'The Excitement of Entomological Exploration'

A pivot or lasting change of focus occurred to me as a teenager. For years, since probably late toddlerhood, I had thought of myself as a budding naturalist. Behind our house in suburban Cleveland were a creek, grassy fields and second-growth woods, including a dense stand of poplars, locust trees and sassafras. Blackberries grew everywhere. In and along the creek were crayfish, salamanders, frogs and water striders. Our backyard was, in effect, a bountiful museum of biodiversity, surrounded by heavy development. Insects thrived – yellow jackets and hornets, spittlebugs and mosquitoes, and, best of all, the order Lepidoptera, butterflies and moths. 

Cecropia moths favored the trunks of ash trees. We found luna moths and mourning cloaks. The first field was rich in milkweed, which attracted monarchs. Various species of swallowtails, painted ladies and fritillaries seemed drawn to blackberry and strawberry blossoms. I became a collector and a devoted reader of field guides.

 

Perhaps it was the arrival of puberty. I never lost complete interest in the natural world but my attention shifted to literature. I stopped collecting. Around 1967, I discovered the work of Vladimir Nabokov, a love that has never faded and served to supplant my devotion to applied biology. He sustained lifelong  interest in lepidoptery and literature, with brilliant accomplishments in both. In the June 5, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, Nabokov published “Butterflies,” a memoir of his infatuation with Lepidoptera while growing up in prerevolutionary Russia. He later revised the piece which became Chapter Six of Conclusive Evidence (1951), then of Speak, Memory (1966), the finest of all autobiographies. He writes of those childhood quests:

 

“Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration. From the very first, it had a great many intertwinkling facets. One of them was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, interfered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania. Its gratification admitted of no compromise or exception. Tutors and governesses knew that the morning was mine and cautiously kept away.”

 

The New Yorker excerpt concludes with one of Nabokov’s best-known set-pieces, an early digression on his great subject, Time:

 “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which I cannot explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love, a sense of oneness with sun and stone, a thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern, perhaps to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to the tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

 

Nigel Andrew in his delightful book The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband 2025), refers to Nabokov as “the most literary of all butterfly lovers,” saying he was “conscious of the inadequacy of his own representations of butterflies in his fiction, when compared to his scientific work.” Yet no one who reads Pale Fire (1962) will forget the repeated appearance of Vanessa atalanta, the red admiral (or “red admirable,” as the novel’s poet John Shade prefers).

'Keep Abreast of the Essentials First'

In a letter to his friend the Rev. William Unwin, written in March 1784, nine months before Dr. Johnson’s death, William Cowper says he is “very much the biographer's humble admirer,” and continues:

“His uncommon share of good sense, and his forcible expression, secure to him that tribute from all his readers. He has a penetrating insight into character, and a happy talent of correcting the popular opinion, upon all occasions where it is erroneous; and this he does with the boldness of a man who will think for himself, but, at the same time, with a justness of sentiment that convinces us he does not differ from others through affectation, but because he has a sounder judgement.”

Cowper had been reading Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81). His assessment of Johnson’s critical judgment is accurate. Incidentally, it might also be applied to Yvor Winters. We no longer associate criticism with common sense and an implicit refutation of “theory.” In his biography of Johnson, John Wain tells us Johnson’s “method” relied on “his memory, his judgement, his learning.” The same might be said of the way he assembled his Dictionary more than twenty years earlier. In writing of fifty-two English poets, Johnson combines biographical storytelling with critical assessment, which in his case means tart, unexpected judgments. He’s not shy about praise or condemnation. Take this from his “Life of Pope”:

“Pope was from his birth of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shewn remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life, but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood.”

Wain describes the Lives as “Johnson’s gentlest, most companionable work.” This is true yet Johnson is often at his most entertaining when cantankerous. In his “Life of Milton” he famously said of “Lycidas” that “the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing.” Johnson knew what he was doing and how some readers would react. Boswell reports that on March 26, 1779:

“He said he expected to be attacked on account of his Lives of the Poets. ‘However (said he,) I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an authour is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse; an assault may be unsuccessful; you may have more men killed than you kill; but if you starve the town, you are sure of victory.’”

Reading the Lives is always entertaining. Were I forced to bring only a single work of criticism, or a single work by Johnson, to that mythical desert island, it would be this one, Johnson’s final masterpiece. Who do you think Johnson is writing about in this passage:

“Next to argument, his delight was in wild and daring sallies of sentiment, in the irregular and excentrick violence of wit. He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy. This inclination sometimes produced nonsense.” 

Read the complete biography and you’ll never think the same way about John Dryden. In his postscript to an essay about Kingsley Amis collected in The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005-2008 (Picador, 2009), the late Clive James writes:

“One doesn’t say that Aubrey’s Brief Lives set the desirable measure, but it always helps to remember how much got said by Johnson in his Lives of the Poets, any one of which is the first thing to read on the poet in question. Not, of course, the only thing: but surely our aim, like Johnson’s, should be to keep abreast of the essentials first.”

'The Changing Year’s Successive Plan'

Walter Jackson Bate tells us in his biography of Dr. Johnson that as he aged, the crusty old man mellowed. “[I]n many ways,” Bate writes, “he was changing—not changing in his character but in what he said or admitted.” Previously, Johnson had denied the impact of the seasons on the emotions (“imagination operating on luxury”), what we call in some cases “seasonal affective disorder (SAD).” In 1784, the year he would turn seventy-five, Johnson spent July through November in Lichfield, the city of his birth. 

“As November came to Lichfield, which he could reasonably doubt that he would ever see again,” Bate writes, “he felt the poignance of autumn as never before. One of Horace’s odes (IV, vii) especially haunted him – the one in which the large revolving changes of nature, destroying and re-creating, are contrasted with the hopes and destiny of short-lived man.” Johnson’s translation of the ode, composed in Lichfield, is among the last things he ever wrote:

 

“The snow dissolv’d, no more is seen;

The fields and woods, behold! are green;

The changing year renews the plain,

The rivers know their banks again;

The sprightly nymph and naked grace

The mazy dance together trace.

The changing year’s successive plan

Proclaims mortality to man.

Rough winter’s blasts to spring give way,

Spring yields to summers sovereign ray;

Then summer sinks in autumn’s reign,

And winter chills the world again:

Her losses soon the moon supplies,

But wretched man, when once he lies

Where Priam and his sons are laid,

Is nought but ashes and a shade.

Who knows if Jove, who counts our score,

Will toss us in a morning more?

What with your friend you nobly share,

At least, you rescue from your heir.

Not you, Torquatus, boast of Rome,

When Minos once has fix’d your doom,

Or eloquence, or splendid birth,

Or virtue, shall restore to earth.

Hippolytus, unjustly slain,

Diana calls to life in vain;

Nor can the might of Theseus rend

The chains of hell, that hold his friend.”

 

Johnson would soon leave Lichfield, return to London and die on December 13. Bate writes of Johnson’s version: “Of the many translations of this famous ode, none catches the spirit of Horace more closely.” 

'Cherries, Nectarines, Apricots and Early Peaches'

Neighbors gave us a sack of golf-ball-size peaches from the tree in their front yard. I’ve been watching it for months through the front window. They covered it with gauzy white netting resembling an oversized shower cap to keep off the bugs and squirrels, and generally babied the tree. The fruit is fuzzy, blemish-free and sweet. Because they are smaller than the peaches you find at the grocery store, you’re tempted to eat two or three at a time. We’re trying to be strong. 

Yvor Winters was the pomologist among poets. Along with raising goats and Airedales, he tended a small orchard of fruit trees at his home in Los Altos, Calif. On November 16, 1958, he writes to Don Cameron Allen at Johns Hopkins:

 

“The frost finished my fig crop, but ripened my persimmons and pineapple guavas. The last of my Valencia oranges were picked recently, but we are still eating them (they ripen in May). My tangerines will ripen around Christmas. My strawberry guava crop has just come to an end, after about two months of heavy production. My pomegranates are ripe. Most of my olives are picked (a big cast-iron washtub full) and I am now engaged in putting them in rock-salt (for Greek olives) and in the lye-and-brine cure.”

 

A professor at Stanford, an active poet and critic, a husband and father – and Winters finds the time to tend and harvest, by my count, eight varieties of fruit. It was from Winters that I first heard of loquats, and this Northerner first saw the trees here in Houston some twenty years ago. He goes on:  

 

“In May my loquats will ripen (loquats are one of the finest fruits I know, but they deteriorate rapidly after picking and so are never marketed) and I shall have loquats for two months. In early June my cherries, nectarines, apricots and early peaches, and in mid-June my early figs (white) and my first crop of black mission figs. In July my late peaches and the end of the loquats. The black figs should continue through half of July and start their second crop late in August, at which time my late white figs and grapes will be starting. In addition to this we have quinces, limequats, and Meyer lemons. The lemons and limequats bear fruit straight through the year.”

 

Throughout my life I have tended flower and vegetable gardens, never fruit trees. Few activities are so primally satisfying. In the summer before second grade (1959), I grew a small patch of watermelons beside the garage. At Christmas I gave my teacher, Miss Esson, the gift of a watermelon. The gift of peaches and Winters’ description of his orchard remind me of my favorite among his poems, “Time and the Garden,” including the opening lines:

 

“The spring has darkened with activity.

The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree:

Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape,

Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape.

These will advance in their due series, space

The season like a tranquil dwelling-place.”

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000).]

'Acquainted With His Real Character'

We all do it, even the most sophisticated and open-minded among us: we draw conclusions about people based on their physical appearance. Sure, there’s pretty/handsome versus ugly/plain. Most men will pause when they see a beautiful woman. That’s natural, not depraved. But we read faces and bodies in ways other than aesthetically. In The Spectator on this date, June 8, in 1711, Joseph Addison writes: 

 “[E]very one is in some Degree a Master of that Art which is generally distinguished by the Name of Physiognomy; and naturally forms to himself the Character or Fortune of a Stranger, from the Features and Lineaments of his Face. We are no sooner presented to any one we never saw before, but we are immediately struck with the Idea of a proud, a reserved, an affable, or a good-natured Man; and upon our first going into a Company of Strangers, our Benevolence or Aversion, Awe or Contempt, rises naturally towards several particular Persons before we have heard them speak a single Word, or so much as know who they are.”

 

A parent will tell a child: “Stop staring.” It’s rude and can be interpreted as invasive or threatening. Most of us learn early to conceal our interest in another’s face. But Addison suggests we can glean useful information from observing the faces of strangers, though I was told before my first visit to New York City: “Don’t make eye contact.” It’s complicated and we can easily commit a faux pas. Addison writes: “I think we may be better known by our Looks than by our Words; and that a Man’s Speech is much more easily disguised than his Countenance.” He quotes Martial’s epigram 12.54:

 

“Crine ruber, niger ore, brevis pede, lumine lœsus:

Rem magnam prœstas, Zoile, si bonus es.”

 

Here is a translation:

 

“Red-haired, black-mouthed, lame-footed, squint-eyed;

it would be a miracle, Zoilus, if you were honorable.”

 

Poor Zoilus. His appearance condemns him to perpetual misunderstanding. He will seldom be judged an honorable man, despite what might be an honorable life. We’re no different. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin suggests facial appearance is important, and that certain expressions are likely an evolutionary inheritance.

 

“We are so familiar with the fact of young and old animals displaying their feelings in the same manner, that we hardly perceive how remarkable it is that a young puppy should wag its tail when pleased, depress its ears and uncover its canine teeth when pretending to be savage, just like an old dog; or that a kitten should arch its little back and erect its hair when frightened and angry, like an old cat. When, however, we turn to less common gestures in ourselves, which we are accustomed to look at as artificial or conventional,—such as shrugging the shoulders, as a sign of impotence, or the raising the arms with open hands and extended fingers, as a sign of wonder,—we feel perhaps too much surprise at finding that they are innate.”

 

Addison urges thoughtfulness as a antidote to prejudice:

 

“[A] wise Man should be particularly cautious how he gives credit to a Man’s outward Appearance. It is an irreparable Injustice we are guilty of towards one another, when we are prejudiced by the Looks and Features of those whom we do not know. How often do we conceive Hatred against a Person of Worth, or fancy a Man to be proud and ill-natured by his Aspect, whom we think we cannot esteem too much when we are acquainted with his real Character?”

'Among the Essential Text-Books of Our Schools'

A reader in North Dakota tells me he has acquired Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1957) and asks for recommendations among them. Really, he can’t go wrong starting anywhere, and he already has his eyes on “Of Sleep,” “Of Books” and Montaigne’s longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Almost randomly I would suggest “Of Idleness” (his shortest essay: one page) and “Of Cruelty.” A sample from “Idleness”: 

“Just as we see that fallow land, if rich and fertile, teems with a hundred thousand kinds of wild and useless weeds, and that to set it to work we must subject it and sow it with certain seeds for our service; and as we see that women, all alone, produce mere shapeless masses and lumps of flesh, but that to create a good and natural offspring they must be made fertile with a different kind of seed; so it is with minds.”

 

Typical Montaigne: homely, readily understood metaphors and a sort of punchline bringing it all together. Here’s the next sentence, which amounts to common sense on minds: “Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination.”

 

In 1934, the English literary critic F.L. Lucas (1894-1967) published in the journal Studies French and English an essay, “The Master-Essayist.” Lucas gives us a charming profile of the Frenchman:

 

“That a gaily self-indulgent old gentleman in Perigord once loved scratching his ears is and will be remembered where lives, by the thousand, of desperate industry and devoted idealism leave not a ripple on the inky waters of oblivion. Such is justice.”

 

Montaigne was the first to make the first-person singular a worthy subject, and he is seldom tedious, unlike Rousseau and a thousand imitators. Here is Lucas’ conclusion:

 

“Today Montaigne would rather have lived in a garret, alone with his own thoughts, than have earned his living in many of our occupations, or joined many of the movements of the modern world. After all, would he be wrong? If only we were wise, I believe that among the essential text-books of our schools, and of our schoolmasters, would be the Lives of Plutarch and the Essais of Montaigne.

 

[Find Lucas’ essay and many others in the “Articles” section of Isaac Waisberg’s essential IWP Books.)

'Pain an Evil'

I was seated in the waiting room of the physical therapy center with the rest of the human wreckage. Two men were seated to my right, speaking Spanish. Both were in street clothes with no obvious signs of injury or disease. To my left was a black man about my age, dressed all in black. He had a prosthetic right leg beneath the knee and was drinking a cup of coffee. He uses a walker to navigate. We chatted, indifferent stuff at first, before I asked him how he lost the leg. “Fuckin’ diabetes,” he said. He still occasionally feels his foot, the so-called “phantom limb” phenomenon. 

He goes to PT hoping to ease other pains – knees, hips, back. Edema is an ongoing problem. He spoke clinically, without complaint, and I appreciated his apparent absence of self-pity. When he stood, he groaned softly. It sounded familiar. He had noticed my cane and I told him about the arthritis. As he moved toward the PT room he said, “Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?” and laughed.

 

To read while waiting I brought along Santayana’s The Life of Reason, originally published in five volumes in 1905-06. I haven’t read it in years and I’m luxuriating in the prose. Can you think of another writer whose English prose is as fluent as Santayana’s? Perhaps Ruskin. Or Evelyn Waugh. No academic nonsense or stiffness, little jargon, philosophical or otherwise. In the first volume, Reason in Common Sense, in the chapter titled “First Steps and First Fluctuations,” he devotes an extended digression to the subject of pain:

 

“[T]o deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil is a grotesque affectation: it amounts to giving ‘good’ and ‘evil’ artificial definitions and thereby reducing ethics to arbitrary verbiage. . . . A man who without necessity deprived any person of a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptible knave, and the person so injured would be the first to declare it, nor could the highest celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse that sentence.”