I learned to spell my name phonetically, from listening to my mother on the phone. She used to say, “B–as in Boy, E–as in Edward, Double-S–As in Sam, L-E-R.” So, after hearing myself saying that for the millionth time today, I decided to see where it comes from. It turns out, my mom (Mrs. Lea Bessler), may have been an undercover cop. If you notice, she is using the official NYPD phonetic alphabet–a dead giveaway. She loved donuts, used the word “vehicle” instead of car. She did have the most polished interrogation techniques out of all my friends’ moms–a technique involving bright lights (her makeup mirror), and a shower brush which was only brought out on special occasions and which she was always too afraid to use.
Quiet in the Library
July 11, 2008When did the whole “being quiet in the library” thing die? I sit in the Spuyten Duyvil branch of the New York Public Library, and for some reason, all the librarians (are they still called that?) are constantly speaking at top volume. The silence is broken every 5 minutes or so by a librarian near me answering somebody’s question about the local buses, or where they might find some video tape. Everyone stops what they are doing, and looks up. Maybe since the advent of earplug technology, they figure they don’t need to whisper anymore. Anyone have any ideas?
Finished Buddhism, Starting Omnivore’s Dilema
May 12, 2008Finished Walden. Finished Buddhism. Starting Omnivore’s Dilema. The obvious influence of buddhism on Thoreau was great. I particularly enjoyed the empahsis on individual growth, and the downplaying of organized liturgy.
Higher Laws
April 12, 2008
The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.
- Henry David Thoreau in Walden
Just yesterday I was speaking with one of the fathers in the class I help with at the Museum. The topic for the day was snakes. There was some discussion of the fear–which some of the parents had–of snakes. “You want to touch the snake, Johnny? Nothing to be afraid of. We discussed how this clued the children into the idea that there was something to be afraid of. Without this, the children have no natural fear of these smaller creatures. Many of the children show no reluctance to touch and hold the cocroaches, millipedes, pill bugs, and snakes we have. The parents were most concerned about the snakes biting them or their children. They have no such concern when handling the chinchillas–one of which bites (and chews!) her holder without warning, often drawing blood.
I began the second class, by showing as many of the parents and children as I could, the tiny teeth on the articulated skeleton of a similarly-sized snake. They are obviously not meant to pierce the skin, rather to grasp prey when working the prey head-first into the snake’s mouth. Still, there remained this fear amongst many of the parents.
I began to wish–to myself at first, and then aloud to my coworkers–that the garter snakes would bite one or several of the parents, so they would see how harmless the bite is. This was met with some skepticism. I was bitten countless times by garter snakes, milk snakes, and water snakes when I was a child, and that is how I learned that they are not to be feared.
The greatest naturalists and most important conservationists al started out, as children or young adults, hunting, fishing, or otherwise getting their hands on animals in ways which today we would not condone. Darwin, collected animal specimens while on his voyage. Theodore Roosevelt was an avid hunter and collector of “specimens.” Take this famous passage from Aldo Leopold:
In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy; how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks.
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
Leopold, Aldo: A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, 1948, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987, pp. 129-132.
I am not codoning hunting. Rather, I believe that, once again, we have skipped over the middle road. We, as a society who cherishes the natural world, have swung too far to the other side in protecting her. We have placed her on a pedistal. Now, she is known only from a distance. Most men now only know her as they know history–from what they read in books and are taught in school. Very few experience nature. The children don’t know that garter snakes are harmless because they were never bitten by one, and have never opened a snakes mouth with a credit card to look.
Also, because children never exert their dominance over animals and nature, they don’t place them in the category of things which require care and compassion. If snakes are dangerous, they can obviously fend for themselves, and require no protection from us. Regardless, reality is that we are the dominant animals on this planet. When man is not allowed to internalize, experientially, that dominance, it is difficult for him to feel compassion for, and a sense of guardianship over other creatures.
Remembering Sounds
March 28, 2008“At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodious …”
-Thoreau, Walden, Sounds
I am itching to go somewhere where it is quiet enough to hear such things. I have not heard silence in a long time. I tried “going” there in my mind. I can picture the scene, but cannot hear the sounds. Why can’t I imagine the sounds?
Children Who Play Life
March 28, 2008Before I was a scientist, I was an artist. The world, my world, was dominated by emotion. I spent my days drawing and painting. I saw the world, not for the objects within it, but for their colors and lines. I loved the way paint flowed from my brush, and the way a line, the simplest of forms next to the point, both divided and focused a page. I thought in the language of asthetics. “If it could be said with words, we would not need the painting,” I used to say.
That idea spoke to me. I finally understood abstraction, and it was very dear to me. My eyes opened to a new world, previously hidden to me–hidden to the masses. I bathed in my new understanding.
All that changed, I’m not sure when and why. I lost that “true sight” somewhere along the way. Thoreau has reminded me, though.
“Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.”
- Thoreau, Walden, Where I Lived and What I Lived For
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
-Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
Walden: Reading
March 25, 2008
Well, had I known what awaited me in the next chapter of Walden, I wouldn’t have gone on and on about how poorly-versed I am in the classics. Now I feel like a complete illiterate!
“The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.”
Thoreau goes on to discuss the virtues of the classics. He equates reading the classics with actually making acquaintance with their authors.
“For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed … I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him–my next neighbor and I never heard him speak …”
He has answered my questions, and more, he inspired me! Not just to wade through the classics rather than to skim them, but to bathe in them. Perhaps the skimming may be a means to an end. To be honest with myself, I must see that the goal is not to read, but to understand.
“The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
I have asked my questions and Thoreau has answered them. I feel as though I have spoken with the man.
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!”
