A sense of another place

 E.T. Collinsworth III of Portal, Ariz., sent me a copy of his book Life on the Line: A Sense of Place. E.T. lives on the border, the line between two countries. The line between cultures is harder to find.

I’m fascinated by places and our ideas about place. So I’m interested in E.T.’s practice of collecting photographs and observations and publishing them in little books.

When I go outdoors to look at the place I call home, I look for tracks and other evidence of the creatures who live here or are just passing through. E.T. does too.

The game cameras on his and his neighbor’s places have captured images of people passing through. Some are migrants, trying to find a better life, what E.T. calls the mythical construction job in Phoenix. Some of the people are carrying loads of drugs. One photo shows a man carrying a rifle.

I looked at his words and images and realized that whatever else I’d imagined about his place, I’d hadn’t imagined the half of it.

Maybe that’s the human urge to communicate — to help someone else imagine what another place is like.

• Note: E.T. published a book about mules a couple of years ago. For a note on it, see “The powers of observation,” May 16, 2024. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-powers-of-observation.html

An offer of public service

 When I was a reporter, a poultry magnate from East Texas came to the Capitol in Austin and started handing out $10,000 donations to state senators. I was in a knot of reporters interviewing one of the senators when Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim of Pilgrim’s Pride stopped by.

That was near the end of the session in 1989, and the Capitol was packed with reporters, advocates and lobbyists. It didn’t occur to Pilgrim that people would question the actions of any fellow who had cash and wanted some consideration in return. That was just business.

A lot of people saw it that way, and you’d be wrong if you thought that the prudes of the press were the only people who were offended. The people who were enraged were the lobbyists who had offered lesser sums and saw the threat of inflation.

I got to thinking about the Good Old Days when I read The New York Times story about the contractor building Trump’s new ballroom. The Times reported that the company got a secret, no-bid contract from the National Park Service to repair two ornamental fountains. The Biden Administration estimated the cost  at $3.3 million in 2022. 

The Times said the company doing the work for Trump would get $11.9 million for the job. Project creep would bring the total to $17.4 million.

The secret contract without bids was justified on the grounds of urgency. Those old decorative fountains are almost a matter of national security.

The story reminded me why a 20-something version of me wanted to be a reporter. I’m too old to do that  work, but I would like to offer my services to any organization that is interested in clarifying the rights of taxpayers.

I would like to withhold a tiny portion of my taxes, just so the courts could clarify our rights. I’m willing to pay taxes to repair the ornamental fountains. What I want to know is whether I have a right to decline to pay taxes on things that are defined as illegal — graft and corruption, for example.

Because I grew up in Texas, I understand the form of government we’re now under as a nation. I think I’d be a good representative litigant.

I’m interested in the accounting. I know that the difference between $17.4 million and $3.3 million is not all questionable. I’m just interested in what’s legal — that is, what I’m legally and morally responsible for. Is that not also a religious question, protected under the First Amendment?

The case would not be significant in terms of money. But it might set a precedent. If the organization won this case, other taxpayers might challenge other deals. Alert taxpayers might file so many suits that it might take the profit motive out of this form of government.

I don’t think we’ll get anywhere talking about the difference between democracy and kleptocracy. But if you cut certain sources of revenue by 20 percent, you might get a different kind of people in government.

You might get the hogs out of the trough.

 • Source: David A. Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater and Andrea Fuller, “Firm Building Trump’s Ballroom Got a Secret No-Bid Contract for a Nearby Job”; The New York Times, April 25, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/us/politics/lafayette-park-fountains-trump-contract.html?unlocked_article_code=1.eFA.08-k.Cc-LE9q8ffbX&smid=nytcore-ios-share

A hole in my knowledge

 When a tree falls in the forest, I suppose I should wonder whether it made a sound. But my mind doesn’t work that way. I wonder about the woodpecker hole.

The oak had fallen recently, and I hoped to find clues that might suggest what kind of bird or critter had been using the cavity.

If you made a list of the most common birds at our backyard feeders, you’d start with titmice, chickadees, nuthatches and wrens. All those birds nest in old woodpecker holes. I’m just now appreciating the role that woodpeckers play in providing housing opportunities in the Geogia Piedmont.

I looked for the hole until I found it. But I found nothing that would help identify the last tenant.

Much of what I see in the woods remains a mystery.

When truth dies first

 Palamedes, wisest of the Greeks, came to a bad end. He was executed for treason during the Trojan War. He’s famous for mourning truth, which he said died before he did.

During the first nine years of the Trojan War, the Greeks raided Troy’s allies, hoping to cut off supplies. Achilles and Ajax came back to camp with loot and captives. Odysseus returned from Thrace empty handed. Palamedes, suspecting a lack of initiative and possibly a lack of courage, let Odysseus hear about it.

Odysseus, at least in the early legends, was the kind of man who always got even.

Odysseus convinced Agamemnon, the supreme commander, that the gods had warned that the Greeks must move their camp for just one night. The army moved out, and that night Odysseus buried some gold at Palamedes’s campsite. Odysseus forced a Phrygian prisoner to forge a letter, allegedly from King Priam of Troy, saying that the money was the agreed price for betraying the Greeks. When the prisoner finished the letter, Odysseus killed him on the spot.

The next day, the army moved back to its original campsite. Somebody found the body and then found the letter.

When Palamedes protested his innocence, Odysseus helpfully suggested that the Greeks search his campsite.

The ancient Greeks constantly worked on their legends and myths. This one was older than Homer, who saw Odysseus in better light.

One of the traditional readings of the tale is that wise people don’t last long in places where truth isn’t valued. It’s a lesson Socrates might have appreciated.

But I like the aftermath, which suggests a problem with abandoning truth.

Palamedes’s father, Nauplius, heard of his son’s murder and sailed to Troy to demand justice. He appealed to Agamemnon, the army commander, who turned the old man away.

Nauplius could do nothing against the powerful block that had gained control of Greece. But on the way back home, he stopped at the palaces of almost all the murderers. He told the wife of each murderer that her husband was bringing a captured princess home as his new queen.

Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, was one of several women who took the story badly.

• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 299-300.

Norman Maclean's stories

 The New York Times tells us that A River Runs Through It is 50 years old. The Times points out that the percentage of American males that read fiction is declining. Norman Maclean’s novella was barely published 50 years ago. Could it be published today?

The book, as opposed to the novella, is A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. One of those stories, “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim,’” is about a lumberjack that the narrator hated. The narrator sounds like Maclean.

Jim was the best sawyer in the crew. The narrator worked as his partner, needing the money for graduate school. Jim was bigger and stronger. Manning a crosscut saw with him was an ordeal.

The story includes long passages on the importance of good boots and on the psychological games men play when they have to work with someone they hate. It also includes this:

 

It was getting hot and I was half-sick when I came back to camp at the end of the day. I would dig into my duffel back and get clean underwear and clean white socks and a bar of soap and go to the creek. Afterwards, I would sit on the bank until I was dry. Then I would feel better. It was a rule I had learned my first year working in the Forest Service — when exhausted and feeling sorry for yourself, at least change socks.

 

I’m one of those American males who read fewer works of fiction than I used to. The newer books that I tried and gave up on had conflicts that didn’t hold my attention.

I read Maclean’s story with wonder. If he were alive and writing today, I’d read more fiction.

• Sources: Monte Burke, “Could ‘A River Runs Through It’ Have Been a Hit Today?” The New York Times, April 20, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/books/could-a-river-runs-through-it-have-been-a-hit-today.html?unlocked_article_code=1.d1A.KnEH.XeCTgpqEXfHV&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories; New York: Pocket Books, 1992, p. 122.

The list of freedoms

 The most startling passage in Stefan Zweig’s book on Montaigne is a list of freedoms.

Montaigne was a seeker, and he sought to understand the things that stood in his way, slowed him down, kept him from being the person he wanted to be. “One might be tempted to draw up a list,” Zweig says, and he does. The list is in the form of “freedom from” or “to be free of.” It reads like a UN document.

I was not surprised to see freedom from pride at the top of the list, and freedom from presumption, ambition and greed nearby.

But I began to wonder when I got to freedom from fear and hope, belief and superstition. I can see what Zweig is saying: Montaigne doubted everything. But he also was a believer.

I was surprised when I got to freedom from family and familial surroundings. Montaigne liked his privacy and spent time alone in his tower. But he strikes me as a person who was part of a place. His homestead — and the many people in it — were part of him.

The most interesting item is freedom from custom. Custom — the countless small agreements we make when we live in a community — holds societies together. Montaigne was, in a way, a traditionalist. But Zweig is right. Montaigne was brutally frank about the costs. Here’s the opening of his essay “On the custom of wearing clothing”:

 

Whichever way I want to go I find myself obliged to break through some barrier of custom, so thoroughly has she blocked all our approaches.”

 

He argued that we must find the difference between natural laws and rules we contrive. He picks up the same in “On ancient customs”: 

 

I am prepared to forgive our own people for having no other model or rule of perfection but their own manners and behavior, for it is a common failing not only of the mob but of virtually all men to set their sights within the limitations of the customs into which we were born.

 

• Sources: Stefan Zweig, Montaigne, translated by Will Stone; London: Pushkin Press, 2015. The list of freedoms is on pp. 112-13.

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993. The quotations are on pp. 253 and 331.

What April is like

 In the garden, the tender plants came up.

Then came an explosion of insects — all kinds, but I noticed the caterpillars, which were dining on the plants.

Then came a hatch of paper wasps, reddish brown with gold trim, and the air was full of dive bombers, killing caterpillars and other bugs.

Finally, the flycatchers lined the fence rail, waiting for any wasp that dared to fly across the garden.

All these sights can be seen by an idler who leans on his shovel, goofing off when he should be digging.

Wars and stories of war

 Herodotus told the story of many men who fought at Platea. I’ve been thinking of three.

Aristodamus of Sparta somehow survived Thermopylae and was so shamed that he tried to make up for it with insane bravery at Platea. He was awarded no honors. His comrades knew he wanted to die.

Sophanes of Athens was an eccentric who, in one telling, carried an anchor around the battlefield. He dropped it whenever the enemy charged. It’s one way to eliminate even the thought of running away.

Herodotus also tells of a nameless Persian who shared a couch with Thersander of Orchomenus at a Theban-Persian banquet before the battle. The Persian drank too much because grief had brought him to tears. He could see, clearly, the folly of a stupid war instigated by an arrogant tyrant. He could see the folly but could do nothing about it.

I find myself thinking about the drunk Persian these days.

• Source: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 570 (Aristodamas), p. 571 (Sophanes), and pp. 546-7 (the unnamed Persian).

Politics and academic politics

 A little more on names in ancient Greece: By making changes to names, some people in higher education tried rebrand their rivals. Someone called the philosopher Democritus Lerocritus, meaning nonsense dealer. Antidorus, another philosopher, became Sannidorus, meaning gift-bearing sycophant.

People played with names and with descriptions. Imagine that you are trying to decide on a school for your kid. You hear that one school is run by wastrel who, after squandering his inheritance, took up soldiering and drug sales.

Are you thinking of Aristotle?

The civilization from which our civilization allegedly emerged was not all that civilized. 

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II, p. 536. Diogenes says that all these ugly sayings were attributed — falsely — to Epicurus.

A character who's missing something

 I’m partial to Robert Graves’s handling of the Greek myths. I was warned many years ago that his work was imaginative, rather than scholarly. But I continue to read him. He often finds what to my mind is the shortest, simplest explanation to a puzzle.

If you search for clues to the meaning of Achilles’s name, you’ll find all kinds of heroic possibilities. Graves points out that the -chilles part of the name is literally lips. The Greeks used the prefix a- to mean without or lacking. So lipless.

The world is full of false etymologies, and I’m not enough of a scholar to make any claim. I’d just say that the name fits. Homer depicts Achilles as a great man — but also a humorless one.

I think American literature is richer for having characters like Shoeless Joe Jackson around. I like characters who are lacking something. I’d read a story about a character named Lipless Joe, wouldn’t you?

• Source and note: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 288. The word for lip is χειλον. If I were a scholar, I’d put a circumflex over the iota.

Ineducable

 Stefan Zweig said that by the time Montaigne was 13, he was “ineducable.”

It’s not that Montaigne didn’t think or learn, but that he was resistant to guidance. Montaigne was a lifelong student, but he directed his own studies.

Timon said the same thing about Epicurus, “the least educated of mortals.”

Diogenes Laertius preserved Timon’s crack. The Greek suggests “unguided” as well as “uneducated.”

I am interested in this trait because I’m interested in the question of what it means to have a good education.

• Source: Stefan Zweig, Montaigne, translated by Will Stone; London: Pushkin Press, 2015, p. 76.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II, p. 530.

Blackwater Draw

 One of the great sites in world history is Blackwater Draw in New Mexico. In the 1930s, archeologists found large stone spear points among mammoth bones.

The consensus at the time was that wooly mammoths and other large mammals had become extinct beforehumans arrived in North America. It turned out that humans had arrived earlier than originally believed. The site at Blackwater Draw is 13,000 years old.

The historian Dan Flores’s telling of that story has me wondering whether we humans can learn to live in a place without destroying it.

Blackwater Draw is near Clovis, N.M. The specimens of tools found there became a type. Artifacts from that period — now known as Clovis Culture artifacts — have been found all over North America.

Human beings eventually exterminated the mammoths and other large animals, like giant sloths and horses. That required a new way of living — a way to survive on what was left. Humans on the plains hunted giant bison. That way of life, known as the Folsom Culture, ended when the giant bison were exterminated.

Human beings again adapted, learning to live on what was left. While the giant bison were gone, the bison that we know today were still plentiful. For 8,000 years humans on the Great Plains lived by hunting them. That way of life vanished in the late 1800s.

Since then, human beings have been limping along using techniques that aren’t remotely sustainable. The Dust Bowl was a calamity. We’re now drawing down aquifers and using fossil fuels for fertilizer. We’ve spending the kids’ inheritance.

I think part of the problem is in the way we look at places.

Most times, when the Wise Woman and I hike through the woods, I am just looking, trying to understand the place.

But on a recent trip to the South River, we passed a stand of hazel, and I thought about how it would be to weave the hazel wands into a wattle. Then I could daub a little clay from the riverbank on the wattle. I could lean that frame against a rock outcrop as a shelter, build a fire, catch fish from the shallows.

Some gear had shifted in my mind without me being aware of it. I went from trying to understand a place to trying to use it.

Only after the hike was over did I become aware of the shift in thinking.

I’ve heard neuroscientists talk about the crocodile brain — the part of our brain that functions without our being aware of it. Perhaps this way of thinking is a holdover from humanity’s earlier days. It’s a way of looking at places to figure out how to survive in them — and that’s not a bad impulse.

We’ve got to temper that impulse though. We can’t just think about our own survival.

Our survival depends on the natural world. We need to think about how it will survive too.

• Source: Dan Flores, “Thinking About Big History in One Western Place,” The American West, Episode 25, is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zJEYm0Yxng

Thanks, Christopher, for sending the link and starting this line of thought.

Addition and subtraction

 The ancient pine south of Stone Mountain had been thoroughly woodpeckered. The drill holes were less than an inch apart. The bark looked like a sieve.

I found a sculptured pine borer, Chalcophora virginiensis, which are as common as pines in Southern forests. The beetle, at first glance, looks like an inch-long sculpture, carved in wood with a chisel, with a lot of rough edges. If you see that, you’ve found a sculptured borer. They are sometimes called metallic borers. If you flip one over and look at the abdomen, you might be reminded of a .22 casing. They are also called flatheaded borers. The larval stage is a worm that looks like a concrete screw: pointed at the tail, getting wider at the top with a head that looks like a mortarboard.

The ancient pine I saw is dying and has been for years. The borers are recycling it. 

Each year, the forest produces tons of new growth — tree trunks, limbs, leaves. It also recycles tons of dead vegetation.

The growth is obvious, especially in spring. The addition is easier to see than the subtraction. The dying, death, decay and release of nutrients to sustain new life is harder to see. But that process goes on all the time.

A moment at the bush

 The canopy of the forest has filled in. I didn’t realize how dark the woods were until I saw the ray of sunlight, stronger than a searchlight, on an azalea, flame red. A burning bush, or so it seemed.

The famous story is in the biblical book of Exodus. The writer of the gospel of Mark says that Jesus referred to it by quoting Moses “at the bush.” No long explanation. No complex citation. Just three words. Everyone knew that story. A couple of thousand years later, it still comes to mind in a moment of astonishment.

Among the other wonders in the woods:

• At a 6-foot pool in one of the burns coming off the mountain, flies were hatching. They were flying off the surface by the hundreds, but I couldn’t identify them. A lot of the 150,000 species in order Diptera are aquatic in their larval stage.

• Spiderworts, in genus Tradescantia, are blooming. The ones we saw were purple.

• A yearling doe, unafraid, grazed within 25 feet of us.

• Sources: For the biblical stories, see Exodus 3 and Mark 12:26.

Everyone knew it was a bad war

 What happens when there’s a bad war — so bad everyone knows it?

Everyone knew the Trojan War was going to be bad. Who wanted to go fight to win Menelaus’s wayward wife back? Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon were rich, arrogant, inattentive, spoiled — difficult guys to like.

They had to go pressure their allies to show up. When they went to Ithaca, Odysseus feigned madness. They found him plowing with a mismatched team — an ox and a donkey — and sowing the furrows with salt instead of seed. Odysseus pretended not to recognize Agamemnon and Menelaus and almost avoided “the draft.” But their adviser Palamedes, known for his wisdom, snatched up Odysseus’s infant son and put the toddler in the way of the plow. The madness act fell apart.

Odysseus was part of the crew that had to hunt down Achilles. Achilles’s mother, Thetis, had put the young man in a dress and hidden him among the girls of the palace. When Odysseus sounded the alarm, one of the “girls” shed clothing and grabbed a spear and shield. Achilles was impressed into service.

Bad wars are not new. People who choose military careers know them and study them.

It seems to me that the first job of the republic’s top military minds is to tell the president and congress when a war is simply not worth fighting.

If you’ve been wondering what the professionals think, remember that the White House has already been purging the top brass.

By the time the Army’s top general, Randy George, was ousted earlier this month, more than a dozen military leaders had been ousted. You can draw your own conclusions about whether their replacements were chosen for their ability to say yes.

There’s nothing new about this either. The Nazis wouldn’t have been able to run over the Soviets in 1941 had not Stalin purged the Red Army of professional soldiers in favor of politically pliable ones.

After the swashbuckling was over

 When the Greeks went to war against Troy, the stories they had on their minds were of Jason and the Argonauts. But the story of the world’s 50 greatest heroes aboard a single ship is largely the story of a woman.

Medea loved Jason so much she killed her father and brother to be with him. Jason and Medea conquered the world together and ruled over Corinth for 10 years. But when Jason left her, she pretended to take his marriage to another princess with good grace so that she could send her a crown and robe. When the princess put on the new clothes, they burned her to death, along with her father and all the wedding guests. Jason escaped by leaping from an upper window. He learned that Medea had killed the kids.

They were vastly different people, Jason and Medea, and it’s interesting to see what the mythmakers made of them after all the drama was over.

Medea was such a woman that Zeus was infatuated with her. He had his way with many women, but Medea rebuffed every advance. She had been Jason’s queen in Corinth, and she became a queen again. She did not die. She became immortal and reigned over the Elysian Fields.

Jason ended up homeless and friendless. He’d beached the Argo at the isthmus, and later in life and alone, he rested in the shade of the hulk and planned to hang himself from the prow. The hulk shifted and killed him.

• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 256-7.

Can you measure wisdom?

 What is wisdom? Can it be taught? Is it something within a person that can be improved? Can I make myself wiser? 

When it comes to measuring wisdom, I’m a skeptic. But I find the attempts fascinating.

Emily Laber-Warren’s article at the University of Chicago’s Center for Practical Wisdom is the best survey I’ve seen.

I overindulged. I followed all the links. I marveled that psychologists and sociologists are devising experiments to tackle questions that interested the ancient Greek thinkers who were called philosophers, lovers of wisdom.

I was both thrilled and alarmed that some of the new research is on sites for the medical profession. (My sense of what counts as wellbeing has been challenged.)

The attempts to define and measure wisdom interest me. But it seems to me that the consensus among the ancient philosophers was that the evidence of wisdom is not so much provable as obvious: it’s in a person’s life.

Fortune does wildly different things to people. As the Greek philosophers put it, some people were born kings. Some were born slaves. Some would suffer horrible hardship and die young. Some would live long in luxury. Fortune’s gifts are neither equal nor fair.

The question is whether, given the whims of fortune, you can carve out a good life. A wise person can. 

Wisdom was a kind of definition — it’s what you called a person who lived a certain kind of life. If a life had a certain character, or approached it, you called the person who lived it wise.

Wisdom, as the old philosophers saw it, was a conceptual problem, rather than a scientific one. It also was an individual problem. What would count as a wise solution in my case might not in yours.

I’m not sure what Socrates would say about all this research. But I think he’d be interested.

• Source: Emily Laber-Warren, “What is wisdom, and can it be taught?”; Knowable Magazine, March 11, 2026. It’s here:
https://wisdomcenter.uchicago.edu/news/wisdom-news/what-wisdom-and-can-it-be-taught

Puddling

 Eastern Tiger Swallowtails were swarming in the mudflats along the Yellow River. The behavior is called “puddling.”

It’s a spectacular sight. These are big yellow butterflies, about the size of the palm of your hand, and they congregate densely, almost like bees in a hive.

If you ask me, the concept of puddling is a work in progress. Biologists say that the butterflies are lapping up salts, minerals and acids that aren’t available in nectar. But that doesn’t explain the swarming behavior — why a hundred butterflies would try to cram into a space about the size of a washtub when the mudflats along the river go on for miles. I would love to know what causes one spot to be so alluring. Carrion? A quirk of geology, like an eroded salt lens? Or is this mostly social, the equivalent of a cocktail party?

Papilio glaucus is not the only species that puddles. All the butterflies I saw were Tiger Swallowtails and were yellow. The females have two forms: one mostly yellow, like the males, and one mostly black.

The Yellow River was as green as rivers get. It was a beautiful day.

A big river cooter, Pseudemys concinna, was basking on a log in the river. I used to see these turtles on the Neches River when I was a boy. This one was a foot long, nose to the end of the shell.

Azaleas were blooming, and so were mountain laurels. Some of the mountain laurels were just putting out buds and some were in full flower. The woods were noisy with songbirds.

Divided loyalty

 I just read a good book about the Irish revolution and civil war. It made me think about the phrase “divided loyalty.”

Most of the book involves events that occurred between 1916 and 1923. The typescript, written by a friend and former colleague, focuses on what was in the newspapers.

We tend to forget that most of the Irish people were in America, rather than in Ireland. A lot of the newspapers that catered to Irish readers were published in the United States.

Governments in London and Washington suppressed newspapers that didn’t follow the official line. The governments viewed public interest in the unrest in Ireland — and what the British were doing about it — as somehow sinister.

But how could you not be interested in Ireland if you came from that country — or your parents did? How could you not care what happened to family members and old neighbors?

Governments tend to cast divided loyalty as a bad thing, particularly in times of war. Through the years, many people have been persecuted. The concentration camps for people of Japanese descent during World War II is just one example.

I imagine it’s hard being an American today if you have loved ones anywhere in the Middle East. I imagine that if you care about people in Iran or Israel, Lebanon or Gaza, you might be viewed with suspicion that you’re not onboard with America First.

But the idea that divided loyalty is always sinister is a bad idea. Being divided in our loyalties is natural. It’s human nature.

Consider a marriage or partnership. Bringing two families together — two sets of interests — can lead to war or it can lead to alliance. When we expand our horizons, we sometimes discover something wonderful. That’s probably the best feature of this country: the fact that we come from so many places and that we brought with us so many competing loyalties with respect to customs, religion and food.

But even when things don’t work out, there is nothing sinister in thinking about the interests of other people. That’s just a symptom of compassion and empathy. It’s not a problem, just a sign that we’re human.

War and the prerequisites

 Before Japan and the United States began fighting in 1941, Americans thought Japanese technology was so primitive that the Japanese simply couldn’t compete. In reality, the Japanese Zero was so advanced that few American fighter planes survived.

The ignorance was mutual. The doctrine among Japanese militarists was that Americans were materialists — so used to luxuries, so soft, they couldn’t sustain a fight for six months.

Almost all the pre-war thinking proved wrong. Military strategy starts with sociology and anthropology, and the ignorance that led to that war would border on the unbelievable — except that the ignorance that  led to the current war is equally spectacular.

It’s important to remember that not everyone in Tokyo and Washington in the 1930s was stupid or willfully ignorant. But the voices of people who understood other cultures were drowned out by the voices of the loud and willfully ignorant.

I wish more Americans read history.

Rondald Spector wrote the standard one-volume history of the Pacific War. His obituary was in The New York Times the other day.

• Source: Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun; New York: Free Press, 1984.

Falsehoods and lacks

 The Mexican newspapers say that Óscar Melchor Peredo y García, the muralista, died in Xalapa at 99. He painted his first mural in the 1940s and was said to be the last of a school that included Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquieros and José Clemente Orozco.

At La Antigua in Veracruz, he got a commission, and someone suggested he focus on the horses of Hernán Cortés, the conquistador. Cortés brought 16 to New Spain. The chronicles include the names of all 16.

Melchor Peredo noted that the chronicles don’t mention the slaves who arrived with the conquistadores. Human beings abducted from Africa and the Indies weren’t named or described in the chronicles that were supposed to aid the collective memory.

Melchor Peredo’s account of his mural uses the word “conscience” where I would have expected “consciousness,” a reminder that you can’t have a conscience about things that you’re not aware of:

 

Because I have the conscience that there are many lies, and that those things that are taught and those that are not taught, have falsehoods and lacks, the textbooks, etcetera. Even university people have a lot of misinformation.

 

• Source: Charles Da Silva Rodrigues and Paula Alexandra Carvalho De Figueíredo, “A new breed open to the future: Melchor Peredo's mural in La Antigua”; Encartes, Vol. 8, No. 16, 2025. It’s here:

https://encartes.mx/en/silva-carvalho-melchor-peredo/

Nature on schedule

 The azaleas you see in Georgia’s gardens are mostly “true” rhododendrons, meaning that each flower has at least 10 stamens. The azaleas we saw blooming in the forest at Arabia Mountain are in subgenus Pentanthera. Each flower has five stamens. Note that the “true” are contrasted with the native. I sometimes think that’s a recurring theme in our culture.

We went to Arabia Mountain looking for the blooms that follow the calendar. The elf-orpine that seems to be growing out of the granite turns red in winter and then puts out its little white flowers — usually in early April. Diamorpha smallii was on schedule.

Woolly ragwort, Packera dubia, also appeared on schedule. It’s a dusty green plant with yellow flowers. I tend to overlook them until one day in April when there are acres of yellow flowers.

The first hummingbird arrived at the feeder April 6 — a female ruby-throat, I think. That seemed late, and I was already worrying about the collapse of the population when I checked my notebook. I saw that the only thing that had suffered a catastrophic collapse was my memory. Some of us couldn’t get by without notebooks.

A scrap of myth

 I admire the ideal, often associated with Aristotle, of the balanced life. But that idea makes sense only if you have an idea of an unbalanced life — how life might be lived with passion, abandon, obsession.

Aesacus was a minor character — almost a footnote — in the Greek myths. He learned to interpret dreams, avoided the city of Ilium for the countryside, and fell in love with Asterope, daughter of the river Cebren. When she died, Aesacus leapt from a cliff into the sea. Surviving, he staggered out of the water, crawled up the cliff and leapt again. And again.

The gods took counsel and turned him into a diving bird. The gods understood grief and obsession. They understood how unlikely it was that Aesacus would stop his obsessive behavior if he were given a good counseling session. 

So they found a solution that would allow him to continue his behavior with a little more decency and dignity. 

To me, some of the best myths are the shortest, mere scraps. This one suggests what work can be like for people who practice an art or craft. They turn a necessary activity into a calling or profession. They talk about art and professionalism, rather than about making a living or earning a wage.

To me, some of the best myths are the shortest — mere scraps.

• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, p. 263.

Stop, children, what's that sound?

 The robin was tugging at an earthworm. How did the bird find it? I’ve been in the garden, and the worms have been underground — out of sight. How did this robin know this worm was there?

It’s a simple question, and Canadian scientists devised a simple experiment to test the notion that robins can hear the worms as they burrow underground.

The scientists placed trays of soil in an aviary with captive robins. Some trays contained worms, and some didn’t. The robins could find worms beneath the soil. Their success rates were above those that could be attributed to chance. When the scientists added white noise to make it harder for birds to detect feint noises, the robins still caught worms, but they struggled. The success rates dropped.

I love simple scientific experiments that shed light on common natural wonders.

This spring, countless children will see robins wrestling earthworms from the soil. I wish adults would tell them stories about the thoughtful people who help us understand the world a little better.

• Source: Robert Montgomerie & Patrick J. Weatherhead, “How robins find worms”; Animal Behavior, 1997, 54, 143-151. It’s here:

https://web2.uwindsor.ca/courses/biology/dmennill/360/article.pdf

Time and reactance

 State senators overwhelmingly voted to put Georgia on Atlantic Standard Time along with Nova Scotia.

The idea, which failed, was peculiar. Although Georgia is on the East Coast, it’s further west than you might think. The meridian that passes through Georgia also passes through Michigan.

Georgia is in the Eastern Time Zone, an hour ahead of Alabama. If Georgia were in the Atlantic Time Zone, Georgians would have a two-hour time change when we crossed the state line.

Why would the Senate approve such a bill?

Because Daylight Savings Time is unpopular. Most Georgians don’t really care what time it is. They just don’t want to be forced to spring forward an hour in spring and fall back an hour in fall.

The proposed change in time zones would have effectively put Georgia on Daylight Savings Time permanently, getting around a federal law that prohibits states from doing just that.

Georgia faces a lot of problems. The annoyance at having to change the clocks twice a year strikes me as among the least substantive. But Georgians of all kinds dislike Daylight Savings Time. In a deeply divided state, Democrats and Republicans agree it stinks.

It’s a case of J.W. Brehm’s Theory of Psychological Reactance. If an individual’s freedoms are threatened, the individual will try to regain them. Most people see the time change as an annoyance imposed on them for no compelling reason. They react more strongly than you’d imagine.

Senators, understanding public opinion, passed the bill and crowed about it. The bill went to the House, which prudently let it die quietly when the legislature adjourned Friday.

What is art?

 When I was young, I wanted to be a short-story writer. It seemed to me that writing could be an art. But the whole idea of art was fuzzy to me. I decided that if I were going to pursue a career in the literary arts, I’d better find out what art was.

I went to the philosophy department of the state university seeking help.

A philosopher from Ireland, James Treanor, was teaching in Texas then. He suggested that I read Tolstoy’s essay “What Is Art?” He said he’d be curious what I could make of it.

I can barely remember that version of myself, and I’m not sure that I said anything to professor Treanor that made sense.

It’s been 53 years since we had that conversation. If I could have it again, I think I’d say that the idea of art is this: If there is an art to an activity, it can be practiced. It’s something that can done well — or not.

Art is not a thing — a painting or a sculpture or play. That is a work of art. The art is in the approach to that creative activity. If there is an art in this activity, it can be practiced, i.e. improved. It can be done well or badly.

We’ve gotten into the business of making judgments about what’s better or worse, good and bad. We can argue about that. We can try to find consensus.

That’s the best I can do after all those years. No revelations — just a first step.

But I think that thinking of art as an approach or a perspective, rather than a thing, is a step forward. Philosophical problems are often like that: We confound ourselves when we mistake perspectives for things.

Why I read stories

  People read stories for different reasons. I read them like scripture. “Scripture” is what people in the Western world might say. People in the East might call them “teaching stories.”

One of my favorite stories from Zen tradition is about two monks who go on a trip at the behest of their monastery. They must keep a vow of silence during the day. They must avoid any impropriety.

The monks travel and eventually reach an enormous mud puddle. As they are reconciling themselves to wading through the muck, they notice a beautiful girl in a beautiful dress. She also is looking at the puddle with dismay.

The older monk, without speaking, picks the girl up and carries her across the muck and puts her safely on the other side. The monks continue on their way.

At night, when they are permitted to speak, the younger monk erupts. He chastises the older monk for not only getting close to a woman but touching her. His behavior brought shame on himself and also on the monastery. The young monk went on at length and finally wore himself out.

When the rant finally stopped, the older monk said: “Are you still carrying that girl? I put her down hours ago.”

Robert Penn Warren’s “Blackberry Winter” is a girl-in-a-pretty-dress story. It’s about something that happens to a boy, and the boy carries around the memory for decades.

In today’s culture, such events are traumatic. Warren’s story reminds us that we make memories from stuff.

It also reminds us that the most memorable things sometimes happen to us while we are doing something else.

I read stories and sometimes get carried away. I’m not looking for moral instruction. I’m reading for some insight into human nature. Before we make claims about how humans should behave, we ought to learn as much as we can what we’re capable of.

• Note: Robert Penn Warren’s “Blackberry Winter” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 363-84.

Visiting rituals

 My friend Christopher called my attention to the importance of small talk in rural life.

East Texas is known for its forests. The place has a lot of sawyers, and one of Christopher’s ancestors sharpened saws. There’s an art to it, and people who make their living in the woods value it.

Many sawyers are migrant workers. They follow the jobs, going wherever the timber companies are cutting.

The fellow who is about to spend hours sharpening a saw doesn’t know the sawyer, and the sawyer doesn’t know the sharpener. And so, before a deal was struck, there was some conversation. It might seem to be about the weather or baseball or the pecan crop. But all the while, each men was trying to get a sense of the character of the other fellow. No one likes to be cheated.

It’s a kind of visiting ritual, and there’s an art to it.

There are other kinds of visiting rituals. When my brother and I were boys, we would be taken visit distant kin. The visits had fixed elements, almost like elements of the liturgy in high church services.

If people were remarking on how the kids had grown, you were at the beginning of the ritual. If your mother was commenting on the lovely zinnias and a great aunt was giving her a couple of seedlings potted in a tin can, it was almost time to go.

• Note: Peter Taylor’s story “What You Hear From ‘Em?” has a specimen of a visiting ritual. It’s in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 327-42.

Stone Mountain, early April

 Someone threw a switch, and all the azaleas in Georgia bloomed.

The Piedmont is full of gardeners and gardens. I love wild places, but I also like gardens. The neighborhood looks like a party with so much color. In addition to the azaleas, you see Japanese kerria, tulips and daffodils. A Japanese cherry is blooming down the road.

I’ve been helping our handyman build a couple of sheds. Our garden is full of songbirds, butterflies, bees and wasps.

The Wise Woman, cleaning out the greenhouse, found an old coffee can. A wren had filled it with leaves, dog fur and paper scraps. We saw four eggs.

Zweig: ‘Montaigne’

 Ryan Holliday, owner of The Painted Porch bookstore in Texas, said he liked Stefán Zweig’s Montaigne so much he bought 1,000 copies. I got one of them.

Holliday is selling Montaigne as a book for our times. I think he’s right.

Montaigne’s Essays are not about the importance of keeping the lights on in troubled times. His essays are an example of that. Montaigne lived in times that were as chaotic, murderous and fanatical as our own. People were killing each other in the wars of religion. Neighbor turned on neighbor.

Zweig was writing during the rise of fascism and the horrors of World War II. He found Montaigne’s question compelling: What does an individual do when the whole world seems to be going mad?

Sometimes, a writer writes a sentence that captures the book. I think Zweig did that, and this is it:

 

He who thinks freely for himself, honors all freedom on earth.

 

The person who keeps his head and continues to use it has a role in troubled times. He or she doesn’t need to publish or broadcast. In troubled times, we don’t need influencers. An example will do.

• Source: Stefán Zweig, Montaigne; London: Pushkin Press, 2015, p. 116.