn’t make up for the losses. All those ships were carrying microbes along with everything else. There was no immunity in the original populations.

Those are the bones of the story — our story.

It’s not that hard to imagine a different one, a story with less greed, cruelty, inhumanity.

• Source and note: One of the historians who is interviewed in Burns’s series is Alan Taylor. I’ve admired his work since seeing American Colonies; London: Penguin Books, 2002.

Nettel: “Life Elsewhere’

 Guadalupe Nettel’s “Life Elsewhere” might be the best new short story I’ve seen in 2025.

It starts with a hunt for an apartment, and I thought it was going to be a story about a couple growing apart. The narrator, a frustrated actor, wants a place in the theater district. His wife, a book illustrator, wants a bigger place with more light.

But it’s a deeper tale. Sometimes, when we seem to want a different apartment, we really want a different life.

Perhaps this story hit me in a blind spot. I’m one of those people: I am immersed in the details of the life I have and don’t spend much energy imagining a life I don’t live. I know that such people are out there. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one portrayed so well in fiction.

• Source: Guadalupe Nettel, “Life Elsewhere,” translated by Rosalind Harvey; The Yale Review, March 11, 2025. It’s here:

https://yalereview.org/article/guadalupe-nettel-life-elsewhere