The Annotated Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (1843), edited by Michael Patrick Hearn, 2004

I had already done my annual reading of this in November, but then the Amherst Book Group talked about it as a one-off (just one discussion since it’s short) between The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Half of a Yellow Sun. So once again I took the opportunity to read the annotated edition, and the extra content is mostly what I recorded.

In this book I learned

  • The long list of adaptations led me to probably the strangest, Rich Little’s Christmas Carol (1963) – basically an excuse for Little to trot out all his impressions. The “casting” is a little random!
    • W.C. Fields/Scrooge
    • Paul Lynde/Bob Crachit
    • Johnny Carson/nephew Fred
    • Laurel and Hardy/the two gentlemen collecting donations
    • Nixon/Marley
    • Humphrey Bogart/Ghost of Christmas Past
    • Groucho/Fezziwig, Columbo/Ghost of Christmas Present
    • Edith Bunker/Mrs. Cratchit
    • Truman Capote/Tiny Tim
    • Inspector Clouseau/Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
    • George Burns, John Wayne, & ? somebody with a cane and top hat?/rag and boneman scene
    • Jack Benny/kid in the street who fetches the turkey
  • An Orwell quote, “It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change in spirit rather than a change of structure, ” led me first to Orwell’s “Can Socialists be Happy?” before finding the origin in “Charles Dickens.”
  • Dickens’ the Life of Our Lord – “No one ever lived who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in any way ill or miserable”
  • In his library at Gad’s Hill, Dickens had a set of fake books in the set The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: Ignorance, Superstition, The Block, The Stake, The Rack, Dirt, and Disease.
  • Welsh wig
  • James T. Fields observed that Dickens “liked to dilate in imagination over the brewing of a bowl of punch, but I always noticed that when the punch was ready, he drank less of it than any one who might be present. It was the sentiment of the thing, and not the thing itself, that engaged his attention.”
  • Scalpers and people camping out in line the night before to get tickets to Dickens’ public readings
  • Dickens was criticized for “the rising inflection” (upspeak?)
  • Dickens reading Bob Crachit’s speech “brought out so many pocket handerchiefs that it looked as if a snowstorm had somehow got into the hall without tickets”

Quotes from the annotations

  • Re Doré’s illustrations: “Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present look remarkably like Dante and Virgil exploring the rings of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, which Doré was also illustrating in 1961.”
  • “Utilitarians have never been fond of A Christmas Carol.“
  • “Remarkably, no scene in this Christmas story takes place in a church, no clergyman plays a role in the drama.”
  • Ruskin in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton: “His Christmas meant mistletoe and pudding — neither resurrection from dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds.”
  • In the manuscript, Dickens included a digression on what Hamlet would be like as a relative: “He would be a most impracticable fellow to deal with; and however creditable he might be to the family after his decease, he would prove a special encumbrance in his lifetime, trust me.”

Every night I read I am described (mostly by people who have not the faintest notion of observing) from the sole of my boot to where the topmost hair of my head ought to be, but is not. Sometimes I am described as being “evidently nervous;” sometimes it is rather taken ill that “Mr. Dickens is so extraordinarily composed.” My eyes are blue, red, grey, white, green, brown, black, hazel, violet, and rainbow-coloured. I am like “a well-to-do American gentleman,” and the Emperor of the French, with an occasional touch of the Emperor of China, and a deterioration from the attributes of our famous townsman, Rufus W. B. D. Dodge Grumsher Pickville. I say all sorts of things that I never said, go to all sorts of places that I never saw or heard of, and have done all manner of things (in some previous state of existence I suppose) that have quite escaped my memory.

Dickens in a letter – see https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25853/25853-h/25853-h.htm

Quotes from the text

  • “when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
  • “a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again”
  • ‘“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.’
  • ‘“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”‘
  • “No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!”
  • “He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk—that anything—could give him so much happiness.” (like Wally in My Dinner with André talking about his cold coffee)

“Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know, that ages of incessant labour by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused!”

The Annotated Alice: 150th Anniversary Deluxe Edition: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) by Lewis Carroll, edited by Martin Gardner, expanded and updated by Mark Burstein, 2015

The Great Books group wanted to read a children’s book and this was the vote. I was surprised how many people had never read it, but of course everyone was familiar with the characters. I’ve read both Alice books many times, so it was fun to have the extra material. I believe this is what started the craze for annotated editions – Gardner’s original version came out in 1960, and the Annotated Sherlock Holmes may have been the next one (1967). It’s notable how many poems that Carroll parodied would otherwise be completely forgotten.

In this book I learned:

  • Gardner’s note: “We know that Cheshire cheese was once sold in the shape of a grinning cat. One would tend to slice off the cheese at the cat’s tail end until finally only the grinning head would remain on the plate.” But this story seems to be apocryphal. Gardner says the source is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Wikipedia gives this very book as the citation, twice, but also references Brewer’s. But the 1898 edition, which is online, has nothing like this, so it was presumably added later and might be a back-formation. And that doesn’t seem like a very practical shape for a cheese!
  • “borogoves” doesn’t have an r after the g! Gardner says it’s a common mispronunciation and misspelling, even on the Alice statue in Central Park. We played there many times as children; I didn’t even remember there was text.
  • Roger Lancelyn Green theorized that “Jabberwocky” was possibly a parody of “The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains.” I found the partial text and I can sort of see it! (Full text here on pp. 298-300 and 326-328 but much harder to read.) For example “The prince cried, stooping from his balcony,/In gratulating tones,/’Come to my heart, my true and gallant son!'”
  • Tweedledum and Tweedledee are references to a poem about the rivalry between Handel and Bonocini
  • Added to my TBR pile:
    • No Name by Wilkie Collins, because Carroll said “Mrs. Wragg and the White Queen might have been twin-sisters”
    • The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (which contains a portion of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” parodied in “Sitting on a Gate”)
  • Added to my plants-to-look-for list: scented rushes, i.e. Acorus calamus
  • Brewer’s elaborates the cut (to ignore someone on purpose) as having four types:
    • The cut direct is to stare an acquaintance in the face and pretend not to know him.
    • The cut indirect, to look another way, and pretend not to see him.
    • The cut sublime, to admire the top of some tall edifice or the clouds of heaven till the person cut has passed by.
    • The cut infernal, to stoop and adjust your boots till the party has gone past.

Quotes

  • Drink Me “a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast”
  • “She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)”
  • After Alice says “till we meet again”: ‘“I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet,” Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake; “you’re so exactly like other people.”’

Mathematical physicists are quite fond of Carrollian nomenclature. A non-orientable wormhole that appears to reverse the chirality (handedness) of anything passed through it is referred to as an Alice handle, and a (hypothetical) universe that includes one is an Alice universe. A charge with magnitude but no persistently identifiable polarity is referred to as a Cheshire charge. An Alice string is a half-quantum vortex in a vector Bose-Einstein condensate. Scientists at the Institut Laue-Langevin, in Grenoble, France, recently for the first time separated a particle from one of its physical properties, creating what they called a quantum Cheshire Cat, in this case by taking a beam of neutrons and separating them from their magnetic moment. In the physics of superfluidity, a boojum is a geometric pattern on the surface of one of the phases of superfluid helium-3. In theoretical physics, the Carroll particle is a relativistic particle model in the limit of which the velocity of light becomes zero. Such a particle cannot move and was named after the Red Queen’s remark, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers, 1940

I had read this at least once before (for the Second Monday book group in 2013), and Great Books has it scheduled for next December, but this was my favorite format: the Amherst College slow read group where we do 50 pages per week. We get so much more out books that way! We followed up reading the book with watching the 1968 movie, and I made cornpones because they were mentioned, few people know about them, and I love them. (I use the recipe from Favorite Recipes of the Lower Cape Fear, a cookbook in which a terrible poem my dad wrote [his description!] appears.) The film is a good movie on its own merits, but not a good adaptation of the book; most of the edges get rubbed off, including the racial ones. The book was so far ahead of its time, especially in blurring gender boundaries, and the movie is more conventional. I loved the idea of Mick’s “inside room” and “outside room” as psychological spaces, and her response to music.

In this book I learned:

  • “Prom party” where “to prom” is to walk around the block
  • Dough-face costume? “One boy had gone home and put on a dough-face bought in advance for Halloween.” I find references to it as a homemade mask, but not many. There’s a photo in this book (need database access to see the digital version – page 91).
  • Bubber “taking a pop” at Baby is an early example of cute aggression

Short quotes

  • Jake: “When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?”
  • “‘It don’t take words to make a quarrel,’ Portia said. ‘It look to me like us is always arguing even when we sitting perfectly quiet like this.'”
  • Portia again: “A person can’t pick up they children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they wants them to be.”
  • “the cold green ocean and a hot gold strip of sand”
  • “By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means. The proof? Real youth and old age. Because often old men’s voices grow high and reedy and they take on a mincing walk. And old women sometimes grow fat and their voices get rough and deep and they grow dark little mustaches.”
  • an old song as “a dragnet for lost feelings”
  • Dr. Copeland “sat in rigid silence, and at last he picked up his hat and left the house without a farewell. If he could not speak the whole long truth no other word would come to him.”
  • a toddler “tuned up to cry”

Longer quotes

‘Pick out some stories with something to eat in them. I like that one a whole lot about them German kids going out in the forest and coming to this house made out of all different kinds of candy and the witch. I like a story with something to eat in it.’

‘I’ll look for one,’ said Mick.

‘But I’m getting kinda tired of candy,’ Bubber said. ‘See if you can’t bring me a story with something like a barbecue sandwich in it.’

[Dr. Copeland] Many of us cook for those who are incompetent to prepare the food that they themselves eat. Many work a lifetime tending flower gardens for the pleasure of one or two people. Many of us polish slick waxed floors of fine houses. Or we drive automobiles for rich people who are too lazy to drive themselves. We spend our lives doing thousands of jobs that are of no real use to anybody. We labor and all of our labor is wasted. Is that service? No, that is slavery.

Harry was a Pantheist. That was a religion, the same as Baptist or Catholic or Jew. Harry believed that after you were dead and buried you changed to plants and fire and dirt and clouds and water. It took thousands of years and then finally you were a part of all the world. He said he thought that was better than being one single angel.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes – Dan Egan, 2017

We (the Nature and Environment book group) learned so much from this book! Few of us had any idea about ballast water bringing in invasives and bacteria; about the dangers of connecting watersheds at Chicago; that there have been many very rapid and recent changes in the species composition of the Great Lakes; how important phosphorus is. I enjoyed reading about lampreys, which I love seeing at the Barrett Fishway in Holyoke. It was fascinating that the introduced alewife was then declared in need of protection when the balance of species changed, crashing the native perch populations again. Also in this book I learned about:

  • “giant trout that can grow to a wolf-sized 70 pounds”
  • James Strang, “a fiery rival of Brigham Young” who proclaimed himself king of Beaver Island but also carefully studied the different kinds of lake trout
  • veliger, almost microsopic mollusc larvae – “What ensued in the next few years was a veliger blizzard down the canal and into Mississippi River tributaries that nobody could have predicted. Biologists in the early 1990s calculated that the microscopic mussel veligers were tumbling down the Mississippi-bound Illinois River at a rate of 70 million per second.”
  • the Cuyahoga River catching on fire is very old – first reported in 1868
  • “Biologically contaminated ballast water is the worst kind of pollution because it cannot be fixed by plugging a pipe or capping a smokestack. It does not decay and it does not disperse. It breeds.”
  • the Great Black Swamp
  • “Lake Erie, which holds only 2 percent of the overall volume of Great Lakes water, is home to about 50 percent of Great Lakes fish” because it is warmer and shallower than the others, so supports more algae
  • ‘“The intuition is that a very large lake like this would be slow to respond somehow to climate change,” [Jay Austin] said. “But in fact we’re finding that it’s particularly sensitive.”’

It’s hard to fault Nicolet if he really did believe his journey had taken him to Asia, because there were no Old World analogues for the scope of the lakes he was trying to navigate. The biggest lake in France, after all, is 11 miles long and about 2 miles wide; the sailing distance between Duluth, Minnesota, on the Great Lakes’ western end and Kingston, Ontario, on their eastern end is more than 1,100 miles. No, the bodies of water formally known as the Laurentian Great Lakes are not mere lakes, not in the normal sense of the word. Nobody staring across Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie or Superior would consider the interconnected watery expanse that sprawls across 94,000 square miles just a lake, any more than a visitor waking up in London is likely to think of himself as stranded on just an island (the United Kingdom, in fact, also happens to span some 94,000 square miles).

A normal lake sends ashore ripples and, occasionally, waves a foot or two high. A Great Lake wave can swell to a tsunami-like 25 feet. A normal lake, if things get really rough, might tip a boat. A Great Lake can swallow freighters almost three times the length of a football field; the lakes’ bottoms are littered with an estimated 6,000 shipwrecks, many of which have never been found. This would never happen on a normal lake, because a normal lake is knowable. A Great Lake can hold all the mysteries of an ocean, and then some.

This left the four lakes above Niagara Falls largely separated from the rest of the aquatic world. The lakes might have sprawled across an area half the size of California, but in a sense they were as isolated as a one-acre pond in the middle of a forest until the early 19th century, when construction of the Welland and Erie Canal bypassed the falls and linked the lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Pulling the Niagara plug that had protected the lakes for millennia triggered an ecological calamity best illustrated by the rise and fall of three species of fish—lake trout, sea lampreys and alewives. Their story shows how a delicate ecological tapestry that had been thousands of years in the making unraveled in just a couple of decades.

The decision to push aside lamprey-killer Vernon Applegate’s goal to restore lake trout and instead focus on grafting an exotic predator [salmon] onto the Great Lakes was a bit like rehabbing an ailing Great Plains by laying down sod strips of Kentucky bluegrass and turning the place into one giant golf course—one that would require constant tending—rather than reseeding the expanse with native grasses uniquely evolved over thousands of years to provide stability in the face of droughts, fires and roving herds of grazers.

Briney can catch 15,000 pounds of [bighead carp] in his nets. Not in one day. In 25 minutes. Here is a little perspective on that number: Wisconsin’s quota for commercial perch fishing on all the state waters of Lake Michigan in some past years has been about 20,000 pounds. That’s not a per-day limit. That’s the limit for an entire year.

Scientists have identified 39 invasive species poised to ride the Chicago canal into or out of the Great Lakes, including a fish-killing virus in Lake Michigan today that could ravage the South’s catfish farming industry as well as five species of nuisance fish, including the sea lamprey. Threatening from the other direction, beyond the Asian carp, is the razor-toothed snakehead, which can breathe air and slither short distances over land and is now swimming loose in the Mississippi basin.

Later, rocks rich in phosphates, which is a form of salt containing phosphorus, would be mined and processed for the mineral that doctors came to believe could cure everything from impotence (it couldn’t) to tuberculosis (it couldn’t) to depression (it couldn’t) to alcoholism (it couldn’t) to epilepsy (it couldn’t) to cholera (it couldn’t) to toothaches (it couldn’t).

The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford, 1915

This had been on my radar for ages (so much praise for this book!), so I was happy the Second Monday group chose it (and I volunteered to lead the discussion, with questions mostly pulled from BookCompanion). A very interesting book technically, which I admired but didn’t exactly enjoy – as a novel it’s very weird. It’s famous as a showcase for one of the most (and earliest?) unreliable narrators in fiction, who contradicts himself constantly and appears to be unbelievably naïve. Ford repeats certain phrases like “the carefully calculated” or “normal, virtuous, and slightly deceitful” which has a kind of hypnotizing effect. I only have one “in this book I learned”: pococurantism – indifference, nonchalance. Only short quotes, also – which I think is a result of the style of the writing.

  • “the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars”
  • “you, silent listener beyond the hearth-stone” (the reader)
  • “God knows what they wanted with a winter garden in an hotel that is only open from May till October. But there it was.”
  • Doctors who advise that Florence not travel because it “might have effects on Florence’s nerves. That would be enough, that and a conscientious desire to keep our money on the Continent.” (as in The Magic Mountain)
  • “The fellow talked like a cheap novelist. Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly.”
  • “In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor—a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some weak spot in one’s character or in one’s career. For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one’s small meannesses.”
  • “Florence was a personality of paper … she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold.”
  • “Here, then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heart-aches, agony of the mind and death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all a darkness.”
  • “You see, Leonora and Edward had to talk about something during all these years. You cannot be absolutely dumb when you live with a person unless you are an inhabitant of the North of England or the State of Maine.”
  • “The Hurlbirds were an exceedingly united family—exceedingly united except on one set of points. Each of the three of them had a separate doctor, whom they trusted implicitly—and each had a separate attorney. And each of them distrusted the other’s doctor and the other’s attorney. And, naturally, the doctors and the attorneys warned one all the time—against each other.”
  • “There was upon those people’s faces no expression of any kind whatever. The signal for the train’s departure was a very bright red; that is about as passionate a statement as I can get into that scene.”

The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann, (tr. by H. T. Lowe-Porter)

I’d heard so much about this book and have been meaning to read it for so long that I was very excited that it was finally chosen for Great Books. It’s been on the suggestion list before but never got enough votes. But I was quite disappointed, especially compared to the other Mann we’ve read, Death in Venice. The monologues and dialogues with Settembrini and Naphta were too frequent, too long, and too tedious. I had been looking forward to the theme of time and its subjectivity, but not much of that felt fresh. I did enjoy the cozyness of wrapping yourself in blankets and fur sleepsacks amidst the snows, and the impact of new technology like the x-rays and the gramophone was interesting. The most memorable bits were Hans Calstrop’s memories of his schoolmate Pribislav Hippe (the “Kirghiz”), who lent him a pencil, and the chapter “Snow” about Calstrop getting lost in a storm and dreaming of utopia. One of the Great Books participants, who loved it, says the book is about Germans blindly following the Nazis, not caring or paying attention to what was going on around them. As Mann said in the afterword:

You will have got from my book an idea of the narrowness of this charmed circle of isolation and invalidism. It is a sort of substitute existence, and it can, in a relatively short time, wholly wean a young person from actual and active life. Everything there, including the conception of time, is thought of on a luxurious scale. The cure is always a matter of several months, often of several years. But after the first six months the young person has not a single idea left save flirtation and the thermometer under his tongue. After the second six months in many cases he has even lost the capacity for any other ideas. He will become completely incapable of life in the flatland.

The translation seems quite problematic – I went back to compare the German and often couldn’t find the passage without a lot of effort because the match up is so loose. To my surprise, I stumbled across the fact that occasionally L-P took dialogue in German between Castorp and Clavdia, who often speak French to each other, and translated it into French? Why??? For example, Clavdia says “Du wirst das verstehen” and L-P renders it as “Tu peux comprendre çela” [sic – should be “cela”] So weird!

Short quotes

  • “It went against his grain to eat butter served in the piece instead of in little fluted balls.”
  • “the feeling of reckless sweetness he had felt for the first time when he tried to imagine himself free of the burden of a good name, and tasted the boundless joys of shame”
  • “One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.”
  • “He talks so well; the words come jumping out of his mouth so round and appetizing — when I listen to him, I keep seeing a picture of fresh hot rolls in my mind’s eye.”
  • Dr. Krokowski says “Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.”
  • “the eyes said thou, for that is the language of the eyes, even when the tongue uses a more formal address”
  • Joachim: “You will find that when people discuss and express their views nothing ever comes of it but confusion worse confounded. I tell you, it doesn’t matter in the least what a man’s views are, so long as he is a decent chap. The best thing is to have no opinions, and just do one’s duty.”
  • “Their spirits, particularly the sallow Frau Magnus’s, were proof against any ray of cheer; forlornity exhaled from her like damp from a cellar.”
  • “Walking, he thrust the end of his stick in the snow and watched the blue light follow it out of the hole it made. That he liked; and stood for long at a time to test the little optical phenomenon. It was a strange, a subtle colour, this greenish-blue; colour of the heights and deeps, ice-clear, yet holding shadow in its depths, mysteriously exquisite.”
  • Snowflakes: “little jewels, insignia, orders, agraffes —no jeweller, however skilled, could do finer, more minute work”
  • Conserve jars: “The magic part of it lies in the fact that the stuff that is conserved is withdrawn from the effects of time, it is hermetically sealed from time, time passes it by, it stands there on its shelf shut away from time.”
  • Behrens on a new resident: “Not much hope, my lad; really none at all, I suppose. Of course, we’ll try everything that’s good and costs money.”
  • Tears: “those clear drops flowing in such bitter abundance every hour of our day all over our world, till in sheer poetic justice we have named the earth we live in after them” (meaning “the vale of tears”?)
  • Re Mynheer Peeperkorn, whose name I could not read without laughing: “his trouser pockets … are put in running up and down, not like yours and mine and most people’s of our class.”
  • Also about him: “He had said absolutely nothing. But look, manner, and gestures were so peremptory, perfervid, pregnant, that all, even Hans Castorp, were convinced they had heard something of high moment; or, if aware of the total lack of matter and sequence in the speech, certainly never missed it.” The same observation recurs in a longer quote below.

Long quotes

[from the foreword] We shall tell it at length, thoroughly, in detail — for when did a narrative seem too long or too short by reasons of the actual time or space it took up? We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

Space, rolling and revolving between him and his native heath, possessed and wielded the powers we generally ascribe to time. From hour to hour it worked changes in him, like to those wrought by time, yet in a way even more striking. Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness ; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.

A familiar feeling pervaded the child: a strange, dreamy, troubling sense: of change in the midst of duration, of time as both flowing and persisting, of recurrence in continuity — these were sensations he had felt before on the like occasion, and both expected and longed for again, whenever the heirloom [baptism basin] was displayed.

Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time ; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course. We are aware that the intercalation of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of time, strengthen, retard, and rejuvenate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself. Such is the purpose of our changes of air and scene, of all our sojourns at cures and bathing resorts; it is the secret of the healing power of change and incident. Our first days in a new place, time has a youthful, that is to say, a broad and sweeping, flow, persisting for some six or eight days. Then, as one “gets used to the place,” a gradual shrinkage makes itself felt. He who clings or, better expressed, wishes to cling to life, will shudder to see how the days grow light and lighter, how they scurry by like dead leaves, until the last week, of some four, perhaps, is uncannily fugitive and fleet. On the other hand, the quickening of the sense of time will flow out beyond the interval and reassert itself after the return to ordinary existence: the first days at home after the holiday will be lived with a broader flow, freshly and youthfully — but only the first few, for one adjusts oneself more quickly to the rule than to the exception; and if the sense of time be already weakened by age, or — and this is a sign of low vitality — it was never very well developed, one drowses quickly back into the old life, and after four-and-twenty hours it is as though one had never been away, and the journey had been but a watch in the night.

Our account of the first three weeks of Hans Castorp’s stay … has consumed in the telling an amount of time and space only too well confirming the author’s half-confessed expectations; while our narrative of his next three weeks will scarcely cost as many lines, or even words and minutes, as the earlier three did pages, quires, hours, and working-days. We apprehend that these next three weeks will be over and done with in the twinkling of an eye.

Which is perhaps surprising; yet quite in order, and conformable to the laws that govern the telling of stories and the listening to them. For it is in accordance with these laws that time seems to us just as long, or just as short, that it expands or contracts precisely in the way, and to the extent, that it did for young Hans Castorp.

Waiting means hurrying on ahead, it means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction; it means making their actual content null and void, by mentally overleaping them. Waiting, we say, is long. We might just as well — or more accurately — say it is short, since it consumes whole spaces of time without our living them or making any use of them as such. We may compare him who lives on expectation to a greedy man, whose digestive apparatus works through quantities of food without converting it into anything of value or nourishment to his system. We might almost go so far as to say that, as undigested food makes man no stronger, so time spent in waiting makes him no older.

[Naphta says] The Fathers of the Church called mine and thine pernicious words, and private property usurpation and robbery. They repudiated the idea of personal possessions, because, according to divine and natural law, the earth is common to all men, and brings forth her fruits for the common good. They taught that avarice, a consequence of the Fall, represents the rights of property and is the source of private ownership. They were humane enough, anti-commercial enough, to feel that all commercial activity was a danger to the soul of man and its salvation. They hated money and finance, and called the empire of capital fuel for the fires of hell. The fundamental economic principle that price is regulated by the operation of the law of supply and demand, they have always despised from the bottom of their hearts; and condemned taking advantage of chance as a cynical exploitation of a neighbour’s need. Even more nefarious, in their eyes, was the exploitation of time; the monstrousness of receiving a premium for the passage of time — interest, in other words — and misusing to one’s own advantage and another’s disadvantage a universal and God-given dispensation.

Not sure I understand this at all? But it’s in the mouth of Naphta, who often says nutty things. And maybe I haven’t run with the right kind of Protestants:

Judaism, by virtue of its secular and materialistic leanings, its socialism, its political adroitness, had actually more in common with Catholicism than the latter had with the mystic subjectivity and self-immolation of Protestantism; the conversion of a Jew to the Roman Catholic faith was accordingly a distinctly less violent spiritual rupture than was that of a Protestant.

“Ah, the trees, the trees! Oh, living climate of the living — how sweet it smells! “

It was a park. It lay beneath the terrace on which he seemed to stand — a spreading park of luxuriant green shade-trees, elms, planes, beeches, birches, oaks, all in the dappled light and shade of their fresh, full, shimmering foliage, and gently rustling tips. They breathed a deliciously moist, balsamic breath into the air. A warm shower passed over them, but the rain was sunlit. One could see high up in the sky the whole air filled with the bright ripple of raindrops. How lovely it was! Oh, breath of the homeland, oh, fragrance and abundance of the plain, so long foregone!

Narration resembles music in this, that it fills up the time. It “fills it in” and “breaks it up,” so that “there’s something to it,” “something going on” … For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are inextricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once. Thus music and narration are alike, in that they can only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after another; and both differ from the plastic arts, which are complete in the present, and unrelated to time save as all bodies are, whereas narration — like music — even if it should try to be completely present at any given moment, would need time to do it in.

“Mynheer Peeperkorn has a gift, say what you like; and thus it is he can stick us all in his pocket. Put Herr Naphta in one corner of the room, and let him deliver a discourse on Gregory the Great and the City of God — it would be highly worth listening to — and put Mynheer Peeperkorn in the other, with his extraordinary mouth and the wrinkles on his forehead, and let him not say a word except ‘By all means — capital — settled, ladies and gentlemen!’ You will see everybody gather round Peeperkorn, and Herr Naphta will be sitting there alone with his cleverness and his City of God, though he may be uttering such penetrating wisdom that it pierces through marrow and cucumber, as Behrens says.”

In this book I learned

  • Third breakfast! Wikipedia only traces it here, but I doubt Mann made it up.
  • I can’t find anything about “Scotch-thread drawers” online except in full-text versions of MM, but looking up the German original it’s “file d’écosse-Unterhose.” So the translation should really be “lisle underwear.” (I doubt my blog has enough Google traction to make “Scotch-thread drawers” come up in this context – I posted the first instance of “kalegarth” back in 2005 and now it doesn’t even come up (because the blog was inaccessible for years and I’ll never get my rankings back, ah well…))
  • Original sweaters: “The women wore chiefly close-fitting jackets of wool or silk — the so-called sweater — in white or colours, with turnover collars and side pockets.” Cardigans, I guess. The German has “sogenannte Sweater… mit Fallkragen und Seitentaschen.” Love those Compound Nouns!
  • I knew Blue Peter only as the British television show, which supposedly refers to a flag indicating a vessel is about the leave, but here it’s a sputum flask. Again the translation is weird, though – it’s “Blauen Heinrich,” Blue Henry, and that’s how it’s most commonly known in English. There’s even a book – looks interesting. Blue Peter is a known variant in English, but I’d love to get more information.
  • Gala Peter chocolate
  • Formamint – “Formamint was a lozenge made up of formaldehyde, milk sugar, citric acid and pepsin-hydrochloric acid” per this very interesting-looking article I want to go back and read someday…
  • Jonathan had just told me about the parlor game of sketching a pig with one’s eyes closed, and here it is in MM, one of the faddish parlor games the residents play.
  • Soldanella, which Mann describes as having “little eye-lashed bells of rose-color, purple, and blue”
  • Coincidentally, Jonathan was reading the September 1927 issue of The Bookman and came across this: “Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain, seems to be winning American favor even greater than that of Hermann Sudermann, whose Song of Songs was for long the most popular of modern novels translated from the German.” Wikipedia says “after 1945, [Sudermann’s] plays and novels were almost completely forgotten,” but Song of Songs has an entry, and the Garbo vehicle Flesh and the Devil was based on one of his novels.
  • Tula-silver-handled cane (Tulasilberkrücke): synonym for niello, found on the very helpful Canequest site
  • Skilly – but in the original it’s Linsen, lentils!
  • The Seven Sleepers
  • Philopena (Vielliebchen, translated “philippina”)
  • Weird fact: Boris Johnson is the great-grandson of the translator.

Winter – Ali Smith, 2017

Read for Second Monday book group. I loved the Christmas Carol echoes – it starts with “God was dead: to begin with” – but hated the Trumpish end: “You’re going to be saying Merry Christmas again, folks.” And the protagonist Art who writes a column “Art in Nature”… it’s a little on-the-nose. Nonetheless, Smith is always a beautiful writer.

Short quotes

  • “That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.”
  • “Then his mother stops speaking and starts humming a tune and Art knows the doors of the reminiscence have closed, as surely as if the Reminiscence is a cinema or a theatre and the show is over, the rows of seats empty, the audience gone home.”

Long quotes

Well, imagine it like this, the optician says. Imagine I’m a car mechanic and someone brings me in a car for a service, and it’s a car from the 1940s, and I lift the lid and find the engine still nearly as clean as when it left the factory floor in (the optician checks her form) 1946, just amazing, a triumph.

You’re saying I’m like an old Triumph, Sophia says.

Good as new, the optician (who clearly has no idea that a Triumph has ever been a car) says.

Those green things, white things, polystyrene. You’re wrong, they’re recyclable. They’re free of whatever it is that’s bad for it. It’s not as bad as you’d think. I quite like them. I do! No, it’s interesting, because, because they’re so amazingly light, so that when you pick them up it’s surprising every time. You always expect them to be heavier. Even if you tell yourself, even though you know they’re light, you think you already know, you pick one up and it’s like, wow that’s so light, it’s like holding actual lightness. It’s, like, the weight of your own hand just somehow got lighter. Like a bird’s bones kind of light. If you pick up several, hold several so your hand’s full of them, you look at your hand loaded with things and your eye can’t understand it because although you can see that your hand’s full of something it feels like almost nothing’s in your hand.

None of these things is happening here. They are all happening far away, elsewhere.

But they may as well be, Iris says. What does here mean anyway, I’d like to know. Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?

In this book I learned

A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us About the Destiny of the Human Species – Rob R. Dunn, 2021

I liked this very much – some Nature and Environment folks thought it wasn’t human-focused enough, but that’s what I enjoyed. Dunn outlines what he calls “life’s laws,” principles akin to gravity, inertia, and entropy, that affect our environment but which humans mostly ignore at their peril. I didn’t make a proper note of them all as I read, so this list may be incomplete.

  • Species-area law (from island studies: how many species will emerge in a given geographic area)
  • Natural selection (evolution away from any imposed control like pesticides etc.)
  • Law of the niche (limits how much species can adapt to climate change, for example)
  • Law of escape (species moving away from their natural controls)
  • Law of dependence (we need our microbiome, for example; moving to outer space or other planets is a fantasy)
  • Law of cognitive buffering (species with extra brainpower will be adaptable to more conditions)

I would love to go back to this book someday to re-order/check this list – and read/re-read Dunn’s other books, because I love his writing style. He is both witty and inspiring. We had previously read Never Home Alone, which was also great, and there are many others.

In this book I learned

Although with a book like this, it’s a fine line between this section and the short quotes – those should also be memorably expressed, which for someone like Dunn makes the line even finer!

  • In Panama, Terry Erwin found about 1,200 different beetles, “more beetle species in one kind of tree in one forest than there are bird species in the United States”
  • There’s microbial life – lots of it – in the Earth’s crust! (Dunn doesn’t mention this, but looking this up taught me of the boundary called “the Moho” – great name)
  • Culex pipiens mosquitos populated the London Underground in the 1860s and are now a variant or possibly a new species, Culex molestus
  • A population of Aedes aegypti mosquitos, who can’t survive the cold outdoors in DC, persist by using human structures under the Mall in the winter
  • Humans mostly still live in the temperate areas of the globe; there are more of us but we’re just more concentrated in the same comfortable-for-us places, not spread out
  • “House sparrows can think circles around other species of sparrows”!
  • “It is thought that the ability and need to pass along microbes was part of what made termites social”
  • C-section babies miss being exposed to their mother’s microbes (increased risk of diverse diseases & infections)
  • Dallol geothermal area – amazing images – populated by Archaeans whose “dozen species are more evolutionarily diverse than all the vertebrates on Earth combined”
  • “Coendangered” (now “coextinct”) species like the black-footed ferret louse and the California condor mite
  • “Colonies of a single species of army ant, … Eciton burchellii, host more than three hundred other species of animals (to say nothing of other life-forms, such as bacteria or viruses)”

Short quotes

  • “More than half the Earth is now covered by ecosystems we have created—cities, farm fields, waste-treatment plants. We now, meanwhile, control, directly and incompetently, many of the most important ecological processes on Earth. Humans now eat half of all the net primary productivity, the green life that grows, on Earth.”
  • Dunn suggests this daily affirmation: “I am large in a world of small species. I am multicellular in a world of single-celled species. I have bones in a world of boneless species. I am named in a world of nameless species. Most of what is knowable is not yet known.”
  • “We are reminded of the scale of the unknown by near tragedy and actual tragedy. We forget about the unknown in the calm wake of near tragedy and the sorrowful quiet of real tragedy. We forget at our own expense.”
  • “As an ecologist, it seems unlikely to me that we could engineer entirely new ecosystems on other planets that we could manage sustainably when we have struggled to avoid destroying the already functioning ecosystems around us on Earth.” [see also quote below]
  • “’Variability’ sounds both vague and harmless. It is neither; it is, instead, one of nature’s greatest dangers, an elemental threat. Variability is to be feared. Variability needs to be planned for.”
  • “From the perspective of their microbes … termites offer housing and transport and a bit of food preparation to boot. They are an entomological mix between a taco truck and a bed-and-breakfast.”
  • “Even in those cases in which the most economical (by any measure) solution is to replace a functioning natural ecosystem with technology, doing so tends to yield replicas of those natural systems that are missing parts and, more generally, act ‘like’ nature systems but not as natural systems.”
  • “Honey bees are no more native to North America than are starlings, house sparrows, or kudzu. Yet as agriculture in North America intensified, honey bees became a key piece of glue necessary to hold together a broken agricultural system.”
  • “To bees, flowers are like toilet seats. And while bees do wash their hands (or, rather, their feet), that is often not enough to prevent the spread of parasites.”
  • “Nearly the entirety of the living world bears the print of human biocides. We have pressed our wide thumb ever more forcefully into the spinning clay of nature.”
  • “Generally speaking, it seems that the more extreme a set of conditions, from a human perspective, the less well the ant species living in those conditions are likely to have been studied.”
  • “The feral cats of Australia are likely to survive the extinction of human Australians. Goats will live on in many regions. With regard to the extinction of humans, goats are tougher than cockroaches.”
  • About speculation that a form of artificial intelligence could outlive us: “it is interesting that in some ways we find it easier to posit that we can invent another entity that can live sustainably than to imagine that we can do so ourselves.”

Long quotes

Repeatedly scientists have announced the end (or near end) of science, the discovery of new species, or the discovery of life’s extremes. Usually, in doing so, they position themselves as having been key to putting the final pieces in place. “Finally, now that I am done, we are done. Look what I know!” And repeatedly, after such announcements, new discoveries have revealed life to be far grander and more poorly studied than had been imagined. Erwin’s law [named after a beetle biologist] reflects the reality that most of life is not yet named, much less studied.

Trying to control the cassava mealybug:

To find the enemies of the mealybug, one would have to know where the mealybug came from. No one did. In the absence of knowing where the mealybug was from, one could benefit from knowing where the relatives of the mealybug were from. No one knew which species it was related to, much less where they lived. In the absence of knowing where its relatives were from, one might go to the place where cassava was first domesticated (where its pests and parasites and their pests and parasites might be most common). No one had studied the geographic origin of cassava in much detail.

As much as the world can sometimes seem futuristic, many of the most brutal tasks are still carried out by human bodies. Human bodies pick fruit, load trucks, and kill pigs and chickens, and so it is still human bodies on which the global economy depends. Fifty percent of global agricultural production alone depends on the work of small landholders, who do much of their work outdoors by hand. Collectively, those human bodies, with their innumerable arms and legs, are directly susceptible to the effects of temperature.

[The basic idea of the law of cognitive buffering] is that animals with big brains are able to use their intelligence in inventive ways so as to find food even when food is scarce and maybe also warmth when it is cold and shade when it is hot. They buffer bad conditions with big brains. Superficially this would appear to be a law that bodes well for us humans. We have very big brains relative to our bodies, big enough that our heads nod with their own weight when we are exhausted. What’s more, those big brains are thought to have evolved, in part, to help cope with variable climates. But whether our big brains will help us in the future is going to depend on just how we use them, whether we and our institutions are more like a crow or more like the dusky seaside sparrow [which went extinct].

Carpenter ants, for instance, depend on bacteria passed by mothers to daughters, generation after generation, in order to produce some of the vitamins they require. At least one of those bacteria species is now housed, by the carpenter ants, in a special kind of cell that lines its gut. It is inside the ant’s cells, integrated into its body. It is inherited by baby ants inside their eggs. It is part of the ant’s body, part of its egg, and yet it is still separate. Conditions too warm for the bacteria, but not the ant, kill the bacteria. Then after a while, no longer whole, the ants slowly die too.

[Space colonization would be], for humanity, something akin to a rebirth, or at least a molt. By this I mean that they require us to take with us the species we need to survive. This is a much harder task than any that species on Earth must engage in. When a leaf-cutter ant queen flies to start a new colony, she carries with her the fungus that her progeny will grow on the leaves they gather. But she doesn’t need to take with her the plants that make the leaves. We will need to take the plants and also much more.

Of the ideas I’ve articulated in this book, the idea that we should save the services of nature, where we can, rather than trying to reinvent them is perhaps both the most obvious and the most contentious. It is obvious in that on some level it is intuitive that we should not break what is already working. It is contentious in that, increasingly, the future being imagined by scientists and engineers is one in which more and more of nature’s services are replaced by technologies. Recently, a number of researchers have gone so far as to suggest that they don’t need nature. They argue that, with genes in the lab, they can create whatever is needed. It is possible that they are right. I doubt it. I suspect my vacuum-cleaner repair person would doubt it too. And here is the thing: if they are wrong, and we have failed to save the ecosystems we needed, failed to keep them from breaking, well, then the consequences will be great.

[This] shows a version of the big evolutionary tree of life. If the branches were all labeled, you would quickly notice that the names on the branches are mostly unfamiliar. Some of the big branches on the tree of life, for example, include the Micrarchaeota, the Wirthbacteria, the Firmicutes, the Chloroflexi, or the even more cryptic “RBX1,” Lokiarchaeota and Thorarchaeota. If you were to look for the branch that includes humans, you might struggle to find it. This isn’t a mistake but, rather, a reflection of our own place in life’s bigger picture.
On this tree, or rather, a sort of bush, each line represents a major lineage of life. All species with cells with nuclei are part of the Eukaryotes, represented as a single broom-like branch … in the lower right-hand section of the tree. Eukaryotes include malaria parasites, algae, plants, and animals, among other life-forms. The Opisthokonta, one small part of the Eukaryote branch, is the branch that includes animals and fungi. Animals, if we zero in, are just one slender branch of the Opisthokonta. From this broad perspective, vertebrates do not get a special branch on the tree. The vertebrates are a small bud. The mammals are a cell in that bud. Humanity is, to continue the metaphor, something less than a cell.

Ecologists love to go to and study rain forests, ancient grasslands, and islands. They hate to work in toxic dumps and nuclear sites, even if the dumps and nuclear sites are proximate and relatively easy to study. And who can blame them? Meanwhile, the most extreme deserts on Earth are both remote and inhospitable, the kinds of places one is exiled to rather than the kinds of places to which one flocks when classes are done. They too are rarely studied. The result is that we tend to be blind to the ecology of some of the most rapidly growing ecosystems, blind to the future’s extremes.

The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy, 1878

The second Hardy we’ve read for Great Books – what an interesting and weird book! I loved the description of Egdon Heath and how Thomasin feels at home there while Damon hates it. Eustacia Vye is a fascinating character, and timorous Christian provides good comic relief.

Short quotes

  • “his painfully circular eyes, surrounded by concentric lines like targets”
  • “‘When folks are just married ’tis as well to look glad o’t, since looking sorry won’t unjoin ’em.'”
  • “the hearty tones natural when the words demanded by politeness coincide with those of deepest feeling”
  • Contrast of Eustacia’s mouth with the locals “whose lips met like the two halves of a muffin”
  • “‘Little children think there’s only one cuckoo, one fox, one giant, one devil, and one reddleman, when there’s lots of us all.'”
  • “thought is a disease of flesh… ideal physical beauty is incompatible with emotional development and a full recognition of the coil of things”
  • “To be yearning for the difficult, to be weary of that offered; to care for the remote, to dislike the near… This is the true mark of the man of sentiment.”
  • “men are drawn from their intentions even in the course of carrying them out”
  • “the players appeared only in outline against the sky; except when the circular mouths of the trombone, ophicleide, and French horn gleamed out like huge eyes from the shade of their figures”
  • A hot, dry day: “large-leaved plants of a tender kind flagged by ten o’clock in the morning; rhubarb bent downward at eleven; and even stiff cabbages were limp by noon”
  • “the quiet way of one who, though willing to ward off evil consequences by a mild effort, would let events fall out as they might sooner than wrestle hard to direct them” (Eustacia)
  • Eustacia again: “instead of blaming herself for the issue she laid the fault upon the shoulders of some indistinct, colossal Prince of the World, who had framed her situation and ruled her lot.”
  • “oozing lumps of fleshy fungi, which at this season lay scattered about the heath like the rotten liver and lungs of some colossal animal”
  • Dickens said it better but differently: “Resources do not depend upon gross amounts, but upon the proportion of spendings to takings”
  • A toddler: “of the age when it is a matter of doubt with such characters whether they are intended to walk through the world on their hands or on their feet; so that they get into painful complications by trying both.”

Long quotes

“I ha’n’t been [to church] these three years,” said Humphrey; “for I’m so dead sleepy of a Sunday; and ’tis so terrible far to get there; and when you do get there ’tis such a mortal poor chance that you’ll be chose for up above, when so many bain’t, that I bide at home and don’t go at all.”

In an ordinary village or country town one can safely calculate that, either on Christmas day or the Sunday contiguous, any native home for the holidays, who has not through age or ennui lost the appetite for seeing and being seen, will turn up in some pew or other, shining with hope, self-consciousness, and new clothes. Thus the congregation on Christmas morning is mostly a Tussaud collection of celebrities who have been born in the neighbourhood.

A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction.

On Egdon there was no absolute hour of the day. The time at any moment was a number of varying doctrines professed by the different hamlets, some of them having originally grown up from a common root, and then become divided by secession, some having been alien from the beginning. West Egdon believed in Blooms-End time, East Egdon in the time of the Quiet Woman Inn. Grandfer Cantle’s watch had numbered many followers in years gone by, but since he had grown older faiths were shaken. Thus, the mummers having gathered hither from scattered points each came with his own tenets on early and late; and they waited a little longer as a compromise.

Neither the man nor the woman lost dignity by sudden death. Misfortune had struck them gracefully, cutting off their erratic histories with a catastrophic dash, instead of, as with many, attenuating each life to an uninteresting meagreness, through long years of wrinkles, neglect, and decay.

In this book I learned about

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses – Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2003

I rarely buy new books these days, but I got myself a copy, as I had done for Braiding Sweetgrass (2013). When we read Braiding Sweetgrass in the Nature & Environment book group, Robin Wall Kimmerer immediately became one of my favorite authors ever, so choosing her first book as a selection was easy. We have read a lot of single-organism books (ants, beavers, coyotes, octopuses, rattlesnakes, ravens, trees…) but this was one of the best, and features in embryo many of the themes woven through Braiding Sweetgrass. The chapters can also be treated like free-standing essays – “The Owner” stood out in particular: a truly compelling essay, more of a short story, with a twist ending – a horror story, really, both beautiful and heart-rending.

Short quotes

  • “Mosses have a covenant with change; their destiny is linked to the vagaries of rain. They shrink and shrivel while carefully laying the groundwork of their own renewal. They give me faith.”
  • “Mosses engineer the movement of water simply by harnessing the attraction of water for surfaces. Their forms take advantage of the adhesive and cohesive forces of water, to move the water at will over their surfaces, without expending any energy of their own.”
  • “‘If you’re going to have livestock, you’re going to have deadstock.'”
  • “I think we need a new aesthetic that honors a mossy roof as a status symbol of how responsibly the homeowner behaves in maintaining the ecosystem. The greener the better. Neighbors would look askance at the owner of a roof scraped bare of friendly moss.” I love the idea… but mosses surely do damage roofs simply by keeping water in touch with the roof for longer?
  • “In the alveoli, your breath is but a single cell away from your blood. The cells are glistening and wet, so that the oxygen may dissolve and pass over. Through this thin watery film, deep in the lungs, our bodies become continuous with the atmosphere. For better and for worse.” Like mosses, which is why they are good indicator species of air quality.
  • “The average person knows the name of less than a dozen plants, and this includes such categories as ‘Christmas Tree.’ Losing their names is a step in losing respect. Knowing their names is the first step in regaining our connection.”
  • “Every way of knowing has its own strengths and weaknesses.”
  • “There is more living carbon in Sphagnum moss than in any other single genus on the planet.”
  • “This global cloud of spores powders every surface with the possibility of mosses.”
  • “It was not money that the rocks required, it was time. And the ‘time is money’ equation doesn’t work in reverse.”
  • “Wildness cannot be collected and still remain wild. Its nature is lost the moment it is separated from its origins. By the very act of owning, the thing becomes an object, no longer itself.”
  • “I think you cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and reducing the possessed.”
  • “trees alone don’t make a forest”
  • After discussing slug feces: “biologists may make unsuitable dinner conversation, but we are seldom bored”
  • her daughters “ate up the summer in heaping spoonfuls like homemade peach ice cream”

Long quotes

Day by day, [students’] vocabulary stretches and they proudly refer to leafy green shoots as “gametophytes” and the little brown thingamajigs on top of the moss are dutifully referred to as “sporophytes.” The upright, tufted mosses become “acrocarps,” the horizontal fronds are “pleurocarps.” Having words for these forms makes the differences between them so much more obvious. With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.

Initial research on Tetraphis shed no light on why some patches produced spores and others gemmae:

There seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to Tetraphis‘ reproductive choice. But if there’s anything that I’ve learned from the woods, it’s that there is no pattern without a meaning. To find it, I needed to try and see like a moss and not like a human.

In traditional indigenous communities, learning takes a form very different from that in the American public education system. Children learn by watching, by listening, and by experience. They are expected
to learn from all members of the community, human and non. To ask a direct question is often considered rude. Knowledge cannot be taken, it must instead be given. Knowledge is bestowed by a teacher only when the student is ready to receive it. Much learning takes place by patient observation, discerning pattern and its meaning by experience. It is understood that there are many versions of truth, and that each reality may be true for each teller. It’s important to understand the perspective of each source of knowledge. The scientific method I was taught in school is like asking a direct question, disrespectfully demanding knowledge rather than waiting for it to be revealed. From Tetraphis, I began to understand how to learn differently, to let the mosses tell their story, rather than wring it from them.

Mosses don’t speak our language, they don’t experience the world the way we do. So in order to learn from them I chose to adopt a different pace, an experiment that would take years, not months. To me, a good experiment is like a good conversation. Each listener creates an opening for the other’s story to be told. So, to learn about how Tetraphis makes reproductive choices, I tried to listen to its story. I had understood Tetraphis colonies from the human perspective, as clumps in various stages of reproduction. And I had learned little by doing so. Rather than looking at the clump as an entity, I had to recognize that the clump was simply an arbitrary unit that was convenient for me, but had little meaning for the moss. Mosses experience the world as individual stems and to understand their lives I needed to make my observations at the same scale.

Driving the Adirondack roads, past glittering lakes and deep woods, you’ll scarcely ever see roadside litter. People love this wild place and the care for its well-being is obvious. But where Route 3 cuts through the mined land, plastic bags are caught in the alders and beer cans float in the ditches full of rusty water. Disregard is also a positive feedback loop; garbage attracts garbage.

The city mosses have much in common with their urban human counterparts; they are diverse, adaptable, stress-tolerant, resistant to pollution, and thrive on crowded conditions. They are also well traveled.

A city offers mosses a multitude of habitats which may otherwise be quite uncommon in nature. Some moss species are far more abundant in the human-made environment than they are in the wild. Grimmia
doesn’t discriminate between a granite crag in the White Mountains and a granite obelisk on Boston Common. Limestone cliffs are not abundant in nature, but there’s one on every Chicago street corner and
mosses perch contentedly on its pillars and cornices. Statues provide all kinds of water-holding niches where mosses abound. Next time you walk through the park, look in the folds of the flowing coat of whatever general sits mounted on a pedestal, or in the wavy marble locks of Justice’s hair outside the courthouse. Mosses bathe at the edges of our fountains and trace the letters on our gravestones.

…

We tend to devalue the flora of cities as a depauperate collection of stragglers, arising de novo with the relatively recent development of cities. In fact, the urban cliff hypothesis suggests that the association between humans and these species may be ancient, dating from our pre-Neanderthal days when we both took refuge in cave and cliff dwellings.

I take great pleasure in gathering plants, filling my basket with roots and leaves. Usually I go with a specific plant in mind, when it’s time for elderberries or the bergamot is heavy with oils. But it’s the wandering itself that has such appeal, the unexpected discoveries while looking for something else. I get the same feeling in the library. It’s so very much like picking berries—the peaceful field of books, the concentrated attention of the search, and the knowledge that hidden somewhere in the thicket is something worth finding.

Its tremendous water-holding capacity allows Sphagnum to modify the ecosystem for its own purpose. The presence of Sphagnum causes the soil to become saturated, filling the spaces between soil particles that might otherwise hold air. Roots need to breathe, too, and the waterlogged peat creates an anaerobic rooting environment which most plants can’t tolerate. This impedes the growth of trees, leaving the bog sunny and open.

[The hairpiece’s] intricate design of bees and flowers was carved from luminous ivory. I was immediately struck by how out of place it seemed on its velvet platform, more like a stolen treasure than a work
of art. How much more beautiful it would have been in the black oiled hair of the artist’s wife. And more authentic. In a display case, a thing becomes only a facsimile of itself, like the drum hung on the gallery
wall. A drum becomes authentic when human hand meets wood and hide. Only then do they fulfill its intention.

At the center of the garden stood a sculptured rock taller than either of us and beautifully covered with mosses. Each carefully chosen clump accented the irregularities of the boulder. An eroded pocket in the rock was filled with a perfect circlet of Bryum. The artistry rivaled any piece we had seen in the gallery and yet it struck the wrong note; the collection was only an illusion of nature. Plagiothecium can’t grow in crevices like that, and Racomitrium wouldn’t share a habitat with Anomodon, despite the beauty
of their colors side by side. I wondered how this beautiful but synthetic creation passed the owner’s standard of authenticity. The mosses had been reduced from living things to mere art materials, ill used. “How did you get these to grow like this?” I asked. “It’s very—unusual,” I hedged. Matt smiled like a kid who had outsmarted his teacher and answered, “Superglue.”

Mosses have an intense bond to their places that few contemporary humans can understand. They
must be born in a place to flourish there. Their lives are supported by the influences of previous generations of lichens and mosses, who made the rock into home. In that initial settling of spores they make their choice and stick to it. Relocation is not for them.

Here on the shadowy edge of where green life seems barely possible, Schistostega has all it needs. Rain on the outside, fire on the inside. I feel a kinship with this being whose cold light is so different from my own. It asks very little from the world and yet glitters in response. I have been blessed by the companionship of good teachers and I count Schistostega among them.

In this book I learned

  • Boundary layer where moss lives: more heat, water, carbon dioxide (10x!), less turbulence
  • Gemmae cups on moss – little eggs that are clonal propagules! They don’t go far – they “carry a combination of genes that has already proven successful on this stump,” whereas spores are “a powder of potential sent off to seek its fortune in the unknown realm beyond the stump.”
  • Psychrometer – wet-and-dry bulb thermometer
  • “The predominant cause of tree mortality in the northern deciduous forest is windthrow.”
  • Gap dynamics: different species can colonize different types of disturbance gaps. “This decaying log is a stage, and the scenes take place in the gaps, where the colonists act out their drama.”
  • Silvery Bryum is everywhere! “I have never traveled without encountering Bryum on my journey. It was on the tarmac in New York City and on the tiled roof outside my window in Quito the next morning.” Unlike larger organisms, mosses are truly omnipresent because their spores can travel the entire world easily.
  • The artist Jackie Brookner, who alas has died since this book came out. I want to visit the boulder Prima Lingua, which is at East 9th & Ave. C in Manhattan.
  • Uses of moss for diapers and sanitary napkins – knowledge male scientists didn’t get