A story that sheds a little light

 In a recent list of favorite short stories, I included one by my friend Christopher Cook. He often writes about a subject that fascinates me: how people are religious.

He’s especially good at telling about the church folk of East Texas. Christopher is a native and knows the place and its people well.

Some of the ancient sages thought that the chief problem in life is anguish — wanting life to be something other than it is. I knew many people in East Texas who were like that: “If only I could get to Nashville and play my songs” or “If only my husband could get a job at the mill” or “If only we could get our boy out of jail.”

Often, the person would put religion on the ache like salve on a sore.

Christopher is best known for his novel Robbers, but I like his short stories. The aching of some of his characters is familiar to me. I don’t just know of it. I know it well, having seen it daily, talking to people as a young reporter. It’s just as he portrays it in his stories.

He writes about ordinary people who have a sense that life’s not quite right and should be better. What fascinates me is that instead of examining that anguish, that ache, that dissatisfaction, they go to church and get saved.

I've seen some good nonfiction writers take a stab that phenomenon. But I come closer to understanding it, I think, when I read a good story.

• Sources: Christopher Cook, Screen Door Jesus & Other Stories; Austin, Texas: Host Publications, 2006. The notes on favorite short stories are at “What short stories would you recommend?” Nov. 1, 2022, and “How can anyone stop at 12?” Nov. 2, 2022.

And also a symbol

 Sometimes, symbols take the place of notes in the margins of my books.

I use lambda, the Greek “L,” for a word I don’t know or for an image I like. The words and images end up in a notebook.

As a result of that habit, I can tell you that a bumbailiff is a bailiff empowered to arrest debtors and that an aspergillum is a contraption, with a brush and can, used to sprinkle holy water.

No, I’m not saving words for my next conversation. I won’t speak them. I won’t write them, at least not in my own voice. But I think the practice of noticing such words makes me more aware of diction — the fact that different people use different words in telling a story.

That’s such an obvious thing you might wonder why I’d even mention it.

Have you ever read a line of dialog and had the sense that something wasn’t quite right? That the words the character is using somehow don’t match the character? That little doubt in a reader’s mind is fatal.

Diction is an obvious thing, an important thing. And getting it right in dialog is a harder than it looks.

(If you’re curious: I suspect that both bumbailiff and aspergillum came from the vocabulary of Robert Graves.)

A note in the margin

 I had to shut off the voice that said: “Thou shalt not write in books.”

Of course you shouldn’t write in library books. Library books are public property and you should treat them as a naturalist treats public land: the motto is “leave no trace.”

But my own books are different. I bought them because I wanted to digest them, not just read them. I wanted to take what was between the covers and make it a part of me.

The cow eats grass, but the grass becomes cow, not vice versa, Eric Hoffer used to say.

Hoffer was a great one for making ideas in great books his own. He read, and thought about what he read. He wrote notes in pocket notebooks as they occurred to him. He later reworked those notes on index cards. He eventually began to publish essays and books.

I use notebooks and index cards too, but I also mark the spot in my own books that ignited the chain of thought. And so my own process looks like this:

• I read a book, making a note where something inside me reacts. Sometimes it’s a question. Sometimes it’s a proposed amendment. C.S. Lewis called his notes “festoons.”

•  I work through the marginal notes in notebooks and index cards until I get comfortable, that is, until I find a version of the original idea that I can use.

• I then talk about the notion with friends who can be trusted to give me an honest appraisal. Or I post the notion at this site and hope for a constructive reply. This note, for example, was prompted by just such a discussion. (Thanks, Alvin.)

That’s the process. The collection of notes you see on this site might be called “The Collective Marginalia of Heber Taylor.” That’s wrong, but not far wrong.

A wonderful little book on physics

 If you like one-night reads, don’t miss Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

The book, which about 80 pages, started as a series of newspaper columns. You might guess that an old newspaperman would like that. But through the years, I came to realize that most Americans just don’t read much about science. I admire efforts to interest ordinary people in the sciences and to encourage people to appreciate some of the difficulties.

Rovelli works on two themes. First, he gives us a tour of physics. The first lesson is a wonderful summary of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The second is a brief on quantum mechanics. What we know about the first and second lessons is that they are contradictory.

For many people of my father’s generation, there was profound concern about conflicts between faith and science. I’m much more interested in the conflict between science and science.

One of the efforts to find a synthesis involves quantum gravity. If you have the cast of mind to be interested in these notes, you really ought to become familiar with the term. And Rovelli will get you there.

The second theme of this book is on what doing science is like. It’s like following a trail, and mainly what you do is doubt — yourself, the conflicting data, the competing pictures of the world that are contradictory and thus can’t both be right.

My favorite sentence in the book: “Genius hesitates.”

• Source: Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics; New York: Riverhead Books, 2016.

A bad case of sibling rivalry

 If you read ancient Greek literature, you run across references to “the house of Atreus.” We’re mainly talking about Agamemnon and Menelaus, the brothers who led the Greeks against Troy.

Agamemnon and Menelaus were disasters as leaders. Homer and the tragedians who followed his lead said the brothers brought hardship and sorrow to the Greeks. The brothers’ hubris caused so much suffering you sometimes have to remind yourself that the Greeks won the war.

Less known is the story of their father Atreus, son of Pelops, who gave his name to the Peloponnese, i.e. the snappy but geographically incorrect “Isle of Pelops.”

Atreus had many siblings, but one brother, Thuestes, was such a rival that their poisonous relationship spread hardship and sorrow among the Greeks.

Atreus made a vow to the goddess Artemis to sacrifice the best of his flocks to her. The god Hermes, who had a grudge against Pelops and his brood, dropped a lamb with a golden fleece into the flock, just to make trouble.

The vow required Atreus to sacrifice the lamb to the goddess. He did, but he kept the fleece for himself.

Once trouble starts, it’s hard to stop. Atreus’s new wife, Aerope, known to some writers as Europe, fell in love with Thuestes. He agreed to be her lover — if she’d give him the fleece, which he said his brother had stolen from his pasture. She did.

The nobles of Mycenae were considering both brothers as candidates for the kingship, and Atreus argued that the golden fleece was evidence of divine approval.

Thuestes seemed shocked. “So you’re saying that the owner of the fleece should be king?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Well, we agree on something.”

Dramatists dragged out the story of how the nobles went to see who had the fleece.

Thuestes had it, but through divine intervention, Atreus became king. (The intervention was spectacular. It was, in myth, the sun set in the east.)

Once on the throne, Atreus took vengeance on his brother, serving him a dinner of his own children, cooked in a stew.

Thuestes wanted vengeance so badly that he consulted the oracle at Delphi. When he was told vengeance could come only through a son born to him and his daughter Pelopia, he committed rape.

Atreus thought that Pelopia’s son, Aegisthus, was his own. Aegisthus was just 7 when he killed Atreus, and Thuestes came to the throne.

There’s more, but you get the gist.

Homer’s Iliad is the story of an ill-fated expedition against Troy, led by two flawed characters. It’s bloody and gruesome, and I’m pretty sure I know a state legislator or two who would try to ban it from public libraries if they knew about it.

I’ve been thinking about the story in terms of a modest theory about Greek literature: If a mythical story strikes you as an awful example of human behavior, inquire into the backstory. If you look at the story behind a troubling character, you’ll often find that his dad was even worse, and you don’t want to know about grandpa.

• Robert Graves’s account is in The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 43-51.

Absorbed by ordinary matter

 I went down the rabbit hole for a couple of days with Theodore Gray’s The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe.

I read somewhere that Oliver Sacks, who loved the periodic table more than most good writers, had been fascinated by this book. I found a copy in the public library.

Two days later I can say this: The book is full of information — atomic weights, density, graphics on the order in which electron rings are filled, spectral emissions, charts of melting and boiling points. Some of the photographs show elements in pure forms. Others show elements in common products.

I know that few people would share my enthusiasm for the book. You might have to have an interest in chemistry and metaphysics, disciplines that are interested, in different ways, in the question of what is, to love this book. Gray introduces that question of what is this way:

The periodic table is the universal catalog of everything you can drop on your foot. There are some things, such as lights, love, logic, and time, that are not in the periodic table. But you can’t drop any of those things on your foot.

There are all kinds of things in the cosmos and some of the naturally occurring material things are wonderful and just barely believable.

I can also tell you this about The Elements: It hit me like Material World: A Global Family Portrait, first published a generation ago. That book is a collection of photographs of typical families in various countries worldwide, posing in front of their houses with their possessions. And so you had an American family with its television sets, furniture sets and appliances, and families from other parts of the world who were proud of their bicycles and livestock. With both books, I was absorbed, unable to do much else until I’d finished, regretfully, the last page.

• Sources: Theodore Gray, The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe; New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2009. Peter Menzel, Charles C. Mann and Paul Kennedy, Material World: A Global Family Portrait; Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 1994.

The way some scientists think

 Let’s reconsider Isaac Asimov’s suggestion that the level of radiation of a particular isotope of potassium determines the window of opportunity for the development of intelligent life.

The background appeared here on Nov. 6, 2022. In a nutshell: A radioactive form of potassium is common in foods that are healthy for humans. Asimov suggested this isotope opened a window of opportunity for the development of intelligent life. Too much of that radioactive potassium, and the long genomes that are characteristic of intelligent creatures would have broken apart. Too little, and the rate of mutation would have been too slow for intelligent creatures to evolve.

In the 1930s, perhaps the leading school of philosophy in the West was Logical Positivism. Most of its famous proponents were members of the Vienna Circle, although an Englishman, A.J. Ayer, wrote the book that became the manifesto for that school of thought. Language, Truth and Logic is arguably the clearest book on philosophy ever written.

The thesis of the Logical Positivists was that only statements that can be verified have sense. That is, scientific hypotheses have sense because you can, by testing, show them to be true or false. Religious texts, poetic declarations of love and other such things can’t be submitted to tests of verification and thus have no sense. They are nonsense.

The problem with the Logical Positivists’ viewpoint is that their central tenet — that only statements that can be verified or falsified have sense — can’t be verified or falsified. Strictly speaking, at least as Logical Positivists speak, it’s nonsense.

But most of the philosophers who made up this school were scientists, and verifiability is essential in constructing a scientific framework for understanding the world. Whether that’s the only meaningful framework for looking at the cosmos is another question.

I’m reciting this bit of intellectual history to get to this point: When I was a student of the sciences many years ago, the most penetrating minds I came across were like Asimov’s: they were creative. They spun off suggestions, some of which were verifiable and some of which were not, constantly. These scientists didn’t know or understand some aspect of the cosmos. And so they used their imaginations to try to come up with an explanation.

In my view, Asimov’s suggestion is not a hypothesis. I can’t imagine how it could be tested. But I think it’s penetrating suggestion, conjecture ... or something. It suggests a meaningful possibility, a way in which the cosmos might work.

I think science is full of that sort of thing. I also suspect that if more young people knew it was full of that sort of thing, they’d be far more interested in science.