Libraries for the Souls

imagined interior of Library of Alexandria

Book-lovers are almost always lovers of libraries.  (I confess to being both.)  Ask a book-lover about some good memory of a library, and I bet you will get a childhood memory.  My wife, for example, tells about her persuading the librarian to make an exception to the 3-book checkout limit because, as a child, she went through books so fast.  So helpful have been libraries to the human race that it is no surprise that the library in ancient Alexandria had over its entrance the sign:

"A hospital for the soul." 

Not that I have found all libraries life-giving or even conducive to learning.  I remember in particular one seminary library where the books were covered in dust, pages dried out and sometimes falling out because the radiators were set too hot.  Some books were wedged in horizontally above other books. And there were no chairs in the stacks area, nor even space between the rows of shelves to make oneself comfortable even on the floor.  That library cramped both books and people's spirits.

Most libraries I have experienced, however, have been life-giving. It interests me how that usually entails letting in important elements of  Nature:  Natural light, and clean air (even if that cleanliness is created by a good air-conditioning system).  Also, how helpful it is to have chairs and tables near a window so that readers can intermittently look up from their books in order to look outside to rest their over-taxed eyes.  And also so that they can look up from their reading to let their over-filled minds relax and expand. Expand so that the thoughts and feelings swirling from the written words can settle deeply into their souls.

One of the unrecognized contributions of the U.S. to the world has been its having been in the vanguard of establishing libraries free to the public.  A good number of older immigrants to the U.S. (such as the actor Kirk Douglas, whose parents came from Russia) tell how their parents were amazed that in the U.S. children could go to a library and borrow books free.  That accessibility has now been expanded through computerized search catalogs, as anybody who has been to a contemporary library knows.  I will confess that there was a romance in the older cataloguing method of index cards, a hole punched at the bottom of each card to keep it securely within the wooden drawers for alphabetical browsing.  That method also meant that every school-child could quickly learn the correct answer to the librarian's perennial question:  "Can anyone tell us what are the three main types of cards in the card catalogue?"  A child could raise their hand and answer, "Title, Author, and Subject."  Nevertheless, I do concede that the computer now makes searching a large library faster.

So those are the ingredients for my recipe for a good library:  Natural light.  Clean air.  Sunlight (not glaring).  Tables by the window.  Comfortable chairs.  A good cataloguing system for finding items.  Oh yes, there is one other ingredient I haven't mentioned:  Good content in the books. That is the real nutrition.

~~~

Do you have a good childhood memory of a library?  Do you have a favorite library today?  Why?

A Fiery Paradoxical Mystery

In his "Canticle of Brother Sun," St. Francis of Assisi uses a series of verses with very similar wording to celebrate one by one each part of the natural world.  Each part -- moon, air, water, and so forth -- is celebrated as both praising God and being a means by which we join Nature in praise.

There is one part of the natural world, however, that is singled out by St. Francis as being most like God, and it is surprising:  Francis singles out the sun.  When speaking to God about the sun, Francis says, "Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness."

Somehow it seems to smack of sun worship!  Wasn't I taught in church-school how the ancient Israelites in the Bible took pains to differentiate their concept of God from the beliefs of the other ancient cultures that worshipped a planet or the sun?  So why does Francis say that of all the things in the natural world God is most like the sun?  We, today, in most mainstream Christianity are more likely to prefer that God be likened to something more close at hand than the sun, and something less likely to burn us.  It's more comforting to think of God as being like a gentle breeze, or a good friend.

Francis's own statement that the sun "brings the day" shows that he found a similarity to God's faithfulness in the sun's faithful rising every morning.  Francis also says that it is through the sun that God provides us light. However, another clue as to how God might by like the sun might be found later in the "Canticle" where Francis says of "Brother Fire" that fire too not only brings light but is also "full of power and strength."  Light and warmth but also power -- some of the same properties held by the fiery sun.

So here is a paradox which might speak even more closely to the similarity between the sun and the great Divine Mystery we call God, who we never see:  We receive light and warmth from the sun, but we could never touch the sun itself, much less enter its fiery core, without being consumed.  Similarly, I can find intimations of God here on Earth, but how could my mind ever fully grasp what kind of power it can be that can make possible all of the 170-billion galaxies, with an average of 100-billion stars in each galaxy?  My mind would be completely overwhelmed, consumed.

In 1654, the Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal experienced for about two hours one of those mystical experiences in which a veil is lifted and the Divine Mystery is experienced extraordinarily directly.  For the remainder of his life, Pascal carried with him a piece of paper on which he had written a description of his experience of God.  It's words in part were:

"In the year of Grace 1654, on Monday 23rd November...

From about half past ten at night until about half-past twelve.

FIRE.

... Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy."

~~~

What to you most strongly proclaims the greatness of the world we live in?

(The Pascal quote is taken from An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, by Harvey D. Egan, © 1991.  p. 482.)

(The photo of artwork, by Frank Vincentz,

 is used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(One translation of St. Francis's "Canticle" can be read at this external link: "Canticle.")

A Strange Word for a Strange World

The first time I was in a national park, I didn't know I was.  During that family vacation, I was elementary-school age, and I don't recall my parents every saying we were going to the "national park," or even to "the park."  Instead, we were going to see "the cave" or "Mammoth Cave."  Even though that famous cave is in a national park, I don't recall our having explored any landscape above ground (other than the gift shop and restaurant).

Mammoth Cave

I also believe it was during that family vacation that I first encountered the word "mammoth."  Today in the U.S., we rarely employ that word as an adjective, preferring "huge," "immense," or "gigantic."  Perhaps at the age I was, I had heard the word "mammoth" used as a noun to talk about woolly "mammoths" (based on the Russian name for those extinct animals first discovered in Siberia).  But I have no recollection of knowing about those creatures at that time either.  Because of my unfamiliarity with that strange word with three "m's" in it, the phrase "Mammoth Cave" did not sound like a description of the cave's size, but instead seemed to be a distinctive proper name, just like the name "Kentucky" for the state we were headed to.

Since that time of my childhood, I have been a tourist in a half-dozen other caves with less descriptive names.  What has stayed with me most in my memory is the otherworldliness of the experience.  (It has been similar to the experience of going into a dark movie theater and becoming so lost in the world of the movie that when I emerged back into daylight I had forgotten what day it was, and even what time of day.)  Some of that strangeness of caves has come from the fascinating, but in a way bizarre rock formations, often accentuated by man-made lights. More than those things, there has been the otherworldliness of actually being beneath the ground that had seemed so solid when I was above it.

Over a half-century before I entered Mammoth Cave as a boy, the early nature-writer John Burroughs (1837-1921) wrote eloquently about his own experience in that very same cave.  He emphasized the strangeness of the place by explaining how even blind people found it so:  "The blind seem as much impressed by it as those who have their sight....  They get some idea of the spaciousness when words are uttered....  When no word is spoken, the silence is of a kind never experienced on the surface of the earth, it is so profound and abysmal."

Burroughs then penetrates more deeply into the otherworldliness by pointing to its similarity to the dead being underground:  "I... said to myself, the darkness and the silence of their last resting-place is like this....  No vicissitudes of earth, no changes of seasons, no sound of storm or thunder penetrate here; winter and summer, day and night, peace or war, it is all one; a world beyond the reach of change...."

Burroughs' words made me even gladder that we humans have evolved so as to be suited to living upon this green Earth's surface, not confined inside it.

~~~

If you have ever been in a cave, what was it like being there and coming back out?

(The Burroughs quotes are from Riverby [1894] by John Burroughs.)

(The photo inside Mammoth Cave is by Daniel Schwen,

 and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Flowers Against the Stereotype

Many a poet has drawn upon the delicate beauty of flowers for literary inspiration.  The softness of the petals.  The sweet fragrance.  Flowers thus lend themselves to being a symbol of femininity. (Also, notice how in our U.S. culture, women will be given a corsage to wear vastly more often than men are given boutonnieres.)

Here are some poetic examples of flowers in an inspiring role:  Shakespeare's Juliet, in the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, depicted herself as "a beauteous flower."   Alfred, Lord Tennyson connected the physical characteristics of a flower even more explicitly to those of a woman, writing:

"Lightly was her slender nose

Tip-tilted like the petal of a flower."

The 19th-century German writer Heinrich Heine went straight to the point, titling one of his poems "Du Bist Wie eine Blume," which translates to "You are Like a Flower."

I wonder what such poets -- who thought of flowers as being delicate and feminine -- would have thought about a flower from Sumatra that I heard about on the radio. Far from sounding feminine, it was described as being "like a giant finger jutting straight up... eight feet tall and [weighing] 250 pounds."  Nor would a person want to extract the essence of the aroma this flower gave off, because it had a "distinctive rotting-corpse-like odor."  The evolutionary explanation behind that flower (scientific name Titan arum) is that the putrid odor enables it to attract insects who believe they are coming to the carcass of an animal on which they might feed.  The insects flocking to the flower get tricked, while the clever flower gets itself pollinated.

It was not only insects who have been disappointed in the case of this particular flower, which was on display at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C.  Many of the museum-goers who flocked to the flower, hoping to get a whiff of its repellent odor, were disappointed because the colossal flower emitted its odor for only a few hours, and did not have the courtesy to schedule its opening so as to align with the museum's daytime hours.

The finger-shaped Titan arum is not the only tropical Asian flower to have evolved such a trick of deception.  Another species, the Rafflesia arnoldii, has a more typical floral shape, being circular with petaled edges.  But it is similarly oversized (two or three feet in diameter) and also smells like a carcass during part of its blooming period, even if only briefly.

I was not among either the disappointed or the pleased museum-goers at the U.S. Botanic Garden. Nevertheless, I take delight in that news story about the non-stereotypical flower for two reasons.  I take delight first in being reminded again about how evolution, with all its immense variety, has developed a living being that defies our human expectations, particularly our cultural associations.  Secondly, I am pleased to hear that so many people can themselves take delight in an example of biodiversity that we ourselves would not have designed, and might have usually found repulsive.

~~~

Do you have any thoughts about these huge, putrid flowers?

(The Tennyson lines are from "Gareth and Lynette," line 574, in Idylls of the King. 1859-1885.)

(The news story was "Lure of Flower's Putrid Essence Draws Crowd," July 22, 2013. © NPR.)
(Second photo, by Henrik Ishihara Globaljuggler, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.) 

Life-Giving Corn

When I was a child, my mother would usually allow me in the kitchen while she worked. More than allow -- she often seemed to like it. She endorsed the motto of "learning by doing," inspired by the early 20th-century educator John Dewey.  When I was young, there was not much I could do by myself in the kitchen except watch up close.  But occasionally, there was a task I could do all by myself: shuck the corn.  However, she sent me outside to do it, knowing it could make a mess.

I would first open several sheets of newspaper, and spread them out on the driveway (the way I had been shown).  That would make it easy to fold up the discarded parts of the corn into a large wad that could be tidily dropped into the trash.  It was pretty easy for me to pull off the green husks and most of the long "hairs."  (Only once was I startled by a small, now dead caterpillar that lay neatly in one of the rows of kernels.)  It was a bit of a chore, however, to try to get rid of every last one of those "hairs" on the ear of corn.  I might have been appreciative of those silks if I had know that it was through them that the cob of corn had been brought to life, those strands being the upper female part of the plant's flower.

Over the past decades in the U.S., corn has been mentioned in the media mostly in regard to concerns about the amount of corn syrup in processed foods, or about the drawbacks of using food such as corn (rather than something like switchgrass) to make ethanol to add to gasoline. About the only time corn gets mentioned with exuberant appreciation is in the patriotic story of how in 1612 Capt. John Smith's ill-equipped Virginia colonists were saved by the bushels of corn they received from Native Americans.  And so, I'd like to speak a good word for the often overlooked corn (which is called "maize" in most of the world).

corn vendor
in India today

Those Virginia colonists were not the only people whose lives have been saved by corn.  When Columbus landed in Cuba, he found the production of maize going strong.  A similar discovery was made by Francisco Pizarro in the early 1500's.  The Inca nation (whose leader Pizarro captured) was vast:  2,200 miles long and containing nine million well-fed people.  Their lives were to a great part sustained by maize.  Even though corn contains little protein, its advantage over the world's other major grains (wheat and rice) is that it can be simply cooked and eaten without having to process the grain.

Moreover, the "sweet corn" bred for human eating is but one category of maize.  Even the Native Americans had field-corn as well for their domesticated animals (which in turn supported human life).  And they had flour corn, whose kernels are more suitable for making flour.  Not to mention that enduring cinema attraction, popcorn.

Guila Naquitz cave, Oaxaca, Mexico
(site of 6,250 year-old corn remains)

All these types date back to a form of wild grass in the Zea genus, whose seed-ear is minuscule.  Human cultivation enlarged that seed-ear.  The great chain of human life living off cultivated corn throughout the world has been traced back by archaeologists over 7,000 years!

~~~

Do you have any childhood memories involving corn?            
           

(The photo of the vendor is by Babasteve.  That of the cave is by Jerry Friedman.

  Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution Generic licenses.)