When the way is not clear

 Ludwig Wittgenstein, who watched Europe descend into insanity before World War II, wrote this: 

When you can’t unravel a tangle, the most sensible thing is for you to recognize this; and the most honorable thing, to admit it. …

What you ought to do to remedy the evil is not clear. What you must not do is clear in particular cases.

 

My ellipsis marks the spot of a note in parentheses that makes it clear he was talking about antisemitism. But I think his observation is generally true of all tangles in the social fabric, including antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and the kind of greed that allows us to exploit neighbors and destroy the natural world while pretending our enterprise is a virtue.

The remedy for all these tangles is not clear, at least not to me. But I think Wittgenstein was right: On a case-by-case basis in our dealings with people, it’s usually clear what not to do.

When doctors are trained, they learn the first rule is to do no harm.

It’s not a bad rule for citizens.

• Source: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value; The University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 74.

A prophet is not without honor ...

 Since I live in Georgia, people ask about U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff and whether he’ll run for president in 2028.

Since I’m a newspaper reader, I can tell you that half the voters in Georgia oppose the idea. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked likely voters which politicians they would like to see run for president and which are opposed to the idea. Here are the percentages, with support given first:

Ossoff: 44-50.

U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock: 36-54.

Gov. Brian Kemp: 47-47.

Former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: 11-77.

Kemp, a Republican, is widely viewed as a popular governor. I think that’s accurate. A lot of Democrats have supported his brand of conservativism, which has been criticized by the current occupant of the White House. Ossoff has some of that crossover appeal. Polls suggest 13 percent of people who say they are conservative support him.

But we’re getting into the fine print. What strikes me about the numbers: Georgians don’t see any of their elected leaders going on to allegedly greater things.

• Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has some interesting newsletters, including Politically Georgia. If I were a newspaper editor, I’d subscribe for a month or two just to study the newsletters. Details are at ajc.com.

Campaigning in Georgia

 The political stars have been coming to Georgia. I’m less interested in the speeches, the rallies and the star power than I should be.

In my working days, I liked stories that were grounded in factual details. I think the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has done some interesting work comparing early voting this year with early voting in the last midterms. The newspaper reported these numbers:

• Percent increase in Black voters: 33.

• Percent increase in voters under 30: 54.

• Percent increase in Black voters under 30: 80.

Voter turnout in the South is so dismal it’s fair to say that elections depend on who shows up.

The current occupant of the White House is unpopular in Georgia. He is especially unpopular with Black voters and young voters.

It’s probably me, but I think those numbers are more interesting than the coverage of the speeches and rallies.

Cheating in Texas

 The New York Times published a story saying that Texas is the most gerrymandered state.

Sadly, that’s old news to me.

I was working for one of the smallest daily newspapers in Texas when the Legislature redrew the electoral maps after the 1980 elections. The process, called “redistricting,” was a dirty game.

Back then, the idea was not to cheat the opposing party. The Democrats were in charge, and there were so few Republicans nobody thought it was worth the trouble to cheat them.

Instead, the goal was to dilute the voting strength of minorities.

Suppose you lived in a county in which 50 percent of the residents were minorities. In our imaginary county, 25 percent of the voters were Black, 25 percent were Hispanic and 50 percent were Anglo, as they said back in the day.

Each county in Texas typically has four county commissioners, each representing a district. Texas was segregated, meaning that you don’t need demographics experts to find the “communities of interest.” If you followed the law and kept communities of interest intact, you’d expect to draw four districts: one representing the Black community, one representing the Hispanic community, and two representing the majority group.

That was what the law required. In fact, it was remarkable how few minorities held office.

How was it possible to have so many minorities in East Texas and so few commissioners?

The secret was that the boundaries were drawn so that Blacks and Hispanics never made up a majority in any single district. By fiddling the lines, it was possible to create districts that “diluted the minority vote.” The term was a euphemism. I’d call it cheating.

Of course, it was more complicated than that. Books have been written about the art of dirty dealing.

But the basic idea was simple, and so I wrote about the process often, hoping that an informed public would insist on basic fairness.

When I began to write about gerrymandered districts, a chorus of county officials sang about fake news.

When I interviewed civil rights organizations that were interested in challenging the gerrymandered districts in court, the chorus of county officials sang louder. Fake news!

When I interviewed legal experts who predicted that the county would spend a fortune on lawyers and still lose, the chorus of county officials screamed. Fake news!

Governments in my county — the county, cities and school districts — lost in court. Taxpayers spent a lot of money that could have been better used on roads and schools.

Of course, the world has changed since then. We’ve elected a president who appoints judges who look for ways to skirt, rather than uphold, laws designed to ensure fairness. We’ve elected state judges who dilute the rights of those the majority doesn’t like. In short, we have done many things that undermine the basic ideas of fairness, the vital ingredient in any concept of justice.

All that is bound to erode the foundations of any democratic society.

We need to stop.

• Source: Eve Washington, Nate Cohn and Rumsey Taylor, “An Extremely Detailed Ranking of the Most Gerrymandered States in America”; The New York Times, Oct. 26, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/10/26/upshot/gerrymandering-ranking.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Alders

 We were on a new trail. I was looking at the plants covering the forest floor and was surprised to see thickets of alders, Alnus serrulate.

I was expecting to see muscadine vines, Vitus rotundifolia. Muscadines cover much of the forest floor in the Georgia Piedmont. Alders can grow to 15 feet, but the ones we saw were knee-high shrubs.

The canopy was the usual mix of pine and hardwood. I wondered why there were so many alders and so few muscadines.

The textbook says alder is a marker for wetlands. The trail we were on ran near a lake but followed a hill above the water table. It never got boggy.

I’m still wondering, and it occurred to me that’s the usual disposition of a person who’s interested in natural history. You always seem to have something in mind that’s provisional — something in mind where the explanations kind of fits, but not really.

Emotional granularity and conceptual confusion

 A footnote or two on Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, and I’ll move on.

Professor Barrett explains “emotional granularity,” a term used by psychologists, with an analogy. An artist or designer, looking at something blue, might speak of azure, cobalt and ultramarine. She says her husband would call all those colors “blue.” (I’m further down on the spectrum. I’m the husband who, instructed to put on a blue tie, has to ask whether the tie he has in hand is the blue or the gray one.)

The ability to handle concepts of emotion — such as “anger” and “fear” — varies.

Psychologists speak of a science of alexithymia. The Greek roots suggest a lack of words for emotion. It’s considered a “subclinical construct,” a trait that is measurable but not in itself a disorder. Ten percent of the population might have this trait.

Some people, including me, have problems distinguishing colors. I’ve no doubt that some people have problems distinguishing emotions.

But it seems to me that countless people, including experts, also have problems with the concepts.

Through most of the history of Western thought, we’ve largely followed Plato in thinking that there must be some essential, definitive quality for any concept. When Wittgenstein examined the notion, he found no essences. He found family resemblances among members of a category, rather than a single essence. (If you are skeptical, try to find the essential feature in the concept of “game.” Does it account for football, polo, poker, solitaire, chess, Monopoly?)

I’d say that the concept of “emotion” is at least as slippery. I think the variation in experiences we lump together under “anger” is enough to confuse anyone. Don’t get me started on “grief.”

• Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Theory of constructed emotion

 Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University, contends that the model of the brain as a stimulus-response machine is a myth. Instead, she thinks of the brain as a predictions market, making guesses about everything the body senses.

If you’re walking in the woods and hear rustling in the leaves and don’t know what’s making the noise, your brain supplies possibilities. Is that a rattlesnake? Your brain is giving odds.

The brain self-corrects. If the feared rattler turns out to be a chipmunk, your brain will give you different odds next time.

Barrett says the brain is predicting, rather than reacting, because life comes at us too quickly to make calculations. Something as simple as a game of catch requires predictions. It takes too long to see a ball coming and calculate where it’s going to be when it arrives in front of you. Your brain predicts where the ball will be so you can get the glove up in time. When you’re a kid just learning to play, there are more misses than catches. Gradually, the predictions get better.

The predictions have physical consequences. Before you’re aware of the rattlesnake, your brain has prompted the release of chemicals to give you an extra burst of energy to escape.

Barrett says each of these countless predictions is accompanied by some feeling — fear in the case of a rattlesnake, relief in the case of a chipmunk. From such feelings we build emotions.

I’m still reading, still thinking about this account, which Barrett calls the constructed theory of emotion. But Professor Barrett is a serious thinker. If you are interested in how minds work, you’d probably be interested in her work.

• Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Enlightenment in a stand of alders

 This is a mystery to me: I can walk past something a million times without noticing it. Then, when I am looking for something else, I see it, as if for the first time.

We were out looking at the autumn leaves. The only reds in the canopy were the native sourwoods, Oxydendrum arboreum. While looking, I noticed some odd colors in a stand of alders in the wetlands along Stephenson Creek.

I’m not good with colors and couldn’t tell if I was seeing dark purple or black. I had to stop to look closely.

What I was seeing was leaf spot disease, typically caused by fungi. I’ve seen countless cases of it. My grandfather used to spray his fruit trees, and I’ve seen many blighted trees of many species in the forest.

I knew that alders, Alnus serrulate, grow in thickets and prefer wet soil. I knew, generally, that many fungi like wet environments.

What I hadn’t known was that fungi in genus Septoria could spread through a stand of alders like flu through a human population. I hadn’t known that the disease could spread so widely that it could be mistaken by an admittedly half-awake observer for a change of the seasons.

A book for young thinkers

 Leo Tolstoy thought his Calendar of Wisdom was his most important book.

The Calendar seems to me the kind of book that belongs in the hands of young students. Tolstoy collected sayings from many traditions. As he thought about them, he wrote about 800 notes of his own. He arranged all these notes by date.

One of the items for Oct. 23 is from Marcus Aurelius:

 

The purpose of your life is not to do as the majority does, but to live according to the inner law which you understand in yourself. Do not act against your conscience or against truth. Live like this, and you will fulfill the task of your life.

 

You’ll like some items more than others. But I would put the book in the hands of young readers as an example of the kind of thing they could do for themselves. I’d encourage young folks to collect specimens of the world’s wisdom that appeal to them and see if they can improve on the collection.

Tolstoy’s Calendar was popular in Russia until the Soviet Revolution. The autocrats banned it.

Some libraries in public schools in Texas have copies, a fact that has been discovered by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. He’s devised ways to punish public schools that keep library books that he and his party don’t like.

Like the Soviets, Patrick and his party have a long list of books they want to purge. Like the Soviets’ list, Patrick’s includes Tolstoy’s Calendar.

• Sources and notes: Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, translated by Peter Kekirin; New York: Scribner, 1997.

Alejandro Serrano, “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick proposes penalties for schools that keep ‘vulgar’ books on library shelves”; The Texas Tribune, Aug. 19, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/19/texas-dan-patrick-obscene-books-school-libraries-penalties/

For an earlier note, see “Tolstoy’s ‘Calendar,’” June 7, 2926. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/06/tolstoys-calendar.html

A short fiction, with emotion

 A drill instructor was dressing down recruits in bootcamp. He woke the barracks up at 2 a.m. screaming. He stepped in front of each sleep-stunned teenager, nose to nose, and screamed.

Recruit A didn’t flinch. Before signing up, he’d taken a course in philosophy. As the drill instructor screamed, the recruit told himself he ought not to worry about the opinions of others.

Recruit B didn’t flinch either. He was a backwoods fellow whose family didn’t count an argument a feud until it had gone on for four generations. He quietly endured the berating but promised himself that if he were ever in the field with the drill instructor, he’d drop a grenade in his tent.

Recruit C swore at the drill instructor. This was exactly the type of undisciplined behavior that the drill instructor and the military were trying to ferret out. The recruit was assigned to Punishment Platoon.

Recruit D burst into tears. This, too, was one of those undisciplined behaviors that the military wanted to root out.

In my day, the military was not much interested in recruits, but it was interested in how individuals managed anger and fear.

What kind of grades would you give these recruits? All were subjected to the same stimuli. But what would you say of the responses?

I’d say two got angry — but in different ways. One lost his temper and got into a dustup. The other, in a cold fury, planned revenge. Of the others, one was afraid, perhaps, and one didn’t feel much at all, if the inquiry is limited to anger and fear.

This is my problem with talk of emotions. Each of the recruits in this story had some kind of feeling that was distinct from the others. But since we are social creatures and communicate with language, we must fit these feelings into categories.

I’m not sure it’s helpful to say that the fellow who lost his temper and the fellow who thought of murder were both “angry.” One was cool, and the other was ready to fight. Their vital signs were different. Would you expect to find neural activity in the same parts of their brains for such dissimilar thought processes, just because we use the word “anger” in both cases?

One of the basic errors in logic is called a categorical error. It seems to me that we’re prone to making such mistakes when we talk of emotions.

A catastrophe of everyday life

 A sweetgum fell across the fence in the woodlot — the one section, near the ravine, that’s made of hog wire. The falling tree would have taken the fence to the ground, but the trunk got stuck in the fork of a living tree, which a fence builder had used as a fencepost.

The crown of a sweetgum makes a remarkable mess. The limbs shatter easily.

But I’ve been filling the ravine with brush. For those seeking to restore eroded land, a fallen sweetgum is a gift.

I put on coveralls, laced up my boots, got an insulated bottle of coffee and spent the morning with a chainsaw. In addition to the erosion control, I have firewood.

A good friend said this catastrophe of everyday life invigorated me, and I suppose it did. I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Before I was old enough to understand the idea of a generational divide, I was raised among men divided by generation. My grandfathers worked with horses, mules and tractors, but mainly with their hands. Their sons went to school and learned to work with their heads.

It was presented to me just like that: head or hands. But I never got the either-or.

A 90-minute read

 One more thing about Theodore Zeldin’s little book Conversations that I admire: its form. I wish I could interest other writers in it.

The book is about a topic I’m interested in, and it’s brief — about 15,000 words.

I can tell you how long it took me to read it: 90 minutes. I’m pretty sure of that because that’s how long it took Zeldin to read it aloud on the radio.

Zeldin’s book is six chapters long. Each was a 15-minute talk on the BBC.

Readers typically cover 150 to 160 words a minute.

Ballpark: 2,500 words per talk or chapter, 15,000 for all six.

In print, the book has about 250 words per page, meaning each chapter runs about 10 pages — about 60 pages of text. The book has 36 pages of pictures by the author, each of which is tied to a question about conversations. Throw in the list of questions and the usual introductory material, and you have a book of 103 pages.

I have some books of more than 500 pages on my shelves and wouldn’t part with them. But I wish writers and readers would come to an agreement that 60 pages of text is a good length for an introduction to a topic.

• Source: Theodore Zeldin, Conversation; London: The Harvill Press, 1998.

What conversation is like

 I like Theodore Zeldin’s little book Conversation, but I want a better metaphor.

To me, a conversation is like browsing at the public library.

Our public library is small. I thought I’d picked over the collection. But on a recent trip, I found myself interested in several books. Until I started browsing, I wasn’t aware that the topics would interest me.

I’ve long been interested in how we form emotions, even trivial ones. How is it that I am delighted by Mozart and am irritated by Wagner? And since the music of these composers works on me every time, how is it possible that someone can change my emotions, even slightly, just by turning on the radio?

After reading Hume in college, I searched the stacks of the library, trying to get a clearer idea of how ideas and emotions are formed. I failed.

For decades, I’ve been aware that’s a topic I just don’t understand. When I’m reminded of it, I take another run at it, seek new ideas and new information. So I was delighted to see Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions are Made at the library.

I think this little episode suggests how conversations work. I have some friends who have well stocked minds.

When I talk with them, I always come away with something valuable. That is, I find or discover or am given something wonderful. Usually, I wasn’t even aware I was looking for it.

Maybe that’s why we read blogs too. It’s another way of browsing the stacks, looking for ideas we’re not fully aware we need.

• Source: Theodore Zeldin, Conversation; London: The Harvill Press, 1998.

Zeldin: 'Conversation'

 Theodore Zeldin says that we can talk about the weather. When we exchange information, that’s a talk. But when we have a conversation, we open ourselves to changing the way we see things.

Zeldin, a historian, says this has happened several times in humanity’s history. One example is the way we have talked about women. The conversations we’ve had on that subject have changed the way we see women and have changed the “we” of that conversation, including women in the concept of humanity in ways that were once unthinkable.

Zeldin says the history of that conversation is instructive. Originally, women were something to be won. A show of power was preferable, but brute force would do. Then women were something to be wooed, courted, won over.

This way of looking at women eventually led to the notion of romantic love — that what happened between men and women was inexplicable, beyond the control of individuals. The feelings couldn’t be understood, much less expressed.

That idea has not worn well, and Zeldin says new conversations are needed to find new ways of seeing relationships between people.

If we can see the possibility of something better, we can act on it. And Zeldin sees conversations as a useful response when we found ourselves stuck. If we’re stuck, we need to broaden our conversation, inviting people who might offer views we haven’t considered before.

I read Zeldin’s brief book because I treasure conversations. I like sitting across the table from someone who might change the way I see things. The idea that a friend might say something that changes the way I think — that changes me — is one of the thrills that doesn’t fade with age.

I still talk to the neighbors about the weather and the garden. But conversations seem especially valuable now. Even as an old man, I begin a conversation with hope.

• Source: Theodore Zeldin, Conversation; London: The Harvill Press, 1998.

An immigrant family's tale

 Imagine this tale of an immigrant family. The teller said his grandfather came to America, looking for better opportunities.

The teller was educated in American schools and raised on American books, music, drama and ideas. It didn’t dawn on him that he wasn’t an American — that in some way he was a foreigner.

But the teller’s grandfather was from Germany. During World War I, people of German descent were targeted. The government, although it represented a democracy, used the tools of power, including the Justice Department, to make life miserable for many.

The teller of this tale was H.L. Mencken. He said the experience cleared his head about democracy, at least the kind practiced in this country. It made him realize he was an outsider — in some way a foreigner.

He also said that he thought his grandfather, the hopeful immigrant, had made a mistake.

You can read the story in Andrew Holter’s Mencken Day lecture, which was published in the Boston Review.

Mencken wrote some wonderful things and some hideous things. Holter argues that the part of Mencken we ought to hold on to is his capacity for “social outrage.” (The phrase is from Murry Kempton, another newspaper guy for Baltimore.)

I like the word social, where we might expect political. As outrageous as our politics can be, it’s our social attitudes that get us into trouble — the kind of trouble that no political system can salvage or redeem.

The phrase “Make America Great Again” is code that all the old social attitudes that created such horrific problems are really OK, even virtuous. That we shouldn’t feel guilty about exploiting others to satisfy our greed. That we shouldn’t hesitate to trample the civil rights of people we don’t like.

This social movement is an argument that we should, like the proverbial dog, return to our vomit.

The proper response is to decline.

• Source: Andrew Halter, “Mencken Agonistes”; Boston Review, Oct. 6, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/mencken-agonistes/

Names, ages, identity

 Baisaō spent almost 40 years as Gekkai Genshō. The Buddhist names were given to him when he became a monk at 11.

He was known by Gekkai, or Moon Ocean, to his fellow monks. Genshō was his true name, given to him by his teacher. It wasn’t used routinely.

When Gekkai Genshō resigned his Buddhist names, he called himself Kō Yūgai or Layman Yūgai. Kō is literally high, with high-minded understood. Yugai suggests some kind of search beyond.

Later he called himself Baisaō, a kind of nickname, pen name, stage name. I learned in a footnote that he was known as Kikusen, or Chrysanthemum Spring, as a child.

In reading Norman Waddell’s biography, I was struck by how differently a person’s identity was viewed in 18^th-century Japan.

In addition to religious, secular and pen names, there were posthumous names. When their mother died, The Old Tea Seller and his sister began referring to her using a different name, reflecting a different relationship or a different way of relating.

The differences in the way people thought about identity go beyond naming. Age is part of identity. In The Old Tea Seller’s culture, a child was a year old at birth. (How else do you account for time in the womb?) The poems celebrating The Old Tea Seller’s 80^th birthday were written when he was 79, in our way of reckoning.

The Western idea of a birthday did not become common in Japan until the 1950s. In The Old Tea Seller’s day, you — and everyone else — became a year older on New Year’s Day.

The year was common — the way the community reckoned time. Everyone gained an extra year at the same time.

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008.

A shaggy crank

 I should have given some samples of Baisaō’s poetry. Here are the first and third parts of “Three Verses on a Tea-Selling Life”:

 

I’m not a Buddhist or Taoist 

not a Confucianist either

I’m a brownfaced whitehaired

hard-up old man.

people think I just prowl

the streets peddling tea,

I’ve got the whole universe

in this tea caddy of mine.

 

Seventy years of Zen

got me nowhere at all

shed my black robe

became a shaggy crank.

now I have no business

with sacred or profane

just simmer tea for folks

and hold starvation back.

 

Gary Snyder loved the line about the shaggy crank.

I love lines scattered through The Old Tea Seller’s poems about the ordinary business of life. He fed his brazier with pinecones. “Pine wind” was the combination of smoke and steam that rose from his fire, the smell competing with the aroma of the tea.

During his years in Kyoto, The Old Tea Seller rented several tiny places. Here’s his note on moving:

 

Having learned the ways of silence

within the noise of urban life

I take life as it comes to me

and everywhere I am is true.

 

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. The inscription is on pp. 53 and 36. 

An odd business model

 I’ve been trying to imagine the Old Tea Seller’s business.

I would love to know what a professor or a theorist would say about it, whether the Old Tea Seller’s practices could be analyzed in any way that could be discussed at a university’s business school.

The Old Tea Seller did not charge a fixed price for a cup of tea. Instead, he had bamboo donation tubes. One had this inscription:

 

The price of this tea is anything from a hundred in gold to a half sen. If you want to drink free, that’s all right too. I’m only sorry I can’t let you have it for less.

 

A physician named Nagatomi Dokushōan, who wrote a book called Little-known Examples of Hidden Radiance, said that the Old Tea Seller would continue selling only until 20 sen had been collected in the bamboo tube.

Twenty sen a day was close-to-starvation income. The Old Tea Seller wrote repeatedly about being hungry and the humiliation of having to beg. But he also wrote about the joy of doing as he pleased and living as he liked.

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. The inscription is on p. 33. 

The Old Tea Seller

 One of the books I took up the mountain was Norman Waddell’s account of Baisaō, the Japanese poet.

Baisaō means Old Tea Seller, so that’s what I’m going to call him. The Old Tea Seller lived from 1675 to 1763, under various names. (That’s another story for another day.)

I’m interested in him for two reasons.

First, he undermined the dominant paradigm of his culture, as scholars would say. Or, as the hippies put it, he undercut the Establishment.

Second, he changed his own life, at least a couple of times, when he was no longer young. Now that I’m old, I’m interested in people who can do that — who can look at changing themselves rather than trying to change the world.

The Old Tea Seller spent most of his life as a Buddhist priest. He lived during a period of military rule, the Shogunate. It was a period when conservative militarists were discouraging individual expression and encouraging order and conformity.

In all societies, respect for religious institutions ebbs and flows. The Old Tea Seller mourned that monks, who were once revered for seeking enlightenment, were despised as parasites.

The problem, he thought, was with the idea that seekers should be free to seek — that doing work takes them away from seeking.

If one monk in a community spends his whole life seeking, perhaps a village will love the idea and will feel charitable when the monk shows up asking for food. If 400 monks in a monastery hit the streets looking for food, the community sees a plague and feels something other than charity.

The Old Tea Seller was a Zen master. He was in line to be abbot of his monastery. When his teacher died, The Old Tea Seller found another candidate for the job and hit the road. He wandered for 10 years, learning from other teachers. He also wanted to think things through.

The Old Tea Seller eventually settled in Kyoto, the capital. Instead of begging for charity, he supported himself by selling tea.

Working for a living was strictly forbidden, and The Old Tea Seller resigned his priesthood and his Buddhist names. Old men who lived on the fringes of society by selling refreshments were called old tea sellers — and the Old Tea Seller appropriated the name.

Many people who have heard of Baisaō are interested in how he changed the way people thought about tea. At the time, people drank matcha, a kind of powdered tea, in elaborate ceremonies.

The Old Tea Seller brewed loose leaves, known as sencha, with little ceremony. The informal conversation at his stall attracted artists and writers. Can you imagine having a Zen master for a barista?

In an era when individual expression was discouraged and conformity was demanded, The Old Tea Seller ignored the social pressure and the rules. He took what he found valuable about Zen and spread it through the streets of the capital, a cup at a time.

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. Waddell’s book is in two parts. The first is a biography, quoting heavily from The Old Tea Seller’s poems and letters. The second includes translations of The Old Tea Seller’s work.

How do you know a poet?

 What does it mean to know a poet? Does it count if you could write a letter off the top of your head introducing a friend to the poet’s work? Do you have to have entire poems or at least some lines committed to memory?

The political advertisements in Georgia are such an assault on my sensibilities that I was trying to imagine whether any of the candidates read poetry. If so, which poets do they know?

It seems as if that would be telling — a good thing to know.

That question led me to Elizabeth Harball’s essay about a dozen U.S. presidents who read poetry.

Jimmy Carter was a fan of Dylan Thomas. He lobbied to have a memorial installed in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Abraham Lincoln was a fan of Robert Burns. People knew that invited the president to make a toast at a dinner honoring the poet. Lincoln declined, saying he could say nothing worthy of the poet’s genius.

Harry Truman carried some lines from Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall” in his wallet. The paper with the copied lines kept wearing out, and Truman kept recopying — 20 or 30 times.

Truman’s devotion to a poem strikes me as admirable. His choice of poem strikes me as creepy, meaning it’s telling. I’m not sure I’d vote for a candidate who had the sensibilities needed to love that poem.

• Source: Elizabeth Harball, “Poetic Presidents: We’ve matched 12 commanders-in-chief with the poets that inspired them”; Poetry Foundation, Oct. 31, 2012. It’s here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69875/poetic-presidents

10 things about Henry

 Sometimes, a week or two after I finish a book, I realize that it’s been simmering on the back burner ever since I put it down. I realize that Henry Seidel Canby gave me a pretty good sense of what Thoreau was like as a person.

Some items that stuck in mind:

• He hated games, parades, shows and company.

• He wore a green coat to chapel at Harvard when black was required. He wasn’t being eccentric. He could afford only one coat, and his was homemade.

• After he failed at teaching, his first idea, before Walden Pond, was to farm. He thought about an orchard.

• He said he was 5-foot-7, but people in Concord thought he was shorter. However, he was accurate in his measurements.

• People said he always walked out of the house with more grace than he walked in, a way of saying that he loved outdoors.

• He had three pairs of boots: cowhide, India rubbers and full rubber. He wore a neckerchief, and his hat had a flap inside the crown that he used as a shelf to hold botanical specimens.

• On his walks, he carried a stick that was notched so he could measure things, an old music book that he used as a plant press, some cord and a knife. Eventually, he bought a spyglass. 

• He probably read less American literature than any other American writer. He read Emerson and Whitman. He didn’t like fiction. His main reading was in the Ancient Greeks, 17^th century English literature, the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita. 

• He could smell a tobacco pipe a-third of a mile away. He discovered that his friend Melvin, a muskrat hunter, kept an azalea bush by sense of smell.

• When he realized he was sick, he compiled a list of the houses he’d lived in. He reasoned that the first step of a biographer or an obituary writer is to establish the basic facts.

Ten details about the man. I think they catch of the sense of him.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.

Black Rock Mountain

 We spent three nights on Black Rock Mountain. We rented a 17-foot trailer and stayed in the state park.

From the mountain, you can see a series of ridges, the Blue Ridge of the Appalachians. I’m pretty sure the last ridge we could see was in North Carolina.

We saw all those ridges after the fog had cleared each day. In the morning, you could see the peaks. They looked like islands in a sea of fog. It’s thick stuff. You get wet walking through it.

It seems to me that the need to see such sights is not just a matter of personality. It’s deeper than that. Some people need to see wild places and get out in them. They sometimes get wet.

Anne Carson and the sublime

 Kant pictured the sublime as something overwhelming. A poetic soul looks at a mountain range and feels awe.

Anne Carson pictured the sublime as a documentary technique. Instead of capturing the grandeur, she liked to capture the detail.

Here are three stanzas of her prose poem on Kant, “Outwardly his life ran smoothly”:

 

Comparative figures: 1784 Kant owned 550 books, Goethe 2300, Herder 7700.

 

Numbering: Kant never ate dinner alone, it exhausts the spirit. Dinner guests, in the opinion of the day, should not number more than the Muses nor less than the Graces. Kant set six places.

 

Sensualism: Kant’s favourite dinner was codfish.

 

Her sublime is like a mosaic. The individual shards of painted glass somehow make a larger picture.

I find that quality in Carson’s work. Some of the things she’s written will send my mind off on a saunter for half a day.

When I heard she’d won the Nobel Prize, I celebrated.

• Source: Anne Carson, Decreation; New York: Vintage Books, 2005, p. 69. For an earlier example of how Carson’s writing can prompt a line of thought, see “Sleep temples and sacred snakes,” Sept. 29, 2023. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2023/09/sleep-temples-and-sacred-snakes.html

A story about a library

 I’m at that age: Younger colleagues ask about retirement.

I think every person should have something he or she wants to do. If you want to write a book, do it. If you want to go to Paris, go. If you don’t have anything you want to do, maybe you ought to hold on to that job.

One of the best projects I’ve heard about was a library in the backyard.

Karen Swallow Prior, a professor of literature, designed it, talked her husband into building it and wrote about it. Her essay gave me a bad case of the daydreams.

I love public libraries, my alma mater. But Professor Prior got the sense of what’s it like to have your own collection.

Her library has a place for the cheap paperback copies of classic novels she read as a teenager. She tells how she counted (roughly) her books and organized them (loosely) into sections.

I retired almost a dozen years ago and have done other things. If I were retiring tomorrow, I think I’d try to imagine a library in the backyard, maybe back in the woodlot.

• Source: Karen Swallow Prior, “My Books Needed a House of Their Own”; Miller’s Book Review, Sept. 19, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/my-books-needed-a-house-of-their?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I learned about the essay because it was mentioned in Julian Girdham’s wonderful newsletter, The Fortnightly.

A newspaper test

 Jane Austen said that a person who read only newspapers couldn’t be a good conversationalist. To be able to contribute to a good conversation, you need to go further in search of ideas. You need to read books, journals, maybe even scientific papers.

I sympathize with that view. But the remark made me want to imagine a better newspaper. I think even the smallest country weekly can convey interesting ideas. I want to read newspapers that have at least one interesting and surprising story in the news columns and at least one interesting idea on the editorial page. Then again, the newspaper folks who are most likely to come up with something good probably read books, journals, maybe even scientific papers.

Meeting minutes and other evidence

 A problem for historians: What to do when evidence is contradictory?

Herodotus wrestled with the problem. Like most historians, he was divided. He had more than one solution.

People who work for newspapers wrestle with the problem every day. If there is no contradictory evidence, seasoned newspaper folks tend to think something is fishy or something’s been overlooked.

But the technology of our age has changed our notion of evidence. Think of the videos recorded by passersby that give the lie to police accounts of arrests. Before that, there were the Watergate tapes, which contradicted the president’s story that he had done nothing wrong and was being persecuted by the press.

Matthew Wills has an interesting summary in JSTOR Daily of David R. Gibson’s study of meeting minutes. Historians and journalists routinely use the minutes of government meetings. Often, the official minutes aren’t reliable. Here’s Wills:

 

Gibson gives the example of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who “exaggerated his importance as an advocate for the temperate approach that brought the crisis to a peaceful resolution” during the heady days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

The reason we know this is that Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, was secretly taping those National Security Council Executive Committee meetings in which the launch of World War III was seriously contemplated. So there is something to compare RFK’s retelling to.

 

That magic phrase: “something to compare.” Two sources, at least. Not one.

Good reporting doesn’t stop with the first account, which often comes from some spokesman for a government telling ordinary people only what those in power want them to believe.

We live in a time when it seems everything is reported — every action, every thought, every event.

The better question is how much of what we consume is reported well — accurately, completely, briefly, honestly. 

I am one of the dinosaurs that still believes that “objective” reporting is a sensible notion, even if objectivity is a goal not achieved. I also think that good reporting is rare and valuable, and that it’s always been that way.

We’re living in a marvelous age of technology. But all our gadgets can’t compensate for failures in something as fundamental as providing another person an honest report.

• Sources: Matthew Wills, “Beware of the Meeting Minutes: What gets lost when spoken conversations become part of the historical record?” JSTOR Daily, Sept. 28, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27367987?mag=beware-of-the-meeting-minutes

It’s a discussion of David R. Gibson’s “Minutes of History: Talk and Its Written Incarnations”; Social Science History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Fall 2022), pp. 643-669, Cambridge University Press.

Blake’s paradox

 One of the recurring themes of this online collection of notes is that writing doesn’t start with questions of craft.

It’s a recurring theme because the problem of what comes before craft eludes me. I can see the frozen nut on the bolt. I just can’t get a wrench on it.

I’m kin to those who think of writing as a way of life, rather than a collection of skills or competencies. And I think temperament has more to do with what any one writer does with his or her time. I don’t think we choose our temperament. In a way, we don’t really choose the kinds of things we like to write or read.

Writing, which combines creation and craft, strikes me as a paradox.

William Blake claimed that a lot of his work was not just inspired but dictated by divine voices. He edited with a heavy hand.

A 17th-century kind of book

 Henry Seidel Canby has me thinking about 17^th-century writers and the kinds of books they wrote.

Sir Thomas Browne is a wonder to me, though I have trouble describing his books to friends. I started with Religio Medici, which is allegedly about how the training of physicians influences their religious thought. There are so many digressions, a reader sometimes wonders whether the book has anything to do with medicine, religion or the influence of scientific training on thought.

Canby says Thoreau loved that kind of book and tried to write one in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

The book pretends to be a record of a trip, and perhaps it is. But it’s also a collection of poems and short essays posing as a record of a journey. Canby calls it a library of Thoreau’s shorter works.

The remark made me think of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, an alleged novel about a walking tour through Suffolk. The narrator, while walking, thinks about Browne, literature, identity and silkworms. You might think of it as an anthology of Sebald’s shorter essays posing as a record of a trip.

I think it takes a peculiar temperament to write a book like that — and also to read it with appreciation.

You don’t choose your temperament. I suspect that if the 17^th-century book appeals to you, you’ll find a lot of classic novels a slog — and vice versa. Maybe there are personalities broad enough to love both, but generally I’m not among them. I’ve found it difficult, as a reader, to serve two masters.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 272-3.

'Now October has come again'

 I wonder whether any American writer saw as much as Thomas Wolfe.

Louis L’Amour thought Wolfe’s powers of observation were remarkable and cited a passage in Of Time and the River about the coming of October. It’s long — Chapter 39 in the novel. But these paragraphs will give you a sense of it:

 

Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big you cannot say the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails; just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up: the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling about you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun, so that you cannot say where sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground and where the leaves.

Meanwhile the Palisades are melting in massed molten colours, the season swings along the nation, and a little later in the South dense woodings on the hill begin to glow and soften, and when they smell the burning wood-smoke in Ohio children say: ‘I’ll bet that there’s a forest fire in Michigan.’ And the mountaineer goes hunting down in North Carolina; he stays out late with mournful flop-eared hounds, a rind of moon comes up across the rude lift of the hills: what do his friends say to him when he stays out late? Full of hoarse innocence and laughter, they will say: ‘Mister, yore ole woman’s goin’ to whup ye if ye don’t go home.’”

 

I’m marking the day. Wolfe was born Oct. 3, 1900, in Asheville, N.C., and died Sept. 15, 1937 of miliary tuberculosis.

• Sources: Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935. Project Gutenberg has it here: 

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301021h.html

Chapter 39 begins Book III.

Louis L’Amour’s remark is in Education of a Wandering Man; New York: Bantam Books, 1989, p. 125.

 

L'Amour on short stories

 Maybe the best parts of Louis L’Amour’s book on self-education are the bits on how he learned to write short stories.

He started with the view that he knew how to write them.

He couldn’t understand why so many were rejected. He eventually decided that all those editors couldn’t be wrong. Something was wrong. with his approach.

Baffled, L’Amour decided to study the masters. In his case, that meant O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, Jack London and Arthur Conan Doyle. Later, he added Maxim Gorky and Robert Louis Stevenson to the faculty.

L’Amour doesn’t say much about the lessons he learned. His main theme about writing is that no writer really helps another. Writing is something you must learn to do by yourself.

But bit by bit, I got a sense of his process:

• If you’re writing historical fiction, immerse yourself in the era. Read diaries, journals, letters and newspaper accounts. Don’t read one diary. Read 50.

• If you read a lot of first-person accounts, you’ll begin to read between the lines. You’ll begin to get a sense of unexpressed, or barely expressed, hopes, doubts and fears. At that point, you’re in business.

• Soak up the place and time, but don’t borrow incidents. Fiction writers should make up their own.

That last point is interesting and probably explains why I usually write essays, rather than stories.

L’Amour said he wrote more than 100 short stories before he wrote his first novel. He liked the short story and had a collection in his library.

• Source: Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man; New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

A problem of thought

 The vine crops — mostly squashes — are doing well in the fall garden, but some of the vines look as if they’ve been hit by birdshot. The leaves are not so much a latticework as museums of pinprick holes.

If you look, you’ll see the vines are covered with bristly little bugs. If you snipped off small bits of a pipe cleaner and scattered them through the vines, you’d recognize the picture.

The problem with poisons is not so much a problem of chemistry as a problem of thought. We connect the damage to something we value, the squash vine, with something we can see, the visible bugs.

If we made a more serious effort, we’d find that the damage is caused by aphids, which are tiny and hard to see. The bugs we can see are the larvae of ladybugs. Each might eat 400 aphids before it becomes an adult.

Everyone seems to know that ladybugs are beneficial in the garden in some way. Most people don’t seem to know what that looks like. Ironically, some gardeners reach for poisons at the first sight of beneficial insects.

There might be a lesson in this garden story about how we Americans, especially, are trained to reach for solutions to all the problems that confront us.