Esther Waters – George Moore, 1894

Read for Irish Writers – a joint hybrid meeting with a similar group in Castlebar, County Mayo, which was delightful. Very good but alas I’m blogging this three years later (the quotes were marked in an old Nook and I thought they were lost!) so I don’t remember much, except that it was very dark and realistic. Also the novel has many Plymouth Brethren (the sect into which my dad was born), so that was of interest to me.

  • “[Christ] had not forgiven, because she could not forgive herself”
  • “‘It is always a woman’s fault, ma’am'” – but Waters shows that not to be true
  • “Esther looked at the poor wizened features [of the infant], twitched with pain, and the far-off cry of doom, a tiny tinkle from the verge, shivered in the ear with a strange pathos.”
  • “religion is easy enough at times, but there is other times when it don’t seem to fit in with one’s duty”

So the flood of gold continued to roll into the little town, decrepit and colourless by its high shingle beach and long reaches of muddy river. The dear gold jingled merrily in the pockets, quickening the steps, lightening the heart, curling lips with smiles, opening lips with laughter. The dear gold came falling softly, sweetly as rain, soothing the hard lives of working folk. Lives pressed with toil lifted up and began to dream again. The dear gold was like an opiate; it wiped away memories of hardship and sorrow, it showed life in a lighter and merrier guise, and the folk laughed at their fears for the morrow and wondered how they could have thought life so hard and relentless. The dear gold was pleasing as a bird on the branch, as a flower on the stem; the tune it sang was sweet, the colour it flaunted was bright.

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness – Sy Montgomery, 2015

Very enjoyable but far from perfect. One of the Nature and Environment book group folks said she’d made the mistake of listening to the audiobook and did a very funny impression of the author (who reads it herself) being dramatic about everything: “And THEN I picked up my GLASSES and they were AMAZING!” Also, we were shocked by the poor captive octopuses who live in a pickle barrel, which Montgomery touches on but doesn’t fully engage with.

The bottom right corner of each page makes a little flip-book of an octopus moving, which is cool.

I’ve always loved octopuses but learned a lot that was new to me:

  • they taste people’s skin with their suckers
  • the females have estrogen (and in fact, lots of hormones are cross-species, like oxytocin—I had no idea!)
  • Tennyson’s “The Kraken” is about an octopus (did I ever read it? and me such a Tennyson fan!)
  • octopuses can change the texture of their skin as well as its color
  • a hagfish can “fill seven buckets with slime” in minutes (which led me to learn much more about the amazing genus Myxini–that name! the only animal with a skull but no vertebral column; they can tie themselves into a knot for leverage or slime exudation! they can eat with their skin!!!)

An octopus presented with a difficult puzzle for the first time often undergoes several rapid changes in color, like a person who frowns, bites his lip, and furrows his brow when trying to solve a problem. A nervous octopus takes special care to disguise its head and especially its eyes, and can create a variety of spots, bars, and squiggles to confuse a predator. … Another disguise is known as the eyebar display, in which an octopus makes a thick, dark line extend at the outer edge of the eye from either end of each slit pupil, masking the roundness that is typical of an eye.

I strongly identified with this quote: “A bite from a fish or an octopus is proof we are willing, even eager, to literally give ourselves (even tiny, actual pieces) to the animals here [at the aquarium], in order to touch the wild” because it reminded me of feeding stingrays on a trip to the Florida Keys. It was an amazing experience—the rays swarmed me as I sat in the shallows with their food, like muscle pancakes shouldering each other aside—but the trainer warned me to keep my hand flat with the food because “they’ll accidentally bite you, and it feels like getting your finger slammed in a door” (because the ray’s teeth are like flat cement plates smashing together). I did get bitten and that’s exactly what it felt like. I wouldn’t have tried to make it happen on purpose, but I’m glad it did because it was so alien and cool.

  • “an area pocked with nooks and crannies into which an octopus could melt as easily as butter into an English muffin”
  • diving is “like being an invisible time-traveler to another planet”
  • “The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible.”

Above the surface, we move and think like wiggly children, or like teens who twitch away at their computer-phones, multitasking but never focusing. But the ocean forces you to move more slowly, more purposefully, and yet more pliantly. By entering it, you are bathed in a grace and power you don’t experience in air. To dive beneath the surface feels like entering the Earth’s vast, dreaming subconscious. Submitting to its depth, its currents, its pressure, is both humbling and freeing.

Narada the ascetic and Vishnu:

When Vishnu became thirsty, he asked Narada to fetch him some water. Narada went to a house and there met a woman so beautiful he forgot what he came for. He married the woman; together they farmed the land, raised cattle, and had three children. Then came a violent monsoon. Floods threatened to carry away the village’s houses, the cattle, the people. Narada took his wife by the hand, his children by the other. But the waters were too strong and they were lost. Narada was swept beneath the waves. Washed up on shore, he opened his eyes… to see there, still waiting for his drink of water, Vishnu—the got who is often picture as sleeping on a fathomless ocean as his dreams bubble forth to create the universe.

Beatlebone – Kevin Barry, 2015

Irish Writer’s Group selection. I mostly hated it! Using a real person, especially John Lennon, just feels lazy, even though it’s based on an actual incident in Lennon’s life. Constant references to external things (“Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush) w/o specifically identifying them, which usually bugs me. Example re Gerard Manley Hopkins: “I caught this morning morning’s fucking minion—the one where he sees a bird and goes all swoony coz he loves fucking nature.” Weird interspersion of first-person as-himself metafiction as he researches the book in New York and Ireland – I would have liked just that, as an essay, much better. In that section he says amusingly: “I would return to report my findings in a mature, honed prose, as clear as glass: this from a man who had never knowingly underfed an adjective.”

I looked up:

  • bevvied: drunk
  • boreen: narrow country lane
  • Liverpool time slip reports (note I do not believe in anything paranormal but find it interesting)

Quotes:

  • “Zola wrote that the road from Lourdes is littered with crutches but not a single wooden leg”
  • Depressed/unresponsive father (of the driver) “would look back at me, with the eyes like stones inside his head”
  • “He read once that the hare augurs darkly in the Irish mythology. From what he can remember there is fuck all that augurs brightly in the Irish mythology.”

Cornelius (the driver) asks what’s on his mind:

Love, blood, fate, death, sex, the void, mother, father, cunt and prick—these are the things on his mind.

Also—

How many more times are they going to ask me to come on The fucking Muppet Show?

I do like that italicized tmesis there! And the references to Radio Luxembourg (this is set in 1978 so right around when I was listening in my bedroom in Paris).

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Etc. – Daniel Defoe, 1722

Forbes Great Books selection. What a fascinating book – we had a great discussion, and it’s one of the most memorable titles we’ve read.

Defoe starts by saying that “there is not a wicked action in any part of it, but is first and last rendered unhappy and unfortunate” but what comes through is the focus on money, on survival, whatever it takes. “I am giving an account of what was, not of what ought or ought not to be.” “The vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.” Moll’s self-interest makes her emotional responses of guilt wear off quickly. Useful warnings to the reader against being too trusting. It also emphasizes how fabric was so valuable – a bundle of lace was worth 300 pounds in money of the time!

  • “all I understood by being a gentlewoman was to be able to work for myself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible bugbear going to service, whereas they meant to live great, rich and high, and I know not what”
  • Old governess comforting her: “to sink under the Weight, was but to encrease the Weight”
  • Transportation: “we should live as new People in a new World”

it was requisite to a whore to be handsome, well-shaped, have a good mien and a graceful behaviour; but that for a wife, no deformity would shock the fancy, no ill qualities the judgment; the money was the thing; the portion was neither crooked nor monstrous, but the money was always agreeable, whatever the wife was.

I’d love to find out more about this: “A Garbling Office has been established in London in the fifteenth century to inspect several Sorts of Goods, more particularly subject to Frauds, Mixtures and false Package, in order to cleanse them, and make them Merchantable)” (Review, iv 635, 17 Feb 1708)

The Genius of Birds – Jennifer Ackerman, 2016

Wonderful read for the Nature and Environment book group. The language is sometimes a little precious: hippocampus described as “this whiff of tissue”; “a glister of goldfinches”; “a twitch of birders.”

I looked up:

  • gökotta – Swedish tradition of getting up early to hear the first birdsong
  • kagu (Rhynochetos jubatus) – rare flightless New Caledonian bird
  • pigeons are better at the Monty Hall problem than humans
  • Cuba uses pigeons to transmit election results from remote mountainous areas
  • “in each of a bird’s cone cells is a drop of colored oil that enhances its ability to detect differences between similar colors”
  • I was very surprised to hear that house sparrow populations are declining around the world. You wouldn’t know it around here – they thrive!

Short quotes / facts:

  • “sexy” syllable: “when a male bird uses his syrinx to sing with two different voices at once”
  • A pet monk parakeet “obligingly sat on my shoulder and periodically leaned in to my ear to say, ‘Whisper, whisper, whisper.'”
  • “chickadees use their calls like language, complete with syntax that can generate an open-ended number of unique call types” (for example, the number of “dees” indicates the size of an approaching predator – more for smaller, hence more dangerous, predators)
  • “A frigate bird with a seven-foot wingspan has a skeleton that weighs less than its feathers”
  • mockingbird imitating a canary but not able to deliver the notes as rapidly “clusters the notes and pauses to breathe while still maintaining identical song length”; they regularly imitate as many as 200 different songs
  • Quote from the New Yorker so most likely too good to be true: “after weeks of silence, the first words uttered by a Westchester parakeet were, ‘Talk, damn you, talk!’”
  • Bowerbirds take seven years to mature, which correlates with their intelligence (learned a lot about them in Evolution of Beauty); females evaluate males in a way “very similar to a search for job candidates” (brief visit, then longer for the finalists)
  • white-crowned sparrow flock: “each a single feathered ounce of fortitude”
  • “Twilight is a rich source of information for navigating animals of all types. It’s the only period in the day when birds and other animals can combine light-polarization patterns, stars, and magnetic cues.”
  • Complexity of mapping/relating odors could have driven the ability to remember relationships between unrelated elements: “for example, the scent of a certain mineral or tree and the direction toward home”
  • In some cities, sparrows use cigarette butts in their nests for their ability to repel parasites
  • Quoting Richard F. Johnston: “Everything that is is adaptive.”
  • “A new study … suggests that, genetically speaking, the turkey is closer to its dinosaur ancestors than any other bird is; its chromosomes have undergone fewer changes than other birds since the days of feathered dinosaurs.”
  • Interesting behaviors: crows and others dunking food, skuas stealing milk from lactating seals

Longer quotes

Newborn chicks spatially “map” numbers from left to right, as most humans do (left means less; right means more). This suggests that birds share with us a left-to-right orientation system—a cognitive strategy that underlies our human capacity for higher mathematics. Baby birds can also understand proportion and can learn to choose a target from an array of objects on the basis of its ordinal position (third, eighth, ninth). They can do simple arithmetic, as well, such as addition and subtraction.

Like the black-billed cuckoo a friend saw perched just above a nest of tent caterpillars: The cuckoo waited as the caterpillars climbed out of the nest to scale the tree, then plucked them off one at a time, like sushi from a conveyor belt.

Closely-related birds, the Bajan bullfinch and the black-faced grassquit:

“These two birds are virtual genetic twins with the same ancestor, having diverged probably only a couple of million years ago,” Lefebvre explains. “Both live in the same environment. Both are territorial and share the same social system.” The only difference is that the bullfinch is clever, fearless, and opportunistic; and the grassquit, skittish, deeply conservative, and afraid of nearly everything. … [A grad student] has measured the speed at which the two species will feed from an open cup of seed. The bullfinches find the novel food source in about five seconds, she says. It takes the grassquits five days. “A yogurt top filled with seeds is just too odd for them.”

Quote by naturalist Edmond Selous about flocking birds:

“They circle; now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net, now darkening, now flashing out a million rays of light . . . a madness in the sky,” he wrote. “They must think collectively, all at the same time, or at least in streaks or patches—a square yard or so of an idea, a flash out of so many brains.”

An award for nest-building brilliance should go to the long-tailed tit, a common relative of the chickadee that lives in Europe and Asia. Its nest is a flexible bag composed of small-leaved mosses that form hooks, which are woven together with the silk loops of fluffy spider egg cocoons to create a kind of “Velcro.” The little birds work to line the inside of the bag with thousands of small insulating feathers and cover the outside with thousands of small lichen flakes for camouflage, creating a structure made of roughly six thousand separate pieces.

Is there something special in the cognitive toolkits of house sparrows and their like—pigeons, turtledoves, and other so-called synanthropes drawn to settle near humans—a set of mental skills that allows them to thrive in a place no matter how altered or degraded it may be?

Most vertebrates are either fearful of strange objects or indifferent to them. But newfangledness of most kinds doesn’t seem to faze a house sparrow. When Lynn Martin of the University of South Florida, Tampa, tested the sparrow’s tolerance for novel objects such as a rubber ball and a toy plastic lizard by placing them near seed-filled feeding cups, he discovered a surprise. The house sparrows were not only unperturbed by the strange objects, they actually seemed drawn to them—happier to approach the seed-filled dishes when ball or lizard was present. Martin noted that this was the first record of a novel object actually being attractive to a vertebrate (apart from man).

If you’re going to invade a new place, a love of novelty helps.

So does a fondness for hanging out in groups.

But later Daniel Sol explains in the case of Carib grackles:

“Bolder individuals tend to explore more quickly but more superficially, … the slower explorers gain better information and use this to act with more flexibility.”

The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck, 1939

To my surprise, most of us in the Great Books group had never read this before. I particularly loved the amazing descriptions and the poetic interstitial chapters.

In this book I learned

  • anlage – “the foundation of a subsequent development”
  • Rochester lamp

Short quotes

  • “all the various purposes of a cap—carrying sack, towel, handkerchief.”
  • Half-car/half-truck “this was the new hearth, the living center of the family”
  • “You’re jus’ as free as you got jack to pay for it”
  • Poor boys staring at a candy case: “not with craving or with hope or even with desire, but just with a kind of wonder that such things could be”
  • “a furrow four miles long that ain’t stoppin’ or goin’ aroun’ Jesus Christ Hisself”
  • “I never seen nobody that’s busy as a prairie dog collectin’ stuff that wasn’t disappointed”
  • “A red is any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we’re payin’ twenty-five!”
  • “the on’y thing you got to look at is that ever’ time they’s a little step fo’ward, she may slip back a little, but she never slips clear back”
  • “Ruthie looked fiercely about, but she went to a corner of the car and put her back in the corner. Her shame and fierceness were blended.”
  • “Every kid got a turtle some time or other. Nobody can’t keep a turtle though. They work at it and work at it, and at last one day they get out and away they go- off somewheres.”
  • Tenant says: “We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.”
  • “The nickel, which has caused all this mechanism to work, has caused Crosby to sing and an orchestra to play- this nickel drops from between the contact points into the box where the profits go. The nickel, unlike most money, has actually done a job of work, has been physically responsible for a reaction.”
  • “‘We pay sales tax an’ gas tax an’ tobacco tax,’ this little guy says. An’ he say, ‘Farmers get four cents a cotton poun’ from the gov’ment- ain’t that relief?’ An’ he says, ‘Railroads an’ shippin’ companies draw subsidies- ain’t that relief?'”

Jim Casy quotes:

“I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road. I figgered, ‘Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit- the human sperit- the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent- I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”

“I ain’t sayin’ I’m like Jesus,” the preacher went on. “But I got tired like Him, an’ I got mixed up like Him, an’ I went into the wilderness like Him, without no campin’ stuff. Nighttime I’d lay on my back an’ look up at the stars; morning I’d set an’ watch the sun come up; midday I’d look out from a hill at the rollin’ dry country; evenin’ I’d foller the sun down. Sometimes I’d pray like I always done. On’y I couldn’ figure what I was prayin’ to or for. There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate no more. We was one thing. An’ that one thing was holy.”

“This here ol’ man jus’ lived a life an’ jus’ died out of it. I don’t know whether he was good or bad, but that don’t matter much. He was alive, an’ that’s what matters. An’ now he’s dead, an’ that don’t matter. Heard a fella tell a poem one time, an’ he says, ‘All that lives is holy.’ Got to thinkin’, an’ purty soon it means more than the words says. An’ I wouldn’ pray for a ol’ fella that’s dead. He’s awright. He got a job to do, but it’s all laid out for ‘im an’ there’s on’y one way to do it. But us, we got a job to do, an’ they’s a thousan’ ways, an’ we don’ know which one to take. An’ if I was to pray, it’d be for the folks that don’ know which way to turn. Grampa here, he got the easy straight. An’ now cover ‘im up and let ‘im get to his work.”

Tom Joad quoting Casy:

Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an’ he foun’ he didn’ have no soul that was his’n. Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain’t no good, ’cause his little piece of a soul wasn’t no good ‘less it was with the rest, an’ was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn’t even think I was listenin’. But I know now a fella ain’t no good alone.”

“Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one — an’ then —”
“Then what, Tom?”
“Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ — I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build — why, I’ll be there.

Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.

Selling horses:

You’re buying a little girl plaiting the forelocks, taking off her hair ribbon to make bows, standing back, head cocked, rubbing the soft noses with her cheek. You’re buying years of work, toil in the sun; you’re buying a sorrow that can’t talk. But watch it, mister. There’s a premium goes with this pile of junk and the bay horses- so beautiful- a packet of bitterness to grow in your house and to flower, some day. We could have saved you, but you cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there’ll be none of us to save you.

“Ain’t you thinkin’ what’s it gonna be like when we get there? Ain’t you scared it won’t be nice like we thought?”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, I ain’t. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s too much- livin’ too many lives. Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ’em, it’s too much. You got to live ahead ’cause you’re so young, but- it’s jus’ the road goin’ by for me.

Little pot-bellied men in light suits and panama hats; clean, pink men with puzzled, worried eyes, with restless eyes. Worried because formulas do not work out; hungry for security and yet sensing its disappearance from the earth. In their lapels the insignia of lodges and service clubs, places where they can go and, by a weight of numbers of little worried men, reassure themselves that business is noble and not the curious ritualized thievery they know it is; that business men are intelligent in spite of the records of their stupidity; that they are kind and charitable in spite of the principles of sound business; that their lives are rich instead of the thin tiresome routines they know; and that a time is coming when they will not be afraid any more.

They arose in the dark no more to hear the sleepy birds’ first chittering, and the morning wind around the house while they waited for the first light to go out to the dear acres. These things were lost, and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not also a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.

The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water – Charles Fishman, 2011

Nature and Enviro selection. Fishman reached out to Forbes and we had a very enjoyable Skype session with him at the end of the meeting. We asked about what’s changed since 2011 and he shared a few more great win-win stories. He plugged his new book, One Giant Leap, with a compelling tie-in to climate change.

There are a lot of numbers – audio book listeners complained – and it was a bit repetitive, but overall I really liked it and it made an interesting comparison to When the Rivers Run Dry, which we read in 2018.

In this book I learned

  • “Fit-for-purpose water” – just clean enough (e.g., use gray water on golf courses)
  • It’s a location problem – we don’t have less water, it’s in different places, and saving it here doesn’t necessarily help over there
  • Lots of success stories and win-win: “Americans in 2005 used less water per person than they did in 1955” (of how many other resources is that true?) “Business is actually ahead of politics, and ahead of popular awareness” – so much money to be saved
  • “Caustics” – the wonderful word for “the shapes of shifting light water makes on the bottom of a swimming pool”
  • Space water! Space is full of it! “There is enough water being formed [in the Orion Molecular Cloud] sufficient to fill all of the Earth’s oceans every twenty-four minutes.”
  • The fourth state of water! Incorporated in hydrous minerals like serpentine – of 200 lbs of serpentine, 22 is H2O
  • Ultra-pure water, used to clean semiconductors, is “not just regarded as an industrial solvent, but … considered akin to a poison. … UPW is ‘hungry’ – it will leach molecules right out of your body tissues.”
  • OMG the crazy situation of Atlanta’s water supply from Lake Lanier. At publication time (2011) it wasn’t resolved, so I flagged it to look up. Summer 2019: still not resolved!!! Revisiting this to finish and publish in January 2025: the case was dismissed in August 2021. Only 11 years…
  • Water service levels have gone backwards in India – most major cities had 24/7 water in 1947, but now “That level of service, and more important, the expectation of that level of service, has slipped away”
  • Lack of water means girls are more likely to stop going to school once menstruation begins!
  • Insane amount of pollution in the Yamuna river: “One eyedropper of Yamuna River water is enough to make six bathtubs of water unsafe to sit in. Says the CSE report, ‘The river is unfit for any human purpose.'”
  • I want to see a WET fountain, like the one at the Bellagio!

Things I’d already thought about that he expressed really well:

  • the ridiculousness of paying for bottled water. “Ten gallons of tap water, at home, costs on average 3 pennies. … We happily pay three thousand times that price at the convenience store … But when the water bill goes from $30 to $34 a month, customers react as if they’ll have to choose between their prescription drugs and their water service.” “Bottled water undermines our financial and civic commitment to a reliable public water system.” “It is easier for the typical American living in Beverly Hills or Miami or Manhattan to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fijian water than it is for most people in Fiji.” Many of us in the group didn’t realize it was more than just marketing, that the water actually comes from freakin’ Fiji. WTF!

Given that water is both the most familiar substance in our lives, and the most important substance in our lives, the really astonishing thing is that most of us don’t think of ourselves as having a relationship to water. It’s perfectly natural to talk about our relationship to our car or our relationship to food, our relationship to alcohol, or money, or God.

But water has achieved an invisibility in our lives that is only more remarkable given how central it is. Water used to be part of the rhythm and motivation of daily life, and there are plenty of places, including farms and whole swaths of the developing world, where it still is.

But in the United States and the developed world, we’ve spent the last hundred years in a kind of aquatic paradise: our water has been abundant, safe, and cheap.

Water is tirelessly resilient. Water participates in a mind-bending array of physical, chemical, biochemical, geological, and human-created processes every minute of the day—water is essential to creating soup and computer servers, it drives both hurricanes and erosion, it is the essential element in human beings maintaining our body temperature at 98.6 degrees—and yet water emerges from every one of those processes intact, undamaged, unchanged, ready to make a fresh cloud or a fresh drop of sweat, an iceberg or a jellyfish, as the occasion requires.

Water’s indestructibility, its reusability, will be vital as we confront an era where water scarcity becomes more common. Water itself isn’t becoming more scare, it’s simply disappearing from places where people have become accustomed to finding it—where they have built communities assuming a certain availability of water—and reappearing somewhere else.

We want a comforting mental and physical distance between the last time our water was dirty and the moment we use it to stir up a pitcher of ice tea. It’s easy for water professionals who live every day of their careers with the reality that while there is plenty of pure water, there is no fresh water—our water was Tyrannosaurus rex pee and dirty snow at some point, because there is no other water. For ordinary people, though, our consciousness of water doesn’t even include a willful forgetting about its source, as it does with the hamburger. We really don’t know where our water comes from, just that it needs to be “fresh” when we fill the ice cube tray.s

In any meaningful measure of reality, there was nothing in the purified water but water. In scientific terms, there were some molecules of other stuff.

But the difference between “nothing” and “virtually nothing” is the difference between security and anxiety. In a heated political campaign, it’s the difference between trust and suspicion.

One of the legacies of scaling an economy to abundant water is that when the abundance disappears, it turns out we not only don’t have the water, we don’t have a water system that can adapt to scarcity.

One of the interesting things about water is that it is one of those rare areas where the gold standard of service and the basic level of service are the same thing: Water should be provided twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in pipes that keep it clean and safe.

Water poverty doesn’t just mean your hands are dirty, or you can’t wash your clothes, or you are often thirsty. Water poverty may mean you never learn to read, it means you get sick more often than you should, it means you and your children are hungry. Water poverty traps you in a primitive day-to-day struggle. Water poverty is, quite literally, de-civilizing.

Water issues, in particular, are often made worse when everyone operates independently—all those pumps sucking water from mains in Delhi and Hyderabad and Bangalore make everyone’s water dirty. The collective solution is usually cheaper, more efficient, less wasteful, and better for the fate of the water itself. Money and technology are often not the best solutions to water issues—rainwater harvesting is simple, low-tech, and it’s a lot easier and less expensive than finding new sources of water.

When you think about the qualities of water that are so appealing—the energy, the playfulness, the adaptability, the variety of mood, the artistry, and also the sheer everyday usefulness—what’s striking is how much the personality of water mirrors our own personality as people.

The Liar’s Club: A Memoir – Mary Karr, 1995

Second Monday book group selection. I led the discussion and adapted some questions from the online reader’s guide. One of my big points was that this was the vanguard of the whole miserabilia memoir genre.

  • Sheriff goes up to neighbor women “setting in motion a series of robe-tightening and sweater-buttonings.”
  • “Like most people, he lied best by omission…”
  • Oil-storage tanks “like the abandoned eggs of some terrible prehistoric insect.”
  • “It turned out to be impossible for me to ‘run away’ in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement of all was taken as progress in my family.”
  • “The four of use tended to eat our family meals sitting cross-legged on the edges of that bed. We faced opposite walls, our back together, looking like some four-headed totem, our plates balanced on the spot of quilt between our legs.”
  • a penis: “it felt like a wet bone encased in something”
  • “Maybe drinking caused Mother to go crazy, or maybe the craziness was just sort of standing in line to happen and the drinking actually staved it off a while.”
  • ““Don’t make no difference, bigger,” Daddy says. “Bigger’s just one thing. They’s a whole lot of other things than bigger, Pokey. Don’t you forget it.”
  • Kids trying to navigate their own fate “when we wanted a straight-thinking adult but couldn’t find one”
  • “bench-pressing boxes up” into an attic

I kept cutting my eyes between my window, where the new glass skyscrapers going up just slid past, and the small rearview mirror, where Mother’s eyes were still eerily blank. Nothing showed in those eyes but the road’s white dashed lines, which seemed to be flying off the road and into the darkest part of her pupils, where they disappeared like knives.

It is a sad commentary on the women of my family that we can recite whole wardrobe assemblages from the most minor event in detail, but often forget almost everything else. In fact, the more important the occasion—funeral, wedding, divorce court—the more detailed the wardrobe memory and the dimmer the hope of dredging up anything that happened.)

The school had taken up something called self-paced learning, which meant kids worked independently through a progression of reading folders and math folders. Student monitors oversaw the classes. The teachers stayed in the lounge all day smoking and eating from big Tupperware containers they took turns bringing in—brownies and cupcakes and cookies by the boatload.

I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow “transcend” the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger.

O Pioneers! – Willa Cather, 1913

Great Books selection – we’ve loved every Cather we’ve tried!

I learned about buffalo-pea (Mrs. Bergson tries to make jam of them)

Short quotes

  • “Marie was incapable of being lukewarm about anything that pleased her. She simply did not know how to give a half-hearted response. When she was delighted, she was as likely as not to stand on her tip-toes and clap her hands. If people laughed at her, she laughed with them.”
  • “There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.”
  • Poor Swedish girls marrying men “they are afraid of” because they “think a cross man makes a good manager”
  • Alexandra says about Carl understanding her: “I expect that is the only way one person every really can help another.”
  • Smart young man “raising the new kind of clover. He says the right thing is usually just what everybody don’t do.”
  • “The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it’s exactly the sort you are not.” No-fault divorce would change everything!

Long quotes (so many!)

The little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been, had fallen behind the swell of the prairie, and the stern frozen country received them into its bosom. The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow. But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy’s mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.

The winter twilight was fading. The sick man heard his wife strike a match in the kitchen, and the light of a lamp glimmered through the cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shining far away. He turned painfully in his bed and looked at his white hands, with all the work gone out of them. He was ready to give up, he felt. He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find him. He was tired of making mistakes. He was content to leave the tangle to other hands; he thought of his Alexandra’s strong ones.

At one end of the pond was an earthen dam, planted with green willow bushes, and above it a door and a single window were set into the hillside. You would not have seen them at all but for the reflection of the sunlight upon the four panes of window-glass. And that was all you saw. Not a shed, not a corral, not a well, not even a path broken in the curly grass. But for the piece of rusty stovepipe sticking up through the sod, you could have walked over the roof of Ivar’s dwelling without dreaming that you were near a human habitation. Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank, without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done.

Ivar found contentment in the solitude he had sought out for himself. He disliked the litter of human dwellings: the broken food, the bits of broken china, the old wash-boilers and tea-kettles thrown into the sunflower patch. He preferred the cleanness and tidiness of the wild sod. He always said that the badgers had cleaner houses than people, and that when he took a housekeeper her name would be Mrs. Badger. He best expressed his preference for his wild homestead by saying that his Bible seemed truer to him there. If one stood in the doorway of his cave, and looked off at the rough land, the smiling sky, the curly grass white in the hot sunlight; if one listened to the rapturous song of the lark, the drumming of the quail, the burr of the locust against that vast silence, one understood what Ivar meant.

You know that my spells come from God, and that I would not harm any living creature. You believe that every one should worship God in the way revealed to him. But that is not the way of this country. The way here is for all to do alike. I am despised because I do not wear shoes, because I do not cut my hair, and because I have visions. At home, in the old country, there were many like me, who had been touched by God, or who had seen things in the graveyard at night and were different afterward. We thought nothing of it, and let them alone. But here, if a man is different in his feet or in his head, they put him in the asylum.

Contrast between brothers and Alexandra:

The Bergson boys, certainly, would have been happier with their uncle Otto, in the bakery shop in Chicago. Like most of their neighbors, they were meant to follow in paths already marked out for them, not to break trails in a new country. A steady job, a few holidays, nothing to think about, and they would have been very happy. It was no fault of theirs that they had been dragged into the wilderness when they were little boys. A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.

Oscar:

But he was as indolent of mind as he was unsparing of his body. His love of routine amounted to a vice. He worked like an insect, always doing the same thing over in the same way, regardless of whether it was best or no. He felt that there was a sovereign virtue in mere bodily toil, and he rather liked to do things in the hardest way. If a field had once been in corn, he couldn’t bear to put it into wheat. He liked to begin his corn-planting at the same time every year, whether the season were backward or forward. He seemed to feel that by his own irreproachable regularity he would clear himself of blame and reprove the weather. When the wheat crop failed, he threshed the straw at a dead loss to demonstrate how little grain there was, and thus prove his case against Providence.

The table was set for company in the dining-room, where highly varnished wood and colored glass and useless pieces of china were conspicuous enough to satisfy the standards of the new prosperity. Alexandra had put herself into the hands of the Hanover furniture dealer, and he had conscientiously done his best to make her dining-room look like his display window. She said frankly that she knew nothing about such things, and she was willing to be governed by the general conviction that the more useless and utterly unusable objects were, the greater their virtue as ornament. That seemed reasonable enough. Since she liked plain things herself, it was all the more necessary to have jars and punchbowls and candlesticks in the company rooms for people who did appreciate them. Her guests liked to see about them these reassuring emblems of prosperity.

Carl:

“Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him.

Remembering Alexandra:

He could remember exactly how she looked when she came over the close-cropped grass, her skirts pinned up, her head bare, a bright tin pail in either hand, and the milky light of the early morning all about her. Even as a boy he used to feel,  when he saw her coming with her free step, her upright head and calm shoulders, that she looked as if she had walked straight out of the morning itself. Since then, when he had happened to see the sun come up in the country or on the water, he had often remembered the young Swedish girl and her milking pails.

Alexandra and Emil’s wild duck:

In this little bay a single wild duck was swimming and diving and preening her feathers, disporting herself very happily in the flickering light and shade. They sat for a long time, watching the solitary bird take its pleasure. No living thing had ever seemed to Alexandra as beautiful as that wild duck. Emil must have felt about it as she did, for afterward, when they were at home, he used sometimes to say, “Sister, you know our duck down there—” Alexandra remembered that day as one of the happiest in her life. Years afterward she thought of the duck as still there, swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight, a kind of enchanted bird that did not know age or change.

As he rode past the graveyard he looked at the brown hole in the earth where Amedee was to lie, and felt no horror. That, too, was beautiful, that simple doorway into forgetfulness. The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death. It is the old and the poor and the maimed who shrink from that brown hole; its wooers are found among the young, the passionate, the gallant-hearted.

When Frank took up his gun and walked out of the house, he had not the faintest purpose of doing anything with it. He did not believe that he had any real grievance. But it gratified him to feel like a desperate man. He had got into the habit of seeing himself always in desperate straits. His unhappy temperament was like a cage; he could never get out of it; and he felt that other people, his wife in particular, must have put him there. It had never more than dimly occurred to Frank that he made his own unhappiness. Though he took up his gun with dark projects in his mind, he would have been paralyzed with fright had he known that there was the slightest probability of his ever carrying any of them out.

He knew that he was to blame. For three years he had been trying to break her spirit. She had a way of making the best of things that seemed to him a sentimental affectation. He wanted his wife to resent that he was wasting his best years among these stupid and unappreciative people; but she had seemed to find the people quite good enough. If he ever got rich he meant to buy her pretty clothes and take her to California in a Pullman car, and treat her like a lady; but in the mean time he wanted her to feel that life was as ugly and as unjust as he felt it. He had tried to make her life ugly. He had refused to share any of the little pleasures she was so plucky about making for herself. She could be gay about the least thing in the world; but she must be gay!

The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch, 1970

Irish Writers selection, but alas I missed the discussion. Once again didn’t have post-it flags with me for most of it, and it’s a long book—too long by half and soap-opera-ish, but I loved the beginning. What struck me the most was Charles Arrowby’s love of food and focus on his little meals and treats, which I 90% identify with (not 100% because I get synergistic pleasure from reading while eating):

I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.

It was early evident to me that my uncle was more loved and fortunate than my father. How does a child perceive such things, or rather how is it that they are so perceptible, so obvious, to a child, who perhaps, like a dog, reads signs which have become invisible amid the conventions of the grown-up world, and are thus overlooked in the adult campaign of deceit?

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

I also took up acting … because I wanted to have fun myself and to procure some for my father. I doubt if he possessed the concept, or ever managed to acquire it later under my eager guidance. In having fun myself I have throughout my life been fairly consistently successful.

This interesting Paris Review essay comments that Arrowby’s food is not as good as it sounds to him, indicative of his self-deception about his character, but also that Iris Murdoch herself loved and ate similar dishes.