How would you define good judgment?

 Here’s Montaigne, talking about good judgment:

Whoever thought he lacked sense? … In others we readily acknowledge superior courage, physical strength, experience, agility and beauty; but superior judgment we concede to none.

We all know good judgment when we see it. But if you try to define it, it’s tricky. As Montaigne points out, good judgment is usually something we have and they don’t.

I can’t give you a definition of good judgment, but I’m persuaded it involves the way we go about making decisions when all the facts aren’t in.

If we knew all the facts, the smart move would be obvious. But life is seldom like that. Being in a position where you have to make decisions without knowing all that you need to know … well, to me, that just about covers the human condition.

• Sources: The quotation comes from “On Presumption” in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 745. Although I put down Paul Woodruff’s Reverence (Oxford University Press, 2001) a week ago, things he wrote keep coming to mind. He said reverence is not the only way to avoid making terrible mistakes. A perfect knowledge of the facts or divine guidance would make me immune from error. (And “error free” would be pretty cool, in terms of good judgment.) But such clarity seems to be beyond me.

Why don't babies have teeth?

 Zora Neale Hurston was a preacher’s daughter who had a questioning mind. She thought about babies' teeth, for example. Everyone knows babies have to have teeth. Why don’t babies come already equipped?

Such simple questions, raised in childhood, led to a more difficult one: “if Christ, God’s son, hated to die, and God hated for Him to die, and having everybody grieving over it ever since, why did He have to do it? Why did people die anyway?”

The same story moves countless people to embrace faith and leaves others baffled.

The quotation is from Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road. I came across it in Christopher Cameron’ Black Freethinkers,which is filling one of the many holes in my education.

Some of the most interesting people in this part of Texas were German freethinkers who settled in places like Comfort and Sisterdale in the 19^th century. It’s hard to imagine Texas towns without churches, but for decades, there were such places.

I’ve known about the European freethinkers since I was a teenager living in New Braunfels. Black freethinkers? 

So much has been written about the influence of Black churches that I’d lost track of all those who, like Hurston, simply chose another way.

• Christopher Cameron, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism; Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2109.

Louise Glück's 'Parable of the Swans'

 Yesterday’s note on Louise Glück made me do some searching.

Her Nobel Lecture mentions a contest, conducted when she was 5 or 6, to declare the greatest poem in the world. It made me think — against her warnings — about which poem of hers I’d claim to like best.

I think it’s “Parable of the Swans.”

The male believes love is a feeling in the heart. The female believes love is what you do. After 10 years, they hit a patch of slimy water.

                        Sooner or later in a long

            life together, every couple encounters

            some emergency like this, some

            drama which results

            in harm. This

            occurs for a reason: to test

            love and to demand

            fresh articulation of its complex terms.

If you are lucky enough to have had a long life together with someone, I’d guess you’d like this poem.

• Source: The poem is here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49615/parable-of-the-swans

 

The intimate voice of poetry

 I’m always on the prowl for one-night reads — interesting alternatives to an evening of TV sitcoms and lost hours on the Internet.

Here’s a suggestion: Louise Glück’s 2020 Nobel Lecture. It’s short.

Glück argues that poetry is the intimate voice of private life, and that we’re in danger of losing it as our lives become increasingly public. It contains this sentence:

I am talking about a temperament that distrusts public life or sees it as the realm in which generalization obliterates precision, and partial truth replaces candor and charged disclosure.

I spent my working life as a newspaperman, working to make things public, to resolve differences in public and to examine public life. But I understand that deep distrust of public life. And that experience examining public life might be one reason that I love poetry so.

• Sources: The lecture is here:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/lecture/

For more on one-night reads, see the series of notes and recommendations from Oct. 28 through Nov. 2, 2021.

A Texas writer you should know

 Christopher Cook is probably best known for Robbers, a mystery that has so many surprises you can’t talk about the novel without spoiling some of the fun.

If you are trying to write a novel, I’d read this one and take notes.

People who are not from Texas usually think of the Hollywood version, heavy on the landscapes and cattle of West Texas. They are surprised to find that East Texas is covered in pine forests and sawmill hands.

My friend Christopher has that part of the world down: the talk, the characters, the way the cops think and the way the food smells.

Some of his short stories are in Screen Door Jesus & Other Stories. He's as good as it gets on the peculiar role religious belief plays in this part of the world. His short story "Heresies," for example, is about two guys hired as security guards for a conference of theologians who are supposed to give the Austin City Council some advice on a gay rights ordinance. One of the guards is an old hippie, and the other listens to too much talk radio.

Christopher can tell a story. Today’s his birthday, and I’m wishing him well.

• Sources: Robbers was published by No Exit Press in 2001 and then by Berkley Trade in 2002. Screen Door Jesus & Other Stories was published by Host Publications in 2006. Cloven Tongues of Fire was published as a Kindle edition in 2011. 

Alice Oswald's long poem Dart

 Five or six years ago, The Telegraph asked its readers “Is Alice Oswald Our Greatest Living Poet?”

That was before she was named professor of poetry at Oxford, but I was already a fan. I’d read Dart and thought it was one of the best long poems of our time.

The Dart is a river in Devon. Oswald spent two years recording the voices of people along the river, from its source at Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor to the sea.

If you read it, you’ll hear the voices of a doomed naval cadet, a naturalist, a boat builder, a crabber and many others. You’ll hear the voice of a greedy salmon poacher, explaining the temptation of a lad to set an illegal net:

            In twenty minutes he’s covered the cost of the net,

            in an hour he’s got a celebration coming.

And throughout the poem, you’ll hear the voice of the river and of those who love it:

            why is it so sedulously clattering

            so like a man mechanically muttering

            so sighing, so endlessly seeking

            to hinge his fantasies to his speaking. 

Raindrops from a big watershed flow sometimes gently, sometimes dangerously, into the dreamlike sea.

When I’m down and blue, the artistry of this poem restores me. It’s a work of genius, I think.

• Alice Oswald, Dart; London: Faber & Faber, 2002. If all this sounds familiar, I mentioned Alice Oswald’s long poem Memorial on Memorial Day. And Dart was included in a list of one-night reads on Oct. 31, 2021.

A very short conversation

 My father, who was also named Heber, was born on this day in 1924. Today would have been his 98^th birthday.

He died on Feb. 28. I mentioned his death in “A conversation from long ago” on March 3, 2021.

He was laconic.

When I was young, I asked him: “What is the secret of good writing?”

He replied: “Short words, short sentences.”

That’s what he said. If he’d been writing, he would have done something about the comma splice.