`Everything Reverberates and Gains Value'

My friend Fran Manushkin, a children’s book author living in New York City, made my morning when she passed along a link to one of the blogs maintained by Sam Stephenson, director of the Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Don’t let the academic affiliation scare you away. Stephenson is obviously a bright, enthusiastic fellow with excellent taste in writing and music. Among the hobby-horses he rides are Whitney Balliett, Joseph Mitchell and Thelonious Monk – heroes all. He also possesses good common sense. Read this from a recent post on his personal blog:

“Balliett was one of the all-time great serial writers. How many MFA graduates would become great if they had regular serial outlets with hundreds of thousands of readers? We’ll never know, at least not for now. There’s nothing stopping any of us from churning out new writing on a weekly basis. But the days when it could be done on a regular paycheck, like Balliett, seem to be gone. Maybe that’s good in some ways. The writers who have something to say will find a way to say it. But I’d choose to be assured of a paycheck if I could.”

Balliett, of course, had a real and important subject, one he loved and understood like a scholar but without a scholar’s dry impersonality – namely, jazz -- and that gave him an advantage over most MFA graduates. For almost half a century, he covered his beat better than anyone and turned himself into one of the foremost American prose stylists, along with Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, his friends and teachers at The New Yorker. In the prefatory note to my favorite among all his books, Alec Wilder and His Friends (1974), Balliett writes:

“There is no New Journalism; Boswell invented modern literary reporting, and we have all been improvising on him ever since.”

On the Jazz Loft Project blog, Stephenson writes:

“I’d like to see everything Balliett wrote published in chronological order, 1954 to 2001. Most of his work, some seven hundred pieces, is collected in three books; his long profiles of musicians in American Singers and American Musicians II, and his shorter reviews and reportage in Collected Works: a Journal of Jazz. These books are wonderful, but something more dynamic happens when you read his work in sequence as it was originally published in the New Yorker, rather than forked out and reassembled by topic and format in these books. When his seminal long portraits are blended with his shorter album reviews and reports from gigs, concerts, and festivals, what unfolds is a panoramic, novelistic chronicle of post-War America. Everything reverberates and gains value. Fifty or a hundred years from now this new publication would be the most important single document of twentieth century American jazz outside of the recorded sound.”

If the Library of America can find room for H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick, surely they can wedge in two or three volumes of Balliett. Much of his work has never been collected in book form. I recall several reviews about a decade ago in The New York Review of Books – of God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church by Caroline Fraser and Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens – and even some scattered poems.

Thanks to Fran I’ve also picked up a copy of Stephson’s most recent book, The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue 1957-1965 (2009). Fran adds in her e-mail: “His [Balliett’s] daughter, Blue, is a kids' novelist and I saw her signing her new book at the librarians' convention in D.C. a few days ago. I guess the name `Blue’ was good for her!”

`Lines of Heartbreaking Beauty'

Thanks to Dave Lull for alerting me to a profile/interview with Geoffrey Hill and three of his poems – “Sei Madrigali,” “Hiraeth” and “Odi Barbare” (in all, 227 lines of new verse) -- in Standpoint. Included with “Hiraeth” is this note: “from Oraclau / Oracles, forthcoming from the Clutag Press.” That’s the press that published the first version of A Treatise of Civil Power, in 2005, recast and published under the same title by Yale University Press in 2007.

In the interview we learn Hill has completed four unpublished books of poems in the last three years and is working on a fifth – this from a man who turns seventy-eight in September. Sample the characteristic Hill density in two stanzas from Section II of “Odi Barbare”:

“Rumpus uncouth anacolutha bullish
Metamorphs treading out a line the luckless
Fetishizing blood of the lucky victims
Rote ruination”

“Rimini marred Pisa the slew of armies
Apennine muscular brusque torrents voiding
Panzers Anzacs out of the rocky slurry
Mud-wrestled corpses”

Soothe yourself with this common-sensical passage from Chris Woodhead’s profile/interview:

“[Hill’s] critics allege that his poems are impenetrably difficult. The truth is that every first reading is likely to yield lines of heartbreaking beauty (`the may-tree filling/with visionary silent laughter’; or `The marvellous webs are rimed with eternity’) and wry humour (`I wish I understood myself/more clearly or less well’). Most readers will find his range of reference (from, for example, Dame Helen Mirren to Thomas Bradwardine) challenging, but a good search engine helps pretty quickly to fill in the gaps in your knowledge.”

`By Paradox, Alone'

Another passage from Sir Thomas Browne’s Christian Morals (Part 3, Section IX) swarming with metaphors, learning, humor and life:

“Unthinking Heads, who have not learn'd to be alone, are in a Prison to themselves, if they be not also with others: Whereas on the contrary, they whose thoughts are in a fair, and hurry within, are sometimes fain to retire into Company, to be out of the crowd of themselves. He who must needs have Company, must needs have sometimes bad Company. Be able to be alone. Loose not the advantage of Solitude, and the Society of thy self, nor be only content, but delight to be alone and single with Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the Day is not uneasy nor the Night black unto him…”

Obvious but wise and practical advice: “Be able to be alone.” I enjoy good company, including my own. We all know unfortunates unable to savor solitude. For them, the crowd, noise and distraction – essential features of my vision of hell. Equanimity in solitude feels like part of one’s preparation for death, the ultimate and inevitable solitude. In Part 3, Section XX, of Christian Morals, Browne writes:

“Though the World be Histrionical, & most Men live Ironically, yet be thou what thou singly art, and personate only thy self. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy Nature, and live but one Man. To single Hearts doubling is discruciating: such tempers must sweat to dissemble, and prove but hypocritical Hypocrites. Simulation must be short: Men do not easily continue a counterfeiting Life, or dissemble unto Death.”

A man comfortable in solitude, even in pleasant company, is likelier prepared for life and death. Reading Browne, who I’ve come to think of as a trusted, dotty uncle, reminds me of L.E. Sissman’s final poem, “Tras Os Montes” (Hello, Darkness: Collected Poems, 1978). Sissman died at age forty-eight of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1976. His best, final poems concern illness, hospitals and death, and are witty, exuberant, playful and brave – not a self-pitying whine in the bunch. “Tras Os Montes” memorializes the deaths of his mother (1892-1973) and father (1895-1974) and the imminence of his own – “(197-).” The mountains of the title refer to three ascents he makes in the poem – first with friends, then his wife, then “Alone.” This Brownean passage is from that final section:

“The long march up the fulvous ridgebacks to
The marches, the frontiers of difference –
Where flesh marches with bone, day marches with
His wife the night, and country marches with
Another country -- is accomplished best,
By paradox, alone. A world of twos,
Of yangs and yins, of lives and objects, of
Sound grasses and deaf stones, is best essayed
By sole infiltrators who have cast off
Their ties to living moorings, and stand out
Into the roads of noon approaching night
Casting a single shadow, earnest of
Their honorable intention to lay down
Their lives for their old country, humankind,
In the same selfish spirit that inspired
Their lifelong journey, largely and at last
Alone…”

The poem, like Browne’s book, ends with a jaunty desolate “FINIS.”

`A Collection of Moments'

“Some Saian mountaineer
Struts today with my shield.
I threw it down by a bush and ran
When the fighting got hot.
Life seemed somehow more precious.
It was a beautiful shield.
I know where I can buy another
Exactly like it, just as round.”

The poet is Archilochos, the translator Guy Davenport (7 Greeks, 1995). Davenport describes Archilochos (c. 680 B.C. – c. 645 B.C.) as “the second poet of the West” – that is, after Homer. We’re left with teasing scraps of his words, as with most of the early Greeks. Davenport writes:

“We have what grammarians quote to illustrate a point of dialect or interesting use of the subjunctive; we have brief quotations by admiring critics; and we have papyrus fragments, scrap paper from the households of Alexandria, with which third-class mummies were wrapped and stuffed. All else is lost. Horace and Catullus, like all cultivated readers, had Archilochos complete in their libraries.”

Despite the corrosions of time Archilochos leaves us with the sense of a sovereign voice, a collection of memorable human moments, a recognizable individual speaking to other individuals about things he thinks might interest them – fear, acquisitiveness, an aesthetic sense, a wry acceptance of one’s fate. Elberry has been reading Davenport (The Geography of the Imagination, Eclogues), investing a portion of his paltry teacher’s salary to acquire his books, and says this of Davenport’s translation (in an e-mail with the subject line “prudence”):

“The poem seems quietly faithful to the momentary sense of things, without elaboration or explanation - because, to quote V Woolf, the moment is enough - everything is given in these moments, all you have to do is record them, be faithful to the moment, without trying to make it something it isn't (but that is no easy thing).”

Two sorts of memory come to me when I recall my past: general impressions, as when I remember two years lived in Indiana (and this sort of recollection feels processed, second-hand, edited), and photographically vivid moments, combinations of event, sensory data and emotional content. The former are vague and useful; the latter, specific and precious. The vivid sort I acquire involuntarily. They happen, and I suspect cannot be willed. Oliver Sacks, in a footnote to Awakenings, describes the memory-inducing qualities of L-DOPA on his patients:

“These sudden revocations of personal memories have nothing of the `dead’ quality of re-run documentaries, but are experienced as intensely moving re-livings of one’s past, vital recollections (akin to those of the analysand or artist) by which one recollects one’s `lost’ identity, one’s continuity with the forgotten past. The quality of these recaptured moments shows us the quality of experience itself, and reminds us (as Proust is continually at pains to show) that our memories, our selves, our very existences, consist entirely of a collection of moments.”

“Be faithful to the moment,” as Elberry says. They’re nearly all we have.

`This Internal Militia'

In Awakenings, after giving us the case histories of twenty patients he roused from decades of sleeping sickness with L-DOPA – the most elegantly literate case histories you’ll ever read – Oliver Sacks reflects on them in a section titled “Perspectives.” His reflections, though rooted in recent research in medicine and pharmacology, have a seventeenth-century flavor about them, recalling the meditations of that other physician-writer, Sir Thomas Browne. Here is Sacks:

“Our sense that there is something the matter, that we are ill or in error, that we have departed from health, that we are possessed by disorder and no longer ourselves – this is basic and intuitive in us; and so too is the sense of coming to or awakening, of resipiscence or recovery, being restored to ourselves and the world: the sense of health, of being well, fully alive, in-the-world.”

The style is rich without exhibitionism. There’s a sense of striving after precision, and the striving is part of the story, for Sacks is exploring an ineffable region where disease and health, medicine and psychology, overlap and mingle. Without explicitly saying so, he’s searching for an elastic definition of what it means to be human. Sacks describes such language as “metaphysical terms – the terms we use for infinite things.”

My spell-check software fails to recognize one of Sacks’ terms – resipiscence. In his Dictionary, Johnson defines this Johnsonian word as “wisdom after the fact; repentance.” The Latin root is helpful: resipiscere, “to become reasonable again; recover, come to the senses.” The word first shows up in Awakenings some one hundred and sixty pages earlier in the first case history, devoted to Frances D.:

“…the attack would finally end quite suddenly, with restoration of normal movement, speech, and thought (this sudden restoration of normal consciousness Miss D. – a crossword addict – would call `resipiscence’).”

It’s typical of Sacks to give this lovely, faintly antiquated word to one of his patients. Throughout Awakenings he's equally generous with borrowings from both medical and literary writers, in particular Donne and Browne. On the second page of the “Perspectives” section he quotes from the latter’s Christian Morals, Part 1, Section XXIV:

“To well manage our Affections, and wild Horses of Plato, are the highest Circenses; and the noblest Digladiation is in the Theater of our selves: for therein our inward Antagonists, not only like common Gladiators, with ordinary Weapons and down right Blows make at us, but also like Retiary and Laqueary Combatants, with Nets, Frauds, and Entanglements fall upon us. Weapons for such combats are not to be forged at Lipara: Vulcan's Art doth nothing in this internal Militia…”

I love Browne’s verbal riffs. “Circenses” we know from panem et circenses, “bread and circuses,” first used in Juvenal’s “Satire X” and meaning the acquisition and retention of political power through empty populist gestures – giving the people what they want. “Circuses” would include the Roman gladitorial games, reiterated by Browne with “Digladiation.” “Retiary” means resembling a net and “Laqueary” is an adjective that means using a noose, as a gladiator might. “Lipara” is the Latin name for the Sicilian island of Lipari, part of the volcanic archipelago between Vesuvius and Etna. Vulcan was the god of volcanic fire.

Sacks endorses Browne’s schema of disease and health as inner conflict, a sort of elevated gladiatorial contest. After the Browne passage he writes:

“These are the terms in which we experience health and disease, and which we naturally use in speaking of them. They neither require nor admit definition; they are understood at once, but defy explanation; they are at once exact, intuitive, obvious, mysterious, irreducible, and indefinable. They are metaphysical terms – the terms we use for infinite things. They are common to colloquial, poetic, and philosophical discourse. And they are indispensible terms in medical discourse, which unites all of these. `How are you?’, `How are things?’, are metaphysical questions, infinitely simple and infinitely complex.”

`An Enlargement of the Mind's Real Resources'

“The approach to perfection in literature is marked, as we know, by a stripping of the vocabulary; the number of words used diminishes, but the number of their different uses increases: and this shrinkage of `material’ emphasizes an enlargement of the mind’s real resources, of its ability to simplify and combine.”

The impossible audacity of “perfection in literature” thrilled me on first reading. That a writer could proceed with such confidence as late as 1945, when Paul Valéry published “The Physical Aspects of a Book” (also the year of his death), is cause for cautious hope: Perhaps not every writer has lost his artistic nerve. Two writers, most of whose work dates from the post-war period, came to mind as filling some of Valéry’s daunting prescription – J.V. Cunningham and Samuel Beckett.

The American poet produced some of the most compact verse composed since the Elizabethan Age. Guy Davenport said his poems are “as well made as wristwatches.” Such concision, rich and never desiccated in Cunningham’s hands, results in greater attention paid to individual words as units of sound and sense. Thus, “their different uses increases” and the fat is gone. Without desiccation or fat, what’s left but muscle? Take #12 from To What Strangers, What Welcome (1964), subtitled A Sequence of Short Poems:

“Absence, my angel, presence at my side,
I know you as an article of faith
By desert, prairie, and this stonewalled road—
As much my own as is the thought of death.”

No archaisms or jargon, no vocabulary exceeding the command of a bright second- or third-grader, even in American public schools, yet no one would mistake these four lines for light or children’s verse. In his essay “Several Kinds of Short Poem” (The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham, 1976), Cunningham says the fifteen-poem sequence “relate[s] some sort of illicit and finally terminated love affair.” Surely “an enlargement of the mind’s real resources.”

With Beckett we watch a lifelong condensation, a famously scornful jettisoning of superfluity. The result is prose with the density of poetry but seldom “poetic” in the cheap sense. Take the opening sentences of “Stirrings Still,” Beckett’s final work, published the year before his death in 1989 at age eighty-three:

“One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. One night or day. For when his own light went out he was not left in the dark. Light of a kind came from the one high window. Under it still the stool on which till he could or would no more he used to mount to see the sky. Why he did not crane out to see what lay beneath was perhaps because the window was not made to open or because he could or would not open it. Perhaps he knew only too well what lay beneath and did not wish to see it again.”

The plainness of vocabulary is notable. Read the fifth sentence aloud, slowly, and savor the consonants. “Simplify and combine.”

[The Valéry essay is included in Aesthetics, volume thirteen of the sixteen-volume Collected Works of Paul Valéry.]

`Both Wallers, Edmund and Fats'

In his elegy for a friend and fellow poet, “To L.E. Sissman, 1928-1976” (The Transparent Man, 1990), Anthony Hecht writes:

“Dear friend, whose poetry of Brooklyn flats
And poker sharps broadcasts the tin pan truths
Of all our yesterdays, speaks to our youths
In praise of both Wallers, Edmund and Fats…”

Any friend of the Wallers is a friend of mine. Edmund Waller (1606-1687), whom Samuel Johnson describes as “too young to resist beauty, and probably too vain to think himself resistable,” is a modest, sober-minded poet not of the first or second rank, best remembered for that anthology war horse:

“Go, lovely Rose—
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.”

More to contemporary taste is Thomas “Fats” Waller (1904-1943), composer of another roseate song, “Honeysuckle Rose,” introduced as a dance number in the 1929 revue Load of Coal. The lyrics are by Waller’s longtime collaborator Andy Razaf:

“When you're passin' by,
Flowers droop and sigh,
And I know the reason why,
You're my sweety, goodness knows,
Oh, honey ! suckle rose!”

The continuity of lyrical content across three centuries, shared by an English parliamentarian and two black American showmen, is remarkable. But so is the swing, if I can apply such a quality to Edmund Waller’s little song. Listen to its closing couplet:

“How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!”

Imagine Fats tickling those iambs. As the Rag King says: “…you are the music / While the music lasts.”

`Co-Explorers in the Uncanny Realm'

“I open [a book]: it speaks. I close it and it becomes a thing to be looked at. Thus more than anything else in the world, it resembles a man. At first approach, a man is his form and color; next his voice strikes us, and finally his voice is transformed into a mind that mingles with our own.”

In the library I watched a boy I know from our special-education program signing out a tall stack of comic books, more than he could comfortably carry. Adults I took to be his parents stood beside him, waiting to help. I don’t know if he can read, or how well, and I’m not certain of his diagnosis though I assume autism. In class he carries on a ceaseless commentary, a monologue composed of wishes, observations, anecdotes, songs and nonsense syllables. He’s sunny and good-natured but given to periodic fits of anger and stubbornness. I like him.

When he and his parents turned, the father carrying most of the comics, I greeted the boy by name and identified myself to the adults. He smiled, greeted me and repeated the name of our school several times as a question, with a little interrogatory lift at the end of words. At some level he recognized me but our unfamiliar context made my presence alien and difficult to place. His parents, sensitized by years of commonplace confusions and pleased I had acknowledged their son, understood my gesture and reinforced it. They wished to be polite, to support their son and avoid an embarrassing public scene.

I have no philosophy when it comes to such things, no codified rules of conduct. As in most of my life, I try to rely on intuition, common sense and courtesy. The kids I work with are mysteries without definitive solutions, like the rest of us. To reduce a person to his diagnosis (or sex, or race, or nationality, or whatever) makes life easier for us at the expense of his individual existence, which must be at least as complicated as our own.

The passage at the top of this post is from “The Physical Aspects of a Book,” an essay by Paul Valéry in Aesthetics (volume thirteen of the sixteen-volume Collected Works of Paul Valéry). I like the notion of people-as-books, and vice-versa, a metaphor that flowers for so long as we think about it. Our introduction to others begins with appearance, and is notoriously misleading. Then the voice, likewise, but Valéry reminds us that voice is the mind’s expression. With patience, trust and respect, another mind “mingles with our own.” (Edgar Bowers describes Valéry as “Humbling his pride by trying to write well.”)

In his second book, Awakenings (1973), Oliver Sacks suggests something similar in a footnote to his prologue. Sacks is a neurologist who worked, starting in the nineteen-sixties, with survivors of the encephalitis lethargica pandemic that occurred in the wake of World War I. They had been “asleep” for almost half a century and were “awakened” when treated with a new medication, L-DOPA. Their “sleeping-sickness” resembled Parkinson’s disease. Suggesting that physicians, researchers and caregivers ought to establish “a collaboration, a participation, a relation” with such patients, Sacks writes:

“Indeed we must go further, for if – as we have reason to suspect – our patients may be subject to experiences as strange as the motions they show, they may need much help, a delicate and patient and imaginative collaboration, in order to formulate the almost-unformulable, in order to communicate the almost incommunicable. We may be co-explorers in the uncanny realm of being-Parkinsonism, this land beyond the boundaries of common experience; but our quarry in this strange country will not be `specimens,’ data, or `facts,’ but images, similitudes, analogies, metaphors – whatever may assist to make the strange familiar, and to bring into the thinkable the previously unthinkable.”

We're all “co-explorers” in the uncanny human realm but some of us are a little handier with metaphors.

`The Riddled Trunk'

“It attracted me because it was not a formless thing but one whose parts and aspects manifested an interrelation, a sequence and harmony as it were, that enabled me, after a single look, to conceive and foresee the aspects I had not yet examined. Its parts are joined by something more than the cohesion and solidity of matter.”

My seven-year-old and I were on a nature scavenger hunt in the woods behind the Lutheran church where his Cub Scout pack meets. We had a list of sixty-three objects to find in twenty minutes. Some from the start were hopeless on a cool June evening in the Pacific Northwest – a snake, a frog, a lizard. Others were throwaways – “the funniest thing you saw” (a middle-aged father with Bermuda shorts and tattoos on his calves).

We found forty-nine items on the list, including a robin’s egg, an earthworm and holly berries, but our proudest find was a cedar stump almost covered with mushrooms that looked a bit like this and this but denser, with almost no bark showing. The stump from a distance appeared terraced with gray and silver-gray balconies like a futuristic condo. Some were dry and hard as wood, others moist and still growing. Even mycophobes could admire this creation, something so unlikely, elegant and formally regular as to resemble sculpture, surely of human origin.

“If groves are choirs and sanctuaried fanes,
What have we here? An elm-bole cocks a bloody ear;
In the oak's shadow lies a strew of brains.
Wherever, after the deep rains,
The woodlands are morose and reek of punk
These gobbets grow —
Tongue, lobe, hand, hoof or butchered toe
Amassing on the fallen branch half-sunk
In leaf-mold, or the riddled trunk.”

And where does this come from? Beowulf? Christopher Logue’s reimagining of The Iliad? No, from “Children of Darkness,” published by Richard Wilbur, that supposed tatterer of filigree, in The Mind-Reader: New Poems (1976). The title refers to mushrooms, which inspire revulsion and hunger, fear and admiration. Wilbur celebrates both qualities as well as the role of fungus in the life-and-death cycle of the natural (and human) world:

“Light strikes into a gloom in which are found
Red disc, grey mist,
Gold-auburn firfoot, amethyst,
Food for the eye whose pleasant stinks abound,
And dead men's fingers break the ground.”

Here in Washington primitive and enterprising lifeforms flourish – mushrooms, mildew, lichens, algae, yeasts, toadstools, slimes, all sorts of fungi and tattoo-wearers. The cause is so much moisture, so little sunlight and so many sheltering trees. The Dutch biologist Midas Dekkers writes in The Way of All Flesh (2000):

“Where fungi are found, humidity is usually so high that’s it’s almost impossible to stop the decay. No fungi can survive in less than 20 per cent humidity, and to settle somewhere they need much more than that.”

Eric Ormsby in “Wood Fungus” (from Time’s Covenant, 2007) comes closest to describing what David and I found in the suburban wilds of Bellevue, Wa. (the title is the start of the first line):

“juts in grey hemispheres like a horse’s lip
from tree-trunks. The outer edge is crimped
in sandy ripples and resembles surf.
The upper plane of the fungus does not shine
but is studious beige and dun, the hue
of shoe-soles or the underside of pipes.

“Jawbone-shaped, inert as moons, neutral
entablatures, they apron bark and pool
rain. Underneath they’re darker, fibrous
and shagged.
Mountain artists like to etch
intricate patterns on their flat matte skins
and their tobacco-bright sketch-marks look burnt
as tattoos or tribal tangles of scars.

“When you grip their surfaces, they bruise.
When you pry them from their chosen oak,
they seem shut fast, like the eyes of sleepers,
or the tensed eyelids of children when they’re scared.”

This post's opening paragraph I took from “Man and the Sea Shell,” an essay by Paul Valéry in Aesthetics (volume thirteen of the sixteen-volume Collected Works of Paul Valéry). Valéry describes his reaction to a shell found on the beach. In the mass of mushrooms growing on the cedar stump I observed an “interrelation, a sequence and harmony” similar to what he perceived in his shell, and there is certainly more to these lovely organisms than “the cohesion and solidity of matter.”

`A Dusty Haze of Pollen'

I see a lot of things on the way to the trash bins at the side of the house. The largest bin is blue and holds paper and plastics for recycling. Next comes the container for yard-waste, green and aromatic after two years of vegetable fermentation (the noisome marinade on the bottom is black). Then there’s the smaller gray bin for old-fashioned trash. All are made of plastic (recyclable, I trust). Monday morning I saw something on the side of the gray bin near the ground and mistook it for a wood chip. It was a moth of mottled brown, about two and half inches long. Rather drab, I thought, but I don’t know enough about moths and decided to take a closer look.

It climbed onto my finger and I carried him to the glass doors leading to the kitchen so my younger sons could see him. The 9-year-old thought I was holding a cockroach but lost interest when he saw it was a homely moth. When I touched the insect’s back it spread its brown forewings and revealed another self. The hindwings are the color of a pumpkin, orange cut with a hint of rusty brown. I thought of dry brown maple leaves in autumn reversing chronology and turning ostentatiously orange. In “Moths at Nightfall” (from Time’s Covenant, 2007) Eric Ormsby describes moths as having “madras wings, graced / With a dusty haze of pollen.”

I looked through a couple of guides, print and electronic, and concluded I had been visited by a male yellow underwing, Noctua pronuba, a Eurasian species named by Linnaeus in 1758. I kept him on my desk under an inverted glass until the cat tried to knock it over. Only after I released him did I remember he arrived two hours after the arrival of the summer solstice, though the morning was damp, cold and gray.

`The Principle That Is Hid'

In our encounters with some things we feel attraction and repulsion in virtually equal proportions: pâté, pink, Pound’s poems. There’s no precise word in English for this state – ambivalence is nebulous and over-emphasizes repulsion. That’s a shame because with some things indifference is not an option but neither is hearty endorsement. We’re venturing into terrain Henry James mapped, where discrimination is measured by the nuance, and shades of gray, that misunderstood color, are numberless.

Take the snail. While carrying trash to the bin I saw it on the wall of the shed – the spiraled shell gray-brown and wider than a nickel, its “stomach-foot” marbled with more grays and browns. I see their mucous trails on the patio at the back of the house but most days the snails disappear with the dawn. This one trailed glue, foot and eye-tipped tentacles extended, moving in perfect perpendicularity to the roof line. Its life-saving coat of snot is repugnant. So are fantasies of its foot suction-cupped, Alien-fashion, to one’s face. But the shell is exquisite, a marvel of calcium carbonate, Fibonaccian perfection (see Paul Valery’s Sea Shells), even this drab little specimen. In “To a Snail,” Marianne Moore never mentions its beauty, repugnance or, thank goodness, its proverbial slowness:

“If `compression is the first grace of style,’
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, `a method of conclusions’;
`a knowledge of principles,’
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.”

Is “feet” here a unit of prosody? The quoted phrase in the first line is from On Style, a treatise by Demetrius, the Greek critic from the third century B.C., though in her notes Moore identifies the author as Democritus. She names Duns Scotus as the source of the other quoted material. Her interest is aesthetics not natural history. The snail’s strategy, like the poet’s, is clandestine.

An hour later, the sky still low and gray, the snail was gone, leaving only a dry glistening trail.

`Ramming the Ebb'

The boys threw handfuls of sticky brown fish-meal pellets into black water and watched it explode with snapping salmon jaws and white bellies. This is the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery on the Issaquah Creek, home to twenty-thousand fish returning each September. The main building was a 1935 WPA project. The place is part farm, part factory, part salmon-theme park. Nature is regulated and no salmon are strictly “wild,” though they swim past Canada, up the Alaskan coast and back.

Growing out of cracks in the concrete wall flanking the creek were two mulleins, one resembling a large flattened structurally perfect artichoke. Yellow flowers on the other were just opening. In “Mullein,” Eric Ormsby says the velvet-leafed plant “grows big and green where other green things die” and “domesticates / Small desolations.” From a distance I saw a crow hopping and picking at something on a bare spot in a nearby field. When I walked over and he flew off I noticed he had only one leg, which accounts for the hopping. He left behind fragments of peanut shell.

Our guide was vague and unfocused but grew articulate when asked specific questions. Casually she used the language of salmon biology, much of it lovely, monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon in origin. I wrote some of it in my notebook:

Alevin: larval salmon fresh from the egg.
Redd: depression in river-bottom gravel created by the female salmon's body and tail, into which she deposits hundreds of eggs.
Fry: alevin that have left their yolk sacs
Parr: salmon several months old which have developed markings on their sides.
Smolt: parr that have turned silver in color, lost their markings and are ready to journey down river. Etymologically related to smelt.
Kelts: adult salmon that survive after spawning.
Kype: the hooked snout of males used to fend off other males during spawning
Milt: salmon sperm.

The names of the salmon’s sexes are borrowed from other species -- males are bucks and females hens. We also saw a weir, a low dam in the creek. Perhaps because Geoffrey Hill on Friday was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, I saw traces of his poems everywhere. In the weir, for instance, Section XCVI from The Triumph of Love, 1998:

“Ignorant, assured, there comes to us a voice—
Unchallengeable—of the foundations,
distinct authority devoted
to indistinction. With what proximity
to justice stands the record of mischance,
heroic hit-or-miss, the air
so full of flak and tracer, legend says,
you pray to live unnoticed. Mr Ives
took Emersonian self-reliance the whole
way on that. Melville, half-immolated,
rebuilt the pyre. Hoist, some time later,
stumbled on dharma. What can I say?—
At worst and best a blind ennoblement,
flood-water, hunched, shouldering at the weir,
the hatred that is in the nature of love.”

And then the relentlessly procreative salmon themselves. The first poem in Hill’s first book, For the Unfallen (1959), is “Genesis,” one he subsequently dismissed as juvenilia. All those roiling fish in concrete tanks reminded me of this stanza from the first section:

“And where the streams were salt and full
The tough pig-headed salmon strove,
Ramming the ebb, in the tide’s pull,
To reach the steady hills above.”

`The Whole World Is a Phylactery'

Another metaphor for the blogging enterprise comes to mind. Call them cabinets of wonder, cabinets of curiosities, Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer -- already they are metaphors for the curious bounty of the world. Sir Thomas Browne, himself the proprietor of Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia and other cabinets of wonder, a luxuriant prose style and arcane learning, writes in Christian Morals:

“To thoughtful observers, the whole world is a phylactery, and everything we see is an item of the Wisdom, Power and Goodness of God.”

Even a secular sensibility recognizes that “everything we see,” perceived with sufficient curiosity, imagination, memory and learning, is connected. There is no isolation, no island-hood. Among books, models are numerous: some of the curious creations of Montaigne, Rabelais, Swift and Sterne, Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s journals, Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, William James' Principles of Psychology, Joyce’s final two novels and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (bathed in Browne’s benisons). Near-models are Pope’s The Dunciad, Coleridge’s Biographica Literaria, Lamb’s essays and Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm. What distinguishes them is a grab-bag quality, plentiful anecdotes and evidence of learning, preserved from chaos by suffusion with the personalities of their authors.

In his review of Louis Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963), Guy Davenport writes: “[This] is a book that belongs to that scarce genre which we can only call a book, like Boswell’s Johnson, Burton’s incredible Anatomy, Walton’s Compleat Angler.” In other words, a genre without rules or definitions, one recognized by its failure to remain fixed by genre. I would add Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination to the heap. Among blogs, Mike Gilleland’s is the peerless example. You might find anything at Laudator Temporis Acti (books, trees, etymologies) and know with confidence it will prove a phylactery worthy of your attention.

`Childish in the Proper and Complimentary Sense'

“Plato held, and the child holds, that the most important thing about a ship (let us say) is that it is a ship…all these pictures are designed to express things in their quiddity. If these old artists draw a ship, everything is sacrificed to expressing the `shipishness’ of the ship.”

Several special-education students, higher-functioning kids than those in our room, were still at school Thursday morning as we cleaned and packed. There’s one boy I’ve never worked with directly but whose company I enjoy. I once helped him find the winter coat he had lost in the men’s locker room. That broke the ice. I like him because he’s spirited and funny and gets raw pleasure from laughing. He laughs with his entire body, without embarrassment, gums exposed and spit flying.

I don’t remember how it started but a couple of months ago we began barking at each other as we passed in the hall or on campus. We improvised a vast canine repertoire, eventually moving on to whimpers, panting, paw-giving, tail-wagging and so on. Our routine variously puzzles, annoys and amuses staff and students, which is just about the right mix of reactions you would expect to anything that gives pleasure. I do something similar with another student, a girl, except we make pig sounds.

While washing dishes in the kitchen Thursday morning I heard behind me the familiar bark-greeting. I replied in kind before turning my head and there he was, grinning and holding out a large wad of folded construction paper. “This is for you,” he said, and I took it and opened the page. On it he had drawn a perfect minimalist dog. There’s nothing crude or “cute” about it. There’s no mistaking it for anything but a member of the family Canidae, though the breed is less certain.

“It’s a dog,” he said, barking. The drawing amounts to seven curved lines of varying lengths – simple, elegant, beautiful. I had no idea this kid could draw (he can’t read or do elementary math). I thought of the passage quoted above from “The Grave-digger,” a brief essay collected in Chesterton on Shakespeare (edited by Dorothy Collins, Dufour Editions, 1971). The piece is ostensibly devoted to the grave-digger in Hamlet but Chesterton ranges about, beginning with a look at the medieval books he finds in the Rylands Library in Manchester. The “old artists” he refers to illuminated the manuscripts. He continues:

“These pictures are childish in the proper and complimentary sense of the word. They are childish in this sense, that they are Platonists. When we are very young and vigorous and human we believe in things; it is only when we are very old and dissolute and decaying that we believe in the aspects of things. To see a thing in aspects is to be crippled, to be defective.”

Chesterton never uses the word “realistic” and neither will I. Is the boy’s sketch of a dog “realistic.” I don’t know but it’s deftly drawn and uncluttered, like a passage in Hamlet (“the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!”) or a good dog impression.

`They Understand All Too Well'

I’m in class for the final three hours and fifteen minutes of the school year today. We’ll be vacuuming and disinfecting our special-education room, ridding the refrigerator of forgotten lunches, stripping posters from the walls and stowing toys and electronic gear in cupboards for the summer. This is the work performed by teachers and staff out of the presence of students, who probably don’t even suspect it has to be done. My schoolday memories remain vivid so I feel like a playgoer chosen to stand backstage and watch the artifice dismantled.

Wednesday was the final day for the kids at our high school. The girl I’ve worked with for four months, who turned nineteen on Tuesday, I won’t see again until late in August when school resumes. She was giddy and bouncy all day, prompting teachers who don’t know her to say, “Isn’t she happy! What a happy girl!” but we know laughter means she’s due for another seizure, perhaps as early as this morning. It’s difficult to watch portents of devastating neural explosions mistaken for happiness, and I don’t even try to explain.

My last sight of my student was in her seat on the school bus. I had fastened her harness and buckled her safety belt, rubbed her head, squeezed her shoulder and hoped for the best. I turned while stepping down to the sidewalk and saw she had lowered her head to her chest. She was crying softly and I walked up the hill and back to my car.

“Unfortunately, children do not always want to understand, though sometimes, when one would prefer that they didn’t, they understand all too well.”

A long time ago I copied into a notebook a sentence from one of the fairy tale-like stories, “The Problem Child,” William Maxwell published in The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing (1966).

`The Departure of a Once-Useful Word'

Kingsley Amis was surely the wisest, funniest drunk ever to grace belle-lettres, except for Flann O’Brien. As a revivifying break from Emerson I’ve been browsing in the steroidal Letters of Kingsley Amis (2000), edited by Zachary Leader, and finding much to laugh out loud about. In a 1993 letter to Paul Fussell, the American critic then working on The Anti-Egoist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters (1994), after referring to Jane Austen as “a 2nd-rate pisser while still at school,” Amis writes:

“While I’m about it, I’ll take you to task for your trendy use of perception. When Sam J[ohnson] said of whomever, `Sir, I perceive that you are a vile Whig,’ he meant not `My view of you is that you are a v.W.’ (whereas Bozzy’s [James Boswell’s] view of you might be something else), but `I see through to the truth, which is that you are a v.W.’ There used to be only one true perception, now there are as many as the people doing the perceiving, One more tiny but revealing example of the lefty movement to dethrone absolute or objective truth and institute a republic of equally `valid’ relative truths. So watch it, Jack.”

Amis refers to a well-known episode in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. It’s 1772, Johnson is sixty-three years old, and Boswell has just introduced him to Sir Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), a Scottish philosopher and historian:

“Sir Adam suggested, that luxury corrupts a people, and destroys the spirit of liberty. JOHNSON. `Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of Government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual. Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private man….SIR ADAM. `But, Sir, in the British constitution it is surely of importance to keep up a spirit in a people, so as to preserve a balance against the crown. JOHNSON. `Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig.—Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the crown? The crown has not power enough. When I say that all governments are alike, I consider that in no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.”

Hardly the words of a stereotypical monarchist. How long since you’ve heard such straight talk about government? Recall, too, that Johnson had never met Ferguson when he launched this verbal cannonade. It’s easy to dispense with social niceties when people utter idiocies with conviction. Amis is right: In his Dictionary, Johnson’s second definition of “perception” is “knowledge” – not “opinion.” not “feeling.”

Amis includes the same Johnsonian example in his entry for “Perceive, perception” in The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997). He writes:

“[Perceive] is almost a synonym for see, except that a degree of effort or special ability is implied. But whatever you perceived was understood to be really there.”

Of Johnson’s reply to Ferguson, Amis writes:

“…he certainly did not mean to say anything as wishy-washy as that his uneven and temporary view of the chap took him to be some sort of vile Whig; he meant he now knew the other chap was a depraved supporter of parliament rather than crown, etc. As Johnson would have known, the Latin roots of perceive indicate that it meant to grasp thoroughly.”

Amis concludes the entry like this:

“Such is a common result of verbal innovation: instead of anything valuable, it causes either muddle or the departure of a once-useful word.”

`Nothing But a Soft Mush or Jelly'

To the left of our front door are the remains of a cedar cut down before we moved in two years ago but not fully decomposed. The stump is four inches tall, eighteen inches across and stands about six inches from the house. Obviously someone skilled with a chainsaw leveled it. Saturday morning I noticed a disc of pale yellow about two inches across on top of the stump. It looked like scrambled eggs or saffron rice and I assumed it was a slime mold, though it looked appetizing.

By Saturday afternoon the blob had turned brown as a toasted bagel. Sunday morning it looked like molten horehound candy. By Monday it was a carbonized pierogi. A little research suggests what I found was Fuligo septica, popularly known as scrambled egg slime mold or, more euphoniously, dog vomit slime mold.

Myxomycetes once were classified as fungi but, regardless of taxonomy, remain beautiful organisms, little understood. The appearance of Fuligo septica at our front door coincides with my ongoing reading of Emerson, about whom my thoughts are more conflicted than ever – great writer, silly thinker. Here’s a passage from “Man the Reformer” (we’re already in trouble), a lecture he delivered Jan. 25, 1841, to the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library Association (wonderful name) in Boston:

“Love will creep where it cannot go, will accomplish that by imperceptible methods, -- being its own lever, fulcrum, and power, – which force could never achieve. Have you not seen the woods, in a late autumn morning, a poor fungus or mushroom, – a plant without any solidity, nay, that seemed nothing but a soft mush or jelly, -- by its constant, total, and inconceivably gentle pushing, manage to break its way up through the frosty ground and to actually lift a hard crust on its head? It is the symbol of power of kindness. The virtue of this principle in human society in application to great interests is obsolete and forgotten.”

My reading of his journals emphasizes the differences between Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson’s “nature” is bookish and gaseous. He saw little in the fields and woods of Concord, and what he saw he views through the lens of Romanticism – a lens Thoreau removed through a disciplined devotion to the real. Thoreau, not a scientist, though more of one than Emerson, trained himself to see.

The passage above from Emerson’s lecture is typical. “A poor fungus or mushroom.” Why “poor?” Meaning humble, discredited, scorned? Perhaps. “A plant without any solidity, nay, that seemed nothing but a soft mush or jelly.” Not so. Its solidity is as notable as its mushiness. A soft form, almost gelatinous, spongy, like the Fuligo, but no less solid than an apple or a bird. “It is the symbol of power of kindness.” Emerson likens human kindness to the growth of fungus, and I trust some readers will share my amusement and recall that “slime” is a dyslexic's “smile.”

Kay Ryan has a poem with a conceit remarkably similar to Emerson’s, though less unintentionally funny. “Tenderness and Rot” is from The Niagara River (2005):

“Tenderness and rot
share a border.
And rot is an
aggressive neighbor
whose iridescence
keeps creeping over.

“No lessons
can be drawn
from this however.

“One is not
two countries.
One is not meat
corrupting.

“It is important
to stay sweet
and loving.”

`Strange & Multiplex Byways'

Emerson writes in his journal in 1839:

“Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is a wonderful work of a man. To read it however is much like reading in a dictionary. I think we read it as an inventory to be reminded how many classes & species of facts exist &, by observing in to what strange & multiplex byways learning hath strayed, agreeably infer our opulence. A dictionary however is not a bad book to read. There is no cant in it. No excess of explanation. And it is very suggestive, full of inferences undrawn. There is all poetry & all prose & needs nothing but a little combination. See what hosts of forgotten scholars he feeds us withal.”

Years ago I was charmed to learn Oliver Sacks read the Oxford English Dictionary for amusement, something I had been doing since college when I discovered the OED. A good dictionary is a utilitarian tool, of course, like a screwdriver, but it’s also a cabinet of wonders, a CT-scan of human sensibility across space and time, and a story with infinitely diverging plot lines. I enjoy opening a big dictionary, turning to the page where my surname would appear (it never does), reading the adjacent entries and following a path of endless digression. In my copy of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, a gift from friends thirty-seven years ago this month, with the covers and spine long ago detached from the text, I find these name-neighbors:

kurnakovite: “a mineral…consisting of hydrous borate of magnesium,” named after N.S. Kurnakov (1860-1941), a Russian mineralogist.

kurrajong (also koorajong or currajong): “any of certain Australian shrubs or trees esp. of the family Sterculiaceae that have strong bast fibers used by the aborigines for making cordage, nets, and matting,” also known as the bottle tree and the flame tree.

Lovely to be flanked, even in my absence, by exotic features of the natural world, things I’ve never seen. Kurnakov, I see, is known as “the founder of a new chemical discipline, physicochemical analysis,” and the kurrajong shows up in “The Man from Snowy River” (1890) by Kurnakov’s close contemporary Andrew Bartson “Banjo” Paterson (1864-1941), Australia’s national folk poet:

“And upward, ever upward, the wild horses held their way,
Where mountain ash and kurrajong grew wide;
And the old man muttered fiercely, `We may bid the mob good day,
No man can hold them down the other side.'"

Paterson is best known for “Waltzing Matilda,” and “The Man from Snowy River” was turned into a movie and a television series. Dictionaries, you see, are bottomlessly discursive. Even my bookless father, who to my knowledge never consulted Webster’s or any other lexicon, was fond of saying with utter assurance, “If you want sympathy you’ll find it between `shit’ and `syphilis’ in the dictionary.” Perhaps for the first time he and Emerson are in agreement:

“There is all poetry & all prose & needs nothing but a little combination.”

Three of a Kind

Three prose passages that pleased me:

“His old-school tie, on the day I met him, was Columbia blue covered with sharps and flats in black, green, and cerise. The weavers of his shirt had imprisoned it in the texture as well as the color of pistachio ice cream. It was a wonder children hadn’t eaten it off his back in the street, with the weather the way it was outside. He was wearing a pale-gray suit and skew-bald shoes, and his eyes, of a confiding baby blue, were so bright that they seemed a part of the ensemble. He has a long, narrow, pink face that widens only at the cheekbones and at the mouth, which is fronted with wide, friendly-looking incisors, habitually exposed in an ingenuous smile. The big ears folded back against the sides of his head are not cauliflowered. They are evidence that in his boxing days he was never a catcher. Kearns is slim and active, and could pass for a spry fifty-five if the records books didn’t show that he was knocked out by a welterweight champion named Honey Mellody in 1901, when he must have been at least full-grown.”

(A.J. Liebling, from “The Melting Middleweight” in The Sweet Science, 1956.)

“The priest’s mother was distracted with herself, wakeful, impenitent, heated in every part by a wearisome discontent that had begun in her spirit very young. She wore herself out cleaning her house, going over her rooms with her dry violent hands, scraping and plucking and picking and rubbing the walls and floors and furniture, and stopping in the middle to clench her fingers tight, tight, tight, but not tight enough, never enough for her, there was no tightness hard and fast enough to satisfy her. Therefore she continued in want.”

(Maeve Brennan, “The Poor Men and Women” in The Springs of Affection, 1997.)

“To be a translator was to be at best a secondary figure. To be a translator from Yiddish, a language now plundered for its idioms mainly by comedians and spoken by nobody under fifty not wearing a black hat – this was hopeless, to condemn oneself to the periphery of a periphery. Why was I so drawn to it? Even now I can’t say. All I can provide by way of explanation, to myself if to no one else, is a line from Keats that I must have picked up at Yale, probably in Cleanth Brooks’s class on the Romantics: `so I may do the deed / That my own soul has to itself decreed.’”

(Joseph Epstein, “Beyond the Pale” in The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff and Other Stories, 2010.)

`I Would Make Education a Pleasant Thing'

My fourth-grader’s teacher is retiring at the end of this school year and on Friday we helped organize and attended a party in her honor. We taped banners, forty-four years of class photographs, poems, paintings and drawings to the walls in the school gymnasium, set up tables and chairs, hooked up the sound system and organized the potluck line. The class photos were revealing. Every face was white in the first decade of pictures, while my son’s class is overwhelmingly Asian, mostly Chinese. I spent much of the party talking about movies and Bolshevism with a computer engineer from Sri Lanka whose daughter is in my son’s class.

The retiree started teaching in California in the fall of 1966, when I entered the ninth grade. My son likes and respects her despite constant homework laments. In ten months he’s progressed from claiming to hate math to reading trigonometry texts for recreation. His teacher impresses me as a rare serious person with a robust sense of humor. Her deportment is teacherly. Everything is a potential lesson and she seems unconcerned with being liked, though she is – essential qualities for effective teaching.

Her retirement reminded me that Thoreau had a truncated career as a teacher in the formal sense. In the fall of 1835 while enrolled at Harvard he taught seventy students in Canton, south of Boston. We know little about the experience except that he was hired by a minister, Orestes Brownson, who was soon to number among the best-known of the transcendentalist crackpots.
After graduating from Harvard in the summer of 1837, Thoreau returned to Concord and was hired as a teacher at the Center School. He apparently ran a loose ship and was advised by a member of the school committee to more liberally employ corporal punishment. The school didn’t have the traditional strip of cowhide for flogging, so Thoreau used a ferule on six students and submitted his resignation that evening. While looking for another teaching job he wrote to Brownson on Dec. 30, 1837:

“I have even been disposed to regard the cowhide as a nonconductor. Methinks that, unlike the electric wire, not a single spark of truth is ever transmitted through its agency to the slumbering intellect it would address.”

Thoreau started his own school in June 1838. He and four students met in the family home. In less than a year his older brother John joined him as a second teacher and they rented the Concord Academy building, where Thoreau had studied. John’s failing health caused the brothers to close the school in April 1841, though I suspect Henry's high-mindedness doomed the enterprise from the start. Thoreau tutored Emerson’s nephew for several months in 1843 but was never again a classroom teacher.

Like Samuel Johnson, Thoreau taught formally only when young but both of them remained essentially teachers as writers. Their instinct to instruct was powerful. Neither was merely an entertainer though both were immensely entertaining. About the efficacy of formal education Thoreau remained skeptical. In the 1837 letter to Brownson quoted above, he writes:

“I would make education a pleasant thing both to the teacher and the scholar. This discipline, which we allow to be the end of life, should not be one thing in the schoolroom, and another in the street. We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.”

The notion of ceaseless education, of living as learning, is among his favorite themes. He writes in his journal on Feb. 19, 1841:

“A truly good book attracts very little favor to itself. It is so true that it teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint….What I began by reading I must finish by acting.”

And on Dec. 31, 1859:

"How vain it is to teach youth, or anybody, truths! They can only learn them after their own fashion, and when they get ready. I do not mean by this to condemn our system of education, but to show what it amounts to. A hundred boys at college are drilled in physics and metaphysics, languages, etc. There may be one or two in each hundred, prematurely old perchance, who approaches the subject from a similar point of view of his teachers, but as for the rest, and the most promising, it is like agricultural chemistry to so many Indians. They get a valuable drilling, it may be, but they do not learn what you profess to teach. They at most only learn where the arsenal is, in case they should ever want to use any of its weapons.”

`The Quirky Treasure-House of His Mind'

A reader in New York City shares a fantasy I harbor:

“I've often thought I could be very happy in a tiny room big enough for bookshelves and little else.”

What do we need but light, food and drink, something to write with and a few carefully parsed books? Somewhere Henry Miller says we don’t own things, they own us, and that’s not always an unhappy arrangement. I’m content to own and be owned by Religio Medici, Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems.

Another reader, this one in British Columbia, has sent me a copy of The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald (2007) edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. I still sometimes forget, after eight and a half years, that Sebald is dead. He was the last living writer whose arrival (The Emigrants appeared in English in 1996) came as a revelation, a reminder that literature can still matter. We’ve subsequently lost Saul Bellow, Guy Davenport and Anthony Hecht but I had devoted decades to them. Sebald I knew as a living presence for only five years.

Included in Schwartz’s volume is “Crossing Boundaries,” Arthur Lubow’s account of his meeting with Sebald four months before the German’s death. Lubow writes:

“…the joy of reading Sebald is the pleasure of stepping into the quirky treasure-house of his mind. `I don’t consider myself a writer,’ he said. `It’s like someone who builds a model of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks. It’s a devotional work. Obsessive.’ His books are like some eighteenth-century Wunderkammer, filled with marvelous specimens, organized eccentrically.”

I love Sebald’s books which are at once contemporary and old-fashioned. So too does Kay Ryan who published “He Lit a Fire with Icicles” in the Feb. 2005 issue of Poetry and included it in The Niagara River (2005). The poem carries a dedication -- “For W.G. Sebald, 1944-2001”:

“This was the work
of St. Sebolt, one
of his miracles:
he lit a fire with
icicles. He struck
them like a steel
to flint, did St.
Sebolt. It
makes sense
only at a certain
body heat. How
cold he had
to get to learn
that ice would
burn. How cold
he had to stay.
When he could
feel his feet
he had to
back away.”

In the fourth chapter of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald mentions his visit to the grave of “my patron saint in Nuremburg” – that is, “the holy prince of heaven St Sebolt.” Sebald recounts some of the miracles his near-namesake performed:

“At Regensburg he crossed the Danube on his cloak, and there made a broken glass whole again; and, in the house of a wheelwright too mean to spare the kindling, lit a fire with icicles. This story of the burning of the frozen substance of life has, of late, meant much to me, and I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one’s own wretched heart is still aglow.

`A Man Walking About All Day Long'

In American Procession, Alfred Kazin gives the truest description of Thoreau’s essential project and, incidentally, the best apologia for blogging I know:

“Writing and the constant preparation for writing became for Thoreau access to some `higher,’ divinelike energy. Writing was parallel to living; unlike living, it was a promise that became greater and even sublime. Thoreau’s existence had a theme; it was the search. He transcribed it day after day, seeking to capture experience in just one form: the sensations of a man walking about all day long. To this daily round he was restricted by his own experience; he magnified what happened but did not wish to invent anything and in fact was incapable of doing so. (Of course he scorned novels – transcendentalists always did.)”

Thoreau was never in the banal sense an autobiographer – first this happened, then that, on and on in tedious lockstep. His experience -- “a man walking about all day long” -- was raw material, the stuff he molded into precise, elegant sentences. In the hands of a clod unable to write he might have produced another pious nineteenth-century diary, of documentary worth or none. Instead he made a great American poem, one man’s small-town epic, in prose (“of exceptional vibration,” Kazin writes). Thoreau saw and heard more than most of us will, though his life by twenty-first-century standards was brief, difficult and circumscribed. But his vision was acute and disciplined, like a dragonfly’s or hawk’s. He looked where others saw.

I first read Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman in Signet paperbacks early in my early teens. I bought them all in the May Co. in downtown Cleveland when department stores still had book departments. “Thoreau” was Walden and “On Civil Disobedience,” both of which can be read as adolescent manifestoes and the latter of which remains so. I don’t think I even suspected the existence of his journals, but remember thinking those three books might be the only ones I would ever need and how comfortably they fit in the outer pocket of a backpack.

My ardor for Emerson has cooled and about the others I’m a more critical reader but also more appreciative. Almost half a century of reading Thoreau has internalized the importance of writing as well as possible on all occasions, preserving personal independence (intellectual, spiritual, economic) at almost any cost, and remaining attentive to the human and natural worlds. “Writing was parallel to living,” Kazin writes, though they also intersect in unexpectedly non-Euclidean ways. In his essay on Louis Agassiz in The Geography of the Imagination, Guy Davenport writes:

“Thoreau’s love affair with the scrub-oak, homeliest of trees, began to have the qualities of myth, the Greek feeling for the olive which we find in Oedipus at Colonus.”

`A New Contribution of Observation'

Only as a writer and reader am I greedy and acquisitive; otherwise I have little appetite for stuff, the world’s shiny clutter. A convenient stock of books that have proved themselves reliable by long acquaintance – that’s almost all I ask. But once I open a book the jealous gourmand takes over. I expect always to be gratified with savory sentences, phrases and words, even in books otherwise indifferent. Alfred Kazin writes of Emerson in American Procession (1984):

“Emersom the writer had lived from day to day by talking to himself in his journal. What was instinctive to him, elemental, was the fragment, the stray observation, the aphorism or epigram that came from an absolute confidence that his perfect freedom made him a vessel of truth and a link to the divine mind. No wonder Emerson found any right sentence sufficient to itself.”

Much in Emerson’s two volumes of Selected Journals reads indifferently but that’s inevitable. The Library of America has included roughly one-third of the 182 volumes Emerson accumulated over fifty-some years, totaling almost two-thousand pages of printed text. Let’s say one good sentence for every ten pages (the true proportion is gratifyingly higher). That’s two-hundred memorable sentences, and here are several from 1834 on the subject of sentences:

“As soon as I read a wise sentence anywhere I feel at once the desire of appropriation. How shall I use it? If I possessed the power of excluding all other readers from that sentence I should be conscious of some temptation to do it. At the same time I know the lower & the higher objections to this meanness.”

A blogger sympathizes with Emerson's avariciousness and at the same time feels gratitude for the technology that permits me to have it both ways: We can remain greedy for sentences and hoard them like a miser while sharing them like Santa Claus with good boys and girls everywhere. Emerson returns consistently to the subjects of writing and reading, often splendidly. Here he is in 1836:

“He only is a good writer who keeps but one eye on his page and with the other sweeps over things. So that every sentence brings us a new contribution of observation.”

This reads like the commonest of common sense yet how often do we see it in practice? “Observations” not diatribes or political sermons. Most writers seem to bring us only new contributions from the interior of their self-regardingly cloistered subcultures. David Myers, no admirer of Emerson but a fine crafter of sentences, observes of American novelists:

“The American continent no longer compels them into an aesthetic contemplation they neither understand nor desire. What moves them are the envies and ambitions, the disdains and irritations, of their class.”

Emerson’s sensibility, with its broad learning and bottomless curiosity, is admirably inclusive. He draws wrong conclusions – about the pervasiveness of evil, for instance – but little is foreign to him. Had he written fiction he might have failed but his novels would have been interesting, eccentric and probably big, as most of Melville’s are. He might have produced a literate Uncle Tom’s Cabin. One of the few contemporary novelists whom Myers singles out for praise, Marilynne Robinson, has frequently credited Emerson and others in the great American Renaissance -- particularly Thoreau and Melville – as “very influential for me in the way they use metaphor.”

`Man-Making Words'

In his “Editor’s Afterword” to the two Library of America volumes of Emerson’s Selected Essays, Lawrence Rosenwald notes that the journals are conventionally viewed as “primarily a literary quarry, a mine of rough material to be refined into finished products.” (The same understanding is applied to Thoreau’s journals.) Rosenwald then makes the audacious claim that Emerson’s journals should be understood as “a great work in themselves, a different kind of literary work perhaps: more intimate, conversational, spontaneous, aleatoric, and indecorous than the lectures and essays.”

Except for “aleatoric,” a fifty-cent word that stinks of graduate seminars and means nothing fancier than “characterized by chance,” Rosenwald’s conclusion is commendable. As beneficiaries of the Modernist project we’re comfortable with, or at least tolerant of, the fragmented, improvised and incomplete. We don’t reject out-of-hand the notion that a work written across half a century, guided only by the whims of its author, may be judged as “a great work.” Damion Searls, editor of The Journal 1837-1861, a recent selection from Thoreau’s life work, describes it as consisting of “a longish essay about the events of the day, day after day, month after 80- or 100- or 120-page month.” I would argue that Thoreau’s journal is his supreme artistic accomplishment and a foundational work of American literature, greater even than Emerson's, and comparable to Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass.

Emerson writes in 1841:

“All writing is by the grace of God. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. In these sentences that you show me I can find no beauty, for I see death in every clause & every word. There is a fossil or a mummy character which pervades this book. The best sepulchres, the vastest catacombs, Thebes, & Cairo pyramids are sepulchres to me. I like gardens and nurseries. Give me initiative, spermatic prophesying man-making words.”

The words might have been Whitman’s, more than a decade before Leaves of Grass. The “you” and his book are unidentified by Emerson and Rosenwald but he’s still with us, fathering stillborn books. What I admire about the passage in particular is the way the pious first sentence in no way predicts what follows. What begins as a sermon turns abruptly into an artistic call to arms.

Rosenwald describes Emerson’s journals as “intimate” and “spontaneous,” virtues that can turn heartbreaking:

“28 January 1842
Yesterday night at 15 minutes after eight my little Waldo ended his life.”

The second of the LoA volumes includes a photograph of this entry, the words written in Emerson’s clean hand at the top of an otherwise blank page, as though only silence can do justice to his grief. Five-year-old Waldo, Emerson’s oldest son, died of scarlet fever. Two weeks earlier Thoreau’s brother John had died of lockjaw. His son’s death damaged Emerson forever. On his deathbed in 1882 he’s reported to have said, “Oh that beautiful boy.” In the wake of Waldo’s death Emerson writes his best poem, “Threnody” (“I mourn / The darling who shall not return”) and the essay “Experience” in which he says:

“Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, -- no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.”

But the journal entries in the days following Waldo’s death, raw and unliterary in the sense of polish and formality, make even more painful reading. Often they read with an oddly modern unadorned directness:

“30 Jan What he looked upon is better, what he looked not upon is insignificant.”

Sometimes he neglects punctuation as though unable to complete his thoughts:

“Every tramper that ever tramped is abroad but the little feet are still
He gave up his little innocent breath like a bird”

“Sorrow makes us all children again destroys all differences of intellect The wisest knows nothing”

And this:

“It seems as if I ought to call upon the winds to describe my boy, my fast receding boy, a child of so large & generous a nature that I cannot paint him by specialties, as I might another.”

“My fast receding boy” are the most desolate words I’m able to imagine. If we must read them in the spirit of literary criticism, let’s turn the task over to Robert D. Richardson in First We Read Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process:

“Emerson’s interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase.”

`Good Writing Sips the Foam From the Cup'

“I am an old writer, & yet I often meet good English words which I never used once. Thus I met just now the word wainscot.”

This is the Emerson whose company I most enjoy – not the Unitarian or Transcendentalist, the airy-minded Sage of Concord, but the writer with a gift for wonder, enthusiasm and curiosity. The “old writer” jotted these sentences in his journal in 1865, the year he turned sixty-two. I remember using wainscoting for the first time in the nineteen-eighties in a story about house demolition I wrote as a newspaper reporter. Learning a word and using it correctly is satisfying enough to be lastingly memorable, worth preserving in a journal (my journal being a newspaper). Only a writer, for whom words are warm, palpable objects, will understand.

The Library of America recently published Emerson’s Selected Journals, edited by Lawrence Rosenwald, in two volumes covering 1820-1842 and 1841-1877. Strange to think that when he started his journal, John Keats had another year to live and Thoreau was Emerson’s three-year-old Concord neighbor. I’ve read like a dilettante in the more scholarly sixteen-volume set of his journals and notebooks but never systematically. The new selection I’ve been reading sequentially but with a guilt-free skipping over of dull passages, and there are many, especially those devoted to homespun metaphysics and almost anything to do with Bronson Alcott, the Channings, Brook Farm and other utopian schemes. Without his genius for sentences Emerson, like so many in his circle, would have ended up a high-minded drone. Here’s a passage from 1857:

“Surfaces. Good writing sips the foam from the cup. There are infinite degrees of delicacy in the use of the hands; and good workmen are so distinguished from laborers; & good horsemen, from rude riders; & people of elegant manners, from the vulgar. In writing it is not less. Montaigne dwells always at the surface, & can chip off a scale, where a coarser hand & eye finds only solid wall.”

Typical Emerson: the paradox of plumbing the depths of surfaces, a nice conceit he might have borrowed from paradox-minded Thoreau (whose writerly strategy, cell-deep, is as dedicated to paradox as Chesterton’s). Again, only a writer knows how deep and essential are surfaces, ignored only by the superficial. In an echoing entry from 1844-1845, Emerson writes:

“Poetry has never dived. It hovers opaline about the brighter surfaces, but rarely ventures into the real world. How pungent are the words that once in an age or two record those experiences.”

First one thinks: ridiculous. Hasn’t he read Homer, Dante and Shakespeare? Of course he has, and almost everything else. So what does he mean by “the real world” and why aren’t “the brighter surfaces” a part of it? Is this refried Plato, unnamed? The thought is never developed, found as it is in a journal not an essay, scholarly or otherwise, but the observation is useful. How long since you read a poetry of “pungent words?”

Emerson’s wit is sprinkled sparsely through his journals, and more welcome for its sparseness. In 1857 he notes: “If men should take off their clothes, I think the aristocracy would not be less, but more pronounced than now.” It’s like a joke turned back on itself and seems to imply at least two punch lines. In the next entry, so different from the last, Emerson writes:

“If men were as thick as snowflakes,--millions of flakes, but there is still but one snowflake: but every man is a door to a single deep secret.”

The science is shaky – snowflakes are proverbially unique in design – but the image convinces us that each man is singular and mysterious. The joy of reading Emerson’s journals is the joy of half-expected surprise, like nuggets in slurry or diamonds in a magpie’s nest. He’s not for every reader, and sometimes he’s not for this one, but we read for the shiny things in the dross. He writes in 1854:

“A good head cannot read amiss. In every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides, hidden from all else, & unmistakeably [sic] meant for his ear. No book has worth by itself; but by the relation to what you have from many other books, it weighs.”

`Infidelity and Confections and Persiflage'

Persiflage I learned from Mencken or W.C. Fields (or Mr. Micawber). Fittingly, we take it from the French persifler, “to banter,” in turn from the Latin sibilare, “to whistle,” “to hiss” (thus, “sibilant”). Persilflage is what it sounds like – frivolous talk, light-hearted raillery, first cousin to “bullshitting.” The verb is “persiflate.” Kay Ryan seems to know all of this and more in “Persiflage” (from Flamingo Watching, 1994):

“Garden serpents
small as shoelaces
are found in
side lots and
grassy places.
Green coat
striped with yellow
makes the garden viper
a dapper fellow.
Birds mock
and children chase
our minor adder
thinner than a pencil.
Born sans puff or rattle
he counts on persiflage
in battle. Before
his flippant tongue
children stiffen,
dogs fall like beef cattle.”

Ryan is our wittiest poet and her wit is rooted in sound: “viper,” “dapper,” “minor adder,” “thinner.” “Born sans puff [adder] or rattle [-snake].” Let’s remember “hiss” in the etymology (“flippant tongue” brings to mind Alger Hiss). The “rattle”/”battle” rhyme reminds me of Robbie Robertson lines in “It Makes No Difference”: “Since you’ve gone it’s a losing battle, / Stampeding cattle, they rattle the walls.” Like a poet, Ryan’s garden snake “counts on persiflage / in battle” – a wittier way of saying the pen is mightier than the sword, or writing is fighting, at the same time suggesting that writing poetry is a species of bullshitting. Ryan has an ally here in Walt Whitman, of all people, who uses “persiflage” in his preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Referring to “the great poet,” his American ideal, Whitman writes:

“If the time becomes slothful and heavy he knows how to arouse it . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he masters it. High up out of reach he stands turning a concentrated light . . . he turns the pivot with his finger . . . he baffles the swiftest runners as he stands and easily overtakes and envelops them. The time straying toward infidelity and confections and persiflage he withholds by his steady faith . . .”

`The Page Stirs to Life'

“His poems are not much read now. Bound in solid leather and adorned with the sober magnificence of gilt lettering, they rest upon the upper shelves of old-fashioned libraries, unread from year’s end to year’s end, their backs growing drab, drained of hue and lustre by the strong, destroying sunlight. They are become merely furniture, less valued because less noticeable than the globes and grandfather clocks and graying mezzotints that crowd the room around them.”

The words date from 1929 when David Cecil published his first book, The Stricken Deer or The Life of Cowper. They come midway through the prologue in a copy of the volume I ordered through interlibrary loan less than three weeks ago that arrived at our public library on Saturday. It’s the 1947 edition published by Constable & Company Ltd. of London, and is “merely furniture” in the collection of the Bill and Margot Lee Library at Crowder College in Neosho, Mo. – a school and city in southwestern Missouri I had never heard of before.

This is the sort of unlikely convergence, across time and space, that spices the experience of reading a book – a biography of an English poet, William Cowper (1731-1800), by an English writer, Cecil (1902-1986), published in London sixty-three years ago, acquired by a college near Joplin, Mo., and shipped across the continent to Bellevue, Wa., so I can sit in my comfortable leather chair and read it. Judging from the circulation card at the back of the book, I’m its first reader. Here are Cecil’s subsequent sentences:

“And the words seem dusty and faded as the paper on which they are printed. Pedantic epigram, antiquated compliment, pompous, didactic apostrophe, follow one another, as lifeless as the half-obliterated signs on an ancient and undeciphered papyrus. It seems impossible to believe that this was ever the genuine expression, however formal, of a living person’s mind. And then suddenly one’s attention is caught by a chance word; the page stirs to life; a bit of the English countryside appears before one’s mental eye as vividly and exactly as though one really saw it; or an ephemeral trifle, a copy of verses addressed to Miss M. or Mr. D., laughs out of the page with the pleasant colloquial intimacy of a voice heard over the teacups in the next room. And now and again, as if from the strings of a tarnished, disused harp stumbled against in one’s rambles round the library, there rises from the old book a strain of music, simple, plangent, and of a piercing pathos, that fairly clutches at the heart.”

Cecil then quotes two stanzas from Cowper’s “To the Rev. Mr. Newton (On His Return from Ramsgate”:

“To me the waves that ceaseless broke
Upon the dangerous coast,
Hoarsely and ominously spoke
Of all my treasure lost.

“Your sea of troubles you have past,
And found the peaceful shore;
I, tempest-tossed, and wrecked at last,
Come home to port no more.”

“The Rev. Mr. Newton” is John Newton, a curate and former slave-ship captain we know as the composer of “Amazing Grace” (Newton’s original title was “Faith’s Review and Expectation”). Cowper and Newton collaborated on a hymnal, Olney Hymns, published in 1779. (Go here for the site of the Cowper and Newton Museum in Olney.) Here is Cecil’s next paragraph, following the excerpt from Cowper’s poem:

“Here is no Byronic pessimism, rhetorical, exaggerated, the expression of a posture or at best a passing mood. Through these quiet verse trembles the true voice of despair.”

Thanks to a dusty book, an unread piece of mere furniture, we know a man dead more than two hundred years. “The page stirs to life,” as Cecil writes.

`True Friendship'

My review of True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound by Christopher Ricks appears in Issue 20 of The Quarterly Conversation.

`He Did It Out of Pure Curiosity'

“—Not familiar with this Thoreau, a Frenchman?”

“—A New Englander, hermit and mystic. Americans run to originality.”

“—Examined his soul, did he? I hear a lot of that in America.”

The exchange comes in a middle of a story, “Dinner at the Bank of England,” by Guy Davenport (collected in The Cardiff Team, 1996). The second speaker is George Santayana and two of the three points he makes in his first sentence are inaccurate. Thoreau was inarguably a New Englander and lived his forty-four years in Concord, Mass. He was no hermit but hosted melon parties, and was too enamored of facts and the quiddity of the world to wallow in mysticism. Even Emerson lauded his “robust common sense.” More than most Americans, Thoreau certainly ran to originality without trying to do so (the mark of true originality). Simply being David Henry Thoreau (his given name) was more original than most of us could stand.

Elsewhere, Davenport, our Thoreau, writes: “…Thoreau’s eye is as lively as a squirrel, and his descriptions are beautiful not because he is out to write poetic prose but because they are accurate and meticulously responsible as to information.” Thoreau and Davenport reveled in curious information and fueled their lives and writerly engines with curiosity. Elberry writes to me in an e-mail:

“…i am keen to get Thoreau's journals, after reading your posts. You really are a great encourager of curiosity, i think because…your own curiosity is quite immeasurable, provokingly so.”

Thoreau is tirelessly curious and a tireless provoker of curiosity in others. His prose, once he matured, was charged with surprise. Often we have no idea how the sentence of his we are reading will conclude – a trust in improvisation he learned from Emerson, then honed. Thoreau esteemed facts but not exclusively. He was no Gradgrindian piler-upper of facts but recognized their capacity for poetry. When he saw a flower he smelled it. A world of scents and olfactory receptors – the convergence is inevitable.

In school I fear for the inert children, the implacably indifferent ones immune to wonder and beauty. I’ll take the manic phase of a bipolar disorder any day. The incurious ones are prey to boredom, manipulation, resentment and violence, even if only emotional. Those without curiosity are probably condemned to misery and to making others miserable. Reviewing a biography of Charles Darwin, Davenport awards the biologist his supreme accolade:

“He loved what he was doing, and he did it out of pure curiosity.”

`A System in Itself'

We drove my student and four others to a park on the western shore of Lake Sammamish where we met a dog walker who let the kids hold the leashes on her three schnauzers. Everyone enjoyed the anomalously beautiful morning – sun, blue skies, fat white clouds. A violet-green swallow worked the long lawn sloping to the beach. It glided inches above the grass, dipping or adjusting course only to catch insects in its beak.

On the beach, in the cold wind off the lake, two women squeezed into black wet-suits. A crew team out of a Thomas Eakins painting skimmed past. A Japanese woman and her little girl dug in the sand. I walked with my student to the end of the pier where two young men stood fishing, and I asked if they’d had any luck. The taller guy leaned over and pulled a stringer from the water with two rainbow trout hanging from the end, one of them measuring nineteen inches. The pair had caught two fish in three hours, starting at 6:30 a.m., and both were blissful. I asked what they planned to do with their bounty and the tall laconic guy said, “Eat ’em.” He and his buddy reminded me of Ishmael: “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

The beach and lake surface were tufted with seed-bearing fuzz from the cottonwoods. A Stellar’s jay landed on a split-rail fence and bounced along its top for fifty feet or more, pecking at the wood. The dominant wildflower was dandelion. The flowers on three chestnut trees had fallen and the burs – botanists call them cupules – were still small and hairy, not yet spiky. Three squirrels spiraled up the trunk of the tallest. On May 9, 1858, Thoreau notes in his journal:

“A dandelion perfectly gone to seed, a complete globe, a system in itself.”

Three days later, at the end of a lengthy entry, he writes:

“Saw some unusually broad chestnut planks, just sawed, at the mill. Barrett said that they came from Lincoln; whereupon I said that I guessed I knew where they came from, judging by their size alone, and it turned out that I was right. I had often gathered the nuts of those very trees and had observed within a year that they were cut down. So it appears that we have come to this, that is I see any particularly large chestnuts at the sawmill, I can guess where they came from, even know them in the log.”

`Only By a Corresponding Experience'

I read Nige’s post on Wednesday with bemused sympathy. The science crank, the self-satisfied know-it-all who crams all of it into One Grand Scheme, is a tiresomely familiar modern type. One lurks on the margins of my awareness, ready to pounce when I stray from revealed writ. Nige’s nemesis is “fascinated and impressed by such research fields as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology and what they have to tell us about 'human nature.'”

It’s no surprise she’s attracted to fashionable fields dominated not by experimentally tested findings but the wispiest of speculation. In my experience, such types seldom are scientists but rather fellow travelers of science who glean enough from the popular press to bolster the a priori bent of their characters. Good scientists aren’t troubled by mystery. Like good artists, they feed off it.

I'm reimmersed in Thoreau, whose knowledge of the flora and fauna of his native turf was encyclopedic and almost wholly self-taught. He lived in the heroic age of science when giants walked the earth. He read Darwin with sympathy. He befriended Louis Agassiz, an anti-Darwinian, and sold specimens for his collection at Harvard -- from Walden Pond, minks, muskrats, frogs, lizards, tortoises, snakes, caddie-worms, leeches, “etc., or rather, here they are,” Thoreau wrote. Once, over dinner, Thoreau and Agassiz discussed the mating habits of turtles, to the profound discomfort of Emerson. In his “Friday” chapter in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Thoreau writes:

“Much is said about the progress of science in these centuries. I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely?”

I assume with confidence that Nige’s antagonist possesses little knowledge acquired “by a corresponding experience.” Science, like art, is a discipline rooted in attentiveness and engagement. Take the example of Donald Olson, a physicist at Texas State University who practices something called forensic astronomy. Dave Lull sent me a link to the New Scientist blog in which Olson discusses his search for the astronomical origins of Whitman’s “Year of Meteors.” He thinks he has identified the meteor procession , the same one seen on July 20, 1860, by the artist Frederic Church, who painted it. Olson says:

“It turns out that both the prose and the poetry of Walt Whitman is unusually rich in terms of references to the sky - very specific ones, in fact. He tells you exactly what he sees, and often gives the date. For example, he discusses the 1833 Leonids [one of the most spectacular meteor showers on record]. So I have a big file on Walt Whitman and astronomy. He's a very rich source of descriptions of the sky.”

To his credit, Olson doesn't reduce Whitman's poem to a scientific curiosity or claimed to have "cracked" it. I'd like to turn Olson loose on Hopkins and his skyscapes. Let me repeat what I’ve often quoted from Guy Davenport’s essay on Eudora Welty, “The Faire Field of Enna” (collected in The Geography of the Imagination):

“Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world. Ancient intuition went foraging after consistency. Religion, science, and art are alike rooted in the faith that the world is of a piece, that something is common to all its diversity, and that if we knew enough we could see and give a name to its harmony.”

`Shackled to Their Oars'

“Unlike some intelligent people Max was extremely sensible. He surveyed the world with a realistic gaze that made him as impervious to nonsense as Dr Johnson himself, however much it was accepted by respectable or fashionable opinion.”

So writes David Cecil, biographer of Max Beerbohm, in his introduction to Selected Prose, an anthology of Beerbohm’s work published in 1970. The judgment is accurate and interesting because it’s not the fashionable opinion about Beerbohm, who, usually, when considered at all, is dismissed as a frivolous entertainer. Sometimes frivolity, as Johnson knew, is a weighty matter.

The same charge has been leveled against Kay Ryan, who steadily, off in the margins and late in life (she turns sixty-five later this year) has turned herself into one of our finest poets. Her work is free of cant, a favorite Johnsonian derision. Consider “No Rest for the Idle” (from Flamingo Watching, 1994):

“The idle are shackled
to their oars. The waters
of idleness are borderless
of course and must always
be plied. Relief is foreign
on this wide and featureless
ocean. There are no details:
no shores, no tides, no times
when things lift up and then
subside, no sails or smokestacks,
no gravel gathered up and spit back,
no plangencies, no seabirds startled:
the weather, without the Matthew Arnold.”

If the final line with its accompanying off-rhyme doesn’t make you laugh, I’m sorry. Seldom has the grinding dullness of idleness, “life retarded by the vis inertiae,” as Johnson put it, seemed so funny. Ryan’s poem is likelier to steer us from idleness than one of Poor Richard’s bromides. Johnson had a burning fear of idleness and saw it as a step away from madness. It’s also an insidious deceiver, especially in newsrooms and government offices. In The Idler #31, Nov. 18, 1752, Johnson writes:

"Idleness predominates in many lives where it is not suspected; for, being a vice which terminates in itself, it may be enjoyed without injury to others; and it is therefore not watched like fraud, which endangers property; or like pride, which naturally seeks its gratifications in another's inferiority. Idleness is a silent and peaceful quality, that neither raises envy by ostentation, nor hatred by opposition; and therefore nobody is busy to censure or detect it."

Johnson writes from intimate experience. Note the wit of “nobody is busy to censure or detect it.” A friend of Dr. Johnson’s, Boswell reports, said “his laugh was that of a rhinoceros.” That is, presumably, powerful, occasionally intimidating, seldom idle.

[ADDENDUM: On Nov. 16, 1850, eighteen months after he published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and four years before he published Walden, Thoreau writes in his journal: "I feel ripe for something, yet do nothing, can't discover what that thing is."]