'You Must First Invent the Universe'

I interviewed Carl Sagan about three years before his death in 1996. The astronomer was charming, patient, friendly and one of the most articulate men I had ever met. He seemed to relish the act of thinking. Questions prompted thought, not prerecorded soundbites. I was prepared to find him a media-created mannequin. Instead, he was smart and attentive, not merely the star of Cosmos. Our interview soon turned into a conversation. George Santayana characterized sensibilities like Sagan’s in Realms of Being (1942): “A mind that would keep up with the truth must therefore be as nimble as the flux of existence. It must be a newspaper mind.” 

The line I remember most vividly from Cosmos has turned into a popular meme: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” In short, nothing is original in the human realm. Every invention is based on the inventiveness of our forebears. Combining and fine-tuning previous accomplishments and insights might constitute originality. Otherwise, creation is recycling.

 

On July 28, 1763, Johnson dined with Boswell at the Turk’s Head coffee-house. The conversation begins with Johnson’s criticisms of Swift and Sheridan, writers for whom he had little sympathy. As Boswell puts it, “the conversation then took a philosophical turn” and he reports Johnson saying:

 

"Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth. A system, built upon the discoveries of a great many minds, is always of more strength, than what is produced by the mere workings of any one mind, which, of itself, can do very little. There is not so poor a book in the world that would not be a prodigious effort were it wrought out entirely by a single mind, without the aid of prior investigators.”

 

Johnson isn’t disparaging writers and other creators. He is urging humility and a recognition of our ever-present precursors.

'A Form of Knowledge'

A reader asks why “Anecdotal Evidence”? I don’t have a definitive answer. When I covered courts as a newspaper reporter I would hear lawyers and judges casually disparage anecdotal evidence, as opposed to physical evidence or sworn testimony. In other words, it was less reliable, likelier to be dubious or fictional, and thus more like literature. The OED bolsters this understanding in its definition of anecdote: “a short account of an amusing, interesting, or telling incident or experience; sometimes with implications of superficiality or unreliability.” 

You and I dwell every day in the realm of anecdotal evidence. You go to the grocery, witness a shoplifter being taken away, and you go home and tell your spouse. We’re surrounded by anecdotes, assuming we’re paying attention, and as humans we instinctively share such stories, even with strangers. They form part of the civil contract. Anecdotes overlap significantly with what we usually prize as “good gossip,” another ingredient of the social glue. Dr. Johnson tells us in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775):

 

“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”

 

Another source was “Anecdote and Storyteller,” an essay by Irving Howe posthumously collected in A Critic’s Notebook (1994). Howe defines an anecdote as a “brief, unelaborated, often humorous account of a single incident, taken to be piquant in its own right.” And goes on: “One of its attractions is that in times of dislocation, the anecdote holds out the possibility that human beings may still connect, perhaps only briefly, through memory and story.” In the Spring 1992 issue of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein’s essay is titled “Merely Anecdotal.” He enjoys anecdotes and takes them seriously:

 

“If anecdotes are a form of knowledge -- about the zaniness of human behavior, about the shocking stupidity as well as the startling intelligence of people, about our irrationality, our unpredictability, our hopeless comicality -- then it is a form of knowledge that is cumulative and yet without end. If anecdotes teach anything at all, it is probably that it is best never to think we know the last word about any human heart, not even our own.”

 

[“Merely Anecdotal” is collected in Epstein’s 1995 essay collection With My Trousers Rolled.]

'Give Thanks, Give Thanks'

Already people are complaining about spring’s tardiness. This is Houston, where a week or two of cold, even a few brief dips below freezing, are likened to Shackleton in Antarctica. The garden has wilted, shifted from green to brown in weeks. Look at the bright side: you don’t have to mow the lawn. For the moment, no mosquitoes. In the North, February was one of my favorite months. 

Someone asked if I missed Northern winters, and I do, though winter at those latitudes is not one thing. Some years it means snow and cold and little else. Other years it’s a cycle of freezes and thaws, beginning in October or November and ending for good in May with the big thaw of summer, the season that seems like an anomaly, a mere interruption of winter. The best part is the thaw that arrives late in January or early in February, boosting the temperature into the forties or higher. It’s a thaw you can smell, especially in the woods. I think of it as slow-motion decomposition. The earth in patches is bare again and the mineral scent of rot – death turning into life – fills the woods. Skunk cabbage melts snow cover and sends up twisted purple buds, a false harbinger of true spring. It’s a tease, of course. A deep freeze soon follows, sometimes lasting into April.

 

See Aaron Poochigian’s “The Renaissance,” a paean to spring. He doesn’t say so but he’s writing of spring in New York City. An urban spring without skunk cabbage. Here is the final stanza, composed with Poochigian’s customary gusto:

 

“For here and now, this vernal

victory over the squally

season of melancholy

indulgence, for the diurnal

human madrigal

and hibiscus on terraced banks,

for the boon of ‘I’ at all,

give thanks, give thanks.”

 

Poochigian’s epigraph to the poem is from Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”: “In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise.”

'Hold Fast, Hold Fast to These'

“I use books to help me remember my life, to give that life fuller sense and broader contour.”

Some years I remember mostly for the books I read. Take 1970. Sure, I graduated from high school, we invaded Cambodia and the Beatles broke up. What I remember most vividly is for the first time having access to a university library. My life pivoted. Sure, some books I found with the aid of the catalog but I loved trolling the shelves, going floor to floor, trusting in bookish serendipity. That is literally how I discovered Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. I had never heard of either book or writer before finding them, read both cover to cover, and have reread them in the subsequent half-century.

 

That brings us to Ernest Hilbert’s sonnet “Cover to Cover,” which opens with a line every devoted reader will understand: “I don’t collect them. They just accumulate . . .” The sentence quoted at the top is from a prose passage by Hilbert that accompanies his poem. He writes:

 

“As I grow older, more and more volumes gather about me as well, like barnacles on the hide of an aging gray whale. I feel an intense animal affection for the books I’ve read, but I also experience their incredible weight as if it were on my very back. How many things do we actually hold in our hands, feel in so many ways for so long before relinquishing?”

 

Just the other day I discovered a poet new to me. James Reidel uses as an epigraph to Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (2003) these lines from Lindley Williams Hubbell’s “Angelology”: “The tragic view of life / Requires a degree of health than seldom persists / After forty.” A little poking around turned up Hubbell’s “Old Books” in the February 1938 issue of Poetry:

 

“Sappho’s dark hyacinth,

Prospero with his rod,

Achilles in his tent,

Saint Francis praising God:

 

“Hold fast, hold fast to these,

The sturdy and the few

That are more lovely than your love,

More actual than you.”

 

I’m not sure about that final sentiment but I’m sympathetic to “holding fast” to the “sturdy and the few,” including Burton, who writes in The Anatomy of Melancholy:

   

“Heinsius, the keeper of the library at Leyden in Holland, was mewed up in it all year long; and that to which thy thinking should have bred a loathing, caused in him a greater liking. ‘I no sooner’ (saith he) ‘come into the Library, but I bolt the doore to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idlenesse, the Mother of ignorance, and Melancholy her selfe, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine soules, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pitty all our great ones, and rich men that know not this happinesse.’”

 

Burton was born on this day, February 8, in 1577, and died in 1640 at age sixty-two.

'A Harmless Drudge'

After reading the February 3 post on “euphonious” words, a reader in the UK writes, “I wondered whether any particular dictionary definitions delighted you.” He adds: “I remember, in my late teens, having to look up the meaning of micturate; I’ve remembered the definition, with amusement, ever since: ‘the morbid propensity to urinate frequently.’” He guessed he had encountered the definition in The Chambers Dictionary but was unable to find it. A general internet search was also futile. 

By happy coincidence, today, February 7, is the 251^st anniversary of the letter Dr. Johnson wrote to Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield. In 1747, Johnson had published his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, outlining his intentions and methods for preparing the volume. Chesterfield published two anonymous essays endorsing the project. After seven years of almost single-handed labor, Johnson published the Dictionary on April 15, 1755 – without Chesterfield’s promised public patronage.

 

Johnson got his revenge in the Dictionary, where he defines patron as “one who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.” Of course, Johnson also defined lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” Plenty of Johnson’s definitions “delight” me, to use my reader’s word. As Macaulay put it, Johnson’s masterpiece is “the first dictionary that could be read with pleasure.” A Johnsonian sampler of delightful words and definitions:

 

Kissingcrust: “crust formed where one loaf in the oven touches another.”

 

Smellfeast: “a parasite; one who haunts good tables.”

 

Thabdomancy (a Sir Thomas Browne coinage): “divination by a wand.”

 

Hector: “a bully; a blustering, turbulent, pervicacious, noisy fellow.”

 

Some of Johnson’s definitions amount to compact moral essays or treatises. Take conscience: “the knowledge or faculty by which we judge of the goodness or wickedness of ourselves.”

'A Paradise and Cabinet of Rarities'

Among my sub-specialties as a newspaper reporter was writing profiles of people who collected things. I collected collectors, including men and women (predominantly men) who sought every variety of the world's sand, bowling alley memorabilia, wood samples from every species of tree, the coins and currency issued by leper colonies and, of course, beer cans. All showed a propensity for taxonomy, organizing their collections according to arcane theories of genus and species. It’s stupid and self-righteous to dismiss such people in glibly Freudian terms as anal retentive. My impression was that they cared deeply for something. They were enthusiasts and, in a sense, were celebrating the bounty of creation. In general, they were happy people who enjoyed showing others their collections.

 

John Evelyn (1620-1706), the renowned gardener and founding Fellow of the Royal Society, for sixty-six years kept a diary, published posthumously in 1818. Its six volumes contain more than half a million words, and I’m reading a selection. In the entry for October 16, 1671, Evelyn describes his “desire to see that famous scholar and physician, Dr. T[homas] Browne, author of the Religio Medici and Vulgar Errors, now lately knighted.” He continues:

 

“Next morning, I went to see Sir Thomas Browne . . . ; his whole house and garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities; and that of the best collection, especially medals, books, plants, and natural things. Among other curiosities, Sir Thomas had a collection of the eggs of all the fowl and birds he could procure, that country (especially the promontory of Norfolk) being frequented, as he said, by several kinds which seldom or never go further into the land, as cranes, storks, eagles, and variety of water fowl.”

 

I admire few writers of prose more than Browne. His writing is a form of collecting – words, ideas, scraps of knowledge – but I confess the collecting of birds’ eggs disturbs my twenty-first-century sensibilities (I don’t even eat eggs). It comes to seem like needless slaughter, an act not unlike abortion, especially today with all the other threats – loss of habitat, pesticides, etc. -- facing wildlife. I collected butterflies as a boy, which entailed netting, killing and mounting specimens. Nigel Andrew recounts his own evolving reaction to butterfly collecting in his marvelous  book The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband, 2025). According to the website of the American Ornithological Society:

 

“Egg collecting, or öology as it was once known, became illegal in the UK in 1954, and collectors have since been excoriated to such an extent than even the sight of a clutch of eggs in a museum can trigger an indignant outburst.”

'Discipline Imposed By Ourselves'

Marianne Moore died on this date, February 5 in 1972 at age eighty-four. She is a genuine homegrown American eccentric, writing in a manner borrowed, in part, from Henry James. Of him she wrote, “There was in him ‘the rapture of observation,’ but more unequivocally even than that, affection for family and country.” Her self-describing tag from James is taken from his 1875 short story “The Madonna of the Future.” As with Keats, I prefer Moore’s prose to her poetry. Regardless of fame, honors or critical recognition, a good or great writer amounts to a man or woman observing the world and turning what he sees into memorable, sometimes beautiful, sometimes savage words.

I started Anecdotal Evidence twenty years ago today, on February 5, 2006. I started in ignorance, not certain what I wanted to do, unsure of my digital skills. I have posted at least once every day since then – 7,595 times in total -- except for a brief spell in 2019 following spinal surgery. Writing a blog amounts to conducting an education in public. As I wrote on the occasion of the blog’s fifth anniversary: “If a day were to pass without a thought worthy of nurture, I would be a sorry writer. Arranging words in pleasing shapes, like a folk artist snipping tin for a weather vane, is what we do.” I try not to take myself too seriously while taking the writing very seriously.

 

I have many readers and covert teachers to thank. Among the personal dead: Guy Davenport, Kenneth Kurp, D.G. Myers, Helen Pinkerton, Terry Teachout. Among the public dead: Max Beerbohm, Whittaker Chambers, J.V. Cunningham, Dr. Johnson, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Oakeshott. Among the living: Nigel Andrew, Gary Baldridge, R.L. Barth, Elizabeth Conquest, Boris Dralyuk, Joseph Epstein, Joel Gershowitz, Dana Gioia, Cynthia Haven, Mike Juster, Thomas Parker, Jay Stribling, Rabbi David Wolpe, Mike Zim and many others. Above all, Dave Lull, my personal copy editor and style conscience since the early days of the blog.  

 

In her 1948 essay “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto,” Moore writes: “All of which is to say that gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves. Moreover, any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.” 

 

[Moore’s 1934 essay “Henry James As a Characteristic American” is one of her best. It’s collected in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, 1986), as is “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto.”]