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!"

Three Books For Those Lost in the Wilderness

[Note: This is a post I was working on over a week ago. It may not be "finished," but I'm tweaking it slightly and posting it today to clear the pipeline.]

 

Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, by David Abram (2011)

 

The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs, by Tristan Gooley (2015)

 

Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, by Susan Cain (2022)

 

Anyone who loves philosophy or has had any serious relationship with it at all is at heart, I believe, either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Neither of these ancients gave us a perfect philosophy: Aristotle defended slavery, and Plato believed philosophers should rule the people with lies. The history of philosophy, however, is usually seen as a gradual development, with each major philosopher in turn commenting on the thought of those who went before, accepting some parts of what they said and wrote, rejecting others, and building on what they keep. 

This oversimplified evolutionary picture of human thought reminds me of the oversimplified cartoons of the evolution of human beings, the ones that begin with an ape and gradually, as the ape marches across the page from left to right, more upright with every step, become what we recognize as our own species. We don’t see evolution as scrapping its work at a certain point and going back to the drawing board or going off on tangents, but I believe false starts, discards, and tangents are very much a part of the evolution of philosophical thought. 

 

Let me go back to my beginning today, only two paragraphs ago, and say this: I see philosophers across the ages, again and again, going back either to Aristotle or to Plato. That is, either recognizing that we are part of the natural world and find our truth there (Aristotle) or escaping into fantasies of disembodied, inaccessible truths presumed to be hiding behind the world of illusions in which we live (Plato). I see in the rejection of Cartesian dualism a return to Aristotle, who believed everything that lived had a soul. Even a turnip. Plato, infamously (as I see it), was uninterested in anything outside the life of the polis. Man in society: nothing else counted for him. His thought focused exclusively, that is, on man as separate from nature, as if nature were irrelevant. 

 

So you see where I come down, despite Aristotle’s defense of slavery (one of his worst arguments) and his unenlightened view of women (study of biology barely begun at the time). Now for today's books.

I’ve written already of Susan Cain’s Bittersweet, and I’ll come back to it later in this post, so I want to begin with David Abram. 

As I read Abram's accounts of hiking in the mountains of New Mexico, they are familiar to me from my daily walks here in the Arizona high desert, and at the same time his thoughts recall to me the thought of philosophers I have loved: he hasn’t mentioned Aristotle or Bergson (would no doubt object to the latter’s dualism), but halfway through the book I come upon names that had already been ringing in my head: Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty, Mark Johnson. 

 

Sentience is not an attribute of a body in isolation; it emerges from the ongoing encounter between our flesh and the forest of rhythms in which it finds itself…. Human awareness could not exist without a human body, true, but it could no more exist in the absence of ground, leaf, and flowing water. 

 

-      David Abram, Becoming Animal

 

Nothing in the natural world is a machine, not our body or anything else it encounters, and so we are always in dialogue, necessarily, even if unconsciously – with the slope of the hill, the rabbit that starts and bounds away, even, Abram believes, with the rocks and the air and the sun.

 

(Where I think Abram would find Bergson’s thought congenial is in the distinction between lived time and clock time and in Bergson’s rejection of intellectual analysis as a means of discovering ultimate reality, while he very much appreciated its use in practical problem-solving. Will Abram use the term ‘intuition’ as I proceed in the book? I am about halfway at present. People have called Bergson anti-intellectual, but that is a gross misreading and distortion of his work. Bergson saw intellect as practical and necessary; he rejected it as a tool for metaphysical understanding.)

 

When I love a book, I find myself wanting to quote whole pages – and almost every page – but I will move quickly now to Tristan Gooley. The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs is less philosophical, more practical. Gooley teaches us how to find our way (in the northern hemisphere) by the stars at night and by numerous daytime methods. He calls our attention to shadows and to the wind, to fog and clouds and lichens and algae, to shapes of trees and what kind of wildflowers, weeds, and crops are growing around us. Even rocks have stories to tell us: their size, where they lie, whether sharp or rounded. Many of his examples come from the U.K., rather than the U.S., and he gives only common names rather than Latin names of plants, but the general lessons are transferrable.

 

My hiking partner and I (and our dogs) climbed a new hill the other day, and since I’d been reading Gooley’s book I was much more aware of the clouds moving above us and the delight of walking through an invisible river of cooler air flowing over the hill. The Lost Art is not a book to read once but something to study so that the lessons have time to sink in. Here is a relatively simple lesson to apply to noticing wildflowers:

 

The first general rule is that if you come across two banks facing in opposite directions, one with a profusion of different wildflowers and the other with relatively few, then you have a strong clue that the popular one is south-facing.

 

-      Tristan Gooley, The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs

 

As I say, that lesson seems simple. It’s the ones about stars and clouds and wind that I will need to review multiple times. 

 

These two very different books, for me, complement each other beautifully. There is so much to learn from Gooley’s observations and experience. And when I read Abram, happy tears often come to my eyes. 

 

And those happy tears (were you surprised by them?) are my reason for connecting these two nature books with Susan Cain’s Bittersweet. Cain writes of bittersweetness as being “an acute awareness of time passing” and the recognition “that light and dark, birth and death – bitter and sweet – are forever paired,” as well as a natural human longing for perfection and for union, which explains our searches for God, for romantic love, for utopias and transcendence and immortality. 

 

One early chapter of Cain’s book that focused on romantic love introduced a speaker (I had to return my library copy of the book and forget the name of the man giving the workshops) seeking to convince people that romantic love was a myth. I disagree. It isn’t that I think each of us is half a person, searching the world over for the only other half that can complete us. No, that makes no sense. But that if we are very lucky we may find a soul-mate? That I do believe, because it was my good fortune to experience that kind of love. But even so – and this will relate to experience in wilderness, also – the happiest of couples do not ride waves of bliss every waking moment. Ideally, there will be fun at times, contentment at times, and at times experience of transcendence and absolute union. And then we go to sleep or have to take out the dog (or the garbage) or get ourselves to work. Or we experience agonies of misunderstanding and resentment. Everything.

 

So it also with losing the talky, thinky self on a wilderness hike and feeling one with the wind. Or driving down the highway with my dog beside me when a hawk swoops in front of the windshield, and Sunny and I are together as the bird grabs our attention. 

 

And always I remember being with the Artist in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the two of us reunited after a five-year separation, and he behind the wheel, barely inching along a dirt road and playing sweet tones on a harmonica, bringing tears to my eyes. (Yes, then, too.)

 

To experience union and transcendence at all is a priceless gift that comes and goes. Like a rainbow; like the sight of a wheeling hawk; like a beautiful song that comes to an end. The earth itself is not eternal, let alone the short-lived mammals that we are, but life is beautiful, the earth is beautiful, it is all precious, and the beauty grips our hearts because we are part of it all. 

-----

Much as I would like not to end this post on a mundane note, I’ll say that I was all set to take three minutes to answer questions for Susan Cain’s online quiz, and then the first question had to do with television commercials. I don’t watch television, so how can I say if I get choked up over certain commercials? Have I, in the past? I’m kind of resistant to commercials, suspicious of them to begin with. But when I read David Abram or Susan Cain or even at certain moments Tristan Gooley, then yes, I do have an emotional response. Does that count, Susan? You tell me. I didn’t go on to look at the rest of the questions.

 

Oh, but wait, wait! That mundane note won’t be the end of the post, because I remembered something else I wanted to include: As I was reading, thinking of Merleau-Ponty long before Abram brought in his name, I was thinking also of a friend from graduate school days whose specialization was phenomenology and his “main man” (as the Artist liked to say of Bergson with reference to me) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I was thinking that I needed to e-mail Larry and ask him if he had ever read David Abram. I’ll remind you (or see my earlier post) that Larry, with his Ph.D. in philosophy, now makes his living as a stage magician. So imagine my absolute astonishment to come upon this memory of Abram’s:

 

Many years ago I journeyed through Southeast Asia, making my way as an itinerant sleight-of-hand magician, performing on street corners and at small family inns. 

 

-      Abram, op. cit.

 

What were the odds? I was gobsmacked! This surprise came in a beautiful chapter called “Depth,” something the author defines as “the dimension of closeness and distance.” In southeast Asia one day he had an experience of having the mountain that has been accompanying him on his hike all day long disappear into the fog.

 

It occurred to me then, staring across the boulder-strewn pass into the swirling vapor, that here was the truest archetype for my craft as a sleight-of-hand magician. I must strive to make my silver coins and my billiard balls vanish as completely as this cloud had coaxed the entire mountain to vanish…. To this day, whenever I roll a silver dollar across my knuckles, preparing to make it disappear, I bow subtly toward the remembered mountain and the monsoon clouds – an apprentice honoring his masters.

 

          - Abram, ibid.

 

And yet, I have to admit that these days, this particular time of year, late February into the beginning of March, there is very little that does not bring tears to my eyes, whether sights or songs, music or words....

 

Gooley’s book is lessons, Abram’s is magic, Cain’s is you and me, and all three are all three. And there is a road for each of us.

“We Must Cultivate Our Garden”

The latest self-assigned reading project for our intrepid Ulysses group was a double-header: Candide and Zadig, by François-Marie Arouet, known to the world as Voltaire. Comparing notes when we met to discuss Voltaire, we learned that all of us had read Candide first. It is, after all, Voltaire’s most famous work, and in the Signet Classic paperback edition we read (translated by Daniel M. Frame, with introduction by John Iverson and afterword by Thaisa Frank), Candide gets top billing on the cover and is the first work in the book, Zadig and Selected Stories trailing after.

Voltaire was no stodgy writer. When one member of our group observed, a trifle disparagingly, “He’s no Proust,” another agreed enthusiastically and gratefully. (Only five of the nine of us will meet in November to discuss Swann’s Way, the others begging off.) Voltaire’s outlandish adventure tales move right along, calamities and reversals of fortune piling up so fast it makes a reader’s head spin. This is not ‘realism,’ magic or otherwise, but sharp satire.

So, like the others in the group, I read Candide first, and when I reached the last page and the final words, I was overcome with deep satisfaction. Candide’s teacher, Pangloss, having learned nothing from all his experiences, is still holding forth with his metaphysics of optimism:

“All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds; for after all, if you had not been expelled from a fine castle with great kicks in the backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunégonde, if you had not been subjected to the Inquisition, if you had not traveled about America on foot, if you had not given the Baron a great blow with your sword, if you had not lost all your sheep from the good country of Eldorado, you would not be here eating candied citrons and pistachios.”  

“That is very well said,” replied Candide, “but we must cultivate our garden.”

I loved that, and the morning I finished Candide, I posted a line or two on Facebook about how satisfying I found the protagonist’s final words. One of my friends objected. He felt the end of the book counseled withdrawal from the world and a retreat from action. (What is the word I’m forgetting here? The entire Fb exchange appears to have vanished into thin air, including the message I sent my friend.) I hadn’t read it that way at all! Metaphorical, yes, but meaning -- ???

Set that aside for a moment. I'll come back to it.

Turning to Zadig felt like coming down a few steps on the literary-historical ladder. The character Zadig was nearly perfect in the beginning – not only handsome and rich but also wise, generous, etc., etc., etc. – and rewarded in the end. He had a hero’s challenges (ho-hum) but not much to learn. Well, he did have a little something to learn, not in how to behave or how to live or how to counsel others but how to view the world. The most intriguing and bothersome passage to me in all of Zadig was his conversation with the hermit who transformed into an angel, come to enlighten him.

Immediately before the following exchange, the old hermit threw a widow’s nephew into the river, where he drowned. When Zadig protested, the hermit said that the young man “whose neck Providence has wrung would have murdered his aunt in a year and you in two.” The hermit then sprouts wings, Zadig falls reverentially to the ground, and the following conversation takes place.

“Men,” said the angel Jesrad, “pass judgment on everything without knowing anything; of all men you were the one who most deserved to be enlightened.” 

Zadig asked his permission to speak. “I mistrust myself,” he said, “but may I venture to ask you to clear up one doubt for me? Would it not have been better to have corrected that child and made him virtuous than to drown him?”  

Jesrad replied, “If he had been virtuous and if he had lived, his destiny was to be assassinated himself, together with the wife he was to marry and the child that was to be born to them.”  

“But,” said Zadig, “what? Then it is necessary that there be crimes and misfortunes? And the misfortunes fall on the good!”  

“The wicked,” replied Jesrad, “are always unhappy. They serve to test a small number of just men scattered over the earth, and there is no evil out of which some good is not born.”  

“But,” said Zadig, “what if there were nothing but good, and no evil?” 

“Then,” replied Jesrad, “this earth would be another earth, the chain of events would be another order of wisdom; and that other order, which would be perfect, can exist only in the eternal abode of the Supreme Being, whom evil cannot approach. He has created millions of worlds, not one of which can resemble another. This immense variety is an attribute of his immense power. There are not two leaves of a tree on earth, or two globes in the infinite fields of the heavens, that are alike; and everything you see on the little atom on which you were born had to be, in its appointed place and time, according to the immutable orders of him who embraces all. Men think that this child who has just perished fell into the water by chance, that it was by a similar chance that that house burned down; but there is no chance; all is test, or punishment, or reward, or foreseeing."

Is the angel Jesrad a precursor of Pangloss? All that is, must be? But Pangloss, for all his contorted reasoning, did not go so far as to see reward and punishment in necessity! Pangloss told Candide, “...private misfortunes make up the general good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more all is well.” It is not that those visited by misfortune have been punished. Besides, pointed out a sharp-eyed group member, the angel goes on to say that Zadig has been sent to change the fisherman’s destiny! Change it? Change destiny? Is it destiny, or isn’t it?

John Iverson writes that Voltaire was troubled by the philosophical system of Leibniz, “who reasoned that if God was perfect then He must have created a perfect world.” My French edition of Candide has an introduction (in English) by Julian Eugene White, who claims that Voltaire was better acquainted with Alexander Pope’s “perversion” of the Liebnizian philosophy reconciling the existence of evil with God’s perfect goodness. The general view, at any rate, still assumed everything in nature to have a purpose, or what Aristotle called a “final cause.” This is not ‘cause’ as we understand it today, coming before the effect and bringing it about, but one serving as a goal, a reason “in order to” rather than a reason “because of,” if you will.

At this point, one group member took off after Aristotle, blaming him for centuries of convoluted rationalizations on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, but I’m not going to take up that fight. Instead I’ve looked up birth and death dates for Voltaire, the three giants of European rationalism, and the triumvirate of European empiricists.

Rene Descartes, 1596-1650

Baruch Spinoza, 1632-77

John Locke, 1632-1704

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1646-1716

Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, 1694-1778

David Hume, 1711-1835

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-78

Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz are the rationalists, and to understand the world, they simply reasoned about it. No telescopes or microscopes needed – an armchair would do. Descartes, by means of a famous thought experiment, demonstrated to his own satisfaction that he could always trust his own God-given mind to lead him to the truth. Cartesian confidence was clearly at work in the reasonings of Voltaire’s Doctor Pangloss.

But John Locke, the first of the empiricists, was born ahead of Voltaire, and David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were of Voltaire’s generation. Voltaire, then, is on the cusp. The authority of the rationalists is waning, and scientific experiment and the authority of experience are coming to the fore. Candide, malgré lui, is an empiricist: although his only goal was to be reunited with his beloved Cunégonde, he learns from his travels and his experiences. Interestingly, one of the things he learns is to judge and think for himself, which was a very Cartesian proposition, but let’s not think too much about that....

Here’s something I found myself wondering: How optimistic, really, was the philosophy of Doctor Pangloss or Alexander Pope or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz? It was not, surely, the optimism of a happy modern individual, sure that things will always go right in his or her life. The optimism, if one wants to continue calling it that, was instead a faith that the clockwork of the world was running on some rational basis. Thus, early in the story, when Pangloss reappears exhibiting all the ravages of venereal disease, he reasons that his personal sufferings are all necessary to go into making up the general good. Punishment? No, simple necessity! – So what I wonder is, why could we not call this fatalism?

And now, looking back at Zadig (1748), don’t the angel’s pronouncements – pronouncements the author seemed to endorse at the time of writing that work – seem only ever so slightly improved upon in the philosophy of Pangloss, the latter philosophy one that the author at the time of writing Candide (1759) clearly rejected? Pangloss may have thought it “not fitting” for a philosopher to recant an earlier opinion, but the philosophe Voltaire, it seems, was not ashamed to learn and move forward.

The group member who noted the inconsistency in the angel’s lesson on destiny was concerned with Voltaire’s opinion of his imaginary Eldorado, the land where all goods were freely shared, no courts of law needed, and God only thanked, never petitioned. This was the only place Candide visited, she observed, that the author never seemed to mock. Was this, then, his Utopia, his ideal society? Was it a possible society? I asked. Wouldn’t it get boring? a couple others wondered. We left the question unresolved.

But now, let's come back to our sheep. For me, the most burning question was the meaning of “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” or, “We must cultivate our garden.” Admitting the phrase to be ambiguous, White nevertheless chooses what he calls “the more optimistic interpretation” (!), which he articulates in the following proposition: “Practical action should be substituted for ... vain speculation.” White argues passionately that in the latter part of Voltaire’s life, “cultivating his garden” took the form of unremitting battle for humanitarian causes, unceasingly writing pamphlets against all manner of intolerance and injustice. Écrasons l’infâme (“Let us crush infamy!”) is hardly the slogan of a man who has retreated from the world to live complacently behind his garden walls! Thus the author’s life supports the pragmatist interpretation.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

Écrasons l’infâme!

If not identical, the two phrases are certainly compatible, n'est-ce pas? I would even say quite compatible.

Voltaire’s garden was the world. It was not that of Eden, where no work was necessary. And as for Voltaire, so for us: our garden is the world we have, it admits of improvement, and it is up to us to do the work. At least, that is the lesson I take from Candide. And to my mind, he could not have chosen a happier metaphor.

This past year I have cultivated my bookstore garden very well, I think. Dog Ears Books hosted fewer events, but every single one of them was a roaring success. I have used this blog, at least from time to time, as a platform for important social and environmental causes. My vegetable garden, on the other hand, the literal garden in my life, was the victim of shameful neglect. I’m not happy about that. I can’t do everything, but I hope to have a real garden again next year -- even with the realization that, for my bookstore customers and guest authors, the metaphorical garden of my bookstore is undoubtedly the more important ground to be worked.

Completely Frustrated

I read a blog on the Record-Eagle site today and wanted to leave a comment. Signed up for a password. Got it. Tried to leave a comment. Nothing doing. My name appears, but I can't paste in my comment. Signed in with my Google account--same result. Okay, you can go read the original column yourself if you're interested. The author cited Plato as an inspiration for the framers of the U.S. Constitution, which to me was a very scary idea. Here's my response:

I highly recommend THE TRIAL OF SOCRATES, by Stone, for a rare, critical look at Plato’s political philosophy. To cite only one example, Plato believed that his philosopher-kings should govern an ignorant populace with lies. This is hardly (one hopes!) the view of our Founding Fathers. As for Aristotle continuing Plato’s dualism, that is a complicated subject, but suffice it to say that he did not share Plato’s disdain for the natural, material world, for this world. He believed, in fact, that the body is the “form” of the soul, the soul the beginning and end of action. It was Aquinas who resurrected Aristotle and brought his philosophy into Catholic thought, where the basic idea was to bring people to any right idea, even the existence of God, by way of reason.


Every philosopher is at heart either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Plato didn’t get everything wrong, and Aristotle didn’t get everything right, but I think most Americans would prefer to be reasoned with rather than lied to.

I may go back and see if I can type in the comment, though it wouldn't let me do that, either, the other times. Anyone else have a problem leaving comments on the Record-Eagle site? Got ideas for how to make it work?