Green Mountain Creek

Matt and I stand thigh-deep in one of the small streams that tumble down the eastern slopes of the Green Mountains.  Many of those streams, including this one, have carved steep gorges over the millennia.  As the water falls it strips away the sand and loam, leaving a course choked with jumbled boulders.

Every year a few more trees, undercut by the current, tip over into the stream, where they lodge against the boulders and form temporary dams.  As the water flows over those dams it digs deep plunge pools, bubbling and swirling for a few feet, then quickly settling into swift, clear, tea-colored glassy pools.  The water slows only long enough to catch its breath before it plunges again, stair-stepping down the mountain, moving the mountain itself downstream one grain of sand at a time.

Beside us, logs carpeted in moss play host to uncounted lives of plants and animals. Trees reach their branches down into the cleft cut by the river, searching for sunlight wherever they can in this steep gorge.  Small flies whirl restlessly across our vision.  Their blue wings and olive bodies seem an unnecessary and extravagant dash of color on something so small, so ephemeral.

Vermont is named for the greenness of its mountains, or les monts verts as the first French settlers called these ancient hills.  One of the rivers nearby is called the Lemon Fair, its name preserving the French sounds in misplaced English words.  A sweeping glance would call this place green, but it only takes a moment of slowing down to really look before you see all the rainbow represented here.

Much of the color is underwater, on the scales of the fine-featured trout that fin the current before us.  The native brook trout are dappled a vermiculated green above, fading to pale bellies below.  Their fins are slashed with bright red and white.  The rainbow trout, imported from the west coast, iridesce when a beam of sunlight finds its way down through the leaves and the water.  The young brown trout - far from their native Europe - shine like salmon.  Under the rocks small tan sculpin harvest tiny invertebrate meals.

Gray stones slide slower than glaciers down the bank, moving imperceptibly and irresistibly toward the sea.  On the bank, seven tiny mushrooms stand up, no taller than my thumb, their caps bright orange like yearling efts.

It is a perfect day.  We are grateful to receive it, grateful to be here, to stand in these waters as their life flows around us.

*****

As I think of standing in the river, I am reminded of this passage from Thoreau:

My friends Bill and Brian paddle the Concord River, as Thoreau once did.

“Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole, its silvery bark left on, and a dog at his side, rowing so near as to agitate his cork with our oars, and drive away luck for a season; and when we had rowed a mile as straight as an arrow, with our faces turned toward him, and the bubbles in our wake still visible on the tranquil surface, there stood the fisher still with his dog, like statues under the other side of the heavens, the only objects to relieve the eye in the extended meadow; and there would he stand abiding his luck, till he took his way home through the fields at evening with his fish. Thus, by one bait or another, Nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses [….] His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles."  H.D. Thoreau, A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers, (New York: Signet, 1961; emphasis mine) p. 31-32.

*****

I'm also reminded of a sentence I recently read in Stephanie Mills' book, Epicurean Simplicity:

“[F]ishers can be natural historians and waterside contemplatives par excellence."

By “fishers” she means those who fish, fishermen and fisherwomen and fisherchildren. This comes at the conclusion of a story in which she almost reprimanded a small boy who was catching fish for bait, but then decided not to do so. She was afraid he was catching too many, or juvenile fish that would not grow to maturity.  Later, she considered the fact that if he was fishing, he could well be learning about fish in a way no one else does.  She reports that she was glad she didn't reprimand him.  

It's true that in hunting and fishing some people learn practices of cruelty towards animals, or learn to regard animals instrumentally; but my experience is that most of the people I know who hunt and fish know a lot more about nature than the average person who does not.  Harvesting wild food often makes people naturalists, and can indeed make us much more "mindful carnivores" as Tovar Cerulli puts it.  Anecdotally, I find that hunting and fishing have made me less of a carnivore, and increasingly concerned with animal flourishing.  (The quote from Stephanie Mills is found in Epicurean Simplicity, published in Washington, Covelo, and London: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2002 p.125.)

 *****

Note: I think Matt intended his gesture of catching water in fun, but I like the way it looks like a gesture of gratefully receiving the waterfall.

Three Words About Writing: Plato, Emerson, Bugbee

Last weekend I was at a small writing conference in Vermont, where I was asked to give a meditation on writing with a love of wisdom.  Although I'm a philosophy professor, I'm not sure I have a bead on loving wisdom yet. 

(To paraphrase Thoreau, there are nowadays plenty of philosophy professors, but not so many lovers of wisdom.)

Instead, I offered a reflection on three ideas that matter for me as I write.  Here are three that I keep coming back to:

First, a word from Plato: "Follow the argument wherever it leads."  And try to find good interlocutors.  If you surround yourself with people who say "yes" to everything you say, your writing and your thinking will both atrophy.  If the trail leads uphill, it's no good to stay on the level path.  Plato seems to have used writing as a way of sketching out how one might begin to solve problems.  He didn't give answers so much as good questions.  His dialogues survive because they are such good invitations for us to try to work out the solutions ourselves.

Second, Emerson: Your journals are your savings accounts.  Your life is the way you earn deposits.  "If it were only for a vocabulary the scholar would be covetous of action," he wrote. "Life is our dictionary."  Without action, there is no experience; and without experience, the writer's vocabulary becomes continually narrower. Emerson wrote in fragments - very short essays, or sentences - in his journals, and when he sat down to write his essays and lectures, he found those fragments to be a rich vein of inspiration and even of finished work.

Finally, Bugbee: "Get it down."  Write forward; don't edit too much.  Keep writing, and as much as possible, write the way it comes.  Attend to experience as it is given, without trying too hard to color it or shape it.  Practice seeing, and seeing honestly, and write what you see.

This isn't by any means a whole course in writing, but it is a place to start.  And often, that's what writers need: to start.

Then keep writing.

"Life Is Our Dictionary"

"Authors we have in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, set sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers to replenish their merchantable stock. If it were only for a vocabulary the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary."

R.W. Emerson, "The American Scholar"

A Republic Without Education

“In a republic education is indispensable.  A republic without education is like the creature of imagination, a human being without a soul, living and moving blindly, with no just sense of the present or the future.  It is a monster.”

Charles Sumner, Massachusetts Senator, in “Reconstruction Again: The Ballot and Public Schools Open to All,” speeches in the Senate, on the Supplementary Reconstruction Bill, March 15 and 16, 1867.  TheWorks of Charles Sumner, Vol XI, (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1875) p. 156

Armed in Anxiety

My article on guns, fear, and virtue ethics, now accessible at The Chronicle of Higher Education: 

What do guns do for us? Many opponents of new gun legislation argue that they make us safer. Proponents of gun control hope to promote public safety by keeping guns out of the hands of bent young men who worship projectile power and senseless death. Most of our public-policy debates about guns have focused on safety, but in my opinion, not enough has been said about whether guns make us sound.

Our word "safe" has roots in the Latin word salvus, which means not just "secure from harm" but "whole, well, and thriving"—that is to say, sound. This is one of philosophy's oldest concerns, to examine and foster this kind of sound, flourishing human life. This question is at the heart of Aristotle's ethics, for example. The opening lines of his Nicomachean Ethics declare that it is possible to regard life as having a kind of excellence, a sense of human flourishing and wholeness to which all of our sciences contribute. As Aristotle puts it, failure to reflect on this will make us like people who shoot without considering their target. (Yes, he really says that.)....

Read the rest here.

What I Wish Penn State Would Do

Today Penn State, where I did some of my graduate studies, announced that they would begin making settlement offers to the victims of Jerry Sandusky's sexual assaults against children.

Years ago I read a story in one of the Toronto newspapers - I have not been able to track it down again - wherein a catholic diocese in Canada was being sued by First Nations people who had suffered from abusive policies when they were students in diocesan schools.

The newspaper asked the bishop whether he was concerned about the cost of settling the lawsuits. He replied that if the diocese had to sell all of its property to bring healing to the victims, that was not too high a price to pay. He added "the church isn't buildings but people. In the end, all we need is a table, a cup, and some books - and we really don't even need those."

His attitude is the one I wish my alma mater would adopt. The cost of settling lawsuits may seem high, but when you know you are in the wrong and you know your sins have caused great harm to children, is any price too high to pay?

Because a university similarly shouldn't think of itself as buildings but as a college, a group of people who come together to read and study. And for that all we need are some tables, some books, and maybe a few cups. Not much more. Everything else should be things with which we would gladly part if, in so doing, we can bring healing to those we have harmed, and better become the people we ought to be.

Newspapers in 1854

"[The reading and thinking] class has immensely increased. Owing to the silent revolution which the newspaper has wrought, this class has come in this country to take in all classes. Look into the morning trains...with them, enters the car the humble priest of politics, finance, philosophy, and religion in the shape of the newsboy....Two pence a head his bread of knowledge costs, and instantly the entire rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast."

R.W. Emerson, 1854.

Co-authorship in the Humanities

My friend and co-author John Kaag has just published this piece in today's New York Times.

I think John is right on the money: there aren't firm rules about this, but many times we've both been warned that co-authorship in the humanities will be regarded as a sign of weakness, of not being able to carry one's own weight.

Maybe it's true.  John and I both find that co-authorship make us better writers, so we must have been weak in some ways.  But I don't see why we shouldn't therefore do even more writing with others.