Undisturbing Bedtime Reading

Among writers' names, theirs are two of the most famous to people in the U.S. -- Mark Twain and Charles Darwin.  But how differently they are thought of:  Twain as the grandfatherly humorist; Darwin as the trouble-causing scientist.  When I was in elementary school, my grandmother was displeased that my school was named after the horror-story writer Edgar Allan Poe, but quite pleased when I moved to an elementary school named after the grandfatherly Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens).  And we all know that any proposal to name a school after Charles Darwin would evoke controversy.

The writers Twain and Darwin are also known for different genres of writing --  fiction and nonfiction.  Different also are the ways that Nature is a part of their writings.  Twain, even when writing about his experiences as a young man on the Mississippi, turned them into tall tales about the adventures of people.  In contrast, even Darwin's reminiscences of his journey on the Beagle are strengthened by his scientist's eye for observation of Nature by itself, apart from people.

Despite their many differences, their lives as writers intersected (even if indirectly) in an entertaining incident related by Mark Twain in one of his public presentations.  Twain tells first how he felt flattered when the president of Harvard College, Charles Eliot, who had visited Darwin, told Twain:

"Do you know that there is one room in Darwin's house,
his bedroom, where the housemaid
is never allowed to touch two things?
One is a plant he is growing
and studying while it grows....
The other some books that lie on the night table
at the head of his bed. They are your books,
Mr. Clemens, and Mr. Darwin reads them every night
to lull him to sleep."

What a compliment Twain felt it was to know, as he put it, that "a brain teeming with bugs and squirming things like Darwin's" was reading the American humorists' books.

But Twain's inflated ego was punctured by a subsequent event that Twain also relates.  He tells how, after Darwin died, Twain was visited by the Rev. Joseph Twichell, who he describes as "my oldest friend -- and dearest enemy on occasion."  Twichell had been reading Darwin's Life and Letters, and opened it to show Twain a passage apparently explaining more fully why Twain's books were on that night table.   As Twain tells it:

"Twichell ... said, 'Here, look at this letter from Mr. Darwin to Sir Joseph Hooker.'
What Darwin said -- I give the idea and not the very words -- was this:
I do not know whether I ought to have devoted my whole life to these drudgeries
in natural history and the other sciences [because]
while I may have gained in one way I have lost in another.
Once I had a fine perception and appreciation of high literature,
but in me that quality is atrophied.  'That was the reason,' said Mr. Twichell,
'he was reading your books.' "

It looks as if in this case, it was Darwin who had the last laugh.  Or did he?  It was Twain who was able to tell of the incidents, and thereby laugh at himself.

~ ~ ~

Do you have bedtime reading that helps you let go of the cares of the day?  What is it?

(The incident and quotations are taken from What about Darwin?,
edited by Thomas F. Glick, © 2010, pp. 439-441. [emphasis added])

Our Life from a Dog’s Life

For several years now, I have been writing biweekly articles for this website knowing full well that I have not devoted an article to one very important topic:  Namely, dogs.  That omission has not been due to any disrespect for the canine race.  Quite to the contrary, it has been because of my great appreciation for all they have given to the human race.  How can any writer do justice to those contributions in only 500 to 600 words?

If I were to write an article worthy of dogs' contributions, I would have to mention that the canine trail stretches back into prehistoric times, where it intersects with early humans, thus keeping today's evolutionary biologists speculating about different scenarios.  I might list the variety of occupations dogs have specialized in:  watchdogs, hunting assistants, bloodhounds, rescue dogs, seeing-eye dogs, visitors to the lonely in hospitals and retirement homes, and plain old house companions.  But if I made such a list, someone would know of yet another role and catch my omission.

Because the articles on this website try to touch upon matters related to reading, any dog-article would need to mention some of the countless occasions on which dog-lovers have set pen to paper.  Would I mention the modern classic by animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz titled Man Meets Dog?  Or the noteworthy but almost forgotten essays of E. B. White?  Or would I instead mention some more popular fare adaptable into a movie, such as Marley & Me, the humorous adventures of one dog owner?  There's even a book by a Nobel Prize winner, John Steinbeck's light fare Travels with Charley.

I would also need to mention the cartoons that have apparently been inspired by dogs' instinctive love of play.  Such as the never-ending stream of talking dogs in The New Yorker's cartoons.  Or the very durable ones by James Thurber -- simple but expressive line-drawings.

With so much to give me pause, why have I now at last set pen to paper with this article?  It is because I stumbled upon what is perhaps the highest compliment ever paid to dogs (even if there is a bit of irony about this particular dog virtue).  The spiritual writer Karen Armstrong, contrasting humans to dogs, wrote:  "While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don't find some significance in our lives."

Her statement goes even deeper than the common observation that dogs do not stew over the day's events or worry about tomorrow.  (What a relief for a dog owner who returns home exhausted from a hard day!)  Armstrong's observation goes to the matter of the meaning of life, something humans very much need to search for but can never be absolutely certain about. Ironically, it is because dogs do not possess that human need that they can lightheartedly give meaning to our own lives.

~~~

Have you or your family ever had a dog?  Name something it contributed to your life.

(The Armstrong quote is from her article "Think Again: God" in Foreign Policy, Nov./Dec. 2009.)
(The photo of two dogs is by José Carlos Cortizo Pérez from Fuenlabrada, Spain.  That of the dog with sunglasses
 is by Chiniman123. Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licenses.)

A Church and a Novel

Say “the hunchback of Notre Dame,” and many people will think of that hulky character in one of the movie versions of the novel. Maybe the mental image evoked will include some sense of the height of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, from which the hunchbacked character looks down upon the jeering mob below. Rarely has there been such a famous intersection of a church and a novel; in this case, Paris's largest cathedral and the novel by Victor Hugo.

Paris's second largest church building, the much less famous Church of Saint-Sulpice, has had an interesting intersection with a novel, but in a quite different way.  And that intersection may say something about our human struggles to bring the illumination of both science and religion to our world.

Now on display in Saint-Sulpice is this note about the long, straight line in the 17th-century church's floor:

"Contrary to fanciful allegations in a recent best-selling novel,
 this [line] is not a vestige of a pagan temple.
 No such temple ever existed in this place.
It was never called a "Rose-Line'."

The "best-selling novel" discreetly referred to is the 2003 book The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

The inlaid brass line is in fact part of a device (a "gnomon") for knowing when the spring equinox occurs, based on where during the course of a year a noon-time shaft of light falls along that line, or on the obelisk at the far end of it. The word "gnomon" has its root in the Greek word for "to know." But there is much that Brown does not appear to know (or desire to convey) about the true history of this gnomon. The religious reason for discerning the spring equinox is explained by an inscription on the obelisk's base: "Ad Certam Paschalis," or "for the determination of Easter." That religious task, as the 20th-century scientist Stephen Jay Gould explained, "requires considerable astronomical sophistication, for lunar and seasonal cycles must both be known with precision."

The sun-calculating device in the Church of Saint-Sulpice is not an exotic oddity, as one might think reading Brown's book.  In fact, other similar installations (sometimes called "meridian lines") can be found in cathedrals in Rome, Florence, and Bologna, Italy -- all demonstrating conjunctions of the Church and astronomy. Even beyond those other installations, there is additional evidence that Saint-Sulpice's gnomon has real Christian roots, and is not a pagan import: The Christian practice of scientifically calculating solar equinoxes was mastered notably by an English monk living in the 700's, the Venerable Bede. He developed tables for calculating Easter for the three centuries yet to come. His manual for that scientific field called "computus" continued to be used into the Middle Ages.

And what about the letters "P" and "S" in two of Saint-Sulpice's windows? Here again, the notice posted in the cathedral brings illumination:

"Please also note that the letters "P" and "S" in the small round windows
 at both ends of the transept refer to Peter and Sulpice, the patron saints of the church,
 and not an imaginary "Priory of Sion" [a secret society in Brown's novel ]."

The architecture of the Church of Saint-Sulpice is not to my personal taste. Nevertheless, I can admire the openness not only of the people who built Saint-Sulpice, but also the other Christian minds stretching back to the Venerable Bede and even beyond -- bringing together knowledge and inspiration from both science and religion.

~ ~ ~

Is there knowledge about the natural world from contemporary science that expands your spirit?

(The quotation by Stephen Jay Gould is from his Dinosaur in a Haystack, © 1995, p. 39.)

Moving and Memories

Have you ever woken out of a dream in which you had been in a place where you previously lived?  Such dreams are not uncommon.  They were also the framework drawn upon by Marcel Proust to begin his masterwork novel Remembrance of Things Past.  The author tells of how, sometimes dozing in and out of sleep, he would awake disoriented, not sure at first where he was.  He easily imagined for a moment that he was in a childhood or other earlier bedroom. As Proust wrote, "When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years."

Such dreams fascinate me because they express so well how making sense of new experiences and challenges involves placing them within the context of something we already know.  New situations, particularly demanding ones, can be disorienting, just as Proust was momentarily disoriented.  Drawing upon abilities we already possess can help us orient ourselves in less familiar situations -- just as the dream of a familiar room and walls reveals our subconscious's drawing upon something deeply rooted within us.

Thinking back upon our lives, if we have lived in more then one location, we can recall times of transition that entailed moving.  Some moves can be exhilarating; others can be frightening. Leaving for college can be an exciting, hopeful time despite its uncertainties.  Being forced to move because of divorce is inevitably stressful, the atmosphere of a failed marriage suffocating for the time any joy that once was.

Reflecting upon this matter of moving leads me to thoughts of those non-human animals that must make frequent moves.  Twice a year, thousands of wildebeests make a mass migration covering many miles of East Africa.  Annual migrations by bird species, usually north and south, are an integral part of their lives.  Historians have sometimes employed the world "migration" to describe the movement of groups of people as they relocated, but those human "migrations" are in most cases once-in-a-lifetime, in contrast with the demand that instinct places upon such animal species every single year.  Nevertheless, in that instinct lies salvation, protecting the species against too severe weather, and offering the hope of food ahead.

I wonder if animals who migrate have dreams of previous homes.  I do know that researchers in laboratories have been able to detect through brain waves that rats dream about a new task they were challenged with the day before.  Birds are not as biologically close to us as such mammals, but might they also be dreaming of flying when their wings flutter while asleep?

Ecologists speak of "niches" in which species have evolved, finding their place in a life-giving way.  Human beings, try to find their place spiritually in relation to a Higher Truth or Power. Thousands of years ago, one ancient Hebrew, going to the temple for spiritual reorientation, looked up and was encouraged to see that the temple had also provided niches in its walls for nesting birds:

"How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD....

Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself,

 where she may lay her young."

~~~

Have you ever made a move that entailed not just relocation but also growth?

(The Proust quote is from the opening chapter, "Overture," of the first book, Swann's Way,

 in Marcel Proust's 1913-1927 opus, trans by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, © 1928.)

(The quotation about the temple niches is from the Hebrew Bible [Christian New Testament], Psalm 84:1, 3 [NRSV])
(Photo of wildebeests, by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.)

Tiny Tanks

Tiny army tanks -- that's what they often look like.  Beetles, that is.  The way these particular insects, often with bulky bodies, plow ahead over rough terrain can easily remind a child of army tanks they've seen on TV.  (One subgroup is even called "soldier beetles.")

One 20th-century evolutionary biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, suggested that a different type of mindset might lie behind this Coleoptera category of insects, and his comment has entered the canon of science-humor stories.  After a distinguished career in biology, a reporter asked Haldane what conclusion about the mind of the Maker he had drawn from his vast, scientific knowledge of Nature.  Haldane replied, "an inordinate fondness for beetles."

Indeed, there are over 400,000 species of these little creatures (almost half of all insect species), identifiable by their pair of hard forewings serving as armor.  Some beetles click; some emit blinking light; some are like whirligigs.  Although the word "beetle" derives from the Old English "bitela," meaning "biting," very few would bite you.

 I know God did not invent beetles just to entertain us.  (They and many other insects were, after all, around for at least 50 million years before hominids came along.) Nevertheless, more than one science-humor story revolves around them.

A frequently repeated anecdote is about the young Charles Darwin when he was alone, collecting beetles (one of his favorite hobbies).  Spotting an unusual beetle, he picked it up, but then spotted one of a different species, which he picked up with his other hand.  But then he spotted a third beetle, and so popped the second beetle into his mouth to quickly free a hand.  As Darwin later recalled, "Alas, [the beetle in my mouth] ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out."  The author of a juvenile-level biography concludes this story with the straight-faced comment, "Bugs don't always do what you want them to, and not all beetles want to be caught."

It would be fun to think that God had invented Darwin's squirting beetle so that writers of biographies for youth would have a funny story to insert into their manuscript.  But I expect God has larger concerns in mind than the entertainment of readers.  (Even if the 19th-century novelist William Makepeace Thackeray was able to wittily turn "beetle" into a verb by saying in Vanity Fair that "Chambermaids... beetled from bedroom to bedroom loaded with... champagne.")

No, my hunch is that the plenitude of beetle species has more to do with the strength of their body type and its adaptability to many different environments.  Hopefully, our human sense of humor will remain just as strong and adaptable.

~~~

Even if you don't know what type they were, have you ever noticed any insects around the entrance to where you live?

(The Haldane quote was in an article by G. Evelyn Hutchinson

 in The American Naturalist in 1959 [93, 870]: 145-159.)

(The Darwin remembrance, originally in Life and Letters, Vol. 1, p. 43, and comment about it

 are from Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman, © 2009.  p. 24.)

A Flow that Courses Beneath Our Lives

Rivers.  Every continent on this planet has at least one major river that forms a backbone of life. There is the Nile of ancient Egypt.  The Mesopotamian Tigris and Euphrates of Biblical proportions.  The Mississippi.  Not to mention the Ganges, considered sacred, so important is it to India.

I remember once in my very early adulthood looking out a railway-car window at night as the train I was on crossed over the Mississippi River.  Even though I had read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn growing up in school, only then, as I saw that river's serpentine twists in the moonlight, was I able to truly understand how Huck and Jim were able to experience that river as both a source of safe places to hide and as a treacherous place for navigating in the fog.

celebrating the Festival of Lights
by floating lamps on the Ganges

Obviously, rivers are composed of water, and as such participate in all the symbolic meanings of water, no matter which shape the river takes.  However, because rivers are massive and flowing, they have carried additional layers of symbolism -- ones that draw upon the aspects of depth and of time.  (As the early 20th-century author Thomas Wolfe knew when he titled one of his novels Of Time and the River.)

The story of humankind has been filled with tragedy and comedy, mischief and virtue, chaos and order.  Through it all, rivers have been not only a physical means for life-support, but also a way for faith-traditions and writers to find a way of supporting the fragile boats that our lives sometimes become.  Rivers have thus served as symbols that penetrate into the often hidden continuity of our existence amid all of life's flux.  Amid all the twists and turns of life.

contemporary ferryman in India

I do not know of any novel where this layer of
symbolism is used to better effect than in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha (1922), in which the author fuses Eastern Buddhist thought and Western psychological insights.  That book follows the life-course of a man from early adolescence through his middle years and into his later years -- as he struggles to find an integrity and meaning for his life.  Both as a young man and as old man, he crosses the same river, while that ever-flowing body of water and the ferryman provide a continuity. During one of their encounters later in life, the ferryman guides him with this lesson:  "The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too.  The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it.  You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths."

The 14th century Christian mystic theologian Meister Eckhart had a gift for spiritual teaching. Part of that gift lay in his ability to speak of the Eternal in ways that helped his students discern God not as an abstract concept but as a Force underlying their own ordinary lives.  Eckhart drew upon many metaphors to do that.  Once he wrote:

"God is a great underground river

 that no one can dam up  and no one can stop"

~~~

Have you found a continuity in your life that helps sustain you?  What is it?

(The Hesse quote is from Siddhartha [1922], trans. by Hilda Rosner, © 1951.  p. 86.)

(The Eckhart quote is taken from Wrestling with the Prophets by Matthew Fox, © 1995.  p. 13.)

(The first photo is by User:Pradeep211, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(The second photo is by Steffi, upload by Herrick, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

Much Missed about Mary’s Monster

Despite all the new movie characters you will see portrayed by children in costume come Halloween, you might still spot that perennial favorite Frankenstein.  Usually that depiction will be modeled on Boris Karloff's makeup in the 1931 movie (perhaps all the way down to the lug-bolts on each side of the monster's head, an indication that he was put together from parts).  That movie has also been the primary vehicle through which people have learned a Frankenstein story.  But that movie diverged in significant ways from the original British novel by Mary Shelley.  And what was left out may tell us something significant about life, and even other species.

Mary Shelley

The 1818 original novel was inspired partly by Mary Shelley (wife of poet Percy Shelley) having heard about experiments in which scientists were beginning to discover physical connections between electricity, chemistry and biology.  For example, the severed legs of a frog would "kick" when an electrical current was applied.  Some scientists wondered if electricity could somehow bring a whole dead animal back to life.  Mary's imagination took the matter one step further by having her fictional young scientist use electricity to bring life to a being assembled from parts of human corpses.

So far, novel and movie are roughly the same.  The critical question is:  How will complications appear?  What matters has the scientist overlooked that will lead to difficulties (something any good plot needs, horror story or otherwise)?  In the movie, an explanation for the damage that will ensue is provided by the scientist's assistant unwisely having substituted a criminal's brain for a normal person's brain.  But Mary's book provided no such easy out.

In the movie, the monster was mute and slow-witted (probably because of that inadequate brain). In quite a contrast, the book's newly created living being is precocious, and quickly learns to talk quite well.  He even learns to read, and becomes quite erudite.  How could anything go wrong?

And yet, there are problems from the start, and they have to do as much with the scientist as with the monster.  The new being, desiring contact, reaches his hand out to the scientist's, but the scientist pulls back, avoiding touch.  That will be the key to the problems that continue to develop as the new being seeks companionship but cannot get it, and also seeks a mate but cannot find one.  For, after all, this new being is the only one of its kind.  Like all living beings on this planet, he needs others of the same species.  It is as if he were the last of a virtually extinct species the moment he was "born."

To put it in a nutshell, to me, Mary Shelley's monster story suggests not just the danger of arrogant science, but the even greater problems of living and of loving.  If social species such as mammals and birds could watch movies, they might also identify with the "monster."

~~~

Have you ever identified with a monster in a movie, or thought about why we sometimes can?

(The drawing of Frankenstein is by André Koehne 

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

(The portrait of Shelley is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)

An Easy Way for Evaluating People?

Oh, if we could only know what is going on in another person's head!  Not everything (that would be a nightmare), but enough to protect ourselves against danger that might be coming from someone else.  How can we know through observation whether another person can be relied upon or not?  Interestingly, one formula that has sometimes been given in literature is to watch how that person treats animals.

Just to give some examples from Western literature:  Charlotte Brontë, in her lesser-known novel Shirley, wrote of one character, "we watch him, and see him kind to animals."  That character turns out to be kind also "to little children, to poor people."  In Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, the body language and speech of the gardener Ben makes him forbidding; but then his deeper character is revealed through his affection for a robin.  In one of Victor Hugo's most famous novels, that kind of contrast is emphasized by a caring for birds being displayed by the hideous-looking hunchback.  In this case, the action toward animals not only reveals character, but also belies Quasimodo's ugly physical appearance.

poem
"Kindness to Animals"
by Jane Taylor (1783-1824)

There are so many examples like these that we might think that with them we have gotten the animal-human connection figured out.  But the matter is more complex.  Setting aside the problem of trying to catch a glimpse of a person mistreating an animal in advance of injuring a person, there is the question of whether treatment of animals is really a sure-fire indicator.  Part of the complexity here is that literature is not neutral, objective observation.  Literature develops familiar patterns to suit particular audiences.  Thus, these recurring scenes of good treatment of animals by reliable people could simply be an easy device for the author to reveal what is within a character's head without using a stream-of-consciousness technique.

Moreover, sometimes literary themes develop in order to teach moral lessons.  English literature, especially in the 1800's, was frequently considered to be a vehicle for teaching children.  That role of stories means that animal-treatment scenes may have been designed to teach good behavior, not as a claim about predicting a person's future behavior.

Nonetheless, recent scientific research indicates that our human brains are indeed inclined to prefer a person who is kinder over a person who is not.  Researchers at Yale had babies only five months old watch two stuffed animals (manipulated like puppets) behave differently toward a third stuffed animal.  After watching one stuffed animal be helpful and another animal be unhelpful toward a third animal, the babies were then offered the two main puppets.  Which would they prefer to have?  The babies reached out their arms for the stuffed animal that had been "nice" 75 % of the time.

That's a pretty good predictor.  Nonetheless, we have to admit that in 25 % of the cases, the babies did not choose the "nice" puppet.  It seems that just as with adults, we cannot always be able to predict how a baby is going to behave.

~~~

Do you remember any story you read as a child in which animals were treated kindly?

(The Brontë quotes are Shirley's words to Charlotte in Chap.12 of Shirley by Charlotte Brontë [1840].)

(The novel by Victor Hugo mentioned is The Hunchback of Notre Dame [1831].)

The Oyster’s Secret

One species of
edible oysters

Any number of movie writers have used the plot device of a person eating at a restaurant and finding a pearl in their oyster.  If the screenwriters had consulted marine biologists, those scientists would have disappointed them by explaining that those species of oyster people eat do not include the mollusks that produce pearls. The idea of such a find is appealing, however -- like a winning lottery ticket from Nature herself!  But this source of new-found wealth would come in the form of a small luminescent sphere.

The 20th-century novelist John Steinbeck cautioned against that appeal in The Pearl, a book that was assigned reading when I was in middle school.  The school's decision to require our reading that novella probably lay in its small size and obvious moral:  Greed over material possession can cause people to damage what is truly valuable -- human relationships and love.  Human beings have now figured out how to artificially induce the growth of "cultivated" pearls.  We have not, however, figured out how to get rid of human greed.

There can be another reason for appreciating mollusks:  for food, as many oyster lovers know. Oysters even come with a running gag to make eating them more entertaining.  Namely, the joke that it was a brave man who ate the first oyster.  (I myself very much appreciate the first man or woman who learned how to batter and fry oysters prior to their being served.)  Many people repeat that "brave man" joke without knowing that it originated with the 18th-century Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels.

Although the oyster's secret might seem to be a possible pearl hidden within, it is really no secret that pearls are now usually cultivated.  What is a secret is not what might lie within an oyster, but where oysters lie.  Where they now lie "at rest," so to speak.  And what that speaks about humankind.

The walrus and the carpenter --
whose oysters had fictional legs

That secret lies underwater in middens, old refuse heaps from human cultures.  Those underwater heaps,  which are on coastal areas throughout the world, besides containing bones, contain oyster shells -- evidence of how oysters were an important source of dietary protein and minerals to Neolithic cultures twelve thousand years ago. One midden in Maine, mostly oyster shells, was over 30 feet deep and over 1,300 feet wide.  Although in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass the comic walrus and carpenter tempted the oysters to come out for a walk on the beach so that they could be eaten, oysters had the benefit to humans of being food that could neither run away nor counterattack.  As such, oysters would have sustained human life over precarious times.

Without eyes or an obvious head, and given their inability to run away, it can be easy, I think, for us to forget that oysters are animals, as are we. Oysters live; they breathe; they reproduce. They are another testimony to evolution's ingenuity.  Moreover, although there may not be a pearl within that rugged lump of seeming rock, for ancient humans, there was a source of life within.

~~~

Imagine people gathering oysters thousands of years ago.  Does anything come to mind?

(The photo of oysters is by Myrabella

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

(The illustration of walrus and carpenter is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Paths, Not All Straight or Narrow

The front lawns in the suburb where I live display varying degrees of maintenance.  Some are impeccably trimmed; others are half-wild.  Although my lawn fits within the mid-range on that spectrum, it does have one distinctive feature, especially when the grass becomes dormant in the winter.  There is a diagonal path across it where the grass is kept matted down by the regular passage of neighborhood cats.  (Even though my wife and I are not sure how many cats use the path, it is clearly defined.)  That mark on our front lawn reveals to me that cats have joined a long tradition of animals and humans who have found it wise to follow a path that has been trod before, a path either secular or sacred.

Almost anywhere you look in the history of animals or people, you can come across the idea of following a path.  Just to take some examples from the U.S.:  James Fenimore Cooper's 1840 book The Pathfinder was inspired in part by stories about native Americans being skilled in finding their way in the wilderness.  American legend also contains the story of how in 1775 the hero Daniel Boone found an opening through the Appalachian Mountains, thus making possible the "Wilderness Road" for Europeans to move further west.  In fact, the trail he found was already there, having been used by Indians for generations.  And how did the Indians know about it?  By watching animals, particularly the buffalo.  They were the original pathfinders.

Turning to the other side of the globe, one of the most important scriptures of Buddhism, by its very name, indicates that honing one's life in a spiritually honorable fashion is like following a path.  A collection of elegant sayings of the Buddha is named The Dhammapada, which could be translated "The Path of Truth" or "The Path of the Teaching."  Furthermore, the idea that the followers of Buddhism are, in a sense, walking behind the Buddha is given beautiful artistic expression by the Buddha sometimes being represented symbolically by two footprints carved side by side on the ground in stone.

The religious symbol of a "path" or "way" is just as explicit, although in a somewhat mystical manner, in philosophical Taoism.  Particularly in Taoism's premier scripture, the Tao te ching.  In most English translations of that small classic, the word "Tao" is even translated as "way" because of the double meaning that English word can hold.  In one meaning, "the way" is the nature of the world, in the sense that we might speak of "the way things are."  In a second sense, "the way" is the way we ought to live our lives to best coordinate ourselves with the way the world truly is.

True, the cats that follow a path of tramped-down grass on my front lawn might feel they are just taking the smoothest route to the bowl of food my neighbor puts out.  But I know the cats are following a widespread and noble tradition by being led by fellow creatures who have traveled a path before them.

~~~

Is there a particular way that your life has followed a path of some people who went before you?

(The photo of Buddha footprints is by "Nemo's great uncle"

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License.)

A Kitchen with a View

One feature of many U.S. kitchens built in the 1950's is the placement of a window above the kitchen sink.  I recognize that such an arrangement could have been prompted in part by ergonomics, that science of designing workplace objects to fit the size and movements of a person's body:   Because we need to lean forward slightly to reach down into the bottom of a sink, we could hit our heads on a cupboard if it had been placed above the sink.  I am inclined to think, however, that another reason for that window is our general dislike of washing dishes by hand, contrasted with the soothing possibilities a view of Nature can provide when we look out the kitchen window.

Kitchens in middle-class houses built back in the '50's did not usually have automatic dishwashers as part of the original construction.  And in most families I knew, washing dishes was, let us say, not a beloved task.  (When, in the early 1960's my family briefly hired a maid to assist my mother with household work, my sister and I found the otherwise nice woman a bit peculiar when she explained that she would not cook but that she did love to wash dishes!)

I do not have many happy memories revolving around my washing dishes.  But I do have good memories about people enjoying that view out the window above the sink.  When I was a child and my parents were house-hunting , one thing that attracted them to the house they settled on was a graceful, flowering mimosa tree just outside the kitchen window.  And in our previous house, I lost count of the number of times my mother, at the sink, would remark upon a cardinal or other bird she noticed outside.  What my mother saw and commented upon expanded my own childhood knowledge and awareness of the world.  Today, in my own house, my wife and I have a low cherry laurel to gaze upon, delighting ourselves with the antics of the squirrels that clamor upon it.

I know an architect who says he just cannot imagine designing a kitchen without a window above the sink -- it just would not be the courteous thing to do.

In E. M. Forster's 1908 novel A Room with a View, a window-view becomes both the source of the book's title and a symbol for the book's theme of the struggle between social insularity and openness.  The upper-class heroine, not yet married, and on vacation in Italy, finds that the hotel room she is assigned to lacks a good view.  A gracious middle-class man offers to switch rooms so that she might have a window with a beautiful view.  Who will she marry? That generous man's son, or a man who is of her own class but who is shallow? Those social questions are Forster's primary concern, but the relationship with Nature is a sub-theme.  The cinematographer's who made the 1985 movie version took advantage of that sub-theme:  When the young woman, vacationing away from cold England, opens the shutters on that new window she agreed to accept, the beautiful and warm Italian sunshine floods into the room.  And more than light floods into her as well.

~~~

Do you have a view of some aspects of Nature through a window where you live?  Is there a favorite thing you like to see?

Big Skies

My wife grew up in a moderately hilly landscape in Michigan.  When she first moved to a city on a flat, coastal plain, she missed the open vantage points that had been provided back home by the tops of hills.  And so, she found herself appreciating the freeway overpasses as substitutes. Nevertheless, the shortcomings she experienced in a flat terrain were offset by a payoff:  Being on a flat landscape made the sky seem exponentially larger.  And so, my wife immediately recognized the experience the 20th-century American author Willa Cather had described in one of her novels.  Of flat New Mexico, Cather wrote:  "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.... [T]he world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky."

Seeing the vaulting sky above a flat terrain is like viewing a movie on a wide screen in a movie theater, as contrasted with watching it on an old-fashioned, confined TV screen.  Although experts on movie history tell us that in the 1950's it was the need to compete with television that prompted the creation of CinemaScope and Panavision, I wonder if it was not also the popularity of westerns at that time.  Those wide-screen formats were perfect for depicting the grand open plains during U.S. frontier history.  Even though one 1952 western could not escape critics' pointing out its mediocre content, the movie's title recognized the power of the majestic ceiling above that open land on which the humans traveled.  The movie's title was simply "The Big Sky."

Not that a wide view of the sky is always delightful.  I remember as a kid road trips in the family car when a wide view of the sky revealed the vastness of storms developing on the horizon -- no way to steer around them!  As I remember that image of threatening skies, I also recall a part of U.S. history that most of those movie westerns barely mentioned.  Namely, that as European-Americans expanded outward and westward under a big sky, they confined native Americans to smaller and smaller pieces of land.

Our American love for wide, open spaces continued from frontier times even into the 20th century.  That love paralleled those 1950's westerns, as post-World War II suburbs sprawled out from cities more heavily on their western sides.  People still moving westward, still hungry for something.

Beneath the saga of U.S. history -- as told through the lens of our relationship to a big sky and a wide horizon -- lies, I think, a broader human desire.  It is the desire to feel that our lives are not constrained.  It is the desire to feel that the possibilities for life are so wide that they reach out to an unconfining horizon.  If that is so, what we might really need is not simply to look out across a greater distance, but to pause and look up more deeply into the sky, and into ourselves as we do so.  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The sky is the daily bread of the eyes." If that is so, maybe what we need is not just a larger portion of sky but the habit of savoring it more deeply and more thoughtfully.

~~~

Whether your physical vantage point is confined or more open, are there any occasions during the day when you look at the sky?

(The Cather quote is from Death Comes for The Archbishop

 by Willa Cather, © 1927.  Book VII, Ch. 4.)

(The Emerson quote is from his Journals entry May 25, 1843, as quoted in

 A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, ed. Barbara K. Rodes, et al., ©1992.  68.44.)

(Stormy-sky photo by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos used under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Unported 3.0 license.)

Conviviality and Commonality

It has made the name of a minor character in a novel by Herman Melville into a household word.  It inspired Johann Sebastian Bach to write a cantata.  The "it" is coffee, made from the berries of plants of the genus Coffea.

Career teachers inevitably accumulate props to enliven their teaching.  My middle-school Spanish teacher had one prop that particularly fascinated me.  It was a set of five small glass jars demonstrating coffee production, from bright red fruit (simulated) through green beans to ground coffee -- the last being the only form in which most people in the U.S. at that time knew coffee.  I was fascinated by the contents of those jars, wanting to know more than the Spanish words.  I think I looked at the set closely because I so much wanted to understand this world.

Although cultivated coffee dates back to the 15th century (the plant originating in Ethiopia), the coffeehouse did not develop until the 16th century in Turkey.  The first such business in the main part of Europe appeared in the mid 1600's, no more than a century after coffee was introduced there.  (Bach's 1735 "coffee cantata" was titled "Be Quiet, Stop Chattering.")  Today, half of the adults in the world drink coffee.  We of humankind are divided on so many issues, but half of us agree upon liking coffee.

Les Deux Magots
in Paris today

In centuries before democracy, coffeehouses could be hotbeds for political criticism.  After the rise of democracies in Europe, those social gathering places became more associated with intellectual and literary movements.  In the decades of disillusionment after World War I, Les Deux Magots in Paris became one center for existentialist writers such as Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.  Those literati tried to come to grips with "modern times," or Les Temps modernes, as their periodical was named.  I'm not sure what the chief mate named "Starbuck" in Melville's Moby Dick would think of his name being on thousands of coffee outlets today.  That the Starbucks company was wanting a literary reference for their establishments is underscored by their having first considered "Pequod," the ship's name in that novel.  ("Starbucks" is certainly easier to pronounce.)

Even before counter-cultural beatnik coffeehouses emerged in the 1950's (and even longer before today's widely mainstream Starbucks), there was the tradition of the coffee break:  A chance to pause from work.  And a chance perhaps to chat with one's co-workers.

To me, all those percolating pots, dripping coffee-makers, and hissing espresso machines speak a message about our Homo sapiens species.  They say that we do not live solely by bodily nutrition nor by work alone.  If those little red Coffea berries could tell the story of all the experiences they have been through, they would tell us that human beings need a rhythm of work and relaxation, and that we also need conviviality.  And to have our minds stimulated.

~~~

Can you think of another plant whose life is intertwined with the lives of human beings?

(The photo of coffee beans is by Marcelo Corrêa

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

Nature’s Time Machine

"Let's set the Way-Back Machine to the year...."  Many a person in the U.S. of my generation, upon hearing that line, will recall the Peabody cartoons that were part of the Bullwinkle TV show. With that periodic segment, the Bullwinkle show joined the long line of plot-writers (primarily science-fiction) who employed the device of time travel.  It's a literary tradition that can be traced all the way back to H. G. Wells's 1895 appropriately titled novel The Time Machine.

When we look at species of plants and animals, if we have some knowledge of evolutionary biology, we can also be taken back in time.  We Homo sapiens are late arrivers on this planet (150,00 yrs. ago).  And so, knowing other species sets the dial of the time machine farther back.  To use another metaphor, if evolution is thought of as a huge tree of life with numerous levels of branches, as we look at branches that began lower on the tree, we are taken further back in time.

leaf of
a ginkgo biloba tree

Despite many extinctions, most species still around today have endured an incredibly long time.  I remember the day I noticed the unusually shaped leaves of a tree beside the sidewalk in a southern city I was visiting.  The person I was with explained that it was a ginkgo, which, unlike other trees in the U.S., was of a type that dated back a quarter-billion years.  Another example of going way back are some species of marsupials, such as ancient opossum species.  Marsupials (which include kangaroos) represent an early state of mammalian evolution, having no placenta. They bear young that are extremely small, and carry the young in a pouch for the remainder of their early development.

A nautilus,
another ancient species

For those of us who think of God as the Giver of Life and as the Fountain out of which all possibilities come, evolution can be seen as the way by which the Divine manifests its power and wonder.  Although evolution, seemingly paradoxically, requires elements of chance (such as mutations and chance experiences), there is in evolution a discernible direction toward a richer diversity of life.

Although Peabody and Star Trek episodes took the audience back in time (to such periods as Prohibition or ancient Rome), H. G. Wells's The Time Machine actually took the reader forward in time.  That is a harder task when it comes to evolution. No one studying the varieties of species 100 million years ago could have predicted that a meteor would hit the earth off the Yucatan, bringing such thick clouds that plants would die, thus cornering all the great species of dinosaurs into extinction.

We do know however, that we are suffering a loss of biodiversity -- a reduction of the number of branch-tips at evolution's treetop of the present.  The main cause is human:  the stresses of loss of habitats and climate change.  It is not yet determined in what way this plot will turn out.  Whenever we work to preserve the rich diversity of inter-species relationships that strengthen life, we try to write a happy ending for the story of life.

~~~

Does it add something to your perspective or your life to imagine way back in time?

(The photograph of the leaf is by Daniel Miłaczewski.  That of the nautilus is by Lee R Berger.

Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licenses.)

Turning Our Brains to Birds

In the book To Kill a Mockingbird (adapted into a movie). Atticus Finch tells his children that they are allowed to shoot some birds with their air-rifles, but that "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."  That directive resembles many laws in the U.S. when it was a rural society. Shooting birds such as crows in defense of one's crops was allowed, but killing "songbirds" (such as the versatile, melodious mockingbird) was prohibited.

Fortunately, birds have not been so discriminatory toward the human race.  They have blessed us in many ways, whether or not their calls have been labeled "songs" by us.

Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds (based on the Daphne du Maurier book) is an unforgettable movie in which birds attack humans for undetermined reasons.  The trailer for the movie, instead of showing frightening clips from the film, presented Hitchcock himself drolly giving a mock lecture about the history of the bird-human relationship.   As he speaks, Hitchcock casually picks up a quill pen, letting the viewer make the connection to our use of birds.  He then escalates from picking up a hat with a feather to picking up a hat with an entire stuffed bird decorating it.  Finally, he sits down at a dining table with an entire roasted chicken before him.  Throughout the trailer, his "lecture" feigns a naive innocence, wondering why birds, would ever be unappreciative of us humans.

A Pheasant and
a Bird Called Tabut
(1717  C.E.)

I was once given an insight into how critical birds have been for some cultures.  I found myself in a conversation with a group of people comparing their families' plans for the upcoming Thanksgiving.  Most people were opting for turkey, but a few had in the past sometimes eaten chicken instead.  One person then asked a member of the group who had been silent -- an immigrant from Haiti -- what kind of birds his family had eaten in Haiti.  His unhesitating and quite earnest reply was, "Any kind we could catch."  His reply revealed how, for some people living in poverty, birds have been life-savers.

Today, in highly technological societies, almost all the birds we eat are domesticated animals (which we distinguish by calling them "fowl" or "poultry.")  We virtually never see them when they are alive, even as the protein from their bodies gives life to our own bodies.

Despite that disconnect, there might be a way that the living birds singing all around us can add more life to our spirits.  That way is captured by Lisel Mueller in her poem "Why I Need the Birds."  Mueller imagines birds with their songs as traveling ahead of her throughout the day as they follow the arc of the sun.  Part of the poem reads:

"... the birds, leading

their own discreet lives

of hunger and watchfulness,

are with me all the way...."

~~~

Do you ever hear the songs of birds during the course of your day?  When?

(The photograph of the manuscript is used under a Creative Commons license,
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, by the Walters Art Museum.)
(Mueller's complete poem can be read on-line at this external link:  "Why I Need the Birds".) 

A Plant that Lost Its Social Status

When I was a child, there were two things my mother was most likely to comment upon when she looked out the window into our backyard.  One was when she spotted a cardinal, a hopeful sign that cardinals might be nesting nearby.  The second thing she would frequently comment upon was when she noticed a new bright dandelion flower that seemed to have suddenly appeared in the grass.  The cardinals would never allow me to approach and look at them close up.  But the dandelion flowers would.

My sister, the neighborhood kids, and I would take greater delight in the puffball that would later appear from such a flower.  The ball seemed like a toy (of a kind that no human could have ever constructed).  We were fascinated by its perfectly spherical shape made of delicate hairs so lightly attached that we could blow them off the stem.  As we watched the hairs with their tiny seeds float away, seemingly carefree in the breeze, we children had no concern at all that we might have been increasing the labor of some adults trying to weed their lawns.

The dandelion flower's ability to release to the lightest breeze its feathered seeds (as many as 50 per flower) is part of the larger story of how the dandelion has spread across the planet Earth.  The other key to understanding dandelion history is realizing that for most of its history the dandelion was not considered to be a weed. Instead, it was thought to be one of the most important and versatile gifts that Nature provided to humankind.

Going back just a little over a century, we can get one clue to the dandelion's usefulness in an 1888 U.S. Formulary of medicine.  A full 12 of the 435 prescriptions listed included an ingredient from the dandelion plant.  Although the dandelion-human connection had begun centuries earlier in Europe, by 1800 the plant had reached the Pacific coast of the U.S.  The plant had been carried westward by European pioneers and by winds propelling its puffball's seeds.  (It would eventually get to Japan.)

Over the past few decades, many writers on spirituality have been excited to discover the rich tradition of prayers and thought of the Celtic Christians.  Researchers have also found in Celtic history many references to dandelions, an indication of the roles the plant played in culture throughout Europe.  Its primary uses were as a diuretic and as a vegetable.  Because of its deeply-notched leaves, the plant (which had an ancestry of many millions of years behind it) was honored with the name "dandelion" from the Old French words for "lion's teeth."

detail of painting
by Richard Mauch, 1921

The dandelion's involvement with human society is demonstrated in its being mentioned in literature as diverse as that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thoreau, George Eliot, and Beatrix Potter. By the 20th century, however, medicines and diets had changed, and dandelion greens came to be eaten mostly by the poor who had to stretch their food budget with a free, found vegetable. In the U.S. and some other countries, the dandelion has now mostly returned to its former life as a vagabond, blown about by the wind.

~~~

Do you have any memories about dandelions?

(The photograph of the yellow flower is by Arcanewizard

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

A Seed Deeply Lodged

I am sometimes surprised by which people have a love for Nature and a strong interest in it.  For example, of the many people I've had a chance over the years to chat with at the barbershop where I have my hair cut, I discovered a keen interest in Nature in the shoe-shine man.  Among all the people, both customers and barbers, I'm sure his income was the lowest.  And indeed, he has never enjoyed the benefits of Sierra Club outings or family trips to national parks.  Instead, his interest in Nature seems to have stemmed from fishing -- not for sport, but as the way his family put enough food on their table.

Despite that background, his appreciation of Nature is more than utilitarian, more than an interest in its practical value to himself.  He knows all sorts of facts about the animals of the rural landscape he came from before moving to the large city where he now makes a very modest income shining shoes.  To that knowledge he has added information he has gleaned from reading the National Geographic magazines that are a part of the barbershop's reading material.  He and I discovered our mutual interest in Nature when he noticed that I was sometimes browsing in the National Geographic's while I waited my turn.  Now, he alerts me when there is a new issue, digging for it himself among the large stock of periodicals while he tells me about one of the latest articles about Nature.

What intrigues me most about Nature-lovers I have encountered unexpectedly, including that shoe-shine man, is how their sense of the world they value extends far beyond the immediate sphere of their life.  My sister, another Nature-lover, became a biology teacher, filling her middle-school classroom with a variety of plant and animal species.  She says it might have been a sign that she was destined to be a biology teacher when, at the age of four, she accidentally sat on a bumblebee, and her first thought was not whether she would be stung, but instead, "Oh no, I hope I didn't hurt the bee!"

As I have reflected upon the character of these two people and other Nature-lovers I know, it seems to me that one quality they have in common is a humility.  In particular, a humility that manifests itself as an absence of any inappropriate amount of self-importance of themselves as a human being.  They do not over-elevate the human race.  Of course, there are many humble people who have little interest in Nature.  That means that something else is going on within the character of Nature-lovers.  I think that other element is that lively interest in a realm larger than our human sphere.  Their minds come to full attention when someone else tells of an unusual bird they've seen, or an article about animals in National Geographic.

Even though I cannot explain why one child will develop an enjoyment of Nature while another child living in the same setting will not, I do think what one little-known early 20th-century novelist wrote is true.  That writer, Mary Webb, wrote in her book The House in Dormer Forest:

"The love of nature is
 a passion for those in whom it once lodges:

  it cannot be removed."

~~~

Do you have a love for or a fascination with Nature?  Where do you think it came from?

(The Mary Webb quotation is from her novel

 The House in Dormer Forest, © 1921.)

Much between the Oink and Curly Tail

A character in PBS's Call the Midwife remarked that dogs look up to us, cats look down at us, but pigs see us as we are.  That bit of wit may say more about our relationships with dogs and cats than it does about pigs.  Nevertheless, pigs probably deserve more credit than they usually get.  Just to start with, we virtually never hold up any quality of a pig for people to emulate.  We say humans should be faithful, and recognize dogs as being so.  In contrast, to call a person a "pig" or a "hog" is always an insult.

detail from
Gauguin's The Black Pigs

Despite that contrast between our attitudes about dogs and pigs, there may well have been a similarity between the way ancient ancestors of dogs and of pigs entered the circle of human culture.  Our domesticated pigs are descendants of tusked wild boars.  Scavenging in humans' waste heaps, those boars that were less aggressive would have been more likely to have been domesticated (just as dogs were from their wild ancestors).  Recent DNA studies have now revealed that the transition from wild boars to pigs was made in seven separate regions of the world, ranging from China to India to Central Europe.

The human-pig relationship, however, has been an uneven one ever since those domestications in Neolithic times.  The unevenness has extended far beyond the matter of pork-eating being a taboo in parts of Judaism and Islam, in contrast with it being the primary source of meat in New Guinea. The larger difficulty has been in humans' not having figured out what degree of wildness and tameness they want in the lives of their hogs.  For centuries in Europe, hogs were allowed to wander freely, perhaps getting some of their own food from the forests, but also being able to search out humans' garbage.  That freedom meant that hogs sometimes caused accidents or killed children, leading to the oddity of a number of hogs having actually been put on trial during the 14th century before being executed.

Today, we have other problems resulting from an opposite condition -- a reduction in the pigs' freedom.  The over-concentration of hogs in massive factory farms has led to unnatural concentrations of urine and feces, far beyond the ability of Nature to reprocess it into the ground. And beyond our ability to find a good way of dealing with it.

pig statue in Sweden

Yes, the history of human-pig relationships has been an awkward one.  Knowing something of human nature, it should not be surprising that people have sometimes pointed the finger of blame at the pigs, even though we ourselves have been ultimately at fault.  It is not just Charlotte in E.B. White's Charlotte's Web who might feel some sympathy for the pig. Perhaps we could give pigs more credit for all they have contributed to the human race -- from pork to leather to bristle brushes to even finding highly valued truffles.  I am doubtful, however, that pigs will be given full credit.  Even when we see a sausage in a bun with mustard, we linguistically honor our canine friends by exclaiming "hot dog" -- saying "dog," when it was the pig that made the real sacrifice.

~~~

As you read this short history, did it bring any thoughts to mind?