Category: • Essays •

EP#25: Insomniac City, Bill Hayes

Insomniac City is by Bill Hayes, the partner of Oliver Sacks in his final 2-3 years. This is a book rather than a set of essays, but we are including it just to round out the coverage of OS. And, it should be noted, we have occasionally included other books-rather-than-essays such as OS’s lovely A Leg to Stand On.

That said, I don’t have a lot to say about Insomniac City. It is an account of Hayes’ arrival in and growing appreciation of NYC (as well as Hayes’ photographs), with alternating chapters describing his relationship with OS.

Hayes’ accounts of NYC didn’t engage me. He has what feels to me like an overly romantic/heroic view of NYC which doesn’t ring true to me, perhaps, though, because I’ve never lived there. I was much more positive about his accounts of his daily life with Sacks. It was nice to get a glimpse of Sacks through other eyes, and find that his eccentricities and charm persisted. I found it especially nice to see that Sacks, who had been alone most of his life, experienced a kind and loving relationship in his last few years.

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EP#27: Essays of Samuel Johnson: An Online Sampler from The Rambler

We are back to the traditional essay form, after a detour into Oliver Sacks, and an abortive taste of William James (which we decided was too far afield from the essay form). I asked Claude.ai to provide a short list of Johnson’s most acclaimed essays from The Rambler, with links to online versions, and we read those.

I find Johnson a bit of a chore to read, although I appreciate his writing. To help consolidate it, I’ve adopted the practice of reading paragraph, and the writing a single sentence that summarizes it.

This time, as an experiment, after writing and consolidating my summary sentences into a precis, I gave Claude.ai the text and asked it to produce a precis of the same length. I was impressed by the results – Claude.ai did as well as I did, although I am confident I will remember the essays better, and appreciate them more, because of my efforts. Below, for each essay, I provide both my own precis and those produced by Claude.ai, as well as links to the essays themselves.

No. 2. The necessity and danger of looking into futurity

No. 2 (imagination vs. execution): https://www.johnsonessays.com/the-rambler/no-2-the-necessity-and-danger-of-looking-into-futurity/

Tom’s Precis

We are distracted from the present by dreams of the future. This manner of wasting time has been widely ridiculed. Yet this condemnation is indulged because those who level it can feel superior, imagining that they think more deeply and possess more perspicuity than the general public. Because it is so easy to mock, writers fail to examine the virtues of looking ahead.  

Yet the inclination to look ahead seems unavoidable. Human progress is gradual, and it is only as we progress that we are able to see new things. And when we attain an end, a new one will be in sight: the human mind moves from hope to hope. To make progress you must attend to your goal, which despite its uncertainty provides motivation.

Even the most repeated maxim contains some truth, otherwise it would not persist. It is true by fixing too strongly upon the imagined results of success, one may neglect the practicalities of achieving it. But little would be undertaken unless we did not, to some degree, magnify the rewards of success. Still, we can overdo it, just as a plant may suffer as much from too much sun as too little. 

Authors may be particularly prone to this sort of error, in thinking of their writings. I am only lightly touched, and will endeavor to fortify myself against this. 

Epictetus advises that one should often think of what is most terrible, to diminish one’s hopes.  A new writer should imagine that he may lack the ability to achieve success; this view may be buttressed by looking at all those authors who came before and are now forgotten. Even talented authors my go unnoticed. The public may be too lazy to read anything without an established reputation; others may neglect new offerings because they are not open to new thinking, or are tainted by suspcion or envy. The learned may hesitate to recommend because they are careful of their reputations, and the ignorant may wish to portray themselves as wise by being critical. Writers who succeed, in spite of all this, must acknowledge their debts to things beyond their personal learning, talent, and industry. 

Claude’s Precis (Opus 4.8)

Johnson examines the human tendency to live in the future rather than the present. The mind, he observes, is never satisfied with what lies immediately before it but is always “breaking away from the present moment,” losing itself in schemes of future happiness—neglecting the time we actually have in order to prepare for enjoyments that may never arrive.

He notes how easily critics mock this habit. Condemning others flatters one’s own sense of superiority, and recycling familiar complaints lets a writer “shine without labour, and conquer without a contest.” Ridiculing the dreamer who refuses present ease for distant pleasures is a smooth, flowery path—which is precisely why Johnson distrusts it and asks whether it actually leads to truth.

The habit, he argues, is in fact unavoidable for a creature whose life is progressive and whose powers are limited. We must use means to reach ends, intending first what we perform last, and at every stage we discover new motives, fears, and desires. Each goal, once gained, turns out to be merely a means to some further goal. The mind moves not “from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.” The farmer turns the soil only because he thinks of a harvest that blight or flood might still destroy.

Yet the warning against fixing our eyes too intently on remote rewards has real merit, even if it’s usually delivered carelessly. We often indulge the thrill of success so early that we neglect the steps needed to secure it, letting the moment slip away. Still, few difficult enterprises would ever be attempted if we couldn’t magnify their imagined rewards. Don Quixote’s grand delusions, Johnson notes, differ from our own private fantasies only in degree—when we laugh at him, our hearts admit he merely says aloud what we have quietly thought.

Authors are especially vulnerable. A writer with a lively imagination races mentally to the press and to posterity, anticipating future honors before doing the work. Johnson, feeling the first symptoms of this “writer’s malady” himself, tries to fortify against it. He counsels aspiring writers to expect neglect—the cruelest fate, worse than hatred or opposition—since even genuine merit is easily lost amid life’s noise, blocked by lazy, envious, and prejudiced readers who resist whatever is new.

No. 5. A meditation on the Spring.

03 Apr 1750 

No. 5 (spring): https://www.johnsonessays.com/the-rambler/no-5-a-meditation-on-the-spring/

Tom’s Precis

Discontent with the present leads us to imagine a felicitous future where barriers to our happiness are gone. When this future arrives, it does not live up to our imaginings; but we simply fix our imagination on a new future. If someone is going to do this, it is best if they imagine ends which are wholly outside their power; for then, at least, they don’t try to do anything to achieve the ends. 

One such person imagined that things would improve with the spring. When the season passed without the foreseen improvements, they would simply expect improvements in the following spring. This person has infected me with the same enthusiasm. 

And indeed, there is something inexpressibly pleasing about the spring in the way the world transforms from its dreary winter state. Spring’s greenness, pleasant smells, beautiful sounds, abounding growth, and lovely weather serve as a powerful simile for hope!

Some people cannot, perhaps, bear self-reflection and instead struggle to escape by immersing themselves in the mundane world. Those who are incapable of comtemplation must turn to other means to avoid depression.  

I will address myself to those who lack the knowledge of nature. Everyone ought to reflect on what they see around them; that is the point of taking a walk.Nature provides an inexhaustible store of materials to reflect on; reflection may range from discovering practical qualities of elements of nature to provoking adoration of God. This will not apply to everyone, but it is not improper to offer these suggestions to those who are depressed. And young people, in the spring of their lives, could gain much pleasure from attention to the natural world, while remembering that the flowers of the spring are but preparation for the fruits of autumn

Claude’s Precis (Opus 4.8)

Johnson opens by noting that almost everyone, dissatisfied with something in their present life, lets the imagination chase future happiness, fixing on some moment when a removed inconvenience or a gained advantage will finally improve things. When that moment arrives, it usually comes without the hoped-for blessing—so we simply latch onto a new prospect and press forward again.

He describes a man he once knew who managed this temper harmlessly by always referring the cure of his troubles to “the next spring.” Ill health, high prices—spring would fix them. Spring routinely failed to deliver, but he was always sure the next would be kinder, and he spoke of spring as still coming until it had passed, at which point everyone agreed it was indeed coming.

Such fondness for spring, Johnson notes, is shared by nearly every great poet, and even the golden age was imagined as a perpetual spring.There is something deeply pleasing in the world’s annual renewal: after winter’s cold and bareness, each early flower feels like a messenger of happier days, and nature wears “the smile” of gaiety.

Yet some people take no delight in this and flee to cards, taverns, and idle chatter. Johnson lays down a reliable rule: when a man cannot bear his own company, something is wrong—he is either escaping an empty mind or fleeing painful thoughts. Setting aside those crushed by genuine sorrow, he addresses people merely bored because they never learned to “read the characters” in the open book of nature.

A French writer claimed few men know how to take a walk, and Johnson agrees—changing your position is pointless if your attention stays fixed. Curiosity about nature multiplies the inlets to happiness without tempting envy. He urges his younger readers to use both the spring of the year and the spring of life, since a blighted spring makes a barren year.

No. 14. The difference between an author’s writings and his conversation

  No. 14 (writing vs. conversation): https://www.johnsonessays.com/the-rambler/no-14-the-difference-between-an-authors-writings-and-his-conversation/

Tom’s Precis

The writing and conversation of an author may be strongly inconsistent; this is evinced by Milton’s self-congratulation on avoiding this circumstance in an interview with a visitor. Many have had their high opinions of an author dashed upon encountering the writer in person. Just as oriental monarchs hid themselves in palaces to preserve the august reputations, so ought authors.

It is obvious why someone may write better than they live: writing is not subject to the same pressures and constrains as living. The many impediments–passions, disruptions, the press of time—that create challenges in life may be banished when one only propounds a theory. So it is no surprise that one’s lived experience does not match one’s precepts laid down in solitude, safety and tranquility.

Yet it is valuable to have ideals; even the most remiss may atone for their faults by acknowledging their failings. It’s not fair to call someone like this a hypocrite: they may sincerely believe in their precepts, even while failing to practice them. It is better to have high ideals, and fail at achieving them, than to cynically abandon ideas because of the imagined hypocrisy of others.  Because of this cynicism, it is incumbent on authors to be, at least, no worse than others. Bacon takes the approach of first setting forth a lofty ideal, but then offering lesser but more practicable virtues. Hale long concealed his religious activities, fearing that his actions should bring piety into disgrace. 

Many seek to know authors for other reasons: flights of wit, sallies of pleasantry, elegant diction, and keen analysis. 

Authors are particularly liable to this inconsistency because the solitude of their work keeps them from the public interactions which might enable the refinement of manners and public speaking. Thus men of letters “may be without that readiness of conception, and affluence of language, always necessary to colloquial entertainment.” It is like entering a large city, which appears splendid from a distance, but up close is decrepit and diseased. 

Claude’s Precis (Opus 4.8)

Johnson notes a common inconsistency: the striking gap between an author’s life and his writings. He praises Milton for being found, in private conversation, equal to his own public reputation—a rare achievement. More often, readers who seek out a writer they admire come away disappointed; the sparkling bubble becomes plain water at the touch, and the imagined perfection vanishes. Worse, seeing virtue’s best advocates “loitering below” may discourage others from climbing toward virtue themselves.

He compares this to oriental monarchs who hide in their palaces, known only by their edicts. A writer, like a ruler, benefits from concealment, since people resist being taught by someone who shares their own faults. An intruder might find an admired author behaving no more nobly than Sardanapalus busy with trivial amusements.

Yet Johnson explains why a man naturally writes better than he lives: it is far easier to design than to perform. The writer plans in calm abstraction, free from hope, fear, appetite, and affection—like someone teaching navigation on dry land, where the sea is always smooth. The man actually living must act amid passions, accidents, and a thousand inconveniences, forced to choose before he can examine. So we shouldn’t be surprised that people fail in practice at precepts they laid down in tranquil solitude.

Still, ideals of perfection must be proposed so we have something to aim at, and a flawed man partly atones for his faults by warning others against them. Johnson rejects the charge of hypocrisy: a man can sincerely recommend virtues he hasn’t yet achieved, just as he might praise a journey he lacks the courage to take. An argument’s force doesn’t depend on whether its proposer lives up to it. Nonetheless, since this prejudice persists, a writer should try to practice what he teaches—and should at least not behave worse than ordinary people simply because he writes well.

Finally, Johnson observes that the gifts of writing and conversation differ. The scholar spends his polishing years in study and often proves awkward or arrogant in company. Meeting an admired author can be like entering a city admired from afar: the distant spires of palaces give way, up close, to narrow passages, mean cottages, and smoke.

No. 29. The folly of anticipating misfortunes

No. 29 (envy/anticipating misfortunes): https://www.johnsonessays.com/the-rambler/no-29-the-folly-of-anticipating-misfortunes/

Tom’s Precis

The poets of antiquity recommend focusing on the pleasures of the here and now. Their teachings should not be ignored, but note that they are focused on pleasure rather than instruction. This is not surprising, since as heathens they had no expectations of heaven or eternity. But among these incitements to pleasure one may find wise reflections on life. 

We should not submit passively to what comes our way, but nor should we struggle too much about unknowable and uninfluenceable future events. A wise man is never surprised, but it because he has thought less about the future. “He escapes disappointment because he never forms any expectations.”

Anxiety about things to come is not provoked by the variability of life, but by a fear of misfortune.  This temper, like jealousy, poisons his thinking about the future. While moralists suggest mitigating hope by remembering the vagaries of life, one may mitigate fear in the same way.  Evil, like good, is uncertain, and for the reasons we ought not hope too securely, so we ought not fear too greatly.  Don’t fear misfortunes before they happen; otherwise life will be dismal. If it is improper to fear events, like death, which must happen, it is even more improper to fear those that may never happen.  No one has ever found the realization of one’s hopes as delightful as the expectation thereof; the same is true of evil.Fear is painful, and if it does not provide a path to safety it is useless. 

Claude’s Precis (Opus 4.8)

Johnson examines the folly of anticipating misfortunes. He begins with the ancient poets, who frequently urged seizing the present hour and dismissing care. He regards them as unreliable moral teachers—more eager to please than instruct—and faults modern imitators especially, since unlike the pagans they have the hopes and fears of eternity to consider and shouldn’t simply echo old maxims of debauchery. Still, even a flawed genius scatters real wisdom worth treasuring.

Their warning against probing the future, he argues, shows sound judgment. While idle passivity in the face of calamity is beneath a reasonable being, it is equally foolish to torment ourselves over events not yet in existence—things we cannot influence or even know will happen. The wise man’s famous freedom from surprise comes not from foreseeing more but from thinking less about futurity: he forms no expectations, so he suffers no disappointment.

Such desponding anticipation resembles jealousy in love or suspicion in dealings—a temper that keeps a man perpetually alarmed, scheming against evils that never threatened him, and sometimes producing the very mischief he dreaded. Crucially, the examples moralists use to curb vain hope work equally well against fear: evil is as uncertain as good. Fortune may topple the persecutors we dread, or our enemies may weaken before we meet them.

Both hope and fear are fallacious, hope enlarging happiness and fear aggravating calamity; in reality no distress proves as formidable as imagination paints it, since every trial brings unforeseen supports. Above all, time spent fearing the future is stolen from the present, the only time truly ours.

Rambler #134 [Procrastination]

No. 134 (procrastination): https://www.samueljohnson.com/ram134.html

Tom’s Precis

I tried to think about what to write this essay about, but had no luck until I had to turn something in.  While I can produce something under these circumstances, I reproached myself for idleness; but I felt superior too.Everyone puts off, to a greater or lesser degree, what must be done; it is a persistent challenge. It is easier to believe that a later time will somehow make the task easier.  It is easier to act than suffer, yet every day we put things off; it is difficult to be sympathetic with those who do nothing to help themselves. 

Fear or frequent irresolution becomes a habit, and can make life miserable.  Those who are idle gain nothing; remorse and vexation will eliminate any pleasure. Some procrastinate because they see so many options, and try to purse them all. The perfect is enemy of the good.

Life is short. It is better to try, even if one does not complete the task, than to never try. 

Claude’s Precis (Opus 4.8)

Johnson opens with himself: he spent yesterday morning idly deliberating which subject to write on, deciding nothing, until a summons from the press forced him to write under pressure. He reproaches himself for the delay, yet takes some comfort that he, who merely trifled until diligence became necessary, is still better off than those who trifle until diligence is useless and are condemned to barren sorrow.

This folly of postponing the unavoidable, he argues, afflicts every mind—the most pertinacious of passions, often beaten but never destroyed. We persuade ourselves that necessity is far off, and so waste life collecting resolution that each morning dissipates. Every surrender to fear enlarges its dominion; when evils can’t be avoided, wisdom lies in shortening the dread by meeting them.

Acting is easier than suffering, yet many freeze in idleness like a Tantalus who won’t lift his hand. Others are paralyzed by acuteness—weighing too many options, or refusing to act without unreachable perfection. Since life is short and uncertain, every man should pursue his aims now; even one cut off mid-effort dies honorably in his rank.

No. 208. The Rambler’s reception. His design.

(Fini): https://www.johnsonessays.com/the-rambler/no-208-the-ramblers-reception-his-design/

Tom:

This is Johnson’s goodbye, the last of The Rambler essays. I read it, but did not have time to produce a precis. But, as has been the case with the foregoing, Claude.ai’s version is quite good.

Claude’s Precis (Opus 4.8)

Johnson announces the end of the Rambler after two years and more than two hundred essays. He declines to explain his reasons, doubting anyone will inquire, since he was never a public favorite and never courted patrons, praise, or fashionable attention. He never flattered curiosity about the topic of the day or used living people as examples; his readers were only those whom virtue could please “by its naked dignity.”

He thanks his few friends, identifies the handful of papers contributed by correspondents, and accepts full accountability for his faults, refusing to soften criticism through false modesty or dedication to a patron. A writer bound to compose on a fixed day, he notes, often works with a distracted mind and exhausted body.

He claims one solid achievement: refining the English language toward purity and elegance, drawing chiefly on native resources. His aim throughout was wisdom and piety, not novelty or merriment, and his serious essays conform to Christian precepts. He asks only to be counted among writers who gave ardor to virtue and confidence to truth.

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EP#28: The Art of the Personal Essay*

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, ed. Phillip Lopate, 1994.

June 2026 — ???

This is the 27th book we’ve tackled for the Essays Project. This is a giant anthology which should keep us going through the summer – and given anticipated travel likely well into next year. While we had considered being more eclectic, and curating batches of essays from various authors, after one trial (Johnson, EP#26) it seemed easier to return to a published anthology which both eases the burden of selection, and guarantees us paper pages upon which to make notes. So here we gol

Introduction

An excellent introduction that takes on the task of trying to distinguish the personal essay from other sorts of essays, and from seemingly similar writing such as memoir and autobiography. Among Lopate’s claims about what distinguishes the personal essay from other forms of essay:

  • Sets up a dialog with the reader based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship
  • Contains self-revelation, personal experiences and tastes, and can affect a confidential manner
  • Less formal in that it may have a rambling structure, relaxed diction, freshness of form, and makes no claims to completeness or definitive treatment. Digressions are OK.
  • Depends more on style and personality than flawless reasoning
  • May be conversational, with throat clearing, or putting objections in the mouth of the reader
  • Struggle for honesty; vulnerability; self-revelation; self-doubt and self-questioning; admission of uncertainty, lapses, errors, defects, shortcomings. Interrogation of one’s own ignorance. Amused self-observation.
  • The narrator must be reliable
  • Contrariness: Stand a platitude on its head. Implicate first oneself, then the reader.
  • Unashamed subjectiveness; “skeptical yet gyroscopically poised.”

And this taste for the miniature becomes a strong suit of the form: the ability to turn anything close at hand (Charles Lamb’s ears, Virginia Woolf’s moth, Samuel Johnson’s boarding house) into a grand meditational adventure.

—The Art of the Personal Essay, p xxviii (in Introduction by Phillip Lopate)

Forerunners

Seneca: On Noise; Asthma; Scipio’s Villa; Slaves

As Lopate says in the introduction, one of his goals is to bring in writings that, while not essays by his definition, have some of the central characteristics he sees in the personal essay. Seneca, followed by Plutarch, are the two [western] classical antecedents.

Seneca seems particularly apt in that, unlike most classical authors, his personality comes through: we come to get a sense of the man through his writing about other things. Other essay-like characteristics include a focus on the mundane (how people behave in a bath house), and moving from the particular to the universal (from asthma to death), and a bit of impish humor at the end (where after all this complaining and discussion of the noise, he admits he is about to move elsewhere.

Plutarch: Consolation to His Wife

The Plutarch entry, cast as another predecessor to the essay, seems less apt than Seneca’s work, because it is a letter to his wife rather than writing addressed to a larger audience. As a consequence, the familiarity of his voice, and the emotional quality of his writing (also a consequence of the topic), seem to me to spring from the particular circumstances, rather than the sort of impulses that motivate personal essayists,

… reading break …

These next three pieces are not essays, in my view, but indicate that the impulse that shaped essays arose independently of western thought.

Sei Shonagan: “Hateful Things”

Sei Shonagan is a court lady in 10th Century Japan. She comes across as a snob: opinionated, mannered, petty, spiteful.

This forerunner of the essay is essentially a list of everything she hates, ranging from the minute (a mosquito’s buzz in the bedroom at night) to boorish ill-mannered people. Mildly amusing, and the list tells us a good deal about her and the times and situation in which she lives.

This piece illustrates Lopate’s “unashamed subjectiveness” and “self-revelation,” and the essay’s “taste for the miniature” (e.g. the mosquito’s whine). The list form of this essay also anticipates modern essays that cast themselves as lists (which I don’t care for)

Kenko: Essays in Idleness

Kenko was some kind of court functionary in 13th-14th C Japan, with a reputation as a poet.

The piece is composed of a series of unconnected (as far as I can see) passages about places, scenes, thoughts and so forth. Though as the editor selected the passages to include, perhaps there would be more connection if we could see it all.

It is true it had an informal tone, and treated with every day life. And that it looks closely at small things. And that it, perhaps, in its fragmentary, drifting form illustrates the approach of keeping things open and incomplete.

That said, I did not find this writing very interesting. Lacks the wit, verve, and humor of Shonagan.

Ou-Yang Hsiu: Pleasure Boat Studio

An 11th C Chinese Sung dynasty classical poet ranked as one of the 8 masters of classical Chinese prose. He was a member of the imperial court, and held various offices throughout his life.

He has named his office in the Palace Pleasure Boat Studio, and this piece explains why. He explains that the rooms that make up his office are arranged in a single row, and so the space is long and narrow like a boat. He also notes that after he was exiled he lived on a boat and sailed rivers, and comments that the real purpose of a boat is to deliver people from danger, and not pleasure. But at the same time he notes that some have found pleasure in living on boats, even though he has no time for such diversions. So I suppose his naming his office “Pleasure Boat” is ironic, though perhaps he also likes the connotation of delivering him from danger.

But it doesn’t really make sense to me. Not a vey thrilling piece in my view.

In terms of Lopate’s characteristics of personal essays, this shows contrariness, self-deprecation, and the conversational gesture of speaking to the reader: “Is there anything wrong with that?”

… reading break …

Fountainhead (Montaigne)

Introduction

  • Lopate suggests M may have been the greatest essayist who ever lived.
  • His family on both sides was wealthy; they were minor land owning nobility
  • Notes that he was raised speaking only Latin for the first years of his life, which (not mentioned here) also means he had almost no interaction with his parents or anyone except his tutor.
  • M studied law and practiced as a magistrate
  • He cast his essays as self-study, a portrait of himself in words.
  • His first book, written from 1572-1574, was short and filled with quotations and not especially personal—but it was a success and gave him more confidence.
  • M felt there was a basic unity to human experience. He regarded humanity as constantly in flux, and vain, ashamed and contradictory. But he embedded these views in a frame of forgiveness.
  • “His own sentences were sinewy, dry, yet succulent: they explode like pomegranate seeds on the tongue.”
  • He wrote in the vernacular, not Latin

…the spirit of humanism was in the air, via Erasmus and others, and the classical Greek and Roman authors were being used as a Trojan borse to open the gates to a freer, more speculative and self-analytical mentality (Socrates’ “Know thyself’). Rabelais great, bawdy novel, Gargantua and Pantagruel, likewise gave Montaigne license to write in support of pleasure and an integration of mind and body. Alongside an increase in classical learning and scientific knowledge, new worlds were literally being discovered. Explorers brought back reports of exotic native customs from the Americas and the Pacific, which fueled Montaigne’s relativistic bent.
—ibid., 44

While Montaigne deserves credit for inventing the form, I have to say I don’t care for his writing. He takes paragraphs to say what might be said in a few sentences. And although many seem to think the uncertainty and changeability is a virtue, or at least a characteristic of the new form, I find it a bit irritating. There is something to be said for emphasizing that an important aspect of the personal essay has to do with how the author approaches the topic, but Montaigne not only disclaims expertise, which is fair, but seems to shirk any responsibility for accuracy or accountability.

Having written the above, after reading a few of his essays, I do have to say that I appreciate his tolerant and even compassionate approach.

Of Books, Michel de Montaigne

The first two pages are mostly disclaimer. He portrays himself as unlearned (which does not seem accurate), and uninterested in grappling with difficult books or study—he just wants to enjoy himself.

  • “Let attention not be paid to the matter, but to the shape I give it.”
  • “I want them to give Plutarch a fillip on my nose and get burned insulting Seneca in me.”

After this he comments on books he likes (and some he does not), beginning with entertaining books, fables, poetry. He also likes Seneca, Plutarch, and Cicero.

Of a Monstrous Child, Michel de Montaigne

M describes a child who is a partial Siamese twin, with a headless body joined to his abdomen. He comments that this might be seen as an omen, but it is better not to: “there is nothing like divining about things past. ‘So that when things happen, by some interpretation they are found to have been prophesied.‘ [Cicero]”

M is compassionate, and argues against revulsion. “We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be. Let this universal and natural reason drive out of us the error and astonishment that novelty brings us.“

… reading break …

Essay 3

xxxx

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Atoms of Delight, Kenneth Steven

Atoms of Delight: Ten Pilgrimages in Nature, Kenneth Steven, 2024

March 2026

A short book of essays by a Scottish poet about, essentially, walks he has taken — essays are usually followed by a poem that relates to the walk described. I believe that the phrase “Atoms of Delight” is taken from Scottish writer Neil Gunn.

I’m enjoying the book, and the poems, but mildly rather than intensely. I stumbled across this book in a bookstore, while looking for something else. This is part of my effort to read more books that describe the landscape.

Serpentine

Recounting a walk to St Columba’s Bay that he has taken many times, both as an adult and especially as a child, and how the walk rekindles in him the feeling of being a child.

  • A memory of running ahead and waiting for his parents to catch up.
  • And, today, imagining that he can catch glimpses of his parents, from years ago, walking.
  • The bay is held in rock arms, and the ocean is fierce, not “any gentle sea lapping at the lips of the bay.”
  • Somewhere out in the bay there is a reef of serpentine, and he describes the pebbles they form, “like sweets specifically designed to catch the eye of a child.”
  • He describes gathering cobbles as a child — you’re either a tide dancer or a sifter. “I still come here, year on year, to be blown out of myself and into childhood.“

Hold it to the light and it changes
becomes a globe of fractures;
a cavern of ledges and glinting—
not one green but many at once.

…carrying the cuts of its journey,
the brokenness letting in the light

The High Lochs

An essay remembering the highlands, where his mother’s people are from, and where his parents went for outings, his mother fly-fishing, and his father bird watching.

“The fossil imprints left in the mind can only be chiseled out only as stories, because no other evidence survives. “

“It always seemed an impossible blue, perhaps because it was set against such dark garments of moorland.“

“The silence was like a thin, beautiful layer of ice, something you didn’t want to break.“


“At night the sky a breath of stars“

Cloudberries

About a time spent in the Norwegian arctic with the Sami, shortly after Chernobyl.

“The plateau wasn’t just a bare back of rock and trees: it undulated – rose and dipped and rose again. There were hollows and little dark eyes of pools that I recognised as lochans.“

Conkers

Not a bad essay, but this one did not speak to me.

The Pool

A Treasure

Agates

The Santa Crux Well

The Oaks

The Northern Lights

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Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli

I’m not sure how I came across this book or even why it attracted me. I think that — wherever I encountered it — there must have been a description that mentioned simple but lyrical expositions of key ideas in Physics.

So, far, after having read the first two chapters, I’m liking it very much.

…And now, having completed it, I enjoyed it very much. While a few concepts, particular the issue of time, remain cloudy, over all I understand a lot more about the ‘shape’ of modern physics, and the current frontiers and challenges being addressed. I highly recommend the book.

Continue reading Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli

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Island of the Colorblind, Oliver Sacks

October – November 2025

This is the 23rd entry in the Essays Project. We continue on our quest to read the complete Sacks oeuvre. Despite its title, this book is divided into two books: The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island.

Retrospective on the Book

This was not one of my favorite books, but it was not without interest. It gave interesting glimpses of life in the South Pacific, particularly the hints of how the US military dominates and suppresses freedom in this area of the world. Seems like a remnant of some of the worst of the colonial days. With respect to Sacks’ visits to various islands, the offer interesting accounts, though I have to say it seems to me that he learned little on his visits that he had not already learned from the informants who accompanied him or who he met there.

For me, the high point of the book was the last chapter about his visit to the island of Rota, a little-visited island near Guam. This visit, unlike the others, had no neurological goal: it was simply to see ferns, cycads and the other primitive plants that are dear to Sacks. I like this chapter because it provides some suggestive passages that offer insight on his love of ferns and the allies, which will come to the fore in his Oaxaca Journal. To wit:

The sense of deep time brings a deep peace with it, a detachment from the timescale, the urgencies, of daily life. Seeing these volcanic islands and coral atolls, and wandering, above all, through this cycad forest on Rota, has given me an intimate feeling of the antiquity of the earth, and the slow, continuous processes by which different forms of life evolve and come into being. Standing here in the jungle, I feel part of a larger, calmer identity; I feel a profound sense of being at home, a sort of companionship with the earth.

ibid., 198

Preface

Sacks wrote this book in one swoop, in July of 1995. Subsequently he added voluminous notes, which his editors paired back; this edition appears to have notes that the original one did not.

Sacks writes that his visits to the islands described herein were brief and unexpected, part of no agenda or research program. It does seem that he is pursuing his theme of how individuals (and, in this case, communities) adapt to rare neurological conditions: hereditary colorblindness in the first case, and a fatal neurodegenerative disorder in the second. It also sounds as if his other biological and botanical interests will play into the books.

Continue reading Island of the Colorblind, Oliver Sacks

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H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

October 2025

About the book

I read Macdonald’s Vesper Flights early this year when we were in Hawaii. Flights is a book of essays mostly about natural history and mostly about birds – though, true to the original meaning of essay, “about” covers a lot of ground. The writing was beautiful, and I not only read the book but studied it to improve my own writing. I’d expected much the same from Hawk. 

But Hawk is a very different book. To be sure, the writing is beautiful, and it will repay study, but it is a single-track narrative rather than a series of essays. Hawk traces out two central narratives: one is an account of her training a goshawk and her experiences training, living and hunting with it; intertwined with this narrative is an account of coming to terms with her father’s death, and the period of isolation, depression, and gradual recovery that ensured. Though as I write this, I note that the ‘coming-to-terms’ narrative is really itself a braid that includes childhood memories and an account of the life of T. H. White. Hawk was published in 2014 – I believe it to be her first book, possibly excepting poetry.

I am not going to provide a chapter by chapter account. Rather, my aim here, is just to record the phrases and passages that struck me. 

Continue reading H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

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EP#22: An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks

This book seems to focus on people with either acquired or inborn neurodivergences who have adapted to their situations and live, in a sense, in very different worlds from ours.

After reading: yes, this supposition is correct Most are leading successful, if different lives, except for ‘the last hippy’ of chapter 2.

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EP#21: Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks

*Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, 1989.

August/September 2025

This is, I believe, volume 21 in the Essay’s Project; we are in the process of reading all of Oliver Sacks works. We’ve read much of his work in haphazard order, but after finishing his Letters, we decided to read those books we haven’t read in the order of publication. So far that has been Migraine, A Leg to Stand On, [skipping Awakenings which we’d already read], The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, and now Seeing Voices.

About the book, briefly

This describes Sacks jouney towards understanding Deafness, something he had been hitherto ignorant of. This book — really three separate essays — was written about three years into his inquiry, so, as Sacks notes, he is not writing from a position of expertise. Nevertheless, the book gives a very interesting history of how the Deaf were treated and how their circumstances evolved from being treated as mentally deficient people to non-disabled people who, though they could not hear, used Sign to express themselves, reason, and to develop a unique culture. There is also an account of ASL as a language, and its impact on cognition in those who learn it. It’s a good book, although I think there are probably now better books if what you are interested in is understanding how ASL works.

Preface

Sacks writes that he knew nothing of the Deaf before 1986. It appears that the particular incident that started him on his journey was a request to review the book When the Mind Hears, by Harlan Lane. The request, from Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books, was accompanied by a note: “You have never really thought about languge; this book will force you to.” Sacks writes (in the first section of the book) that he opened the book with “indifference which soon turned to incredulity.” Over time the review expanded to an essay (the first in this volume) when it appeared in the New York Review of Books in March of 1986. He writes that then Stan Horowitz of the University of California Press immediately responded to the essay and encourage him to turn it into a book. How things unfolded from there is not clear, though he visited Gallaudet later that year. It is clear that, over the three years he worked on the book, he was in dialog with leading researchers, including Ursula Bellugi, Bob Johnson of Gallaudet, and Jerome Brunner.

Continue reading EP#21: Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks

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No Time to Spare, Ursula Le Guin

July-August, 2025

No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters, Ursula K. Le Guinn, 2017

About the Book

This is a book of essays – originally written for Le Guin’s blog – that was published in 2017. The essays were written, as best I can tell, from 2010 to approximately 2015, when Le Guinn was in her 80’s.

They are not organized chronologically, but instead in four sections separated by interludes of essays about or inspired by her cat, Pard. The four sections are “Going Over 80,” “The Lit Biz,” “Trying to Make Sense of It,” and “Rewards.” The essays are written in a casual voice, and are more notable for their ideas than their word-crafting.

I found the book engaging, and am happy to have read it. I say a bit my favorite essays – there are over three dozen in the book — and * my favorites of the favorites.

Favorites

The Diminished Thing

“What to make of diminished thing?” (Robert Frost’s Ovenbird). Le Guin discusses old age – she is in her 80’s at this point – and argues against the notion of ‘You are only as old as you think you are,’ and the tendency of younger people to deny that their elders are old.  Le Guin disagrees: “To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase my age, erase my life – me. …So it is that old men come to learn the invisibility that women learned 20 or 30 years earlier.”

Le Guin also writes about respect: 

“…the social requirement of respectful behavior to others, by reducing aggression and requiring self-control, makes room for understanding. It creates a space where understanding and affection can grow.”

–ibid., p. 15

Le Guin’s answer to the ovenbird’s question is “a lot.” At least if one is fortunate. And, she adds, don’t dimmish old age by trying to deny it. 

Would You Please Fucking Stop

A funny rant against the tendency to use only variants of “fuck” and “shit” for emphasis. 

* Having My Cake

(1600 words)

…A great essay, and one that I believe will, for me at least, repay study, since I am trying to learn how to write interesting short essays.

She begins admitting that for a long time she didn’t understand the proverb about not being able to have your cake and eating it too. How can you eat a cake you don’t  have, she asks? She also notes that this proverb, and others like it, are used to test whether people are mentally ill, and wonders about her sanity. But then she slowly realizes that “have” is really being used to mean “keep,” and decides it’s a good proverb, though she back tracks a bit, analyzing the language and why it might be found confusing. This translates into a more general medication on language, and her writerly fascination with it. And then she ponders the parallels between her fascination with words, and artists’ fascination with the materials with which they work, though she is uncertain about the degree to which they hold. But finally, at the very end, she brings it back to cake: 

“Words are my matter, my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarven wood. Words are my magical anti-proverbial cake: I eat it, and I still have it.”

ibid., p.52

Papa H

Nothing much to say about this essay, but that it was an enjoyable mediation of The Illiad and The Odyssey as exemplars, or perhaps archetypes, of the two basic fantasy stories: The War; and The Journey.

The Narrative Gift as Moral Conundrum

A mildly interesting essay, but I loved her comments on the difference between story and plot:

I have a high opinion of story. I see it as the essential trajectory of narrative: a coherent, onward movement, taking the reader from Here to There. Plot, to me, is variation or complication of the movement of story.

Story goes. Plot elaborates the going.

Plot hesitates, pauses, doubles back (Proust), forecasts, leaps, doubling or tripling simultaneous trajectories (Dickens), diagrams a geometry onto the story line (Hardy), makes the story Ariadne’s string leading through a labyrinth (mysteries), turns the story into a cobweb, a waltz, a vast symphonic structure in time (the novel in general) …

ibid., p. 75

Rehearsal 

A very short essay on drama and stagecraft inspired by watching a rehearsal of a play based on The Left Hand of Darkness. “People you thought you’d made up, imagined, invented, are there, not” Performing a play is, Le Guin argues, essentially an act of ritual or magic: “They collaborate methodically (ritual must be methodical) … Essentially they do it by limiting space, and moving and speaking within that space.“

*Without Egg

(1100 words)

A description of an incident, during a visit to Vienna in the early 1950’s, where Le Guin distressed a waiter by saying that she didn’t want an egg with her breakfast. Her reflections on why this was disturbing are interesting, but where the essay shines is in her beautifully detailed description of how she goes about eating a soft boiled egg. She describes the egg, the egg cup, the spoon, the opening of the egg, and the process of eating it.

First Contact

An essay on an encounter with a rattlesnake, and the process of humanely transporting it elsewhere.

This time was outside ordinary time, and outside ordinary feelings; it involved danger for both of us; and it involved a bond between creatures who do not and cannot ordinarily relate to each other in any way. Each would naturally try not to relate – to just get away – or to kill in self-defense.

–ibid., p. 199

Notes from a Week at a Ranch in the Oregon High Desert

These are really notes, as the title says, rather than an essay. But I find it a nice example of how, perhaps, I might take notes during my travels. Le Guin’s notes, while not a narrative, have a bit more structure and connectivity than mine typically do. They capture images, and often there is enough to infer some of the activities going on.

Some nice writing:

  • the cool shadowed air between the eastern and western rimrock
  • the warm towers of air
  • the old tall poplars holding darkness
  • I sit in windy shadow
  • The hens pay no attention, scattering out, scudding along like sail boats over grass
  • behind the ridge that darkens as brightness grows

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On Solitude*, Michel de Montaigne

* On Solitude, Michel de Montaigne (Penguin Books, 1991, trans. M. A. Screech)

This is the first time I have read Montaigne, a little surprising since he is the originator of the essay form. I am not sure whether I will appreciate him…

Later: Montaigne’s essays are just not engaging me. But I am struck by the way he is engages in dialog with scholars and others who have come before. I don’t really resonate with the topics and language in play, but it would be interesting for me to try to do something similar with people who have influenced me.

E1: On Solitude

This eponymous essay Is written from the vantage point of a man in the “tail-end of life,” and explores the virtues of solitude. I was struck by how much, and how widely, he quotes from the classical literature. Hoarce, Seneca, Cicero, Erasamus, Socrates. The general theme is about the advisability and wisdom of withdrawing from public life, and the vices attendant in that and in the majority of people. Instead, he advocates turning inward, and cultivating one’s own happiness and virtue in a what seems to me a stoic fashion. This essay did not, in general speak to me, though there were a couple of quotes I liked. 

“We have lived quite enough for others; let us live at least this tail-end of life for ourselves. Let us bring our thoughts and reflections back to ourselves and to our own well-being”

–ibid. On Solitude, p. 9

“If a hangover came before we got drunk we would see that we never drank to excess: but pleasure, to deceive us, walks in front and hides her train.

–ibid. On Solitude, p. 9

On Books

TBD

On the Power of the Imagination

TBD

On Sadness

TBD

On Constancy

TBD

On Fear

TBD

How Our Mind Tangles Itself Up

TBD

On Conscience

TBD

On Anger

TBD

On Virtue

TBD

On Sleep

TBD

On the Length of Life

TBD

How we Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing

TBD

# # #

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EP#20: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks

* The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks. 1984

The 20th volume in the Essays Project (co-reading with CT) gets us back to essays. Here we are continuing our side quest to read all of OS’s work. This is Sack’s fourth book, and its excellence is consistent with my belief that Sack’s somehow found his muse — at least for writing for general audiences — while writing A Leg to Stand On, his previous book. Hat, so far, seems to be about various forms of agnosia — the loss of knowledge or awareness of things. So far this includes face and object recognition, awareness of limbs (or the entire body), and portions of the visual field. Looking ahead, I now see that only the first section is on “Losses,” so there will clearly be a much wider variety of ‘neurographies.’

The Book

Preface to the Original Edition (1985)

There is also a 2013 Preface, but I find little of note, though if you are reading the book it is worth a quick perusal.

Sacks begins the 1985 Preface by reflecting on his epigraphs, which has to do with his practicing medicine as a physician also involving getting a view of the larger context of his patients’ troubles — he sees himself as as much as naturalist as a physician. He also says, interestingly, that: “animals get diseases; only man falls radically into illness.” In my view, this reflects his view that some (all?, almost all?) diseases have an ontological component. I love the comment in one of his letters: “What is so instructive about disease, like disaster, is that it shakes the foundations of everything.” He also discusses the value of broad accounts, even stories, and laments the modern tendency to eliminate or minimize the subject of ‘case histories:’ “To restore the human subject at its center — the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject — we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale….” (p. xviii) He also brings in myths and fables with their hero’s and archetypes — “travelers to unimaginable lands, lands of which we should otherwise have no idea or conception.“

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Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald

January 2025

I picked up this book, probably about a year ago at the recommendation of Dan Russell. In terms of single-author collections, I’ve liked this more than anything I’ve read in years, perhaps with the exception of Loren Eisley’s essays. Regardless, Macdonald is a superb writer, and in particular her descriptions of the natural world are remarkable. I intend to seek out her other books.

I like, as well, her view of what literature ought to do:

What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. — Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights. p. ix

Favorites

  • 2. Nothing Like a Pig
  • 9. Ants
  • 10. Symptomatic
  • 12. Winter Woods
  • 18. Deer in the Headlights
  • 35 Eulogy
  • 38. Dispatches from the Valley

The Craft of Writing — things I’ve learned here

  • Describing a Moment: “And then it happens: a short, collapsing moment.” This passage, by foregrounding the nature of the moment, and the movement from uncertainty to realization, does a superb job of highlighting and intensifying an epiphany. (In Nothing like a Pig.)
  • A beautiful resonating description: “a long, yawning burr that dopplered into memory and replayed itself in dreams.“
  • Use of incongruity for stream-of-consciousness. In Deer in the Headlights she does a great job of conveying the incongruity of two worlds — the forest and the highway — in a single sentence that juxtaposes glimpses of the nature of each. Similarly, in The Student’s Tale, the first sentence, with independent clauses connected by a series of “ands,” really conveys an immediate stream-of-consciousness experience, where the attention is hopping around, and making non-rational connections as it does so (.e.g, the grapes on the table are black, and so is the taxi out front).
  • Transforming dynamic movement into a pattern.“The hitching curves of the gulls in a vault of sky crossed with thousands of different flightlines…” (Ants). For me, this generates a pattern — a vault of sky circumscribed by imagined flightlines – that extends over time and creates a persistent space which frames other happenings…

1. Nests

This essay describes nests. She begins with her feelings about nests develop when she was a child, and encountered them in her yard. She then goes into the present, and reflects more on this than their meanings.

*2. Nothing like a Pig

This essay describes an encounter with a boar. She reflects both on the boar, and more in general on animals in particular, and how the conception of an animal differs from the reality of the animal

Then it happens: a short, collapsing moment as sixty or seventy yards away something walks fast between the trees, and then the boar. The boar. The boar.

– Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald, p 11.

A great bit of writing. The “short, collapsing moment.” The uncertainty about distance — “sixty or seventy yards” — and what she is seeing — “something.” The revelation: “and then the boar.” And the repetition: “The boar. The boar.“

3. Inspector Calls

A very nice short piece about an encounter with autistic boy, who is visiting her flat with his parents. In particular he connects with her bird and the bird with him.

4. Field Guides

“Field guides made possible the joy of encountering a thing I already knew but had never seen.”

5. Terkels Park

An essay on the place where she grew up. A bit nostalgic, but it was unusual, and had interesting reflections, so I found it worth reading. Some very nice writing:

I could lie awake in the small hours and hear a single motorbike speeding west or east: a long, yawning burr that dopplered into memory and replayed itself in dreams.

— ibid. p 12

My eyes catch on the place where the zoetrope flicker of pines behind the fence gives way to a patch of sky with the black peak of a redwood tree against it and the cradled mathematical branches of a monkey puzzle, and my head blooms with an apprehension of lost space,

— Ibid. p 13

6. High-Rise

About watching migrating birds at night from the top of the Empire State Building. An interesting discussion of how birds migrate — the height and speeds at which they fly, and the way they navigate — and the problems that the lights and tall buildings of the city give them.

7. The Human Flock

“Overhead a long wavering chevron of beating wings is inked across the darkening sky.“

Recounting the observation of large flocks of migrating cranes, and continuing to a discussion of the dynamics of swarms and murmurations. “Turns can propagate through a cloud of birds at speeds approaching 90 miles an hour…” This segues into a concluding comment on refugees, and a plea to regard them as individuals rather than masses.

8. The Student’s Tale

An account of meeting a student who is a refugee and spending time in camps…

A great opening sentence:

There’s a window and the rattle of a taxi and grapes on the table, black ones, sweet ones, and the taxi is also black and there’s a woman inside it, a charity worker who befriended you when you were in detention, and she’s leaning to pay the driver and through the dust and bloom of the glass I see you standing on the pavement next to the open taxi door and your back is turned towards me so all I can see are your shoulders hunched in a blue denim jacket.

— The Student’s Tale, Vesper Flight, Kate Macdonald, p. 53

I think this is a marvelous stream-of-consciousness sentence, with the writers attention shifting from taxi to grapes to taxi to the woman and then to the student whose shoulders are hunched. The second person is also very effective.

*9. Ants

About the mating flights of ants, and the birds that prey upon them. Also reflects on the power of scientific understanding to enhance the beauty of things, rather than detract: “…it’s things I’ve learned from scientific books and papers that are making what I’m watching almost unbearably moving.”

A red kite joins the flock, drifting and tilting through it on paper-cut wings stamped black against the sky.

[…]

The hitching curves of the gulls in a vault of sky crossed with thousands of different flightlines, warm airspace tense with predatory intent and the tiny hopes of each rising ant.

— Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 63

*10. Symptomatic

Discusses her experiences with migraines. The writing is beautiful and ranges from describing the onset and symptoms of her migraine, to the way in which she has come to live with them. Ends with a partial analogy to earth undergoing climate change…

I was busily signing books when a spray of sparks, an array of livid and prickling phosphenes like shorting fairy lights, spread downwards from the upper right-hand corner of my vision until I could barely see through them.
—Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 66

11. Sex, Death, Mushrooms

On mushroom hunting: “It is raining hard, and the forest air is sweet and winey with decay.“

The air is damp and dark in here. Taut lines of spider silk are slung between their flaking trunks; I can feel them snapping across my chest. Fat garden spiders drop from my coat on to the thick carpet of pine needles below.
—Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 80

I like feeling the snapping, and the spiders dropping from her coat to the forest floor. It animates the scene, and tells us she is moving through it.

* 12. Winter Woods

Beginning with her custom of walking in the woods every New Year’s day, she reflects on the things that are distinctive about forests in winter. From the revelation of the landscape, to the bark textures and angled branches of leafless trees, to the sometimes transitory life that becomes evident. Winter woods, she suggests, are full of potential:

So often we think of mindfulness, of existing purely in the present moment, as a spiritual goal. But winter woods teach me something else: the importance of thinking about history. They are able to show you the last five hours, the last five days, the last five centuries, all at once. They’re wood and soil and rotting leaves, the crystal fur of hoarfrost and the melting of overnight snow, but they are also places of different interpolated timeframes. In them, potentiality crackles in the winter air.
—ibid., p. 85

13. Eclipse

On viewing a solar eclipse. The phenomenology of the event, but also the deep, irrational, fundamental, emotional impact. The essay is reminiscent of Joan Didion’s essay, and in particular the way in which the fading daylight alters the colors in ways that cast the landscape in an alien light. It ends, beautifully, with a description of the light returning, and the emotions that brings.

14. In Her Orbit

A description of a trip with an astrobiologist to study extremophiles at very high altitudes in the Andes. Some beautiful descriptions of desolate and unworldly environments.

15. Hares

A description of the phenomenon of boxing hares, their place in English thought and mythology, and their decline due to environmental change.

16. Lost, But Catching Up

A very short essay description her glimpse of a hound that was trying to catch up to the pack during a fox hunt.

17. Swan Upping Nestboxes

About the English tradition of “Swan Upping,” and her experience observing the activity; all interladen with reflections on the role of tradition and its uneasy releationship to Brexit, which had recently occurred.

18. Deer in the Headlights

Discusses her changing feelings about deer, from initially wishing to known nothing about them and valuing them as a source of surprise and delight, to a desire to understand them. She says it better, though:

Deer occupy a unique place in my personal pantheon of animals. There are many creatures I know very little about, but the difference with deer is that I’ve never had any desire to find out more. They’re like a distant country I’ve never wanted to visit. I know the names of different deer species, and can identify the commonest ones by sight, but I’ve always resisted the almost negligible effort it would take to discover when they give birth, how they grow and shed their antlers, what they eat, where and how they live. Standing on the bridge I’m wondering why that is.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 141

As the title suggests, much of the essay is about deer-vehicle collisions; and also about how people react to them, in the moment, and, sometimes in cruel ways, on the internet. It is a complex essay. It doesn’t really speak to me, but there are a lot of great turns of phrase and passages.

Here is how the essay begins:

The deer drift in and out of the trees like breathing. They appear unexpectedly delicate and cold, as if chill air is pouring from them to the ground to pool into the mist that half obscures their legs and turning flanks. They aren’t tame: I can’t get closer than a hundred yards before they slip into the gloom.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 140

And here is a passage I admire for the way it highlights the incongruity of the two worlds: nature and the highway. It moves from the forest, to the road, to the forest, to the road, to her standing, embodied, on the bridge.

For a while the road doesn’t seem real. Then it does, almost violently so, and at that moment the bridge and the woods behind me do not. I can’t hold both in the same world at once. Deer and forest, mist, speed, a drift of wet leaves, white noise, scrap-metal trucks, a convoy of eighteen-wheelers, beads of water on the toes of my boots and the scald of my hands on the cold metal rail.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 141

19. The Falcon and the Tower  

She is watching birds — falcons — in an abandoned industrial plant in Dublin. The essay discusses falcons, and how they have adapted to living in cities and their infrastructures. Moves from their behavior and natural history, to the ways in which people have viewed them, to their change in habitat given the ‘advance’ of civilization. Ends with a reflection on the brevity of life, and a note of hope.

20. Vesper Flights

The essay that gives the collection a title. Begins with her finding a dead Swift and not knowing what to do with it. Segues into a description of Swifts and how they are somewhat “magical” — “the closest things to aliens on earth.” After describing their natural history, describes the phenonmenon of “vesper flights,” where they gather in the evening and fly up to 8,000 feet. She describes how this behavior was discovered, and goes through the history of this behavior being observed and understood. Interleaved with this is her accounts of how, as a small child, she sought comfort in the evening (her own private vespers) by imagining herself as embedded in layers of the earth below her and the atmosphere above her. This comes together as we learn that vesper flights, for Swifts, help them take account of where they are and the oncoming weather conditions, and as Macdonald reflects on ways in which she (we) can adopt practices that enable us to locate ourselves and think about what comes next.

21. In Spight of Prisons

A very nice, short essay about her annual practice of going to see glowworms in a quarry.

* 22. Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres

About her efforts to observe Oriels at the single place in Britain where they can still be found. Over time, their habitat is degraded, and at last there is only one… but, at the last moment, she is able to get a glimpse of it. She has a lovely sentence where she describes the song (or a song) or the oriel: “Wo-de-wal-e, wo-de-wal-e, a phrase like the curl of the cut ends of a gilded banner furling over the page of an illuminated manuscript.“

In this essay, she excels at capturing the fragmentary, mosaical nature of perception.

…what I saw became something like looking into a Magic Eye picture. Here was a circle, and in it a thousand angles of stalk and leaf and scraps of shade at various distances, and every straight stalk or branch was alternately obscured and revealed as the wind blew. I began to feel a little seasick watching this chaos, but then, as magically as a stereogram suddenly reveals a not-very-accurate 3D dinosaur, the muddy patch just off centre resolved itself into the nest.

[…]

Finally, I saw my oriole. A bright, golden male. It was a complex joy, because I saw him only in stamped-out sections, small jigsaw pieces of a bird, but moving ones, animated mutoscope views. A flick of wings, a scrap of tail, then another glimpse – this time, just his head alone – through a screen of leaves. I was transfixed. I had not expected the joyous, extravagant way this oriole leapt into the air between feeds, the enormously decisive movements, always, and the little dots like stars that flared along the edge of his spread-wide tail.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 177 & 179

23. The Observatory

About swans, beginning with an odd experience she had with one approaching her, and sitting beside her, in a moment of grief.

24. Wicken

About a visit to a nature preserve with her young niece, and her niece’s puzzlement about why there were so many animals here — ‘did they bring them from a zoo?’ Reflections on the shift from a time when nature and animals were all around us, to the present, when they are mostly found in special preserves.

25. Storm

A short essay describing a thunderstorm, and also reflecting on storms as metaphors, in particular, in this essay, for the onset of Brexit.

26. Murmurations

Begins with getting a passport replaced at the last minute, and then moves to how birds were seen during war time, and the rise and evolution of the notion of birdwatching.

27. A Cuckoo in the House

On cuckoos, how people perceive them, and in particular a rather eccentric British intelligence agent — Maxwell Knight — who raised a cuckoo. Didn’t grab me, but others might well find it a fascinating tale.

28. The Arrow-Stork

About tracking migrating birds. Makes this interesting point:

Projects like this give us imaginative access to the lives of wild creatures, but they cannot capture the real animals’ complex, halting paths. Instead they let us watch virtual animals moving across a world of eternal daylight built of a patchwork of layered satellite and aerial imagery, a flattened, static landscape free of happenstance. There are no icy winds over high mountain passes here, no heavy rains, soaring hawks, ripening crops or recent droughts.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 217

29. Ashes

About destroying diseased trees, beginning with elms with Dutch Elm disease in her childhood, and ending with ash trees and the emerald ash borer.

30. A Handful of Corn

About feeding animals. Starts with a nice anecdote about an elderly woman who put out corn to attract badgers at night. Continues into the practice of feeding animals, and makes the interesting point that there are some animals it is socially acceptable to feed, and others — foxes, rats, pigeons — that it is not.

31. Berries

This short essay begins with her decorating a Christmas tree, and sprucing up its decorations with berries from outside, but feeling slightly guilty because berries exist as food for birds. Segues into natural history of both birds and berries.

A great bit of description: “…like a gravity stricken whirlwind, a pack of fat birds swirled down from the blank sky…“

32. Cherry Stones

About the return of hawfinches to Britain, the excitement it engenders, and the ways in which their behavior seems to be changing vis a vis what habitat they prefer. Also touches on the blurring of natural history and national identity.

33. Birds, Tabled

About the practice of capturing and keeping birds, which in England is mostly done by the working classes, and which is, it seems, looked down upon by others. She discusses the practice, how bird keepers feel about it and their birds, and the class differences and that this highlights. Interesting.

34. Hiding

An interesting piece about hides (what we in the U.S. call “blinds”). It touches both on the aims and experience of watching animals from blinds, as well as the human experience within blinds.

* 35. Eulogy

A eulogy for a friend: a description of the her friend is interleaved with a night outing to see nightjars. A beautiful piece of writing.

The essay begins with a description of the outing, setting out while it is still light, but with the darkness coming:

 As night falls, our senses stretch to meet it. A roebuck barks in the distance, small mammals rustle in the grass. The faintest tick of insects. The scratchy, resinous fragrance of heathland grows stronger, more insistent. As we pass clumps of viper’s bugloss we watch the oncoming night turn their leaves blacker, their purple petals bluer and more intense until they seem to glow. The paths become luminous trails through darkness. White moths spiral up from the ground, and a cockchafer zips past us, elytra raised, wings buzzing.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 255

After this, she makes the connection to her friend: “Soon all color will be gone. The thought is a hard one.” And then, after writing about him: “Now, watching the slow diminishment of sense and detail around me, I’m thinking of Stu and what is happening to him, thinking of his family, of what we face at the end of our lives’ long summers when the world parts from us, of how we all, one day, will walk into darkness.“

A somber essay, but ending with a note of, not hope, but acceptance. Stu says, “It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s not hard.”

It’s OK, he said. It’s not hard. Those are the words I am remembering as we walk onward, as the minutes pass, until night thickens completely and there is starlight and dust and the feel of sand underfoot. It’s so dark now I cannot see myself. But the song continues, and the air around us is full of invisible wings.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 259

36. Rescue

An account of a visit to the house of a friend who rescues and rehabilitates swifts. It begins with her friend feeding nestlings, and ends with the release of a swift, and a haunting description of the swift’s transformation as it is about to take to the sky.

37. Goats

A brief, funny story about her, her dad, and pushing goats. Wouldn’t call it an essay though.

* 38. Dispatches from the Valleys

A curious essay centered around her experiences in her first job out of college, working on a falcon conservation-breeding farm. She describes what it was like — it sounded unpleasant to me, but she clearly got to do many things she loved and valued. She describes what led her to leave the farm, and does a good job of creating tension by naming two incidents, first “the dreadful incident with the ostrich,” and then “the cattle on the hill,” and describing each played out.

The ostrich incident — euthanasia of a horribly injured bird — was straightforward, if unpleasant. The “cattle on the hill” incident is quite strange: it involves her spending hours sneaking up on them, and then jumping up and scaring them into stampeding, though she does not know why.

At the end of the essay, though, she recounts an epiphany, and, for me, it resolves not just the ‘cattle on the hill’ incident, but the whole essay:

And then I thought of the day I stalked the steers on the hill and it resolved into perfect clarity. For I had seen myself as one of those steers, one of a feral and uncared-for herd enjoying life in the middle of nowhere, not thinking about what would happen in the future, and not much worried about it, but knowing deep down that one day I was headed for the abattoir. There would be no escaping the deep sea for the shore. And my stalking and shouting was not mindless. It had been an inchoate attempt to knock them out of their contented composure. It had been a warning to make them run the hell out of there, because the valley we were all in was dark and deep and could have no good end.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 282

39. The Numinous Ordinary 

An interesting essay with some nice passages in it, but it didn’t really resonate with me.

40. What Animals Taught Me

Discusses the author’s changing conceptions of and relationships to animals. She liked caring for them, as a child, but came to recognize that was about her feeling good about herself, rather than about the animals. As she grew older, she found that an intense focus on animals was a way to make herself disappear, to allow herself into a separate world that did not contain the difficulties she was faced with. Later, with respect to falconry, she speaks about how she learned that the other party in a relationship might see it very differently — a lesson she was slow to apply to humans. The “deepest lesson animals have taught me is how easily and unconsciously we see other lives as mirrors of our own.” And “None of us sees animals clearly. They are too full of the stories we have given them.“

Towards the end of the essay, speaking of a rook, she comments that now what she enjoys is not imagining that she can feel what the rook feels, know what it knows, but that it’s slow delight in knowing that she cannot.

As it passes overhead, the rook tilts its head to regard me briefly before flying on. And with that glance I feel a prickling in my skin that runs down my spine, my sense of place shifts, and the world is enlarged. The rook and I have shared no purpose. We noticed each other, is all. When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in that one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere else sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 299

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A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

Reading on my own, circa Fall 2024.

This book or extended essay is based on a lecture on Women and Literature that Woolf gave, or at least that is the framing of it in the book. She approaches the topic by explaining how she came to develop her thoughts about it:

“At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial–and any question about sex is that–one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”

She begins with an account of going to Oxbridge, and walking about the colleges. She notes that, being a woman, she is barred from walking on the grass, and is not welcome in the library. She has lovely descriptions of the landscape and colleges:

To the right and left, bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.

And as we accompany her, she recounts her thought process. I love her metaphor (more extensive than the excerpt I quote) of thinking as fishing…

Thought — to call it by a prouder name than it deserved — had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until–you know the little tug–the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?

Pausing in my account here, but passages that I like for various reasons follow:

“Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, ‘Tell me then how you wrote your essays?’ For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.“

“Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, old though not past middle age, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. “

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction — so we are told. “

“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me.”

“I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society.”


TBD –The first chapter is brilliant, and I have high hopes for the rest of the book, but have gotten distracted! But I shall return.

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Reflections on “Glaciology,” by Lia Purpura

6 June 2024

Kate C, after reading my latest essay, directed me to this essay.

It is a lovely piece for writing, and on I can learn from. Looking more closely, I see this essay won the Pushcart Prize. You can find it here: https://agnionline.bu.edu/essay/glaciology And there is more by her — at least in the same place this was published — that you can find at https://agnionline.bu.edu/about/our-people/authors/lia-purpura/

It was as if after the big event of snowfall we’d forgotten there was more, still, to be said. A cache of loose details below to attend. A trove poised. A stealth gathering.

Deposition below the singular-seeming white cover.

—Lia Purpura, Glaciology
Continue reading Reflections on “Glaciology,” by Lia Purpura

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Thoughts on “Of Fragments and Segments” by Heidi Czerwiec 

I was ambivalent about this piece. It made me think, but much of the discussion seemed toassume that very personal metaphoric uses of terms like “fragment” and “segment” had some kind of inter-personal validity, …which I doubt they had. But still, it was interesting to think about how (or whether) you break an essay into pieces, and what sort of work that separation does.

Here is the original essay: https://hippocampusmagazine.com/2022/04/craft-of-fragments-and-segments-by-heidi-czerwiec/

Some thoughts:

  • Fragments are natural and respect the object; segmentation/cutting imposes an external / artificial agenda.
    First, the reading of “fragment” as “to break” seems etymologically valid, but the notion that breaking (in fragments) is somehow more violent the cutting (as in segment) is, at least on a physical level, dubious.
    When things break – think about minerals, but it can apply to any material object – they break in accordance with their structures. Often this is because material objects have an intrinsic structure, that includes planes of ‘weakness’ along which they will fracture. When a material object “breaks,” it breaks in the most ‘efficient’ way — it uses the minimal energy to break, and, when it breaks, it is releasing tension that is distorting the structure of the object. In contrast, cutting ignores internal structure, and imposes an external agenda on what is being done. Breaking is true to the structure of the object being broken; cutting ignores that structure, although in some cases, surgery for example, the surgeon may take that into account. 
  • It feels to me like much of the essay is wallowing in metaphor, or at least treating personal metaphors as though they have some kind of agreed-upon interpersonal validity. I’m not convinced that authors who talk about segmentation really have distinct meanings in mind relative to those who talk about fragmentation.
  • The final paragraph seems on the mark to me, but I’m not sure it really follows from the previous material: 

It appears that the more white space – the less “whole” the text appears, the more fragmented, the more visible the breakage – the more charged that space becomes for the reader. That also means more work on the part of the reader. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the reader considers the pieces segments or fragments.

  • The crux of the issue: To me, the crux of the issue is ‘what work does the white space do?’ 
    • Help the reader understand the temporal and topical structure of the text, understanding that the white space is parsing the essay into chunks of some sort?
    • Give the reader time – a beat or two – to assimilate what has been said
    • Signal the reader that it is time to pause and draw meaning from what has been said – that if the dots have not been connected it is now the reader’s turn?
    • Save the author from having to craft an explicit transition from one fragment to the next?
  • Interpretation of Fragments. Mosaics, and collages, and cubist and pointillistic paintings, work because the individual elements can be perceived as wholes, and simultaneously apprehended in parallel to form a larger pattern. Segments of text don’t work this way – interpretation is serial and plays out over cognitively meaningful lengths of time… Re-membering, and re-calling are important, as is the author’s provision of signposts that will help the reader…

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LS: A Wilder Time,* William E. Glassley

*A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice. William E. Grassley, 2018.

A lyrical book that provides an account of a geologic expedition to gather evidence for a 1.8 Ga collision between continents that resulted in a series of shear zones in western Greenland. Also important for providing evidence that plate tectonics has been going on for a long time, something that has been contested. Content is quite interesting, but I also appreciate it for its lyrical writing about landscape and geology, which is this focus of my “LS” project.

Continue reading LS: A Wilder Time,* William E. Glassley

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EP#15: The Making of the American Essay*

*EP#15: The Making of the American Essay, John D. Agata (Graywolf Press, 2016)

Favorites are indicated by ** – there is only one: Blood Burning Moon.
* indicates those that I found something notable in, though I was not keen on them
(*) indicates something previouly read that I still like.
Frankly, I did not care for most of the essays (or, really, most were not essays, but presumably informed or influenced American essayists) in this volume.

This is the 15th volume CT and I have taken up in our essay reading project. Here we return to the type of book we began with — the broadly historical anthology. This differs from previous anthologies we’ve read in that it appears that the editor introduces each piece, something we’ve wished for in the past, especially when we’ve been mystified by why an essay was selected.

Later: Now that we’re farther into it, I’m a little less keen on it. A lot of the material in here are not actually essays: there are short stories, one sermon, a book chapter or two, and some very long pieces (Mark Twain’s A Letter from Earth), none of which strike me as essays. I had hoped for essays, or at least short essay-like pieces… and there are some, but quite a lot is other material. Although his initial introductions were pretty good at situating selections, as the book moves on the introductions are less about the selections, per se, and instead his sort of personal arc through American History. He is also quite fond of experimental work — work that, while it might have raised questions at the time, or contributed to discourse among the literati, is difficult to imagine anyone reading for pleasure or even enlightenment.

Continue reading EP#15: The Making of the American Essay*

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March Danceness: Notes on an Essay Contest

March 2024

Today I went to the “March Danceness” web site to check out the context for Kate C’s essay. I found the essays quite interesting and, as they are all supposed to be about ‘dance music’ from the ’00’s, I also enjoyed them as a window into a musical era and genre of which I was unaware. It also attracted a certain demographic, and I find it both interesting and a little amusing to hear those in their 30’s and 40’s lamenting their ages.

The contest is modeled on the metaphor of a sports playoff, where a large set of candidates pair up, are voted on, and then the winners pair up again… I am a week late to the party, but at least today I read all the essays for March 8, and voted on entrants. What follows are my notes for each day, though I think it unlikely that I will keep this up throughout the month.

Continue reading March Danceness: Notes on an Essay Contest

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Reflections on Nine Drafts of an Essay

7 March 2024

This evening I had a productive discussion about the process of developing an essay. I was allowed to look through a series of drafts the led to a just-published essay, and discuss the author’s process with the author. Although different people obviously have different processes, it was a great exercise.

Continue reading Reflections on Nine Drafts of an Essay

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