Raspberries, Books, and Eudaimonia

Sunny harvesting black raspberries

Too tired after a very busy bookshop day to make another batch of jam on Wednesday evening, I fell asleep over a book until awakened by high winds and rain battering the front porch windows. Time to close windows and go to bed. Up early in the morning, there was time for jam-making, even for a second cup of coffee. 

Mixed with Bardenhagen strawberries

Coming to a rolling boil

My evening reading this week is The Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy, by Jane Brox, which is not the idyllic escape reading you might imagine from the title. Her grandparents came as immigrants, mother’s parents from Italy, father’s from what was then Syria, and life was not a bowl of cherries for anyone. As the author saw local history, stories of “failure” flowed through the lives of valley inhabitants, from indigenous peoples forced out by Europeans to later small farm operators pressured to sell out for financial reasons. Where one generation struggled to make a living, newcomers brought with them (or adopted) different ways of life, and the older ways of living on the land were supplanted by newer methods and technologies, as well as suburban encroachment. 

There was no way to compete with crops being grown more cheaply and efficiently on better soils, or soils that simply had not yet been exhausted. The poorer upland farms were the first to go, though I still see one now and again—a handful of cattle wandering a rocky slope or picking out grasses among the pines, a wrackline of saved, rusted machinery alongside the house. One light selves the night, and every time I pass by I wonder who or how?

- Jane Brox, In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy 

The author’s parents hung on in the stony valley. Early on, the family’s original 35 acres deeded to an immigrant grandfather in 1902, though small by standards farther west, was large enough to sustain a dairy herd. When the dairy operation was no longer feasible, her father kept working the orchards (mainly apples) and fields of the popular vegetables (he saved Hubbard squash seed every year) that the family sold at their roadside farmstand each year. Jane made a place in the stand for fresh herbs, but it was corn and tomatoes and beans, squash and pumpkins that the customers wanted. Those and the apples.

Anyone who would plant an orchard must be undaunted by time, willing to wait long years with little chance of seeing the finest seasons. And since an orchard is land narrowed to one crop only, anyone who would plant an orchard must abide by the final decisions. The chosen rootstock, size, variety, the methods of pruning, are promises that can’t be gone back on, promises requiring care to the end.

An orchard is a commitment.

A third-generation Leelanau farmer grows cherries around my home on land leased from another neighbor, but Jane and her sister left their Massachusetts farm, while their brother’s drug use, celibacy (no children to help on the farm), and general unreliability made him an unlikely candidate for another farming generation. Her parents growing old, Jane came home and tried to work with her brother but found it impossible. Then their father died. 

Jane Brox is a poet. (Her father had a hard time seeing writing as work—the fate of many artists whose parents shake their heads over their children's life choices.) Because she lives by words and employs them so masterfully, her stories of “failure” have a beauty not found in most stories of what the world deems success, and even if history is a tragic progression through time (as it so often seems), surely the finding and sharing and preserving of beautiful moments is a worthwhile life’s work. But I have only just begun reading the second book in the Brox trilogy so cannot tell you where it will go in the end. 

My current morning reading (one book for bedtime, another to start a new day) pleases me in a different way.

Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life was written for a popular audience by one of the foremost classicists in England, Edith Hall, a professor at Kings College, London. Dr. Hall, however, the first woman to have been awarded the Erasmus Medal of the European Academy, is no narrow scholar, and the way she champions Aristotle is, to me, absolutely delightful--undoubtedly because (I admit) it affirms my own preference for Aristotle over Socrates and Plato. 

In her introduction, Hall directly addresses the question of Aristotle’s views on women and slaves, the most troublesome parts of his philosophy for those of us who love all the rest. “I stress,” she writes, “Aristotle’s consistency in arguing that all opinions must always be open to revision."

If you receive incontrovertible evidence that your opinion is wrong, then changing your mind, which some people might condemn as inconstancy, is worthy of high praise. ...[So] I like to think that if we could talk to Aristotle, we could persuade him to revise his opinion on the female brain.

- Edith Hall, Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

(And his opinion of slavery, as well, I would add.)

Hall admires Aristotle for the same reasons I hold his writings dear: Aristotle did not see human embodiment as loathsome or regrettable, and he neither accepted nor promulgated absolute rules for behavior. (Dr. Hall finds his writings in many ways “very modern.”) He was interested in the entire physical world (not only life in the polis), in the senses and the emotions, and he was very concerned with the practical matter of how human beings could live good lives.

What was a good, happy life? How could it be achieved? Aristotle wondered about and pondered many aspects of the universe but perhaps this above all—eudaimonia, the good life.

Aristotle thought that general principles are important, but without taking into account the specific circumstances, general principles can often be misleading. This is why some Aristotelians call themselves ‘moral particularists.’ Each situation and dilemma requires detailed engagement with its nitty-gritty particulars.

I love Aristotle’s metaphysics, in that there are no ghostly (Platonic) Forms apart from matter, and I love his idea of the soul (the beginning of action) and his fascination with all of living nature, but it is the primacy of his ethics that, for me, too, makes his philosophy important. Edith Hall’s contention is that his way of looking at Aristotelian ethics is as relevant today as it was for the ancient Greeks. 

I am only in the initial pages of this book but already so excited by it that I couldn’t wait to write something here on the blog and have ordered a couple new paperback copies for store stock. Not that I expect everyone to start loving philosophy, but doesn’t everyone want to be happy? And what if, as Aristotle believed, it is impossible to be happy without trying also to be good? How can you live in such a way as to be happier, no matter what your life situation? 

Confession: I do not wake up happy every day. I miss my life partner, the Artist. Nightmare gremlins can hang on into the morning dark, too. Then, taking only one day off from my bookshop a week this summer and still having a dog to exercise, laundry to do, grass to mow, and gardens to water and weed, I occasionally feel overwhelmed, because whatever needs doing in my home or business, if I don't do it, it doesn't get done.

So it takes dog kisses and good coffee to put me in a better morning mood and remind me what a fortunate life I have. My own bookshop? Sunny Juliet? An old farmhouse with trees and flowers and room for Sunny to play? How lucky is that? It's the life the Artist and I dreamed about for years before we were able to make the dream come true, and I still have everything but him—which is a huge, unfillable lacuna, but still, every moment and every inch of my life is enriched by memories of our life together.

Picking berries and making jam, which seems today like a never-ending task, will soon be at an end for another year, and the fruits of my labors will last all winter long. Come January, I'll be spreading summer sunshine on my toast and sharing it with family and friends. And yes, I can afford to become a sustaining member of Interlochen Public Radio, too. I don’t want to imagine northern Michigan without that resource, and thinking about Aristotle and eudaimonia has inspired me to step up. 

Life is not always easy, but it is good.

Sunny says, "Life is good, and ricotta is delicious!"