Things I forget

 I forget details that you might not — that Thoreau was an experienced builder when he started his cabin at Walden Pond in 1845, for example.

Thoreau had been helping to build the family’s new house across the railroad in Concord. It was called the Texas house because of its distance from the Mill-Dam, which was reckoned as the center of civilization. Even then, “Texas” was another word for “backwater” or “wilderness.”

Henry Seibel Canby says the cabin was so well made that it survived two moves after Thoreau died and ended up as part of a garage.

Because he taught us to simplify our lives, I remember that Thoreau didn’t have to move much in the way of clothes, furniture and household goods. I forget that he had to haul his boat from the river to the pond.

• Sources: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 209, 217.

The effort to know the world

 Wendell Berry wrote some things I argue with. But I’m not sure we’ve had a writer who was better at getting to a glaring problem with American life. This clear, brief summary is from his essay “A Native Hill”:

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world … We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never fully understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

 

You can read almost anything and want to change our country’s miserable policies. Berry makes me want to change my own habits. He also gives me hope that if we learn to know the world a little better, something good will come of it. 

• Source: Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays 1965-1980; San Franciso: North Point Press, 1980. The quotation, from the essay “A Native Hill,” is on page 98.

Yellow River, early September

 We found a thick stand of beebalm, Monarda punctata, on the banks of the Yellow River on Labor Day.

The plant reminds me of those tiered trays that English people used to serve sandwiches on at teatime, at least in the movies. With beebalm, you have layers of yellow flowers with pink, purple and green bracts in between.

All those flowers attract pollinators, hence the common name. You can see plenty of bees in a stand of beebalm — but also hummingbirds, butterflies, moths and wasps.

Another common name, allegedly, is horsemint. The plant is in the mint family. If in doubt, crush a leaf and smell.

Also blooming in early September:

• Camphorweed is putting out scraggly yellow flowers. Talk about smell. Break a stem of Heterotheca subaxillaris and you’re in the medicine cabinet.

• The crownbeards in genus Verbesina are also have yellow flowers.

• Kudzu vines are putting out showy blossoms. I’d say the blooms are magenta, oxblood or purple, but I’m not good with colors. I wish I knew more about the variations within genus Pueraria.

• We also saw some fuzzybeans, in genus Strophostyles, which put out lovely soft purple flowers that remind me of pigeonwings, Clitoria mariana. Fuzzybeans are legumes and were used as food and medicine by the ancient peoples.

When you get to know a place, you have a sense of when it’s time to see a blossom of a peculiar shape or color. You start looking, and you might notice, as at the poet Franz Wright put it, “the unnoticed miracle of things precisely as they are.”

Selected and unabridged

 I admire Thoreau. But I don’t have it in me to read the entire Journal.

Thoreau saw it as one book, rather than a collection of notebooks. It’s 2 million words. Opinions differ about what’s worth reading.

Henry Seibel Canby points out that in the early years Thoreau played around with short essays. Thoreau was experimenting with topics to see which could be developed into lectures, which were paying gigs. Canby says most of these one-paragraph essays are “pretty dreadful.”

Carl Bode, who edited a selection of Journal entries, says Thoreau soon put his journal to the right use. I can imagine Professor Bode urging his students to read the whole thing.

In college, I spent an afternoon in the library with what was then viewed as the unabridged Journal. I think it was the 1906 edition. I realized that I needed an editor, even if Thoreau did not. My battered copy of Bode’s selections dates from those days.

I think this is one of the interesting features of remarks, thoughts written in journals, aphorisms. Their brevity leaves a lot of room for the readers to do their own work. One reader interprets, while another goes off on a flight of fancy.

In more formal compositions, the author shows the reader where to go.

Since more is left to the readers’ imagination, you’d expect more disagreement about what’s good and what’s not.

An enormous pile of remarks — Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, for example — can be mined in different ways by different editors.

• Sources: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 128-9.

Selected Journals of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode; New York: Signet Classics, 1967, p. 9.

Thoughts in a journal

 I have argued — tongue only half in cheek — that the remark should be a literary form. I think remarks sometimes stand alone and don’t need to fit into some larger context, such as an essay. 

Here’s Thoreau with the same idea:

 

I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form to greater advantage — than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life — & are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched — It is more simple — less artful — I feel that in the other case I should have no proper frame for my sketches.

 

Here’s Winfield Townley Scott on the same notion: 

 

I am trying to put down things I have thought — collecting them as well as I can remember … It is more fun than writing essays: arrangement, progression, transition, are hard for me to manage …

 

In my mind, remarks, thoughts and notebook entries are the same thing.

I’ve been reading Thoreau’s Journal and thinking about journals, diaries and collections of aphorisms. The question about what we think of remarks seems relevant to me in the age where we post a lot of what we write. Maybe I’m doing the same thing when I post a note online and when I compose something. But I’m not sure my old English teacher would see it that way.

• Sources: Thoreau’s remark was from his Journal on Jan. 27, 1852. I think the source is Henry David Thoreau, Journal, edited by John C. Broderick et. al.; Princeton University Press, 1981-. But, alas, it’s now a lost soul in an old notebook.

A similar version of the entry is in Selected Journals of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode; New York: Signet Classics, 1967, p. 15.

A Dirty Hand: The Literary Notebooks of Winfield Townley Scott, University of Texas Press, 1969. I’ve quoted it at least three times, most recently in “On turning 5, Aug. 26, 2026.” It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/08/on-turning-5.html

Politics and predictive numbers

 Several notes in this collection have described Georgia as a swing state.

Cory Ruth of Atlanta, a political strategist and tech consultant, says that’s wrong. He says the Republican Party has had a structural advantage in every election since 2010. Republicans carried every constitutional office that year.

I might owe readers a correction.

Ruth also said that primary turnout is the strongest indicator of general election outcomes in Georgia. Whatever party shows up with the most voters in the primaries in May is the favorite to win the general election in November.

As Ruth put it, “primary turnout is the best polling.”

Here were the figures reported for the May primaries:

• Democratic: 1.08 million, 53.7 percent.

• Republican: 933,000, 46.3 percent.

Those figures ignore ballots cast for nonpartisan races, mostly judicial.

To me, the most important number is voter turnout.

Georgia has more than 7.5 million registered voters. It says a lot when 27 percent is a record — a cause for rejoicing among those concerned about civic engagement.

The Independent Voter Project does not track independent voters in the same way as the sources used above, so the numbers aren’t comparable. But it’s the only source I’ve found that tracks turnout rates across parties.

Here’s the Independent Voter Project’s report on the total number of registered voters with turnout rates for the primaries:

• Democratic — 3.32 million, 43.8 percent turnout.

• Republican — 2.08 million, 27.5 percent turnout.

• Independent — 2.17 million, 28.7 percent turnout.

• Sources: Cory Ruth, “Georgia is not a swing state, but it could veer blue in 2026”’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sept. 4, 2026.

The report by the Independent Voter Project is here:

https://independentvoterproject.org/voter-stats/ga

A new phrase: 'ICE tax'

 My newspaper reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, arrested 2,250 people in Georgia in July, a 50 percent increase over June. On the same day agency officials were bragging about their public service, I heard the expression “ICE tax.”

The phrase, which was new to me, refers to the hidden costs people pay because of the intimidation of mass arrests and deportations.

A lot of the agricultural workers in the South and Southwest are from Mexico. The pay is borderline, and ICE agents are viewed like sicarios, the enforcers for the cartels. If you’re a migrant worker weighing costs and benefits, you might decide the annual trip north is just not worth it.

It’s apparently surprised some American farmers that they have not been overrun by local folks who want to work in the heat harvesting crops.

Farmers, who are already paying disastrous fuel prices because of a disastrous war, are having to pay higher wages. The higher costs are showing up at the supermarket.

It’s not just agricultural workers. A lot of the people working for low wages at nursing homes and at construction sites are also from Mexico. The homebuilding industry is slowing down in some areas. Nursing homes are raising rates.

I wonder whether the new phrase will catch on.

• Source: I’m not sure who coined the phrase, but an advocacy group called America’s Voice used it in a report mentioned here:

https://americasvoice.org/press_releases/watch-lawmakers-an-economist-and-a-care-worker-sound-the-alarm-on-the-ice-tax-hitting-southwestern-families/

So long, hummingbirds

 Fewer hummingbirds are at our feeders. August was such a frenzy I found myself just barely able to watch from my easy chair. It’s feeling you get from watching a nailbiter of a ballgame from the bleachers.

Terry Johnson, a fine naturalist who lives in Central Georgia, said the Ruby-throated hummingbirds go in waves — the males leaving as early as July, the females going next, and this year’s birds going last. 

Most of us know that the birds mobbed the feeders to store up fuel for the migration southwest, crossing the Gulf of Mexico.

Johnson had the numbers: During the feeding frenzy, the weight of the average female increases from 3.5 grams to 5.5. Each gram of fat can be converted into about 300 miles.

I have been trying to imagine it — what a 57 percent change in weight would be like. The gain in a few weeks. The loss in a few days.

'The Problem of Tobacco'

 Wendell Berry, who taught English at the University of Kentucky, was probably the state’s most famous farmer. He argued with the dean of the university’s agriculture school.

The dean was right about some things: Berry used draft horses and other “primitive” methods. If every farmer adapted those methods tomorrow, American farmers couldn’t feed the American people.

I think that’s true, but I’m sure it misses the point. Berry’s point was that we humans had better adopt a way of agriculture that doesn’t poison and destroy the earth.

That’s what right about his defense of “primitive” farming methods. And it’s what’s wrong with his defense of tobacco.

Berry said some things about tobacco that are true but that contradict the argument he made everywhere else. We humans badly need an agriculture that doesn’t poison the earth and doesn’t kill other plants and animals. “Animals” should be taken broadly, to include us.

If we humans are going to develop a better way of growing our food that does less damage to the earth and its creatures, we ought to stop growing crops that poison us. Tobacco is addictive and carcinogenic. It’s poison.

It you’re curious about Berry’s arguments, I’ve including a link below. He says a lot of things about the economics of farming, the policies behind federal agricultural programs and about free choice involving legal products that might interest you.

But the arguments just make me mad. Part of that is because Berry and I share a heritage.

The South has always been a peculiar place and part of that off-kilter quality is because it buys into arguments like this.

In colonial days, at least some people knew that slavery was wrong. But “respectable” people — people with money, people in pulpits, people in banks — raised grave concerns about the economy and the structure of society.

When I was a boy, people in the South knew that Jim Crow was wrong, that denying human rights to human beings was outrageously wrong. But “respectable” people raised grave concerns about the economy and social structure. It made me mad then — and makes me mad now.

It made me mad that the region’s writers peddled these arguments. It made me mad enough to start writing for perhaps the smallest daily newspaper in Texas. I wasn’t trying to change the world. I wanted to try to influence a small community that included the family farm.

I think Wendell Berry was wrong about tobacco. But I know he was right about the larger argument: We’ve got to stop poisoning the earth — and its creatures — as we go about the business of growing something to eat.

I think Berry is one of the most important thinkers and writers of my lifetime. I’ll continue to read him. I don’t think he was perfect.

• Source: You can find Wendell Berry’s essay “The Problem of Tobacco” here:

https://www.kerrykkuehn.com/resources/large/berry_tobacco.pdf

And thanks, Michael, for the nudge.

‘A Timbered Choir’

 Yesterday’s note was on Wendell Berry’s collection of Sabbath poems, A Timbered Choir. I’m not sure you’d enjoy it, but I thought I’d give you some samples so you could see what kind of book it is.

My favorite poem is just four lines, and I’ve quoted it before:

 

Best of any song

is bird song

in the quiet, but first

you must have the quiet.

 

I’ve written essays about why I am, by profession, a woods walker. Berry got it in 17 words.

Some of Berry’s poems always provoke a personal reaction — that is, they get to me in a way they might not get to you. Berry, while walking the woods on Sunday mornings, sometimes mused about his work as a writer.

 

I would not have been a poet

except that I have been in love

alive in this mortal world,

or any essayist except that I

have been bewildered or afraid …

 

I read those lines and knew in my bones I was an essayist, though newspaper people call them columnists.

Finally, there is no level ground in the Geogia Piedmont. The Wise Woman and I live on a slope with a woodlot and a garden on terraces made by hand with a shovel and crowbar.

 

We keep an old way

In light and breath to stay

This household on its slope.

 

Berry wrote more than 50 books. I’ve admired his essays on agriculture and rural life, his long essay on American racism and his short stories. But if I were looking for a place to start on this wonderful American writer, it’d be A Timbered Choir.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir; Berkeley, Calif.: Centerpoint, 1998, pp. 207, 182, 128.

Where no path is worn

 I think of Wendell Berry as an essayist, but I tend to read his poetry. 

He made it a practice to spend Sunday mornings in the woods, just being quiet and listening. A Timbered Choiris a collection of his Sabbath poems from 1979 to 1997. Here’s the beginning of II from 1979: 

 

Another Sunday morning comes

And I resume the standing Sabbath

Of the woods, where the finest blooms

Of time return, and where no path

 

Is worn but wears its makers out

At last, and disappears in leaves

Of fallen seasons. The tracked rut

Fills and levels; here nothing grieves

 

In the risen season. Past life lives

In the living.

 

Berry called himself an amateur poet. He said he did the work for the love of the work to his own satisfaction. Those were two of the conditions of self-employment, he said.

I’m not a poet. But, like Berry, I’m a self-employed woods walker. And like Berry, I sometimes find that my mind seems open and aware for a moment. I see things that I had overlooked — those “finest blooms” that I previously had been in too much of a hurry to see.

I get a whiff of what these poems are about. I tend to come back to them. I can’t imagine a spiritual life that doesn’t grow out of the natural world.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir; Berkeley, Calif.: Centerpoint, 1998, p. 6.

Wendell Berry, 1934 – 2026

 Wendell Berry was the kind of fellow who hated to go anywhere without his pocketknife or his dog. He was the kind of fellow who spoke to me, the kind of writer I read.

News of any death is sad. But I’m grateful that such a writer lived in our lifetime. The landscapes he saw are the landscapes in front of us now. We can see them, appreciate them and conserve them. Or we can, as we are apt to do, see nothing much at all.

I’m going to be reading Berry for bit. I think I’ll start with A Timbered Choir.

Thoreau and the publishing world

 A recurring theme: I’m trying to think about writing — not the craft of writing but the part that comes before it.

Imagine Henry David Thoreau at 25, being told by everyone that he really should find a career. He’s got a degree from Harvard, though he often wonders what it’s for. He’s tried keeping a school. There had been more spectacular failures, one can suppose.

He worked for Emerson for a while, and the great man got him a gig tutoring a nephew. Ralph Waldo’s brother William was a businessman on Staten Island, close enough to give Thoreau a gateway to the publishing world of New York.

The problem, in 1843, was there wasn’t much of a publishing world.

Poe was scraping by, barely, with poetry and short fiction. Longfellow was publishing poetry, but it’d be another decade before he felt he could leave his teaching job and focus on writing.

Can you imagine Thoreau trying to write for a market? Doing a knockoff or cover of one of Poe’s horror stories, for example? Or a long poem narrating the exploits of a Revolutionary War hero?

No one was writing the kind of thing that Thoreau wanted to write. He was interested in the question of the best way to live. He wanted to conduct tests and trials — to travel on rivers or hike across Cape Cod or maybe live in a cabin at Walden Pond — and report on the experiences. What could he learn? What could he convey to friends and readers?

That’s a vital bit of knowledge, finding out what it is that you want to do. Thoreau wasn’t clear when he left college.

He was clearer after seeing the glittering publishing world of New York. By seeing what was there, he got a better sense of what he didn’t want to do. And it wasn’t long before he began thinking about books that contained reports of his investigations and what he’d learned.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 128-49.

Panola Mountain, late August

 The forest canopy is thick, but the early turners have some yellow leaves. The early turners are mostly tulip trees, maples, sweetgums and hickories. But a lot of the yellow you see in the canopy is not from the trees but from muscadine vines.

The berries on American beautyberry are just turning purple — some are still green. Ivy-leaved morning-glory is putting out those lovely blue flowers.

We saw two big batches of Canadian geese — one near Alexander Lake and one resting in a clearing in the woods. In honor of the Current Occupant’s idea to call Lake Ontario “Lake America,” we are calling Canadian geese “Donald ducks.”

If Americans can’t appreciate idiotic ideas, idiotic ideas cannot be appreciated.

Rilke’s two pens

 Ulrich Baer says that Rilke had two pens. One was for poetry and fiction. The other was for other business, such as paying bills and writing letters.

This might be the simplest metaphor for the notion that there is more than one part or aspect to a person or personality. If the person is a writer, like Rilke, he must decide which parts will remain in the privacy of the notebooks and which will meet the public in published works.

I have been trying, without much success, to get a firmer grip on the notion that when we teach writing we usually start with craft of writing. As I’ve said before, the part of writing that interests me the most is the part that comes before the questions about craft.

What kinds of things come up before craft?

A writer has two pens. Which does he choose?

Which aspects of a personality are allowed to speak in tackling this piece of work? Which must remain silent?

• Ulrich Baer’s essay is in Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life, which Baer edited and translated; New York: The Modern Library, 2006, p. vii.  For another stab at this topic, see “The other part of writing,” Aug. 17, 2026. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-other-part-of-writing.html

Rabbit tobacco

 School has started, and rabbit tobacco is putting out loads of little white flowers.

I suppose I connect Pseudognaphalim obtusifolium and school because it’s one of the plants once used by little boys in Texas who were learning to smoke. We learned by rolling our own. We performed this top-secret ceremony at one of our secret hideouts. One of my early memories is getting a dose of discipline from my outraged mother, who had a gift for finding secret hideouts.

Rabbit tobacco grows across the eastern part of the continent. I’ve run across a Georgia gardener who managed to make himself sick by smoking the same plant as a boy.

The plant is in the aster family. The stems and the undersides of the leaves are coated with white hairs, so part of the plant appears to be light gray, almost white.

Checking up on Frank O'Hara

 Yesterday’s note should have come with an explanation. I was reading an essay on Frank O’Hara at 100 because I have trouble with this poet. I think of him as a poet I should like and am puzzled that a lot of his poetry leaves me somewhere short of liking.

But then there’s his poem “The Day Lady Died,” which gets to the point of how sudden, unexpected grief can hit you — grief about a famous person, a singer in this case, that you know through concerts or recordings. How you can feel grief for the loss of the artistry that was in a person, without, perhaps, really knowing the person. How that grief strikes in the middle of the everyday.

If someone did that better than Frank O’Hara, I don’t know about it. And so I read essays about a poet whose poems I struggle with, hoping to get a better grip.

• Source: Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42657/the-day-lady-died

‘We have a cultural life’

 Ryan Ruby’s essay for Poetry Foundation on Frank O’Hara has many wonders. One that surprised me was a quotation from George Kennan, one of the architects of the containment doctrine, the notion that the United States and its allies should stop the spread communism in places like Korea and Vietnam. Here’s Kennan:

We have … to show the outside world both that we have a cultural life and that we care something about it. That we care enough about it, in fact, to give it encouragement and support here at home, and to see that it is enriched by acquaintance with similar activity elsewhere. If these impressions could only be conveyed with enough force and success to countries outside our border, I, for my part, would willingly trade the entire remaining inventory of political propaganda for the results that could be achieved by such means alone.

 

I think that instinct is right. If this country supported its artists and the arts, its cultural life, we’d live in a different world. We wouldn’t have to make up a propaganda for the gullible about making this country great again. We’d be making a richer, better cultural life, one that people in other parts of the world would notice.

We haven’t taken Kennan’s advice. We’ve made ourselves culturally poorer than we need to be, and our propaganda doesn’t begin to cover that fact.

• Ryan Ruby, “Infinite Waves: Frank O’Hara at 100”; Poetry Foundation, Aug. 24, 2006. It’s here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1822640/infinite-waves

Come-outers

 Before there were hippies or even beatniks, there were come-outers. They hung out at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop of West Street in Boston in the 1830s.

The come-outers were people who had concluded that social institutions that were supposed to be moral beacons were colluding in an evil so awful they couldn’t be a part of these institutions. The churches of the day were accommodating to slavery.

The peculiar name of these protesters came from scripture:

 

Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.

 

I wish more people knew about the come-outers. I suspect we have some around today. I’ve run across some young people who are progressive in their politics but have come out of the Democratic Party, largely, but not exclusively, because of its stance on Israel and Gaza.

I suspect there are more of these contemporary come-outers than the pundits allow — enough, I’d guess, to account for the bewildering problems in conducting accurate polls in Georgia.

• Source: The quotation is from II Corinthians 6:17. The “come out from among them” is a quotation from Isaiah 52:11.

On turning 5

 I have never been able to explain what this online collection of notes is, but it appeared five years ago today. This head-scratching is my way of marking the day.

One of the early notes was about something that the poet Winfield Townley Scott had written:

 

I am trying to put down things I have thought — collecting them as well as I can remember … It is more fun than writing essays: arrangement, progression, transition, are hard for me to manage …

One reason for writing these notes: I love to read this sort of thing when somebody else writes it. Almost, I think, no matter who.

 

It seemed like an explanation to me then and still does. I just like notes.

• Source: The lines quoted are from A Dirty Hand: The Literary Notebooks of Winfield Townley Scott, University of Texas Press, 1969. The original note was “A bit more on noticing and collecting notes,” Sept. 15, 2021. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/search?q=Winfield+Scott