Lyceum afterword

What a pleasantly diverting afternoon and evening, before during and after our first live Lyceum since 2019. Best last day of a semester in quite some time.

I was our speaker's designated driver from the hotel out on Thompson Lane in to campus, and left Nashville with enough of a cushion to enjoy a pleasant half-hour at Stones River next door before picking him up. The "Slaughter Pen Loop" was incongruently placid on this gorgeous Spring day in middle Tennessee.

 

  

Richard was waiting and ready at the appointed time, and we had a nice conversation in transit to the venue. We got him set up in the College of Education auditorium with the YouTube film clips he'd show at the top of his talk to illustrate Hollywood's past depictions of the "comedy of remarriage" (It Happened One Night 1935, Mr. and Mrs. Smith 2005), wandered across the quad to the library Starbucks (my treat), headed back and settled in with good friends at each elbow, and got underway.

 

Richard's message, drawing on Aristotle and on Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness, boiled down:

1. Psychosexual intimacy (an erotic friendship of virtue) is really important.

2. Such intimacy requires trust, openness to surprise, and the suspension of self-seeking (greed, covetousness, the "what's in it for me?" attitude the Greeks called pleonexia).

3. Contemporary life and ideology promote pleonexia.

It was a strong, humanistic plea for the recovery of a kind of virtuous friendship and selflessness that our time has increasingly little patience or feeling for. Truly an "applied" form of philosophical reflection of the sort we sorely need. Thanks for that, Richard.

And then on to the after-party (with a stop at a "Kim's Convenience" kind of shop en route, to procure "something better than Bud") at our chair's home near campus. Not Indian this time, but the catered fried chicken, cornbread, and cobbler were great. The conversation flowed, and survived a hickup when two colleagues became heated about a hiring ship that's already sailed. "Arguments are better than feelings!" said one, the message of our speaker clearly having been lost on him.

And you know what was way better than that argument? Getting to have a catch with our hosts' miniature pup. 

 

We need to do this again next year, and the next and so on. Get your boosters, everyone.

Lyceum

 Looking forward to this afternoon's return of our Lyceum speaker series, live on campus again for the first time since 2019 when Robert Talisse spoke of "Overdoing Democracy: The Problem of Political Polarization."

Today's speaker Richard Eldridge reviewed Talisse's eponymous book in the LA Review:

This suggestion that we might thus discover our likeness to others with different political identities resembles Hegel’s account in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the breaking of the hard heart in recognition of likeness. We might, as Talisse puts it, discover that “it matters to ourselves and to others how our lives go.” Unfortunately, however, Hegel’s account of this breaking relies on practices of confession and forgiveness that are rooted in a religious conception of our ultimate likeness to one another as created beings. Absent this, reconciliation in recognition of mutual reasonableness seems likely to founder, and such practices and conceptions have been colonized by individual, competitive self-interest, even more in the United States today than in early 19th-century Prussia, as we have come to take “how our lives go” to be largely a matter of “getting what we want” in competition with others — never mind “reasonableness” and “fairness,” claims to which strike many as having essentially partisan content.

So... only a Hegelian can save us now? That's not encouraging. Our present reality is not quite rational enough to transcend its own contradictions. Maybe things would clarify under the influence of nitrous oxide. 

...That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense!

Thought deeper than speech——!
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL! Oh my
God, oh God, oh God!

The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this:—

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference...

Or not. 

Counting on Professor Eldridge to be a lot more coherent and articulate this afternoon. 

 

Closing Day

 It's Closing Day for the Spring '22 semester at our school. One last time to open the show with a glance at the Writers Almanac, Mr. Keillor says it's soon to be Closing Day for that too. Today I'll mention the great E.B. (Charlotte's Web) White, source of one of my favorite statements of all time: 

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world or to enjoy it. This makes it hard to plan the day.” Some quote.

"Closing Day" lacks the luster and promise of Opening Day, but it's still a milestone. In CoPhi we've surveyed western philosophers from Socrates to Singer with Nigel (Philosophy Bites) Warburton (with the occasional namedrop of pivotal pre-Socratics like Protagoras and Democritus). We've considered How the World Thinks with Julian Baggini and pondered Why Grow Up? with Susan Neiman; we've deplored the infantilism of Fantasyland with Kurt Andersen; and  we've encountered William James's Sick Souls and Healthy Minds with John Kaag.

In A&P we've discussed atheism, pragmatism, naturalism, secularism, humanism, and many other 'isms. Richard Rorty's Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, in retrospect, was also a pretty good introduction to major themes in humanism and secularism.

Finally even mentioned agnosticism the other day, tepid though it still strikes me.

In Bioethics we focused on the ethics of pandemic. Michael Lewis's Premonition and Leana Wen's Lifelines shed much light on recent history, and emphatically underscored the need for greater attention and commitment to public health.

We've thought and talked a lot. The universe of a professor is indeed crowded with words.

My parting words: set some goals, keep asking questions, draw no premature conclusions, and get some walking in. 

Especially keep asking questions, keep moving forward, and drop me a line sometime.

Early to rise

LISTEN. I'm going to miss Writer's Almanac, and items like this about young John Muir, if it really goes away in May. 

One evening the boy was up late reading, and his father forbade him from staying up late, but decided that, as a compromise, he could get up as early as he wanted in the morning. Muir began getting up at 1 a.m. and going to the cellar to work on inventions by the light of a tallow candle. He invented a self-setting sawmill, thermometers, barometers, complex door-locks, an automatic horse-feeding machine, clocks, a firelighter, and many more tools. For motivation in the dark winter mornings, he invented an elaborate clock that also told the day of the week and the month, and was connected to a bed that set him on his feet at an appointed hour.

 HDT, that other patron saint of morning, spurned reliance on alarm clocks: "Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within..." 

But inventive young Muir had at least a matching Genius for the dawn. I'd happily occupy a bed that set me on my feet at the appointed hour too. As he pointed out, “The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” 

The world is big, and the night is more than long enough. Best get an early start on your days. 

Also: Muir was another philosopher of Experience. Like Wordsworth he appreciated the continuum that links interior/subjective life with nature at large. “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in... The sun shines not on us but in us.”

Well, on the best days it does both.

One Two more, these are addictive:

"It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”

“John Muir, Earth — planet, Universe" [Muir's home address, as inscribed on the inside front cover of his first field journal]”

A poet's nature

 The English poet who felt the lakes and mountains much as Walt Whitman felt the American crowd and, as WJ put it, discerned "a limitless significance in natural things," turned 250 in 2020. In recognition of his poetic and human achievement BBC 4 produced In Wordsworth's Footsteps. I just listened to it, waiting for the sun, and look forward to discussing it next week with our Lyceum guest Richard Eldridge. Seems to me he was fundamentally a philosopher of Experience in the Jamesian radical empiricist mode, who understood that the distinctively interior/subjective imprint of the small but significant episodes of our lives is (should be) the heart of philosophy. 

As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors, tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of him or what it might be worth. And yet that inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy. On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 

Another literary walker, Robert Louis Stevenson, put it more pithily. "To miss the joy is to miss all." If we're not attending to those distinctively personal inner springs and their natural exterior sources, we're missing it.  

 

Lucky and grateful

We're wrapping the semester this week. Lucky us.

The last section of Andrew Copson's Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning, and joy includes the Dawkins line I included in my recent eulogy and that should be in every eulogy, humanist or not: we are "the lucky ones"...

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

The "anaesthetic of familiarity" is the sedative we must wake from, Dawkins observes. "Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born?" 

Margaret Renkl expressed the same attitude in her Times essay yesterday, Sadness and Loss Are Everywhere. Books Can Help.

"We've all had near misses that shook us to the core: when a hydroplaning car skidded to a stop in the nick of time; when a toddler, unwatched for half a second, teetered at the top of a flight of steps but was caught just before stepping over the edge; when the scan showed a shadow that had to be a tumor but turned out to be nothing at all."

"And every near miss is almost always followed by a golden time, too brief, when the futile frustrations and pointless irritations of daily life fall away, when all that's left behind is gratitude. We are here. Our beloveds are here. How remarkable it is to be together. How full of grace the fallen world can be."

Gratitude is the best antidote for sadness and loss, and our most reliable source of resilience. We're lucky to have evolved a capacity for it, but it's hard to hold. The stoic emperor was right, and so is Ms. Renkl, we really have to be reminded every day. We should be especially grateful for the authors, living and gone, who remind us.

Ministry for the future

Kim Stanley Robinson hasn't stopped thinking of what humanity might yet make of itself. We're going to read his Ministry for the Future in Environmental Ethics this Fall, alongside Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken, and the Sunrise Movement. 

"Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face." (g'r)

Yes, it's a work of fiction, of the imagination; but that's the source of possibility and the power of maybe. Maybe life will be worth living, climatically speaking, in the decades to come. Dreaming it is a necessary condition of its reality.

The burning source of all our power gets a cameo chapter and speaks bluntly.

“I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive. Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn. Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.”

We don't need to worship Sol, but we do need to respect her. Now. KSR says this possible future had best begin no later than January 2025. The window is shrinking fast.

What man has made of man

LISTEN. Our Lyceum speaker series at MTSU, on pandemic hold since 2019, resumes a week from Wednesday with a distinguished guest whose interest in the intersection of philosophy and literature I share. 

Richard Eldridge has written in particular of Wordsworth as philosopher. This morning's poem* illustrates the point. Since I've been drafted to ferry Richard from his hotel to the event and back, I look forward to discussing it with him.

I think, btw, we can promise a larger and more proximal audience than Vandy managed to muster when he spoke to them remotely last year.

* Lines Written in Early Spring
by William Wordsworth

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played:
Their thoughts I cannot measure,
But the least motion which they made,
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man? WA

Old Wordsworth at some point probably surrendered to his lament, and stopped thinking of what humanity might yet make of itself. I'm not there yet. When you're tired of thinking about tomorrow, you're tired of life.

Only experience

An important new Atlantic essay by Jonathan Haidt says social media’s turned us (who, me?) into partisan performers who don’t even try to connect across political and other divides with those who don't already share our biases. Most of us, anyway, from "dedicated conservatives" to "progressive activists" and all points in between. 

So what do we do about it? He suggests getting involved with organizations like those composing Bridge Alliance, "committed to revitalizing America through civic engagement, governance and policymaking, and campaign and election processes."

Good. But it amused me when I went to their website to sign up and they instantly suggested I share my pro-civic intentions on social media. Another performance. 

On further reflection, I recognize the importance of not giving up on social media as potential bridges rather than insulating walls and bubbles and echo-chambers. So I'm not deleting my Twitter account today (Elon Musk's attempted buyout notwithstanding) or my Instagram, or even my Facebook (which I really don't use, don't take it personally when I ignore your "friend" request). I'm not going to stop using social media, but Haidt's inspired me to do it more mindfully. 

Before each tweet I'll now ask myself: Am I just performing for my choir? Or am I trying to connect, to understand and bridge differences, to articulate my own positions constructively, to share my own actual experience and invite those with a different experience to reciprocate? Leana Wen is right, in the epilog we close today in Bioethics, "there's a need both for loud voices that push at the boundaries and for those who strive for inclusivity and building bridges."

Most of all: I hereby resolve never to argue with a stranger on the internet.

More on the indispensable check of experience today in that delightful Little Book of Humanism.

“We must constantly check the results of our reasoning process against the facts, and see if they fit. If they don’t fit, we must respect the facts, and conclude that our reasoning was mistaken." J.B.S. Haldane

"There is no immemorial tradition, no revelation, no authority, no privileged knowledge (first principles, intuitions, axioms) which is beyond question . . . There is only experience to be interpreted in the light of further experience, the sole source of all standards of reason and value, for ever open to question. This radical assumption is itself, of course, open to question, and stands only in so far as it is upheld by experience." Harold Blackham 

"It might be said that ‘distrust thy father and mother’ is the first commandment with promise. It should be a part of education to explain to children as soon as they are old enough to understand, when it is reasonable, and when it is not, to accept what they are told on authority." John Bagnell Bury

“Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked–as I am surprisingly often–why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?" Richard Dawkins

Somewhere over the rainbow...

Experience and Rationality

I'm offering a course this summer in our Master of Liberal Arts program called Rationality, and another next spring called Experience. This observation of Simon Blackburn's nicely conjoins their complementary themes. One without the other is empty. And blind.*

"Sights, sounds, glimpses, smells and touches all provide reasons for beliefs. If John comes in and gets a good doggy whiff, he acquires a reason for believing that Rover is in the house. If Mary looks in the fridge and sees the butter, she acquires a reason for believing that there is butter in the fridge. If John tries and tries but cannot clear the bar, he learns that he cannot jump six feet. In other words, it is the whole person's interaction with the whole surround that gives birth to reasons." 

Blackburn is quoted again, a little further on in tomorrow's recommended reading:

"Humanism is the belief that humanity need not be ashamed of itself, and [Bacon and Locke, Hume and Voltaire, Newton and Darwin] are its great examples. They show us that we need not regard knowledge as impious, or ignorance as desirable, and we need not see blind faith as anything other than blind."*

Simon Blackburn, in The Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning and joy by Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson

“Love is wise; hatred is foolish"

 In A&P we're picking up our last required text, Andrew Copson's Secularism: A Very Short Introduction. I'm also recommending his and Alice Roberts's Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning, and joy. His podcast What I Believe is good too.

I love that the LBH begins with that Kurt Vonnegut statement of welcome I'm always quoting:

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”

Kurt also said  “I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.”

That's because, as Eustace Haydon said, "The humanist has a feeling of perfect at-homeness in the universe... as an earth-child." I'd drop the perfect but embrace the sentiment and the experience of continuity with all life. 

Contrary to the anti-evolutionary crusaders of his and our time still, that was Darwin's view as well. 

“As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”

Just imagine what a peaceably cosmopolitan world it could be, if more of us echoed Terence (and Appiah): I am human, nothing human is alien to me. And Russell.

“Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”

Comrades

I sometimes wake before I'm ready to rise, in the pre-dawn. When that happened this morning I listened to Garrison Keillor's recounting of an instructive night in the ER, concluding with a fanciful nod to Whitman and demos.

It would be nice to think so highly again of random comrades. Present politics, alas, doesn't cooperate so companionably.

But yes, do keep getting older. By most accounts it does get better, on the U-curve upswing.

 
"My decline, decrepitude, and death are not a tragedy, not even a small one. The impoverished children playing in a park and finding used hypodermics and thereby contracting HIV: that is a tragedy. You read it in the paper and the heart breaks. The desperate Mexican and Guatemalan migrants who paid a smuggler thousands of dollars and he drove 25 of them jammed in a Ford SUV over the border and onto the California desert where he ran a stop sign and crashed into a Peterbilt truck and 13 bodies lay scattered on the highway, dead, Yesenia Melendrez Cardona, dead in the arms of her mother crying out in Spanish, brushing the blood from her daughter's beautiful face, Yesenia, 23, the same age as my daughter, this is tragedy. Let's be clear about these things. I was born in this country to a mail clerk and a housewife, two soft-spoken Christians, a mother who loved comedians, and Mr. Buehler pulled me off the power saw and sent me to Speech and after college, having no particular job skills, I got a job in radio by virtue of being willing to get up in the dark on winter mornings and be cheerful on the air. I visited Nashville to see the Grand Ole Opry and came home and suggested starting a live music show on Saturday nights and the boss Bill Kling said, "Go ahead." My story in 100 words. And now, on a sunny Saturday morning, I walk out in Central Park and sense widespread amiability afoot, people walking their dogs and small children happy to be out of a tiny apartment, old folks at rest on benches, joggers, strollers, amblers, and I think I could pull 20 of them together and rehearse them in "New York, New York, it's a heck of a town, the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, the people ride in a hole in the ground." I'd say, "I'm making a video for my class in cognitive empathy in urban communities," and thus, knowing it's not a joke, they'd link arms in a dance line and do it and really get into it and feel the companionship and love of comrades that Whitman wrote about, except by a reservoir, not a river." — Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80: Why You Should Keep On Getting Older by Garrison Keillor

Like old Walt, Keillor here (as WJ put it) "[feels] the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb one's mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man." Or a happy old man.

==

Postscript. Post to the Host--

Dear Mr. K.,

Re: “It’s going to be all right.”

I seriously doubt it.

Richard Hall

There are times I doubt it, too, and I think it comes from reading too much. If I get outside and walk around and observe humanity, I believe we’ll survive. “All right” doesn’t mean everything will be as we wish it to be, but I do feel we live in a sea of civility.

GK

Clotted with clods

 Bertrand Russell said "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."

This splendid credo often reminded me of George Bernard Shaw's equally heroic encyclical: 'This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.' Alistair Cooke

That's marvelous. Be a force of Nature, not a feverish selfish little clod. We're clotted with clods, lately, with self-absorbed ruminators who can't or won't look beyond their own short horizon of personal woe. 

Cooke's profile of Russell, like other longer bios, betrays plenty of ignoble egoism on the great man's part, plenty of misspent passion and self-indulgence and insensitivity to others. But at his best he knew we're all at our best when we cease ruminating about ourselves, our own disappointments and uncertainties, our personal anxieties etc. etc. 

The happiest are those who turn their attention outward, to others and to a diversified and growing tableau of what Russell calls "impersonal interests" and that I'd call pleasures, enthusiasms, and delights... the sweetest music of life is not a tortured soliloquy. That's for clods.

Postscript

Back home, I've added a postscript to my parting words for Grammy Dot. As I ad-libbed at the service, paraphrasing WJ again, whatever universe a professor believes in is sure to include too many words. I added some to my formal remarks but also crossed out more. It's important to get the right ones.

Postscript. For the record, and to whom it may concern: when my time comes, no time soon I hope, I'd like a Humanist service. Not that I'll be in any position to insist, but matter really is sacred and eternal enough for me. Just as it was for old Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass was much in the spirit of stepsister Tracy's poem that cousin Frank read at the service. Walt: 

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

 

Bright memories

 St. Charles, Missouri. The funeral yesterday afternoon, at the venue we last visited over thirteen years ago to say goodbye to my dad, was dignified and comforting. The rain stopped just before the service began, the sun broke through, and it was a bright day after all. Grammy Dot was by explicit choice, the presiding methodist minister related, a "bright" light for us all.  

The minister tells me he was a philosophy student years ago of my old classmates and friends Mark, David, and Del at Truman State University. Small world after all.

Dot was a bright ever-smiling presence, even in the dark shadow of her terminal diagnosis. She did indeed, as her obit points out, "go out swinging."

That baseball metaphor came to her naturally, her cousin Bob Scheffing was a ballplayer, a Cubs manager, a Mets general manager, and by all accounts a good guy who'd be appalled (according to Uncle Don) at the way money and player equity have changed the game. We do all have our limitations. But we also share a common fate, as Mr. Twain said. None of us will get out of here alive.

Like Yogi, btw, Twain didn't say everything he's said to have said. But he did evidently say, channeling Epicurus, “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Delivering my eulogy was personally consoling and therapeutic, the livestream (should have) closed some of the gap between Missouri and California, the other eulogists were great. 

And what a shock, as the service was ending, to be approached by my old 2d-grade teacher… and her companion who asked if I remembered a 2d grade classmate named Gary. “I’m his mother.” What a memory that moment now will be. Gary was my good friend who died, shockingly, unprecedentedly in the innocent universe of a 7-year old, of brain cancer. 

We who've lived into our seventh decades and beyond, and who are stocked with affirming memories of precious others, are truly the lucky ones. 

Postscript. For the record, and to whom it may concern: when my time comes, no time soon I hope, I'd like a Humanist service. Not that I'll be in any position to insist, but matter really is sacred and eternal enough for me. Just as it was for old Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass was much in the spirit of stepsister Tracy's poem that cousin Frank read at the service. Walt: 

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Just being alive

We talked in class yesterday about the U-curve, that curious phenomenon Susan Neiman mentions whereby people past the halfway mark of life (which varies from culture to culture and country to country) get happier and happier as time goes by. Students are surprised to hear it, but those of us of a certain age know it's generally true. 

But why? On further reflection, and in light of Garrison Keillor's little vignette in my in-box this morning, I think it's because age brings perspective and greater appreciation for just being alive. He says he was at one of those sub-standard generic motel breakfast bars and struck up a conversation with a stranger.

At that dreadful breakfast, I met a man who came up as I was pouring myself a cup of coffee so I poured him one. He was a soybean farmer who also raised sheep and we talked about that for a minute. Parenting is brief, he said, the lambs are weaned at two months and the rams have no parenting responsibility whatsoever, it’s just hit and run, and by thirteen months, the ewes are ready for breeding. He said that soybean farming is looking somewhat hopeful although a couple years ago he lost his whole crop to a hailstorm and almost had to sell the farm.

“So what is the fun in farming?” I said.

“Being outdoors on a beautiful day,” he said. “Knowing other people are shut up in offices and you’re on a tractor and it’s 75 and sunny and you can smell the vegetation and hear the sheep talking.”

“In other words, just being alive,” I said.

“That’s exactly right.”

It is, isn't it? Most of us are too busy, most of the time prior to the bend in the U, to just soak up the sun and inhale the peat and listen to the sheep. We'd be happier earlier, if we did that more often.

Those are my thoughts, as I prepare to pack for the funeral.