Incidents and Intervals from My Summer Life

Country morning scene

Dog and Gardens and Local Happenings

It’s been a beautiful summer so far and a busy one, too, but Sunny and I got to our agility session on Monday with Coach Mike and did better than we had done the week before. Mike says a lot of people don’t want to believe that when the dog makes a mistake, it’s almost always the handler who is at fault. I believe it! I know "our" mistakes are almost always mine!

The flying puppy!

Sunny doesn’t make mistakes when I give her the right cues. The problem is that every little move I make is a “cue” for her. But it’s a good workout for us both.

 

It's time for phlox and daisies in my front yard, while the backyard garden peas are finishing up and purple-podded beans coming on strong. I like the purple beans because the flowers are pretty and the beans easier to see when it’s time to pick but turn green when cooked.

Color contrast is helpful sometimes.

Tuesday evening was the last of four events in the Summer Writers Series sponsored by the Friends of the Leelanau Township Library, all held at the beautiful Willowbrook Mill in Northport. Featured author this week was Stephen Lewis, his latest book a historical novel set in 17th-century New England, From Infamy to Hope. 

Once more at the lovely
Willowbrook Mill - before the event

Stephen Lewis and sound guy Al Noftz - great silent exchange!

Author-interviewer Greg Nobles and guest author Stephen Lewis

Stephen Lewis pointed out that many of the issues of pre-Revolutionary America face us again today, the large, overarching one that of the separation of church and state. Anne Hutchison was found guilty of heresy, excommunicated, and banished from Massachusetts for daring to argue (intelligently) with Governor John Winthrop. Our Founding Fathers thought they had protected us from a return to religious autocracy, but time and the November ballot box will tell if their plan for our freedom will endure.

Meanwhile, Bookstore Daze

 

One day last week a little boy seemed entranced when given a bookmark to go in his newly purchased book. He told me solemnly, “I never had a bookmark before” and thanked me profusely. On his way out the door, he called back another hearty “Thank you!” Who would have thought such a little thing could make such an impression? His first bookmark!

On Saturday, when a woman asked me for a book of poetry with woodcut engravings, I pulled something right off the shelf that suited her to a T. “You made my day,” she told me, adding, “and I hope I made yours.” I replied, “Your saying that made my day!”

 

Then there was the man whose wife looked dubiously at the book he had selected and asked him, “Couldn’t you find it online?” Did she think it would be cheaper online? I kept my mouth shut. He bought the book.

 

When was it that I started reading Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb? My reading was done in stolen moments between bookstore customers, so it took me quite a while, but it was a most satisfying experience! I was also quite satisfied to find for myself the exact quote from Henri Bergson that Taleb could not give word-for-word on page 308 of Antifragile. Taleb says he often “follows” what he calls “Bergson’s razor,” as if it is a rule, when actually it is a description of a lifetime search for clarity of an idea. What would these two have made of each other, Bergson and Taleb, had they been able to sit down over dinner for conversation? Thoughts like this, along with literary quests, keep my mind active – as does figuring sales tax in my head, which would be harder except that it's been 6% ever since 1993 when I started in business.

 

The very day after the foregoing thoughts, I discovered a copy of The Black Swan and dove into it, finding in the prologue another Bergsonian idea: namely, in Taleb’s words, 

 

What are our minds made for? It looks as if we have the wrong user’s manual. Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect…. Consider that thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy, that our predecessors spent more than a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals….

 

Bergson had this insight over a century ago. As active creatures, we did not evolve brains for metaphysics but for survival. Alas! Again I find no entry for ‘Bergson’ in the index to The Black Swan, which is a minor quibble but only goes to illustrate Taleb’s point that individuals who “got it right” are often not remembered for their prescient contributions when labels of “greatness” are being distributed ex post facto.

 

And as a matter of randomness, a random thought occurs to me about a woman who was just here looking for one specific title she hoped to find (always a long shot). She asked about it, and when told I had never seen that book, she left without so much as a glance at the books all around her – depriving herself of the opportunity to meet with the unexpected and wonderful. Some people are on such narrow missions (while on vacation!) that they deny themselves the possibility of serendipity.

 

But then there was the young woman who told her father, as he was paying for her book along with his own, “Libraries and used bookstores are the backbone of our country.” At my urging, she wrote her spoken words in my guestbook. When I sometimes feel discouraged, it’s good to read comments left behind by real book people. And really, I've had more words of appreciation this summer that ever before. "This is the highlight of my vacation," another customer told me, and that kind of mutual satisfaction makes my life's work worthwhile.

 

But now, without further ado, my Books Read list for July 2024. July is busy in the shop in Northport and busy at home in the yard, and while the days are long, there are never enough hours in them for reading, so these books are only #110 through #116 on my list for the year. 

Books Read, July 2024

 

Woolley, Edward Mott. Roland of Altenburg (fiction). Heir to the throne of a small European principality comes to America disguised as a commoner and falls in love with a young woman who is already engaged to someone else. No one knows the prince’s true identity. He is loathe to return to his constrained and formal life but must when his uncle, the reigning monarch, dies. Fast forward: The young engaged woman comes to visit Altenburg. Any reader can see that she and the prince will end up together, but who could have foreseen all the melodramatic cliff-hangers that precede the happy ending? Published inb 1904 by Herbert S. Stone & Co. in Chicago, my copy was printed by R. R. Donnelly & Sons, famous for their Lakeside Press editions. There are “classic” paperback reprints available online, but who would want one of those?

 

Patterson, Susan & Susan DiLallo with James Patterson. Things I Wish I Told My Mother (fiction). When I am buried alive in old books in Northport and have (beloved) weekend company and have, besides, a couple of editing jobs at home for understandably eager (not to say impatient) clients, I look for easy bedtime reading, and this novel filled the bill, although when I started reading it, I had been expected a memoir and was surprised by the style. Oh, well, it was very entertaining. Good way to end a summer day after an afternoon at the beach with my sisters. Can you say "minivacation"?

 

Hannah, Kristin. The Women (fiction). Hannah knows how to tell a gripping story and does so in this novel. The central character is a young woman who enlists in the Army to follow her brother to Vietnam, having not a clue what awaits her there. American re-entry after two tours of duty as a nurse is almost as traumatic as was her time “in-country,” but when she looks for help she is told over and over that “There were no women there”! This story could hardly have been told better if the writer had been through it all herself. It reads as though she had been.

 

Yourcenar, Marguerite. A Coin in Nine Hands (fiction). Is this a novel or a collection of interlocking short stories? The semirealistic setting is Rome in the eleventh year of Mussolini’s dictatorship. There is an assassination attempt. A ten-lira coin passes from hand to hand and links one character to another, sometimes tangentially, other times in more essential ways. Yourcenar, first woman admitted to the French Academy, also wrote Memoirs of Hadrian, an amazing fictional tour de force that no serious reader should miss.

 

Perelman, S.J. The Last Laugh (nonfiction). Ah, yes, the humor books of yesteryear! What wonderful comfort reading they make, especially when the writer is as witty as Perelman!

 

Adams, Katharine. Red Caps and Lilies (fiction). Historical fiction ‘romance’ (in the broad sense) was good bedtime reading during a busy, busy week. Remarkably light reading, considering the time period – the French Revolution! Also remarkable was the author’s ability to sympathize with both aristocrats and revolutionaries, though not with the Terror.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (nonfiction). Although my beloved Henri Bergson rates only the briefest of mention in Taleb’s book, I cannot overemphasize my fascination with and appreciation for the ideas expressed in Antifragile. It would have helped me in the early pages had I realized there was a glossary at the end of the book (I have not yet read Taleb’s bestselling earlier work, The Black Swan, and so was unfamiliar with much of his terminology), but I persevered and feel enriched and -- in a sense, in some aspects of my life – even vindicated by not only his insights into risk management, but also his expressions concerning the choices all of us make in our lives. Despite his analytic approach, this author does not believe that if something is legal (read, “not illegal”), nothing can be said against doing it. He believes in courage, and he believes in shame. What a breath of fresh air in these times of so many shameless cowards in public life! But read the book! Please! And/or any of his others, which I will be reading, also. 

For now, remember the idea of antifragility. (I wrote about books as antifragile in a previous post.) That idea pervades Taleb’s work, as duration pervaded the work of Henri Bergson, the philosopher who wrote, 

A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said. And he has said only one thing because he has seen only one point: and at that it was not so much a vision as a contact: this contact has furnished an impulse, this impulse a movement, and if this movement, which is as it were a kind of swirling of dust taking a particular form, becomes visible to our eyes only through what it has collected along its way, it is no less true that other bits of dust might as well have been raised and that it would still have been the same whirlwind. Thus a thought which brings something new into the world is of course obliged to manifest itself through the ready-made ideas it comes across and draws into its movement; it seems thus, as it were, relative to the epoch in which the philosopher lived; but that is frequently merely an appearance. The philosopher might have come several centuries earlier; he would have had to deal with another philosophy and another science; he would have given himself other problems; he would have expressed himself by other formulas; not one chapter perhaps of the books he wrote would have been what it is; and nevertheless he would have said the same thing. 

― Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics

Sunrise,

Sunset....