Marginalia, no.296

He was lucid, not with an everyday lucidity, the sort one finds acceptable, but on the contrary the sort of which one subsequently feels ashamed, perhaps because it confers on supposedly commonplace things the grandeur ascribed to them by poetry and religion.

~ Georges Simenon, Monsieur Monde Vanishes

I used to experience moments of similar lucidity late at night or walking alone in the afternoon. In my twenties these moments came once or twice each week. Aha! (I would say to myself) There it is again! Hold it tight! But what was it exactly? It was the one bright, thrilling, unutterable thing I knew I must always repeat to myself so as never to forget it, and then seconds later it was gone. 

Marginalia, no.295

Catfish are basically swimming tongues.

~ Mary Roach, Gulp

If your epidermis were covered in taste buds, like the catfish, your clothes would become unpalatable before they became unfashionable. You would always eat dinner with your hands. You would distinguish between rain showers that were sweet, savory, sour or bitter.

Phoebe Furbright, Ornithologist

My seven-year-old daughter recently asked me to write her a story, the only stipulation being that it should involve cats. Cats mean a lot to her. I’ve already mentioned her hand-made field guide to cats in the neighborhood, with illustrations, written descriptions, and names that she’s assigned to each.

One day last week she was struggling on her roller skates. Her brother gave her some grief about it and she began to cry. Curiously, while crying, her skating technique improved. When she stopped crying I pointed this out and told her she ought to think of something sad again. “Think of baby kittens,” I said, “with tears running down their cheeks.”

This is how fathers come to be despised by their children. After twenty seconds of shocked silence, the proverbial floodgates opened and she was bawling so hard she could barely stand, much less skate. I assured her that cats don’t really cry the way people do. “It’s just so sad!” she said. “The poor kittens!”

I’m trying now to repair this trauma by writing the requested story, which is quickly turning into a chapter book. My heroine, Phoebe Furbright, is a young cat with a socially unacceptable career goal: to become an ornithologist. Her father, despite the fact that he works in an office and has never so much as scratched a bird in his life, believes her aspirations contrary to cat nature. Birds, he says, are not for studying, but for stalking and killing!

And so on. This is fun writing. After recently finishing my novel and getting no response from the agents I’ve queried so far, I was feeling down and wondering if fiction just wasn’t my bag. In fact, I don’t read much fiction these days, which is perhaps awkward for an aspiring novelist.

If I had my education to do all over again, I suppose I would study biology in college rather than English and philosophy. Then I would do a graduate degree in ornithology, with the goal of working, say, for the National Park Service. Add books, of course, and I think it would be a fine life.

My daughter is discovering an interest in birds. For years now my son has wanted to be a herpetologist, in order to study venomous snakes and Galapagos tortoises – and he’d convinced his sister that she should do the same. But she recently had a close encounter with a hawk that’s made her reconsider. I wasn’t there when she saw it, but she wrote me the following report:

“We saw a hawk right up close and I walked under it and it looked straight down at me. After a while it flew away. Things I noted about the hawk: A white speckled front coat. Big yellow eyes. Long brownish red wings. A curved yellow beak!”

Patrick Kurp recently directed his readers to a Theodore Dalrymple essay about owls – or, rather, about a book about owls. Dalrymple writes that prior to reading this book he had forgotten that owl pellets were produced by regurgitation. He describes memories of dissecting owl pellets in school. I seem to have the same memories, though I can’t place the year or classroom in which this might have occurred. Perhaps I was at camp.

Dalrymple writes that a pair of tawny owls like to vociferate on summer nights from a tree near his home in France. “I never tire of listening to them,” he says. “I also never see them, and so their lives are a closed book to me.” Personally, I can’t imagine hearing owls nearby and not immediately running out to locate their nest and get a look at them.

A short walk from where my parents live there’s a nest of great horned owls. My father, anyway, claims to have seen two of them. Whenever I visit there’s only one. It likes to sit in the crook of a branch about thirty feet up, just below the nest. We spy on it awhile with our binoculars, and the owl watches us too. Then I hunt up owl pellets in the grass below to see what it’s been eating.

I’m curently reading Washington Irving’s A History of New York, a book which a month ago I didn’t know existed, but which I’ll never again be able to live without. It’s the best, funniest thing I’ve read all year, downright Shandean, and I’ll be recommending it to all my friends. Irving does, however, rather unfairly (I think) malign owls.

“There are two opposite ways by which some men get into notice,” Irving reports, “one by talking a vast deal and thinking a little, and the other by holding their tongues and not thinking at all. By the first, many a vapouring, superficial pretender acquires the reputation of a man of quick parts – by the other many a vacant dunderpate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be complimented, by a discerning world, with all the attributes of wisdom.”

I don’t expect this is very fair to owls, but it’s certainly possible (for all I know) that they are relative dunderpates when compared, say, to corvids. It’s a question, perhaps, for Phoebe Furbright to look into.

Marginalia, no.294

Others advocated the great elementary theory, which refers the construction of our globe and all that it contains, to the combinations of four material elements, air, earth, fire and water; with the assistance of a fifth, an immaterial and vivifying principle; by which I presume the worthy theorist meant to allude to that vivifying spirit contained in gin, brandy and other potent liquors.

~ Washington Irving, A History of New York

Some days it’s only that mysterious fifth element which keeps old chaos at bay. No sooner had I come home from work yesterday than the beloved spouse informed me that I was required to pour the vivifying principle in the form of gin into two glasses of ice, cucumber and superior tonic water. The results managed to hold the world together for yet another night.

Marginalia, no.293

Possession of virtue seems actually compatible with being asleep, or with lifelong inactivity, and, further, with the greatest sufferings and misfortunes; but a man who was living so no one would call happy, unless he were maintaining a thesis at all costs.

~ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

The ambiguity (in English translation) of the pronoun in that final clause is delightful. Is “he” the person who insists that the narcoleptic is happy, or is “he” the virtuous narcoleptic himself? Maintaining a thesis at all costs will often give a satisfactory thrill. “You see what I must endure?” asks the whining longsufferer who never acts to improve his situation. Misery is sometimes converted to happiness by the alchemy of being proven right.

Marginalia, no.292

A tree would never have spoken to me like this.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage

How disappointing it would be to discover that we were wrong about the trees. A willow, for example, might be the most petty, vindictive creature on the planet.

Reading Notes: G.K. Chesterton and John Gray

In his biography of Thomas Aquinas, Chesterton has only a few things to say about the “Dumb Ox” himself, but that’s the way it is with all his books: the ostensible subject is most of the time fondly neglected for the atmosphere surrounding it. From most writers this would be intolerable, but from Chesterton, somehow, it’s better than tolerable, because almost no one else is so fun to read. Chesterton’s Aquinas is no vague hypothesizer of miniature angels traipsing about in Nana’s sewing kit, but the champion of common sense philosophy, out to rescue medieval Christendom from the slow creep of Platonism, and to return it – with some help from Aristotle – to an affirmation of the reality and value of the material order, and a reasonable sense of our place within it.

Regarding our place within it, Aquinas – and Chesterton – insist that we are at home; that the material order is no catastrophe but essential to human beatitude; that a ghost is no more a complete man than a corpse is; that the senses are windows through which we perceive an actual world beyond, and into which light shines to show us ourselves; that the will is free; that we are kindred to other animals while at the same time elevated by intellect; that human reason has “a divine right to feed upon facts.” My grasp on medieval philosophy is weak, but I know that Chesterton is simplifying things. I also know that the compellingly baited lures of our own “age of uncommon nonsense” (Chesterton’s phrase) are sometimes difficult not to swallow. But I’ll happily take this antique sanity over the sort peddled today by persons like John Gray in Straw Dogs.

*

Both Plutarch in the Moralia and Montaigne in The Apology for Raymond Sebond argue that animals are more human than we imagine. John Gray, however, wants us to know that humans are no different from animals at all. These are two very different things to say. The first grants that certain traits we might have imagined belonged only on our side of the fence are actually present on both sides. The second claims that there is no fence at all and that you are the physical, intellectual and moral equivalent of a bacterium.

Gray’s arch-materialist philosophy is the same, I gather, as that popularized by Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and their ilk. According to this view, your sense of self is illusion, your notion of what constitutes just or ethical behavior is imaginary, your every action is absolutely determined, and all that you think you know about reality – relying on common sense – is false in almost every detail. There’s some buzz these days about Thomas Nagel’s attack on this arch-materialism in his recent book Mind and Cosmos, which I have not read and am not qualified to comment on, but Andrew Ferguson’s recent piece for The Weekly Standard gives a summary.

Whatever your personal take on the issue, it’s hard to avoid the sense while reading Straw Dogs that Gray is slowly dismantling his own argument without realizing it. For example, after assuring us of our utter unexceptionality compared to other animals, he goes on to admit at least three exceptions. Per Gray, human beings do, in fact, differ from animals in possessing a sense of selfhood (and hence an understanding of death), in the complex conflicts of their interests, and in their means of employing language.

I’m less sure of these particular points of divergence than Gray is, actually. I’ve known animals with what seemed remarkable notions of their own selfhood – and I could trot out a half-dozen anecdotes suggesting that certain animals, at least, do have a notion of what death means for an individual. But in my opinion, despite the obvious fact of our basic commonalities with other animals, there comes a point – in the degree and use of intelligence, for example, or in the control of nature, or in the capacity for empathy, etc. – where even differences that might be characterized as quantitative add up, in effect, to qualitative differences. No bacterium will ever write a book arguing that bacteria are essentially equivalent to human beings. The fact that Mr Gray’s book exists seems to contradict its own premise.

His strict determinism I find equally unconvincing. According to Gray, determinism extends into the realm of the intellect. There is no free play of mind. People are no more responsible for their perspectives or beliefs than they are culpable for their actions. If this is so, of course, then there’s no point arguing. There’s no point trying to convince anyone to change his mind about anything, and Gray himself can take no credit for his own accidental illumination. Nonetheless, I insist that I can choose to punch a stranger in the face or not. I can likewise choose to endorse Gray’s notion of determinism or not, and the choice I make will have consequences. It will inform my view of life, my interactions with others, my own behaviors and choices. If this is so – if I can freely make even small and relatively inconsequential adjustments in my perspectives or ideas, and if these changes can change me in ways that I would not have changed otherwise – then strict determinism is false.

*

I do give Gray points for his critique of the supernaturalism implicit in popular forms of naturalism today, by which I mean the tendency among certain materialists to pretend that the natural world is a closed system outside of which human beings operate almost as if they were themselves gods. “Cities,” Gray counters, “are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The Internet is as natural as a spider’s web.” Per Montaigne, nothing can be anything but according to nature. However, the lesson for Gray should be to amplify his sense of what nature is – to broaden it to encompass personhood, intellect, moral responsibility, love – rather than to reduce his estimate of man.

In the end there’s something cynical and false in Gray’s posturing as he steps down from the mountain to address the human animals that crowd non-volitionally around him: “You don’t want to hear it, dear species,” he seems to say, “but the sad truth is that no one – absolutely no one – got it right except for Schopenhauer, and of course me….” Chesterton, referring to the John Grays of his own day (1933) writes: “No sceptics work sceptically; no fatalists work fatalistically; all without exception work on the principle that it is possible to assume what it is not possible to believe. No materialist who thinks his mind was made up for him, by mud and blood and heredity, has any hesitation in making up his mind.”

Marginalia, no.290

The abnormal expression of mirth is shown in clownishness, levity, and caricaturing of persons… When excessive it can be restrained by devoting more time to serious and practical principles of science. If deficient it can be cultivated through the study of wit and humor.

~ John T. Miller, Applied Character Analysis

The arch-phrenologist Johann Spurzheim located mirthfulness in a particular corner of the forehead where, he said, Voltaire, Rabelais and Sterne each showed a considerable bulge. It’s a little known fact that all three were solemn and severe children who only developed a sense of humor after years of study.

Planet Doug

You are free to imagine anything you like about an imaginary world. A former philosophy professor of mine – a man with a Tennessee drawl and a permanent smirk – liked to pick on one of my fellow students for purposes of illustration. This student he nicknamed ‘Planet Doug’ and all kinds of unlikely things were posited about him: that he was composed entirely of methane; that he orbited a giant ham sandwich; that he played host to life forms all of which resembled Harpo Marx.

It seems to me that the old notion that “every man is a microcosm, and carries the whole world about him” (in Sir Thomas Browne’s phrase) began to lose its vogue around the time that the actual globe, by conquest, exploration and trade, became more of a known quantity. I’m not sure why this should be the case, but maybe we only liked to think of ourselves as little worlds when the comparison suggested something mysterious and exciting.

It’s probably no coincidence that the shores and mountains of distant continents gave themselves up to the indignity of being named and described at the same time as the components of our physical bodies. Just as their gold and fame-hungry contemporaries were crossing seas to pin their names to various islands and territories, surgeons and doctors of the Renaissance were claiming rights of discovery to our internal organs.

F. Gonzalez-Crussi identifies a number of these inward provinces in A Short History of Medicine. The Fallopian tube, for example, was named for Gabriel Fallopius (1523-1562), and the Eustachian tube for Bartolomeo Eustachio (1520-1574). These two are well-known, the Columbuses of human anatomy. Less familiar is Johann Georg Wirsung (1589-1643) who discovered Wirsung’s duct, the “execretory duct of the pancreas,” or Adriaan van den Spieghel (1578-1625) who first described Spieghel’s lobe, “the quadrate lobe of the liver.” Glisson’s capsule, another part of the liver, was named for Francis Glisson (1597-1677).

The Sylvian fissue (“the deep cleft that separates the temporal lobe of the brain from the frontal and parietal lobes above it”) is named for Franciscus Sylvius (1614-1672). The Graafian follicle, near the surface of the ovary, is named for Regnier de Graaf (1641-1673). Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) gets credit for discovering Haller’s ring, a tiny circle of blood vessels in the eye. Jakob Henle (1809-1885), who thrived at the close of the era, is responsible for Henle’s loop, which Golzalez-Crussi informs us is “a part of the renal tubules.”

If you, like me, never suspected that you owned any renal tubules, you do. Take up a magnifying glass to examine them and you will find a corner labeled with Henle’s name, quite legibly. I’m afraid that’s the way things are nowadays. You may pine for auld lang syne when people were pleased to think of themselves as rather mysterious microcosms of a rather mysterious Macrocosmos, but those days are over with. What you thought were your own undiscovered, dragon-haunted hinterlands have already been visited and claimed by others.

Marginalia, no.288

The ascetic is the inverted libertine.

~ Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century

Montaigne observes that “it is much easier to go along the sides, where the outer edge serves as a limit and a guide, than by the middle way, wide and open.” It seems true, at least, that one extremity is more readily traded for another than for anything in-between. The righteous Puritan is less tempted by lukewarm agnosticism than by outright devil-worship.