Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming – Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, 2010

Nature and Environment selection. We had a good discussion about it—generally we thought that it was somewhat of a slog to read because the details were inherently dry, but that it explained a lot about the sources of the media and public opinion problems we have with scientific information.

I didn’t realize how early the dangers of tobacco were recognized: “German scientists had shown in the 1930s that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer, and the Nazi government had run major antismoking campaigns; Adolf Hitler forbade smoking in his presence. However, the German scientific work was tainted by its Nazi associations, and to some extent ignored, if not actually suppressed, after the war.” Or that the discovery of ozone depletion by CFCs was accidental—the original concern was that super-sonic flights would disrupt the troposphere.

Here’s an early ID of the “just asking questions” strategy: “you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions, even if you actually knew the answers and they didn’t help your case.” The authors highlight the problem with the Fairness Doctrine (1949) and journalistic balance: “Balance was interpreted, it seems, as giving equal weight to both sides, rather than giving accurate weight to both sides.” And the consistent pattern of “scientific claims” (or retractions/corrections) “being published in scientific journals, where only scientists would read them, but unscientific claims were being published in the mass media.”

I didn’t know how unbalanced the money was! “The American Cancer Society and American Lung Association in 1981 devoted just under $300,000 to research; that same year, the tobacco industry gave $6.3 million.”

The biggest shocker for me was how much distortion was driven by just a couple of men (Frederick Seitz, Fred Singer), and the personal reasons (grudges, slighted feelings, rabid anti-communism, and of course greed and ego) that primed them to lead the charge against public heath and safety. Zinger on Singer: “For a man who worried enormously about scientific uncertainties, he was remarkably untroubled by economic ones.” And “his skepticism also gained him a huge amount of attention—far more than most scientists ever get for their research, quietly published in academic journals. So if scientists should be discredited for getting money for their research, or for enjoying the limelight, the same argument would logically apply to Singer.”

I didn’t know that “since nuclear weapon cores decay over time and lose their explosive capacity, any agreement to stop building new ones was, in effect, an agreement to disarm.” Or that the tobacco industry investigated avoiding the second-hand smoke issue by making the smoke “simply less visible“!

Useful term I’ve learned before but forgotten: hormesis (low dose good, high dose bad), but in a weird context: critics claiming that maybe small amounts of second-hand smoke or radiation were good.

Well-researched non-fiction books typically collect interesting quotes from other sources that are often the highlights for me—even from books I’ve read myself. For example, I’m pretty sure I’ve read C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves—if not, I want to—but don’t remember this great analysis of conspiracy-theory argument: “the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.” Similarly, a funny anecdote about Lord Harris, the architect of Thatcherism who venerated Adam Smith: “he declined a coat of arms on the grounds that the invisible hand could not be blazoned.” And Isaiah Berlin saying “liberty for wolves means death to lambs.” (Given that he’s the hedgehog/fox person, I wonder how many other mammal analogies he made?)

Describing the global warming that’s already committed: “‘sentenced’ might be a better word.” Arguments against trying to fix climate change: “It was equivalent to arguing that medical researchers shouldn’t try to cure cancer, because that would be too expensive, and in any case people in the future might decide that dying from cancer is not so bad.”

I’m looking forward to reading Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet; the same philosophical contrast is described here as that between Cornucopians and neo-Malthusians.

Free market fundamentalism:

 The idea that free markets produce optimum allocation of resources depends on participants having perfect information. But one of several ironies of our story is that our protagonists did everything in their power to ensure that the American people did not have good (much less perfect) information on crucial issues. Our protagonists, while ostensibly defending free markets, distorted the marketplace of ideas in the service of political goals and commercial interests. The American belief in fairness and the importance of hearing “both sides” was used and abused by people who didn’t want to admit the truth about the impacts of industrial capitalism.

One leading scientist said about the 1983 report, Changing Climate, “We knew it was garbage, so we just ignored it.” Unfortunately, garbage doesn’t just go away. Someone has to deal with it, and that someone is all of us: journalists who report scientific findings, specialist professional bodies who represent the scientific fields, and all of us as citizens.

It especially does not make sense to dismiss the consensus of experts if the dissenter is superannuated, disgruntled, a habitual contrarian, or in the pay of a group with an obvious ideological agenda or vested political or economic interest. Or in some cases, all of the above.

Or an opinionated amateur!

Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age – Rosemary Mahoney, 1993

Irish Writers selection. I was hooked on the first page, Mahoney’s story of working for Lillian Hellman one summer: “I was as ornery at seventeen as Lillian Hellman was at seventy-three.” A very well-written book but ultimately somewhat infuriating to read (the topic, not the book itself).

In this book I learned about

[Francis MacNamara’s] speech was slow and drawling, and there was a great sense of confidentiality in everything he said, for he spoke with his head inclined toward his listener, and often, when shifting the direction of his ideas, he said softly and urgently, “But come here to me,” which was the Irish was of saying, ‘Listen carefully and keep this between us.” Francis sighed heavily when he spoke, as though he had been too long deprived of fresh air.

The conversational competition [in the pub] was fierce and reached far beyond that evening. It was a matter of intellectual hierarchy, who fit where, who was sharpest and most knowledgeable, and who, therefore, deserved the greatest share of attention.

It delighted me that a lone woman could stand at the side of the road and put out her thumb without trepidation. To me, hitching was a bygone freedom, and that I was able to do it here contributed to my feeling that Ireland lay just beyond the corrupting reach of the modern world.

There seemed to be no conventional concept of time here, no concept of having made a promise or a commitment, and they showed not the slightest embarrassment or remorse over their tardiness. Too, the Irish were always delighted to put things off to a later date, even the most pleasurable things—vacations, parties, picnics. Procrastination, indecision, and stalling were symptoms of a chronic national disease that seemed related to a deeper fear of allowing themselves any expectations at all, and I thought it was as a result of this fear that the Irish appeared so deceptively supple and easygoing.

“Sigh sios agus do scith a ligean! Nil aon tintean mar do thintean fhein! La bhrea buiochas le Dia!” Sit down and rest yourself! There’s no fireplace like your own fireplace! It’s a fine day, thank God! These were the platitudinous sayings that people flung out with bold authority when their Irish was rusty or incomplete. The habit was known as the cupla focail, the few words.

Rosemary volunteers with teenagers and is asked her age. She’s already said “thirty” three times before this exchange:

“Rose! I’m askin’ ya how old are ya?”
“I’m thirty, Una,” I said.
Una brought her face around to look at mine again. She was utterly puzzled. Abandoning all pretense at a whisper, she screeched, “What are ya sayin’ to me, Rose?”
Karen, two seats away, saw the problem. “She said she’s torty, Una. Are ya feckin’ deaf?”
“Torty!” Una exclaimed. “Shite! Older dan me mudder.”

“Are you from Dorchester, Massachusets?”
“Very close,” I said and kept walking.
“I have friends and relatives in Dorchester,” he said, following behind me.
“I know,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Every Irish person has friends and relatives in Dorchester.”
At this the man laughed loudly and gave me a friendly slug on the arm. The ease with which Irish people laid their hands on strangers always impressed me.

Subsequent encounter with another guy:

He spoke as though he had known me for years—the way many Irish people speak to strangers with an ease born of a presupposed universal understanding, as though we were all passing through life together, as though my plight couldn’t possibly be any better or worse than his and therefore I couldn’t possibly reject him.

Though fundamentally at odds, religion and superstition served the same ordering, protecting purpose, and in Ireland the two seemed particularly intertwined.

I saw then that … as a foreigner I was beyond his rural purview. That was what [Mick Pat] and the other villagers appreciated about me: I didn’t have to obey their rules, didn’t have to be watched or reined in. I could live alone in a creepy castle without annoying local sensibilities and without being termed mad or brash. Mick Pat had never asked me whether I had a husband or children. I had come from across the ocean and so was exempt from the question.

As I made my way back into the castle I had a powerful feeling of déjà vu. The evening’s familiar display [of shouting conflict] had recalled an entire habit of existence, a vehement, mistrustful, precipitate way of relating that I had witnessed in Ireland but that I had also grown up with and was part of whether I liked it or not.

Greeted with “Lovely morning” on a cool, drizzly day:

I checked his face to see if he was kidding, though I should have known he wasn’t. The Irish always thought this sort of day was beautiful. As long as there was no wind, the rain wasn’t too hard, and the temperature wasn’t too low, the day was beautiful.

Coyote America – Dan Flores, 2016

In this book I learned about

  • “Species cleansing” (eradication, e.g. of rats)
  • Mouse invasion in 1927 Kern County (California), after coyotes and hawks had been eliminated, which “left highways grossly slick, and ultimately undriveable, after traffic flattened unbelievable swarms of mice”
  • Scapegoating coyotes after the wolves were gone
  • The Coyote’s Lament (Disney, 1961)

Legendary federal coyote nemesis Stanley Young characterized the animal as the Biological Survey’s most frustrating opponent, an enemy members of the agency actually lumped in with fascism as a threat to the American Way.

Most predators are either solitary or social, not both. But like us, the coyote gets to have it both ways.

Coyote power: surviving by one’s intelligence and wits when others cannot; embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates; exulting in sheer aliveness; recognizing our shortcomings with rueful chagrin. These are the values Old Man America has embodied for thousands of years.

In my view the coyote’s howl is the original national anthem of North America … [but] The coyote’s cry, for many Americans riveted by the sound, did not intone the ballad of the continent—America’s ancient native song—that some of us hear today. …

A sense that so much about North America was strange and frightening and that we ought to terraform and remake it extended to every element of continental ecology, from grasses to animals of all kinds. But in truth, almost no other creature reaped the whirlwind of condescension and hostility toward “alien” American nature in quite the way coyotes did. We campaigned to erase those “manic, lunatic” howls for all time and good riddance. And even as evidence mounted of the wrongheadedness and futility of that course, we spent more than half a century in furious pursuit of it.

Chemists and researchers in the Eradication Methods Laboratory [making strychnine and other poisons in huge volume], with government jobs and benefits, presumably realized the American Dream in the 1920s, buying houses, automobiles, radios, and washing machines, all the latest technologies of the decade. Their products, meanwhile, destroyed America’s wild animals, the foundations of an ecology that 20,000 years of evolution had perfected, as if their victims were of no consequence whatsoever.

[Ernest Thompson] Seton has taken his licks across the years as a fellow traveler of the “Nature Faker” writers of the early twentieth century … One critic of Seton’s book Animals I Have Known even wrote, sarcastically, that its proper title ought to have been Animals I Alone Have Known.

The average coyote litter size is 5.7 pups, but that number can range from as low as 2 to as high as 19. The reason for such variability is that coyotes possess an autogenic trait that allows them to assess the ecological possibilities around them. If not persecuted, they saturate a landscape to carrying capacity, then usually have small litters that produce only a couple of surviving pups. But if they sense a suppressed coyote population relative to available resources, they give birth to very large littlers. The coyote’s yipping howl … has several functions, one very important one of which is to assess the size of the surrounding coyote population.

[Olaus] Murie knew that once, in his Yellowstone research, his brother had stood rapt, watching a coyote trot along a trail with a sprig of sagebrush in its mouth. At repeated intervals it had tossed the sprig joyously into the air, caught it, then trotted on. Why had so many in the [Bureau of Biological Survey], without any science to back them up, so hated an animal that took that kind of pleasure in being alive in the world? Why had they encouraged hatred for coyotes among the public? It was not an attitude or a culture Olaus cared to be associated with. He ended up leaving the bureau for the Wilderness Society.

“Biocentrism” in one sense was actually evolutionary. It implied yet another extension of the circle of ethical treatment that had begun long ago in human affairs, when we first moved beyond kinship and our own genetics and granted rights to others outside our families.

.Acme’s overconfidence rivaled that of the Coyote. In these classic cartoons the promise of the technological fix took the form of Acme Jet-Propelled Roller Skates, an Acme Batman Outfit, Acme Leg Muscle Vitamins, and the Acme Burmese Tiger Trap, so many mad-genius devices of pursuit that today an online poster … totals up more than one hundred of them. In iconic, American style, Wile E. trusted every one of those contraptions naively, optimistically, wonderfully. A corporation offers it for sale? Then of course it’s going to work!

We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver, 2003

Read for the Far Out Film group in conjunction with the film—which was a tour-de-force in translating an unreliable narrator to a medium where I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. I enjoyed the writing very much but ultimately felt like the subject matter was ill-chosen/misleading. And the narrator is so much like Shriver in her outrageousness, snark, judgementalness, and general willingness to be dislikable! I flagged a bunch of passages that I’m not quoting because they don’t stick outside of the context of the whole book. A little bit of hate-reading in a way, and this is one of the few books where I used downward-pointing flags (passages remarkable for how much I dislike them) as well as my usual upward-pointing (something I want to look up) and horizontal (passages I find delightful or interesting).

Short quotes

  • The ob-gyn “offered up postnatal depression like a present, as if simply being told that you are unhappy is supposed to cheer you up.”
  • “For Celia, her whole surround was animate, and each tapioca lump had a dense, nauseating little soul.”
  • “How vital, the hard glass interface of that [TV] screen. Viewers don’t want those shows spilling willy-nilly into their homes, any more than they want other people’s sewage to overflow from their toilets.”
  • “Myself, after having not a child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles, and an upstairs neighbor who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.”

Shriver was critiqued for making her protagonist Armenian; it did feel glued-on, especially in that the main way she indicates it is by name-checking various dishes: sarma, lahmajoon, “sesame-topped ziloogs” (can’t figure out what this is?), katah. The window-dressing aspect was confirmed for me when I looked up madagh, expecting to find a dish (the context is “an incident now mythic in my family involving madagh scraped off the ceiling with a broom”), but it’s a ritual event that includes various kinds of food.

Longer quotes

That coy expression “you’re eating for two now, dear,” is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no longer a private affair; indeed, as the land of the free has grown increasingly coercive, the inference seems to run that “you’re eating for us now,” for 200-some million meddlers, any one of whose prerogative it is to object should you ever be in the mood for a jelly donut and not a full meal with whole grains and leafy vegetables that covers all five major food groups. The right to boss pregnant women around was surely on its way into the Constitution.

I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies.

The truth [about drugs]—that we hadn’t cleaned out the medicine cabinet, but we’d both tried a variety of recreational drugs, and not only in the sixties but up to a year before he was born; that better living through chemistry had driven neither of us to an asylum or even to an emergency room; and that these gleeful carnival rides on the mental midway were far more the source of nostalgia than remorse—was unacceptable.

Death in Venice – Thomas Mann, 1924

Another Great Books selection I had always wanted to read, and wow, it is indeed amazing. I tried a couple of translations: Kenneth Burke’s and H. T. Lowe-Porter’s. I noted some interesting differences:

  • Burke translates “schwermütig-enthusiastischen Dichters” as “the heavy-hearted, enthusiastic poet,” which HTLP has as “melancholy and susceptible” (apparently the poet referred to is August von Platen-Hallermünde).
  • In Aschenbach’s dream of ancient rites, Burke uses “the foreign god” vs HTLP’s “the stranger god.”

And one of the most haunting passages, after Aschenbach visits the barber:

  • Burke: “It was raining sparsely and at intervals, but the air was damp, thick, and filled with the smell of things rotting. All around him he heard a fluttering, pattering, and swishing; and under the fever of his cosmetics it seemed to him as though evil wind-spirits were haunting the place, impure seabirds which rooted and gnawed at the food of the condemned and befouled it with their droppings. For the sultriness destroyed his appetite, and the fancy suggested itself that the foods were poisoned with contaminating substances.”
  • HTLP: “It rained a little now and then, the air was heavy and turbid and smelt of decay. Aschenbach, with fevered cheeks beneath the rouge, seemed to hear rushing and flapping sounds in his ears, as though storm-spirits were abroad—unhallowed ocean harpies who follow those devoted to destruction, snatch away and defile their viands. For the heat took away his appetite and thus he was haunted with the idea that his food was infected.”

Other quotes

  • Aschenbach’s longing to travel: “Desire projected itself visually: his fancy, not quite yet lulled since morning, imagined the marvels and terrors of the manifold earth. He saw. He beheld a landscape, a tropical marshland…”
  • “His love of the ocean had profound sources: the hard-worked artist’s longing for rest, his yearning to seek refuge from the thronging manifold shapes of his fancy in the bosom of the simple and vast; and another yearning, opposed to his art and perhaps for that very reason a lure, for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal—in short, for nothingness. He whose preoccupation is with excellence yearns fervently to find rest in perfection; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”
  • Keeping the epidemic a secret: “So Aschenbach felt a dark contentment with what was taking place, under cover of the authorities, in the dirty alleys of Venice. This wicked secret of the city was welded with his own secret, and he too was involved in keeping it hidden.”

The Spinning Heart – Donal Ryan, 2012

Irish Writers selection. A short novel that I found remarkable, both for capturing many different voices in brief chapters, and for the technical brilliance of weaving them together in a narrative without revisiting any. It would have helped me to take notes along the way—I might re-read it at some point.

Most of the inhabitants of this small Irish town, post financial collapse, are miserable. Bobby, the first narrator and effectively the hero, has a father so bitter about his fate that he “trains himself to become a drinker.”

I can forgive him for turning piles of money into piss … I’ll never forgive him for the sulking, though, and the killing sting of his tongue. He ruined every day of our lives with it. Drunk, he was leering and silent and mostly asleep. Sober, he was a watcher, a horror of a man who missed nothing and commented on everything. Nothing was ever done right or cooked right or said right or bought right or handed to him properly or ironed straight or finished off fully with him. We couldn’t breathe right in a room with him. We couldn’t talk freely or easily.

Lily, who sleeps around unashamed and has five children who all leave her, says, “Isn’t that a fright, after a life spent blackening my soul for him, for all of them? Yerra what about it, sure wasn’t I at least the author of my own tale? And if you can say that as you depart this world, you can say a lot.”

Vasya loves to look at water:

The evening sun turns it to a glistening, dazzling thing that has no place on this dull earth except in that short time before sunset. That light is a trick: if I were to swim to it or row out to put my hand upon it, it would be gone as I approached and there would be only dark, cold water in its place.

Bridie, mourning her drowned son:

I came to a little church with a lovely name: Star of the Sea. I went in and knelt down and blessed myself and bowed my head and anyone looking on would have thought I was praying to God for my lost son. I wasn’t, I was cursing Him. You bastard, I was saying, you bastard, just because your son was killed, have we all to suffer forever? Have you not had enough revenge? And your boy only stayed dead three days. Will my boy be back on Sunday, the way yours was?

There’s also a reference to the Pixies’ Black Francis, extra-cool because he lives around here!

Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition with Annotations – James Joyce, ed. John Wyse Jackson, 1995

Irish Writers selection. I first read Dubliners in college and have re-read “The Dead” several times since—love it, as many do—but I don’t think I’d revisited the other stories, and this edition provided so many interesting details that it took me a long time to get through it! Each story has a sidebar of dozens/hundreds of references explained (sometimes dwarfing the original text in total length), plus there are pages of commentary, alternate versions, and wonderful supporting photos and reproductions. Here are some great little tidbits I learned:

  • “jerry hat” in “Encounters” is explained as a “hard round hat, popular in the mid-nineteenth century” but then the footnote elaborates that the full name was “Tom and Jerry hat,” after Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn, characters in Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821). A play called Tom and Jerry was adapted from it in 1822, which a) must be the original of the cartoon names and b) was advertised as an “entirely new classic, comic, operatic, didactic, moralistic, Aristophanic, localic, analytic, terpsichoric, panoramic, camera-obscura-ic extravaganza burletta of fun, frolic, fashion and flash.” Whoa!
  • “Araby” references “The Arab’s Farewell to His Steed” [sic–actually it’s Horse] which I recited over-dramatically in character as part of a skit celebrating the Susquehanna County Historical Society & Free Library Association‘s 100th anniversary.
  • Hugh Kenner’s “Uncle Charles Principle“—how Joyce subtly uses a character’s idiom in what appears to be objective narration
  • The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent, Exposed: ILLUSTRATED . Wikipedia quotes Richard Hofstader claiming it was “[p]robably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
  • the Yankee Rubber Baby
  • Joyce’s satirical poems “The Holy Office” and “Gas from a Burner,” with the great couplet “I printed poets, sad, silly and solemn; I printed Patrick What–do-you-Colm”
  • “Among Joyce’s books was an 1893 copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Novel Notes, with the telling inscription ‘Stolen from Stanislaus Joyce by the present owner.’ Either brother might have written it.”
  • About “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” Stanislaus commented, “My brother was never in a committee-room in his life.”

Quotes

  • “Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money.”
  • “[he was] conscious of the labor latent in money”
  • Poor Little Chandler in “Little Cloud” starts thinking about maybe writing poetry, and jumps right to “invent[ing] sentences and phrases from the notices which his book would get” and planning what version of his name would look best
  • Mrs. Kearney “respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed.”
  • “At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homeward and through this channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry. Now and again the clumps of people raised the cheer of the gratefully oppressed.”

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson, 2003 (reread)

Nature and Environment Book Group selection. Wow, so this I think is the first time I’m writing a second post about the same book. First one was in 2004—when it was new!—and I’m not going to look back at it until I’m done with this one. I love Bryson, and this book is the finest thing he ever did IMO, so this is probably just going to be a great big bag o’ quotes. [I wrote this in 2018 but am finishing and back-dating it in 2023, when I have long given up on doing anything but a big bag o’ quotes; I’ve left in my 2018 attempts to contextualize the quotes, so this is a bit of a mish-mash.]

Yay, first dinosaur tracks discovered very near here—little did I know when first I read, etc. Although it’s interesting that Bryson calls him “Plinus Moody” (Plinius, Pliny for short appears to be the correct spelling)—I think of Bryson’s fact-checking as being good, but what do I know? Hmm, and he calls U. anceps “Unitatheres anceps” whereas it’s Unitathereium anceps, with “Unitatheres” being the plural for the genus (context is about the rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othaniel Charles Marsh: “Between them they managed to ‘discover’ a species called Uintatheres anceps no fewer than twenty-two times.”

In this book I learned

  • The Moon’s gravitational influence keeps the Earth spinning smoothly; otherwise, according to Bryson, it “would wobble like a dying top.”
  • Like in Winter World, we’re reminded how important it is for life on earth that ice is less dense than water. Bryson quotes John Gribbin saying that’s “an utterly bizarre property.”
  • I keep forgetting that there are living stromatolites in Australia—I want to see them! “It is a curiously giddying moment to find yourself staring at living remnants of Earth as it was 3.5 billion years ago.” But apparently in the Bahamas as well?
  • “It has been estimated that less than one species in ten thousand has made it into the fossil record.”
  • But hurray, Bryson (and everyone) was wrong to think that the brain cells we are born with are “all you are ever going to get.”

Short quotes

  • Peter Medawar: a virus is “a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news”
  • David Raup: “To a first approximation, all species are extinct.”
  • “Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.”
  • “Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.”
  • Charles Lyell: “His other slight peculiarity was the habit, when distracted by thought, of taking up improbable positions on furniture—lying across two chairs at once or ‘resting his head on the seat of a chair, while standing up’ (to quote his friend Darwin). Often when lost in thought he would slink so low in a chair that his buttocks would all but touch the floor.”
  • “Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century (and in Priestley’s case a little beyond) scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren’t there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations, and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion.”
  • “’Young man,’ Enrico Fermi replied when a student asked him the name of a particular particle, ‘if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.’”
  • “There was so much unrecognized novelty in the [Burgess Shale] collection that at one point upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, ‘Oh fuck, not another phylum.’”
  • “For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability—like a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo jet, in the colorful simile of the astronomer Fred Hoyle.”
  • “Indeed, some organisms that we think of as primitive enjoy a level of cellular organization that makes our own look carelessly pedestrian. Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again.”
  • “Remarkably, we are even quite closely related to fruit and vegetables. About half the chemical functions that take place in a banana are fundamentally the same as the chemical functions that take place in you.
    It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.”

Longer quotes

Reverend Robert Evans, supernova finder:

To understand what a feat this is, imagine a standard dining room table covered in a black tablecloth and someone throwing a handful of salt across it. The scattered grains can be thought of as a galaxy. Now imagine fifteen hundred more tables like the first one—enough to fill a Wal-Mart parking lot, say, or to make a single line two miles long—each with a random array of salt across it. Now add one grain of salt to any table and let Bob Evans walk among them. At a glance he will spot it. That grain of salt is the supernova.

What Michelson and Morley did, without actually intending to, was undermine a longstanding belief in something called the luminiferous ether, a stable, invisible, weightless, frictionless, and unfortunately wholly imaginary medium that was thought to permeate the universe. Conceived by Descartes, embraced by Newton, and venerated by nearly everyone ever since, the ether held a position of absolute centrality in nineteenth-century physics as a way of explaining how light traveled across the emptiness of space. It was especially needed in the 1800s because light and electromagnetism were now seen as waves, which is to say types of vibrations. Vibrations must occur in something; hence the need for, and lasting devotion to, an ether. As late as 1909, the great British physicist J. J. Thomson was insisting: “The ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher; it is as essential to us as the air we breathe”—this more than four years after it was pretty incontestably established that it didn’t exist. People, in short, were really attached to the ether.

The part I remembered most vividly from my first reading, which I’ve come across in other articles since, is the Yellowstone supervolcano.

Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across—roughly the same dimensions as the park—and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.

That second sentence is peak Bryson—a concrete, memorable image, contrasted with the mundane and comical “shuffling around on top of.”

Now I’m reading McKibben’s The End of Nature, which also emphasizes what I keep forgetting and re-learning: how horizontal our notion of distance and how shallow our livable space on the globe is. McKibben talked about the up, the atmosphere; Bryson is memorable on the down:

Without assistance, the deepest anyone has gone and lived to talk about it afterward was an Italian named Umberto Pelizzari, who in 1992 dove to a depth of 236 feet, lingered for a nanosecond, and then shot back to the surface. In terrestrial terms, 236 feet is just slightly over the length of one New York City block. So even in our most exuberant stunts we can hardly claim to be masters of the abyss.

And also (granted this is going on two decades ago, but I bet we aren’t much further along):

There are still no submersibles that can go anywhere near the depth of the Mariana Trench and only five, including Alvin, that can reach the depths of the “abyssal plain”—the deep ocean floor—that covers more than half the planet’s surface. A typical submersible costs about $25,000 a day to operate, so they are hardly dropped into the water on a whim, still less put to sea in the hope that they will randomly stumble on something of interest. It’s rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark. According to Robert Kunzig, humans may have scrutinized “perhaps a millionth or a billionth of the sea’s darkness. Maybe less. Maybe much less.”

“Five guys on garden tractors”—perfect. And a few pages later, “We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas.”

As you might expect, oxygen is our most abundant element, accounting for just under 50 percent of the Earth’s crust, but after that the relative abundances are often surprising. Who would guess, for instance, that silicon is the second most common element on Earth or that titanium is tenth? Abundance has little to do with their familiarity or utility to us. Many of the more obscure elements are actually more common than the better-known ones. There is more cerium on Earth than copper, more neodymium and lanthanum than cobalt or nitrogen. Tin barely makes it into the top fifty, eclipsed by such relative obscurities as praseodymium, samarium, gadolinium, and dysprosium.

We couldn’t live for two minutes without them, yet even after a billion years mitochondria behave as if they think things might not work out between us. They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do. In short, they keep their bags packed. They don’t even speak the same genetic language as the cell in which they live. It is like having a stranger in your house, but one who has been there for a billion years.

Bacteria can be exasperatingly difficult to isolate and study. Only about 1 percent will grow in culture. Considering how wildly adaptable they are in nature, it is an odd fact that the one place they seem not to wish to live is a petri dish. Plop them on a bed of agar and pamper them as you will, and most will just lie there, declining every inducement to bloom. Any bacterium that thrives in a lab is by definition exceptional, and yet these were, almost exclusively, the organisms studied by microbiologists. It was, said Woese, “like learning about animals from visiting zoos.”

Every cell in nature is a thing of wonder. Even the simplest are far beyond the limits of human ingenuity. To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce.

If you could visit a cell, you wouldn’t like it. Blown up to a scale at which atoms were about the size of peas, a cell itself would be a sphere roughly half a mile across, and supported by a complex framework of girders called the cytoskeleton. Within it, millions upon millions of objects—some the size of basketballs, others the size of cars—would whiz about like bullets. There wouldn’t be a place you could stand without being pummeled and ripped thousands of times every second from every direction. Even for its full-time occupants the inside of a cell is a hazardous place. Each strand of DNA is on average attacked or damaged once every 8.4 seconds—ten thousand times in a day—by chemicals and other agents that whack into or carelessly slice through it, and each of these wounds must be swiftly stitched up if the cell is not to perish.

The proteins are especially lively, spinning, pulsating, and flying into each other up to a billion times a second. Enzymes, themselves a type of protein, dash everywhere, performing up to a thousand tasks a second. Like greatly speeded up worker ants, they busily build and rebuild molecules, hauling a piece off this one, adding a piece to that one. Some monitor passing proteins and mark with a chemical those that are irreparably damaged or flawed. Once so selected, the doomed proteins proceed to a structure called a proteasome, where they are stripped down and their components used to build new proteins. Some types of protein exist for less than half an hour; others survive for weeks. But all lead existences that are inconceivably frenzied. As de Duve notes, “The molecular world must necessarily remain entirely beyond the powers of our imagination owing to the incredible speed with which things happen in it.”

But it is worth remembering, before we move on, that all of these evolutionary jostlings over five million years, from distant, puzzled australopithecine to fully modern human, produced a creature that is still 98.4 percent genetically indistinguishable from the modern chimpanzee. There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.

I mostly trust Bryson’s research, but here’s a case where I think he twisted something to fit a narrative. In talking about collectors who killed and pushed to extinction the species they supposedly loved, he says, “In 1907 when a well-known collector named Alanson Bryan realized that he had shot the last three specimens of black mamos, a species of forest bird that had only been discovered the previous decade, he noted that the news filled him with ‘joy.'” I remember this striking me as odd in previous readings, so I looked it up. This is not a primary source, but it appears he wrote: ” To my joy I found the mangled remains” [of the bird he had shot and couldn’t find], so the joy, awful as it is, isn’t about the extinction per se. It’s possible someone like Bryan may not even have believed in extinction, right? But Bryson is leading up to this powerful ending, worth quoting almost in full:

I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.

But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when alive and when not, we have no idea—really none at all—about how many things have died off permanently, or may soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of the process. …

The fact is, we don’t know. Don’t have any idea. We don’t know when we started doing many of the things we’ve done. We don’t know what we are doing right now or how our present actions will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one planet to do it on, and only one species of being capable of making a considered difference. Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: “One planet, one experiment.”

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here—and by “we” I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.

We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.

We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.

The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin, 1963

This was a Great Books selection that most everyone thought highly of, and which led to a great discussion. I want to read it again more slowly – it was so good.

Short quotes

  • “For these innocent people [white people] have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”
  • “For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.”
  • “But the Negro’s experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. His own condition is overwhelming proof that white people do not live by these standards.”
  • “When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?”
  • “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time to get rid of Him.”
  • “But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears.”

Longer quotes

The fear I heard in my father’s voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.

For many years I could not ask myself why human relief had to be acheived in a fashion at once so pagan and so desperate—in a fashion at once so unspeakably old and so unutterably new. And by the time I was able to ask myself this question, I was also able to see that the principles governing the rites and customs of the churches in which I grew up did not differ from the principles governing the rites and customs of other churches, white. The princples were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others. I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly not so for most Christians, or for what we call the Christian world.

When told by a fellow minister not to give his seat to a white woman:

But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too—unless, of course, there was also in Heaven a special dispensation for the benighted black, who was not to be judged in the same way as other humans beings, or angels. It probably occurred to me around this time that the vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable willful distortions, of the world in which they live. And this did not apply only to Negroes, who were no more “simple” or “spontaneous” or “Christian” than anybody else—who were merely more oppressed.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

All of know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats—the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced. I say “this country” because their frame of reference was totally American. They were hewing out of the mountain of white supremacy the stone of their individuality. … I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played—and play—in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way.

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

I read this in July 2018 and am finalizing the quotes almost six years later… while volunteering at the Botanic Garden of Smith College, spurred on by the Sylvia Plath exhibition!

I’ve read this multiple times since I was a teenager; it’s a touchstone book for me, and scenes like the caviar banquet stick with me, so I was happy to revisit it with Great Books. It’s striking to me how much the protagonist’s tastes (before depression takes over) resonate with me still, and I wonder now how much this book unconsciously shaped my relish of food, desire to ferret out sources of freebies and fun, and love of hot baths. My mother tells of a famous writer acquaintance eating salad with his fingers, but did she actually get that from the poet described here?

This time around I learned

There was conflict over the US publication, which was resisted by Plath’s mother; the foreword by editor Frances McCullough explains that because of a copyright loophole, ad interim, Random House was planning to put it out in the U.S. McCullough convinced them not to but says “obviously we had to publish the novel immediately,” which is more palatable than the story that Hughes wanted money to buy a country house. “It quickly established itself as a female rite-of-passage novel, a twin to Catcher in the Rye—a comparison first noted by one of the original British reviewers.” It’s so much better, though!

Short quotes

  • Prizes of jobs: “in New York for a month, expenses paid, and piles and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passes to fashion shows and hair stylings at a famous expensive salon and chances to meet successful people in the field of our desire and advice about what do to with our particular complexions.”  “I got such a kick out of all those free gifts showering on to us”
  • “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: ‘I’ll go take a hot bath.'”
  • [waiting to get married] “These girls looked awfully bored to me. I saw them on the sunroof, yawning and painting their nails and trying to keep up with their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell.”
  • Doreen “had an interesting, slightly sweaty smell that reminded me of those scallopy leaves of sweet fern you break off and crush between your fingers for the musk of them.” And now I know and love comptonia!
  • Matching one’s purse to one’s dress described as “marvellous, elaborate decadence”
  • “Jay Cee wanted to teach me something, all the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something, but I suddenly didn’t think they had anything to teach me.”
  • “After Doreen left, I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.”
  • “each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam”
  • famous writer Mrs. Guinea’s book “was crammed from beginning to end with long, suspenseful questions: ‘Would Evelyn discern that Gladys knew Roger in her past? wondered Hector feverishly’ and ‘How could Donald marry her when he learned of the child Elsie, hidden away with Mrs. Rollmop on the secluded country farm? Griselda demanded of her bleak, moonlit pillow.'”
  • “I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction.”
  • Poor old Buddy Willard asks “have you ever seen a man?” “Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.”
  • “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” – Captain Awkward did a great blog post about this quote
  • “That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
  • “The only trouble was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn’t take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.”
  • “If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
  • “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. // I am, I am, I am.”

Longer quotes

“I’ll have a vodka,” I said.

The man looked at me more closely. “With anything?”

“Just plain,” I said. “I always have it plain.”

I thought I might make a fool of myself by saying I’d have it with ice or soda or gin or anything. I’d seen a vodka ad once, just a glass full of vodka standing in the middle of a snowdrift in a blue light, and the vodka looked clear and pure as water, so I thought having vodka plain must be all right. My dream was someday ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.

I thought I’d string along with Doreen. I wanted to see as much as I could.

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I’d stop and look so hard I never forgot it.

I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I knew things were all the time.

Under cover of the clinking of water goblets and silverware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. Then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn’t ooze off and ate them.

                I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

                I learned this trick the day Jay Cee took me to lunch with a famous poet. He wore a horrible, lumpy, speckled brown tweed jacket and gray pants and a red-and-blue checked open-throated jersey in a very formal restaurant full of fountains and chandeliers, where all the other men were dressed in dark suits and immaculate white shirts.

                This poet ate his salad with his fingers, leaf by leaf, while talking to me about the antithesis of nature and art. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pale, stubby white fingers traveling back and forth from the poet’s salad bowl to the poet’s mouth with one dripping lettuce leaf after another. Nobody giggled or whispered rude remarks. The poet made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do.

Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she’d had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn’t know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep.

                I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.

                The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.

It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he’d left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he’d expect a big dinner, and I’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted.

                This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.

Once when I visited Buddy I found Mrs Willard braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr Willard’s old suits. She’d spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug on the wall the way I would have done, she put it down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the Five and Ten.

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard’s kitchen mat.

 I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.

                It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

                It made me tired just to think of it.

                I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.