On mornings when I'm feeling particularly disgusted with the political discourse taking place in our country I instinctively reach for the Adams-Jefferson Letters. If I just need a dose of history I read from the first half of the book. If I'm in a more philosophical mood I flip to the later letters when both of these giant thinkers were through (pretty much) with politics and were living lives of the mind. If politicians today would keep a copy of these powerful ideas on their desks and consult the two great founders every once and a while it's possible that the far right and the far left nonsense would become less influential and be drowned out by reasonable compromise. I know, I know, it's a foolish dream.
One thing for sure there would be more fine wine in the halls of power. Jefferson was an oenophile to be sure and kept an impressive wine cellar. Adams was slightly more sober, although in one letter he's concerned he shipped more bottles and casks home than was legal under the import laws of the day. He cancelled part of his purchase.
Massachusetts has changed little regarding wine in the past two hundred and thirty years. It has been unlawful for me, happily living near magnificent vineyards, to ship even a single bottle to my friends in Massachusetts. They have missed out, not only on my generosity, but also on the treat of enjoying unique vintages unavailable on the east coast. But I am happy to say that all this has changed in 2015. Finally the law allows deliveries into the great Commonwealth. I am personally celebrating by sending gifts to several wino friends. John Adams would certainly approve.
An unexpected treat in The Adams-Jefferson Letters are the letters of Abigail Adams. Her's are clever and compassionate as well as insightful and bold. Her relationship with Jefferson was one of great mutual respect yet she never shies away from speaking her mind when she feels her husband has been treated unfairly. And she was also responsible for mending the rift and misunderstandings between the two ex-presidents that resulted in the resuming of their correspondence after a long period of silence between them. Thanks to her admiration for Jefferson, and her sensitive personal notes to him after his daughter died, the two men were able to once again write to each other and it's those later letters from one who worried he suffered from "senile garrulity", Jefferson, to Adams bragging that his own "senectutal loquacity" is no match for his old friend's ramblings that produced the final thoughts and philosophies of their long lives. The massive exchange of wisdom of their last years is a testament to their respective genius.
New members of congress are traditionally given a copy of the Jefferson Bible. In his office at the White House he took a razor to his bible and cut out only the words he considered from the mouth of Jesus. He discarded everything else; the miracles and the supernatural, the virgin birth and even the resurrection. He famously wrote to Adams that getting rid of the nonsense and magic and keeping only the true Christian ideas was "as distinguishable as picking diamonds from a dunghill."
Perhaps instead it's time to provide each office in the Capital Building, at the very least, the last few chapters of the thought provoking ideas of our second and third presidents. I know they continue to enlighten me.
Another book that I have been reluctant to put on the shelf is Seneca's Dialogues and Letters. Seneca was a Roman writer, philosopher, statesman as well as the guardian of the young, before he became infamous, Nero. And then when Nero did become a tyrant Seneca was a reluctant advisor and political consultant. Nero eventually forced him to commit suicide for reasons that will always be murky.
This slim volume is a gem of a book. I can open it at random and always glean a sage piece of simple advice. One morning last week Seneca reminded me "People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy."
After reading that I took the day to myself and ignored my phone and emails. I am easily corrupted! But on this particular day it was Seneca who corrupted me. I cut through the distractions and answered only to my own thoughts. It turned out to be a very productive day of writing and thinking, walking and wondering. A glass of wine at sunset sealed the day. But only a single glass because "But excess in any sphere is reprehensible."
The chapter I return to again and again is On The Shortness Of Life. Not that I am confounded by impermanence, it's that I don't ever want to get too far away from the realization that it may all come to an end at any time, and without warning or reason. I don't want to "squander" my time and when I catch myself doing just that I become irritable and off-balance.
As I sit here writing this morning, while the wind blows off the ocean and the rain steadily falls, I am frustrated by all the petty errands I have ahead of me today. They all seem unimportant and I feel like they drag me away from what is crucial to my sense of balance. What would Seneca say? "Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing that is harder to learn."
To learn to live and actually do it! How hard can that be? Well... Very.
I have struggled for years to keep petty distractions at bay and I'm sure I will continue to be less than successful at deflecting the mundane. But sometimes it is the path where the greatest epiphanies occur and not at the end of the trail. The journey, as a wise philosopher once said, is the lesson.
The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing edited by Richard Dawkins is a fascinating collection of excerpts from books and essays from the greatest scientific minds of our times. Professor Dawkins' selection and introductions of short pieces from longer works has been responsible for a sizable increase in the volume of my modest library. After the first straight through reading I now pick chapters randomly which then causes me to go to Chaucer's or The Book Den and buy books from the scientists who sparked my curiosity. It is from this collection that I first discovered so many new, for me, ideas. I also came across scientists I was unfamiliar with like Richard Forty, David Deutsch and Kenneth Ford. Others I had read before like Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Steven Weinberg and Peter Atkins.
This book is packed with so many thought provoking subjects. I don't always completely understand every theory or concept but the enormity of ideas fills me with wonder. The scope of this book ranges from the submicroscopic and the workings of the tiniest particles that make up everything including our complex yet fragile selves to the massive superclusters of galaxies that are constantly spawning the birth of new stars. It encompass both creation and decay of the elements formed in exploding stars and the entropy that eventually and surely follows. There are chapters on plants and animals, atoms and consciousness, chemistry and evolution. There is enough in this book to keep me fascinated and curious for years.
Here is Albert Einstein writing about religion and science.
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
The first thing (Or maybe the second) that I'm going to do when I hit the lottery is make sure every high school library in the country has at least one copy. I don't think, or at least I didn't, that young kids realize how many directions you can go if you want to peruse a career in science. This book could open a lot of eyes. I wish I had it when I was in school. I just didn't understand how many options for scientific study were at my fingertips. This book presents so many interesting paths to follow and it oozes excitement and passion.
The other book that should be in every junior high school library is Dawkins' The Magic Of Reality. I've yet to read a better and more focused introduction to science. I think both these books could advance the cause of scientific education in America. Our future may very well depend on it.
There is always a poetry book on the night stand, sometimes two. For a long time it was The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers can be exhausting and his themes depressing and vicious. But his sharp and visceral honesty skewers my heart. His language is fertile and concise. He hardly ever wastes a word. He has fallen out of fashion lately but for a time he was viewed as a visionary by serious students of nature, both wild and human.
It takes effort to read Jeffers but the rewards are many. Often times I needed to reread a passage several times until the flow of words offered up layers of meaning.
When I read these poems I can't help picturing him standing near his house that he built himself in Carmel with stones he gathered from the cliffs and the sea. His beautiful wife, Una, waiting for his thoughts to form while watching him from a window as she sips Irish whiskey. To me it is a romantic scene. I never visit Carmel or Big Sur without lugging along Jeffers' massive collection of searing words. Sitting on a ledge by the ocean or near a trail by the coastal redwoods is where his poems should be devoured and studied. It is for me where they come most alive.
From his poem Tor House.
My ghost you needn't look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on the wind
With the mad wings and the day moon.
Then for a while I spent mornings sifting through Jim Harrison's collection, The Shape of the Journey. It's another book I can open at random and begin reading. Harrison's poems are wide ranging and not as raw as Jeffers' but I found overlapping themes. They both have a deep love of wildness but Harrison also uses nature as a restorative and immerses his life into the goings on of the out-of-doors world. Jeffers is more of a chronicler. Harrison has an exuberance towards his need to be involved in the workings of a river, a forest without trails, a swamp or a desert arroyo. Jeffers is a fierce eyed observer who can oftentimes remain just out of view.
Harrison's mind always seems to be whirring at a remarkable speed. Even his reflective moments have an urgency about them as if there is not going to be enough time to take everything in or to grasp it all. Life is speeding by and if its minutes and hours aren't consumed with passion we are living an undeveloped existence. I draw energy from Harrison's works. He provokes me to get off my chair and go out and jump in the ocean or tramp through the woods for a day. He tempts me to sit on a log for a few hours and to watch birds and listen for bears. He encourages being an active participant in your own life and in the often times mysterious workings of your brain. He ponders, questions and then acts. His poems are vibrant and full of real life; a jumping fish, a lumbering bear, an old heron and beautiful, just out of reach, women.
It is to Harrison I go when I am suffering from sloth and acedia. He ignites me. And after an hour with his words I find myself driving to the mountains with a bottle of wine and a heart full of expectation.
DANCING
After the passing of irresistible
music you must learn to make
do with a dripping faucet,
rain or sleet on the roof,
eventually snow,
a cat's sigh,
the spherical notes that float
down from Aldebaran,
your cells as they part,
craving oxygen.
The current book that I'm using to start my day is Map. The Collected and Last Poems of Wistawa Szymborska. She has been one of my favorite poets for a long time. I've been eagerly waiting for this volume to come out and bought it on the day is was released just a few weeks ago. I can't remember what first drew me to her work, possibly the writings of Czeslaw Miloz, but I already had read a few of her poems when it was announced that she won the Nobel Prize. Then her book, View With A Grain Of Sand, became available in English and my copy is now battered and worn and highlighted with a yellow marker.
I've always been interested in going to Poland, the birthplace of my father's parents. They came to this country before World War Two and farmed in Washington, MA. They struggled through the depression and my grandmother died before I was born. My grandfather, Anthony, who Dad claimed he named me after, even though he was Anthony too, lived on to be eighty-eight. My memories of him are few but vivid. He was an old man with a cane (That is still in a closet at the house on Ridge Ave) and white hair who spoke almost no English. He had a quick smile for my brother Michael and I when Dad brought us to visit him on Sunday mornings. It was after we skipped out early from church, just as communion was starting.
His eyes were lively and animated. He lived with my Aunt Virginia and Uncle Joe. We would find him sitting on a day bed on a closed-in porch listening to his tiny radio tuned to a polka station. Often there was a nip of whiskey on the sill. For some reason I always thought he slept there too. In summer the screens let in the breeze from the yard and little garden. In winter the storm windows looked out to the snowy sky and a wood stove in the next room kept him warm.
He would hug Michael and I in his old man arms and rub our faces against his day old white stubble. He had a dry clean smell that to this day I catch in the strangest of places. Dad said that he used to be the strongest man in the world. He is my connection to Poland and Szymborska's poems evoke for me images of what some of his life may have been like. The cadence of her verse reminds my of the conversations that went on in that house so long ago. The mix of Polish and English. The family news of the day, the old stories, the daily drama of lives being played out.
If I ever do make it to Poland I want to carry this book with me.
The book that has been bedside the longest and that I've brought with me on many travels is Emerson's Journals Volume Two. Emerson can be read anywhere, from the woods of the Berkshires to the shore of Walden Pond to the cliffs of Yosemite. Walden Pond you ask. Yes, after all he owned the property were Thoreau built his famous cabin. And Yosemite? He did travel there and met Galen Clark and John Muir. Muir he later referred to as a new type of Thoreau.
He is the first truly American philosopher. He saw the great potential of our democratic experiment. He was a booster of the powers of the American mind. He thought we could, and were going to, accomplish so much. This great thinker of Concord was the catalyst of intellectual thought when this country was just gaining a foothold in the world.
He essays are diamonds of prose. They are painstakingly crafted and packed to overflowing with the thoughts of an original and wild mind. They were first honed to perfection as lectures. They were talks given in packed theaters, lyceums and churches around the country. He was a big draw, the A. C. Grayling or Mark Twain of his day. Not necessarily subject wise but certainly he was a compelling speaker and I would imagine after hearing him give his speeches that later became his first books and pamphlets with the titles The American Scholar, Nature and Self Reliance, you walked out of the theater with a full brain.
It wasn't really that long ago, cosmically speaking, only one hundred and fifty or so years, that the halls overflowed with fans of the great orator. Today he would be all over YouTube and a guest on Bill Maher. And he would have a Twitter account and thesage@concord would offer his unique slices of wisdom like "It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them." Or, "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." He would flaunt his derision at the hundred and forty-four character restriction. He would have more followers than all those self-help charlatans out there these days who think a life philosophy can be condensed to a bumper sticker. You know who they are.
Compared to his essays the journals are more relaxed, more intimate and more humorous. But they too are jammed with wisdom. You constantly come across the nascent threads of brilliance that later find their way into his books. He opens himself up in his journals and is freer with both his criticisms and praises. He is mostly talking to his own ear but with an eye on the future printed page.
I have been a student of Emerson since college when I read his confession in Self Reliance that he liked the silent church much better than any preaching. And remember, he was doing the preaching before he relinquished his position.
That resonated deep with me on many levels. What, I mused, could possibly be said by any priest to me that would be more helpful and relevant to my inner life than my own deep personal thoughts and reflections? It became clear to me that God certainly wouldn't need to filter the meaning of my life through an intermediary. I was better off on my own when it came to comprehending my existence. I didn't need to sit in a church one hour a week. Where ever I was could be sacred. Which as I came to understand was the entire thrust of Emerson and his Transcendentalist buddies.
The short essay Self Reliance has been a favorite of mine ever since. I've lost track of how many copies I've bought and given away. It is a wonderful book to pass along. I read it at least once a year. It never fails to inspire me.
I treat the journals differently. They are more gossipy and unguarded. I see Emerson more as a regular guy with a curious and exuberant appetite for life. He sees lessons everywhere and rarely does a day go by where his experiences do not translate in to an affirmation of his singular philosophies.
Here is an entry that I love because I am constantly struggling with the distractions of a busy social life. I often find it difficult to take the time to seal myself away for a few hours of reading or writing. I hate to be absent from an event or party but at a certain point I find myself offering lame excuses as to why it's already time for me to leave. My friends, and I love them for it, try to coerce me into always staying longer and later than I originally intended. But in the back of my mind I know the sooner I get home the easier it will be to find a groove of relaxation and contemplation. In 1845 Emerson wrote,
"Frivolous reasons have allowance with all men & and with poets also, but no man says, I was reading Plato & therefore could not come; I had new rhymes jingling in my brain, and would not risk losing them."
If I told my friends that I had to go fix a door or finish some yard work or go to the bank they would understand that I was busy and reluctantly let me go on my way. But if I say that I can't stop thinking about finishing the new Saul Bellow collection of essays or that I have to get back to writing a story that is lodged in my head they would smile, not unsympathetically, and top off my drink. I can't help but think that our priorities often times are slightly skewed. Part of the malaise of society is that we are too busy with meaningless and unrewarding pursuits. There is not enough time in the day for self reflection because of all the useless folly and clutter that finds its way into our routines. Emerson says,
"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
Yes, the independence of solitude. Sitting on a massive slab of granite on the south fork of the Merced River, miles away from the nearest human, or just after sunrise wandering the foggy ocean cliffs near Sea Ranch, I can catch a slight perception of this independence. My mind becomes clearer as my thoughts slow down to a manageable volume. I can focus my concerns and eliminate the irritating mind dust that has accumulated to an uncomfortable level. Of course, as Emerson says, the trick is to live with that independence in the whirlwind of a normal life full on constant interactions with society. For me no easy task.
Six or eight months from now my night table will look a little different. Other books will have come and gone. The shelves in my study becoming richer and more disorganized as books migrate from the bedroom. I will take breaks from Symborska and the scientists as other authors intrude for a time. Ralph Waldo's words will wait for me to wake up one morning needing a dose of his wit and commentary on daily life.
Other books surely will be added to the pile and end up not being put away for a good while. Just a few days ago I pulled Peter Atkins' On Being off the shelf and moved to the bed-stand. I may not get to it for a few weeks and why I felt I needed to reread it I'm not quite sure. Perhaps I need a refresher on randomness and entropy. Subjects that I hate to stray too far away from.
A final stanza from Szymborska.
Division into sky and earth-
it's not the proper way
to contemplate this wholeness.
It simply lets me go on living
at a more exact address
where I can be reached promptly
if I'm sought.
My identifying features
are rapture and despair.
