Robert Richardson, farewell

Robert Richardson, superlative biographer of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James, has died.

Just learned of the death of Robert D. Richardson, Jr. Sorry that I never got to meet him. I read his Emerson biography earlier this year, and one of the observations in his Thoreau biography prompted me to start work on Thoreau's Animals. pic.twitter.com/h7rQoj3aHk

— Thoreau'sWildflowers (@ThoreausFlowers) June 19, 2020

When I couldn't initially confirm this sad report I recalled what he said when he and I had just spoken ten years ago, after he delivered his keynote at the William James centenary conference in Chocorua, New Hampshire. 

"We all eventually have to face up to the deeply unfair side of life..."

He concluded our discussion  quoting Mark Twain, “it’s a terrible death to be talked to death.” For Twain, reports of his death were "greatly exaggerated." I'd hoped the same might be true in this instance, but evidently not.

I was not aware at the time that someone had captured our brief exchange and posted it, beginning at about 26:00":

I'd thanked him for his body of work, & for mentioning during Q-&-A the wonderful WJ statement affirming the capacity of materialist metaphysics to capture the totality of our embodied experience: "To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities.”

Thank you, Bob Richardson, for incarnating such humane and sensitive insight into the lives and thoughts of our tradition's best and brightest.

It is with great sadness that we have learned of Robert D. Richardson’s death. In 2001, the Emerson Society presented him with its Distinguished Achievement Award. A kind and generous scholar, Bob will be fondly remembered and greatly missed.https://t.co/OtV7B46owp

— Ralph Waldo Emerson Society (@EmersonSociety) June 19, 2020

“When you start running into the same stuff over and over, it is time to think about writing. You need what Emerson calls ‘the casting moment,’ that is the day or two days when you suddenly see it all and can outline it, hurriedly.”—Robert D Richardson https://t.co/KzINAbZIEF

— Peter Schmader (@jpschmader) June 19, 2020

Marked as to-read: Henry Thoreau by Robert D. Richardson Jr. https://t.co/2tTtGdBOag

— Eevah (@Ivana_Eevah) February 3, 2019

Prize-winning historian Robert D. Richardson dies at age 86

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK (AP) — Robert D. Richardson, a prize-winning historian known for his elegant and authoritative biographies of such leading American thinkers as William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson, has died.

His friend Arlo Haskell told The Associated Press that Richardson died last Tuesday after sustaining head injuries in a fall. Richardson, husband of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Annie Dillard, turned 86 just days before his death.

A native of Milwaukee, Richardson grew up in Massachusetts and had a close affinity with Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and other New England writers. The house in Medford was the former meeting place for the Transcendental Club, whose members included Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. Concord was home in the 19th century to Emerson and Thoreau among others.

Richardson won the Bancroft Prize in 2007 for “William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism,” which judges praised as “a virtual intellectual genealogy of American liberalism and, indeed, of American intellectual life in general, through and beyond the twentieth century.” In 1996, his “Emerson: The Mind On Fire” won the Francis Parkman Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist.

“Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind” was published in 1986 and had a more personal impact on his life. The book’s fans included Dillard, who sent him a fan letter. The two eventually met, and after “two lunches and three handshakes” as Dillard later remembered it, they were married.

Richardson was married twice, most recently to Dillard, had two daughters from his first marriage and three stepdaughters with Dillard. He spent at least part of each year in Key West, Florida. From 2001-2009, he served on the board of the Key West Literary Seminar, for which Haskell serves as director.
==
Richardson and Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk,The Writing Life, For the Time Being, The Living..) married after she wrote him a fan letter for his Thoreau bio. Then he wrote her one... (from AnnieDillard.com):

Biography of Annie Dillard by Bob Richardson

My husband Bob (Robert Richardson) is the biographer of Thoreau, Emerson, and William James.    He doesn't write what Sontag called "pathographies."    When Contemporary Authors needed an update in its account of me, he wanted to write it, and did.  Either the agent or the editors there gagged on all this praise and sent it back.

Bob is 76 and has had 2 open-heart surgeries and 2 pacemakers.  He wants to see this piece of work "out there," and requested I put it on the website, so sure

[Note: This was published about the time I met Bob, I had no idea then that he'd had two heart surgeries. jpo]

     Annie Dillard has been considered a major voice in American literature since she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974 and won a Pulitzer Prize. Her reputation has increased steadily if bumpily since then. Scholars and critics have recognized her scope’s widening from the natural world to history, metaphysics, ever --more narratives, and theology until  Paul Roberts could say in the Toronto Globe and Mail that the 1999 publication of For the Time Being, “places Dillard more firmly than ever among the very greatest of American writers.”

     Dillard has written a novel, some essays, poetry, and a memoir; her most characteristic books, however, are imaginative non-fiction narratives-—witnessings or accounts, stories and speculations–- that resist classification. Her distinctive, and distinctively American, prose style has been widely recognized and openly imitated. She is, like Thoreau, a close observer; she is, like Emerson, a rocket- maker; her works’ prose structures and aims, however, are all her own. “We have less time than we knew,” she writes in Holy the Firm, “and that time buoyant, cloven, lucent, missile, and wild.”

(continues)
==
"Richardson's James"... "James bio" -- U@d
==
A NOTE from Paul Croce:

Thank you, Daniel Brunson, Ermine Algier, and Steve Bush of SAAP and the William James Society, for sharing the sad news of Robert Richardson’s death. It was good to read your memorials to his fine work and the obituaries in both local and national papers.

  Novelist John Banville praised his trilogy of biographies of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James for their “fluent, agile prose.” Richardson possessed still more of the art that he depicted so well in his books. 

  In the most recent biography, he praises James’s ability to write in different styles for different audiences. James could write with “technical density” for his fellow philosophers, but also with “clear exposition” for students; outside the academy, he could make clear points for the “educated non-specialist,” but also craft words in an “easy popular style. (William James: In the Maelstrom of Modernism [Houghton Mifflin, 2006], 512 and 360).

  Richardson also possessed this range of skills. Before turning to biography, his first works were solid scholarly achievements, all published by Indiana University Press. His Literature and Film (1969) highlights how these art forms “illuminate and enliven” each other for finding “human order in life” (https://books.google.com/books/about/Literature_and_film.html?id=24S0AAAAIAAJ). The Rise of Modern Mythology: 1680-1860, a compilation with Burton Feldman (1972), reveals the way Western culture appropriates non-Western mythologies (so relevant still!). Harvard American Renaissance scholar Lawrence Buell called his Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance (1978) an “excellent book destined to win recognition as a significant text in the field” (New England Quarterly 52 [1979]: 569).

  He could write with some of the same range of skills that he depicted so artfully in his biographical trio. 

  Thank you, Robert Dale Richardson, Junior, for your lifetime of good work!

Paul Croce

==

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/thoreau-biographer-robert-d-richardson-praised-for-e2-80-98fluent-agile-prose-e2-80-99-dies-at-86/ar-BB15Qxlk

https://provincetown.wickedlocal.com/entertainmentlife/20200622/obituary-robert-richardson-86-longstanding-south-wellfleet-summer-resident?fbclid=IwAR2rhTzofaoR-l4hklozM_Dw2NX8xWSdtTRWhEVJ8Nis_UtaJfrvw5fQg8E

Daughters Day

Dads Day is coming, I'm just gonna go ahead and surrender to the sentimental mood. From my point of view it's really Daughters Day. Wish I could take 'em out to a ballgame this weekend.

Herschel Greer Stadium, Nashville c.2005

Letting go, moving on

Toy Story 3 is trending in social media just because it's ten today?

Yes, kids, ten years does vanish in a flash. I guess that's just now dawning on millennials and Z's. (It's Paul McCartney's birthday, btw, the guy who worried in his 20s about being loved when he was 64. He's 78 today. So many Yesterdays.)

I'm nostalgic for Toy Story 1, myself, having viewed it with Older Daughter on VHS a few dozen times at least in her most impressionable early days. They both came out in '95.

We moved in to our place 24 years ago on Memorial Day weekend. She was a precocious toddler, soon to discover Woody and Buzz et al. Younger Daughter, technically of Gen Z, would arrive three years later.

Some nice people with two small children of their own came by to look at our place yesterday, and I found myself getting sentimental as I described to them the landscape of our yard back in the Toy Story era -- swing set over there, tree swing here where the bird-feeders now hang, wiffle-ball field just there (we called the car-port roof the Green Monster).

And so I realize that I'm not quite ready to move on, though the swing set's long gone and it's been several seasons since we whacked a wiffle-ball off the Monster. Hoping they don't make us an offer we can't refuse.

But when the time comes, whenever it comes, it'll be nice to think of a new generation of youngsters making new memories on that sacred ground, memories they can someday look back on with the same wistful fondness I'm feeling this morning.

Toy Story 1 taught me to never give up
Toy Story 2 taught me loyalty
Toy Story 3 taught me to let go
Toy Story 4 taught me to move on

...and i am eternally grateful to infinity and beyond. 🥺❤️

so long partner. pic.twitter.com/2Zd24b36GR

— nicholas 🚀 (@VibesWithNick) June 18, 2020

Don't even think about it*

First attempt at posting this tweet, auto-correct changed "sensorial" to senatorial, precisely the opposite of what I'm talking about. But senatorial perception would be nice too. Not to mention presidential.

Rediscovered “the intense interest life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level of pure sensorial perception” (Wm James) on the Harpeth River Greenway & at Warner Parks yesterday. Highly recommended. pic.twitter.com/jBeJH12are

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 17, 2020

*That's what President Ramp-runner said at his rallies in promising a wall. I didn't think about it yesterday.

Talk talk talk, words words words

Talking's a start, as I was saying, and it's way better than not talking.

Language and communication lifted our species from brute existence, created culture, and invented philosophy which, as James said, is "essentially talkative and explicit" -- hence our need for poetry, a form of verbalism that does its work, conveys its meaning, more by implication and ostension than explication. We must talk, but we must never forget that there's more to life than talking. There's much that cannot be explicated but should be noted and appreciated and assimilated.

And that's why I'd amend the statement "Philosophers can explain..." with: good philosophers know they can't explain everything.

"What an awful trade that of professor is," James complained at term's end in 1892, "paid to talk, talk, talk!... It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." Richard Ford's character Frank Bascombe expanded on the same theme: "Real mystery the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book, was to them [his teaching colleagues] a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away; live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble..."

That's how I put it twenty years ago, with the borrowed words of my favorite novelist and favorite philosopher. Look at me now, still talking. I didn't retire at 32. I'm approaching Ford's age of resumption.

But I'm also still talking about talking's limitations, still parroting James's talk on the subject. "I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe by concepts and words what... exceeds either conceptualization or verbalization. As long as one continues talking, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the field."

Intellectualism talks too much. That's why I'm still walking.

Sometimes I walk and talk, when in a peripatetic-classroom situation. Sometimes I walk and think, when ambling solo or (more typically) with the dogs. And sometimes I just walk.

"The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception," is pure gold. Like happiness and health, it's better than all the 'truths' under the firmament.

"Philosophers can explain"

It was a rare acknowledgement, in the opening of the 60 Minutes segment last night on re-opening higher education in the Fall, of the existence and relevance of philosophers in America.

This fall, college will start with a test. Can America's universities reopen during the greatest pandemic in a hundred years? Some universities are remaining online, others are still unsure, but a growing number are preparing for perhaps the largest coordinated return institutions have made since the virus hit. In many ways, colleges and universities are the perfect places for an American reawakening. Scientists can track and trace, behavioral experts can make the pitch and philosophers can explain the balance between collective good and the individual. But, we go to college to be social, with no distance. College students are going to have to step up by staying apart. If they do, they may lead the way not just for the next semester, but for the entire country and its future.

Well, we can try. I know I've been trying, lo these many years, to open a serious conversation about the proper tension between personal rights and public responsibilities, about what it means to be an individual living harmoniously in a community of mutually-interested citizens. I started teaching during the Reagan years. It was a hard conversation before then, but Reagan made it harder. And here we are.

In this region in particular it's a hard sell, the notion of the common good or the public interest -- a notion most directly engaged in my classroom in discussions about Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, and the social contract. A lot of students have been raised, if only implicitly, to insist that nothing constrains their absolute right to do as they please and not be instructed, obstructed, impeded, or otherwise guided in any way by any agency or authority. Individualism rules.

But I was heartened to see local radio personality Jason Moon Wilkins's observation about the striking contrast in social attitudes in an adjacent region that also calls itself southern, "Southernmost Illinois" (where Older Daughter attended SIU):

One striking thing - the level of compliance with mask wearing and the way it was handled by businesses. If you went inside - you wore a mask. Period.

But there was one exception - a Winery that will remain nameless. The 3 percenter bumper stickers in the parking lot gave it away. The loud talking manager had her mask hanging under her chin. We left.

Will that be an option this Fall, if students reject the mask requirement? Just leaving? We need to be clear: if they won't comply, they don't need to show up in the first place. Many of my colleagues have already indicated a preference for avoiding that encounter in the first place. As a society, though, it's past time to have that hard conversation. Your right to do entirely as you please ends at the tip of my mask, and mine at yours. "Philosophers can explain..."

I kinda know how that's gonna go, in many instances. I'll explain, and the most vocal young libertarians will resist. But at least we'll be talking, either through masks or through zoom. It's a start.

Stretching habits

I have a long-standing habit of stretching after our daily morning dogwalk, with a routine improvised decades ago from a popular book on the subject. It began mostly as an exercise in meditation and (before the word was cliche) "mindfulness," continued as a comfortable and comforting habit, and has become an indispensable form of physically-therapeutic self-maintenance I can't afford to miss.

The last couple of years I merged the stretching habit with my baseball obsession, always tuning in to the MLB highlights show while going through my routine. Then the pandemic ended the highlights, among other things, but reruns of old games in March, April, and May called by revived Hall of Fame voices (Vin, Joe, Tony, Jack...) more than managed to fill the gap.

Until it didn't.

There came a day, just days ago, when my appetite for old games suddenly wilted. Maybe it's the time of year. Or maybe it's the time of man... (see postscript below*)

The Smithsonian channel's Aerial America program was good stretching company at first, I used to tune it in a few winters back when we first got our stationary bike. I liked to pretend I was powering a pedal-driven glider like the one in Kim Stanley Robinson's cli-fi novel Pacific Edge. "Hard work; it was one of the weird glories of their time, that the highest technologies were producing artifacts that demanded more intense physical labor than ever before..."

But the pretense and the novelty of the new immobile machine eventually wore off. I learned that I prefer pedaling my non-stationary bikes through middle Tennessee's generally-mild winters (and springs, summers, and falls). And now there's talk in our household of consigning the stationary bike to my Little House, cut off from the cable umbilicus.

When Elon Musk's Dragon launched recently I found myself briefly hooked on the NASA channel, during the morning stretch. The live feed from ISS was, as documented here, calming accompaniment. But that too has acquired a measure of tedium. Round and round and round we go, but are we getting anywhere?

So now I've started catching up on the gazillion (and growing) TED Talks I missed the first time. Really liked Jill Tarter's SETI talk, and Michael Patrick Lynch on truth, facts, and reality, and Wendy Suzuki's "Brain-changing benefits of exercise"...

“...the findings emphasize the wide-ranging, pervasive, immediate and individualized effects of exercise...’It’s beautiful music’...” https://t.co/EUdkodOWow

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 12, 2020

So what would Aristotle say about my stretching habit? Or William James? Or Charles Duhigg and James Clear? A few things...

"It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference." Nichomachean Ethics, Book II

"Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance... we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague." William James, Habit/Principles of Psychology I 

“Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.” Charles Duhigg, The Power Of Habit

“The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.”James Clear, Atomic Habits

One thing for sure: they'd all say not to miss your dogwalk on this beautiful crisp morning.

Solvitur Ambulando

LISTEN

* Postscript--

Just when I thought I was tired of the old games on @MLBNetwork, it’s Red Barber AND David Freese. Oh Doctor! https://t.co/kIliUAMAFj

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 14, 2020

Scoot's legacy

In April Older Daughter had to say a far-too-soon farewell to her sidekick Scooter, who we first met late in 2016 at the Nashville Humane Shelter. He followed her to college in Illinois, then back to Tennessee (when he and I really bonded), then to California. He was a fixture, seen and heard (afflicted with chronic, constant asthmatic coughing and wheezing), in many of her YouTube film reviews and blog posts. He succumbed a few weeks ago to cancer. She wrote: "To say that Scooter was important to me is such a radical understatement. Losing him so quickly has been devastating... Scoot was with me through love, loss, three different states, five different living situations, long night, early mornings, and the shortest walks a dog will ever take. One time I had to carry him a mile back to campus because he refused to walk anymore. What an opinionated little jerk. I miss him so dearly..." He was her "true love."

I thought of him, with the greatest fondness and gratitude yesterday, when I came across this lovely reflection on what we can learn from our four-legged friends about sadness and joy, and being here now.

Among their many gifts, our canine friends show us how to be fully present--a crucial, neglected condition of our happiness https://t.co/vqDsHLP7Mp

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 10, 2020 

We need a trick to feel our joys as deeply as our griefs...

"Just when the coronavirus started to hit Los Angeles, my dog, Ori, stopped eating. I was afraid he had cancer, and I was worried I would have to have him euthanized because it would be dangerous and wrong to be driving a dog around for cancer treatments while we were trying to avoid contact to save human lives, including my mother-in-law’s..." (Eric Kaplan & Eleanor Davis, nyt continues)

Defying demography

Scott Simon is one of the more thoughtful voices on NPR and CBS (if sometimes, to my taste, a bit too earnest and courteously formal). I've long admired his honesty and transparency, in sharing intimate details of life such as the experience of saying goodbye to his dying mother, or expressing his unvarnished joy at becoming an adoptive parent. His tweet yesterday caught my eye. 

@nprscottsimon What artist? My daughter also defies demographic expectations, has lately discovered Neil Young & CSNY (especially “Ohio”)
June 9, 2020

(The verdict is still out on Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers of America," not to be confused with the Tennessee variety.)

Scott Simon

✔@nprscottsimon

 · 12h

Our oldest daughter is in the kitchen, born in China, reared in big cities, is in the kitchen, making tofu, listening to country music, shattering every demographic assumption made about her, and I love that, about her and life.

Phil Oliver@OSOPHER

What artist? My daughter also defies demographic expectations, has lately discovered Neil Young & CSNY (especially “Ohio”)

5

5:34 PM - Jun 9, 2020

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Odds against

Yesterday afternoon's virtual staff meeting on zoom, at which we were tasked to declare our plans for Fall semester, was a dash of cold water and a wake-up call. 

I'd assumed most of us were anticipating a guarded return to campus and the physical classroom, at least a partial return. But with social distancing restrictions in place, coupled with the perennial challenge of finding enough classrooms, and in light of a looming threat that COVID could suddenly roar back and target our demographic (the aging class of Boomer academics). it is now clear that the logistical challenge of placing most of us back "on ground" is prohibitive. 

With just one exception, my colleagues yesterday all opted for "remote" when given a choice of preference for Fall. (There had been a second exception, until she reflected further on the unpleasantness of trying to lecture through a mask. Or shield. Or space helmet.)

Disappointing. But now we’re all “woke” to the bad dream that won’t end anytime soon. The fact that other bad dreams have distracted and lulled some of us — well, me — into supposing that the worst viral disruptions of routine were behind us is immaterial.

But I’m the other remaining stubborn exception, holding out and intending to do Environmental Ethics in an actual physical environment come August. Of course a lot can happen in two months, don’t we know! So we’ll see.

Meanwhile the greater question for us all has to do with the physical space of our streets, and with the social environment in which — virus or not — too many of our fellow travelers remain threatened less by any invisible microscopic threat than by malevolent macroscopic peers, specifically those charged to protect and to serve.

The most arresting thing a colleague said in the meeting yesterday was that he considered his odds of surviving the academic year no better than 50-50, mostly “because I like to go to protests.” He exaggerates. I hope.

LISTEN

A Chocorua of the mind

I was cheered last night when I saw John Kaag's tribute to Mount and Lake Chocorua, William James's New Hampshire getaway from academia and the stresses of daily life in Cambridge (MA) over a century ago. The James Society's centenary gathering there in 2010 was for me the Platonically-perfect paradigm of a professional scholarly symposium.

I revisit this image often, a Chocorua of the mind is a good place for moral holidays. (And if anyone ever wants to organize another conference there...) https://t.co/0Ecel4CNnd — Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 8, 2020 

Those environs were deeply consoling to James, and redolent of a mental freedom he could not find in the thrust and parry of philosophical polemic. He particularly doted on the architectural expansiveness of the lakeside summer house, and its near-dozen doors "all opening out."

That's a lovely simile for his own personal sensibility and sociability, so plural and so "co-" in its eagerness to make significant connection with others beyond the borders of his own personal experience.

He was of course, as we all are to an extent, a trapped specimen of his time and its limitations. But I'd like to think his friendship with W.E.B. Dubois and his contempt for jingoistic American imperialism imply the strong likelihood of his revulsion at the endemic racism in American life that continues to torment us.

That's what I was thinking when we tuned in to 60 Minutes and saw the bravura performance of NAACP Legal Defense Fund chief Sherrilyn Ifill. She made so many sound and insightful points about the wages of denial and indifference, points so constructively instigating of an irresistible impulse to stand and do something, if only (at first) to join a march for justice.

That's the kind of instigation that made James want to spend time in Chocorua, readying for the good fight that's required for a truly righteous and justice-seeking life. Moral holidays -- "we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way" --  aren't simply an escape from the grind and its responsibilities, they're an essential refueling stop. It's beginning to look like that's what the pandemic quarantine has been for many of us, a period of fortifying sequestration before the change that has to come. And suddenly, finally, it's coming fast. Police forces are being deconstructed. Even Mitt's joined the parade.*

LISTEN

*Postscript. Why Romney Marched

The force is with them

Human crowds in time-lapse look like a large single organism, don't they, or maybe a collective to which resistance is futile. What can I do, people say to rationalize their apathetic inactivity. You can get in step with progressive peers and become a force.

It's about the journey, sure, but this looks like it's going to get somewhere. Disengagement is disingenuous.

Here’s a time lapse view of today’s demonstration in #Nashville from the balcony outside the @TNHouseReps #NashvilleProtests @Tennessean pic.twitter.com/t7vA7bqorL

— Joel Ebert (@joelebert29) June 4, 2020

On ordinary days we each walk alone or with a companion or two on the sidewalks, and the streets are used for transit and for commerce. On extraordinary days—on the holidays that are anniversaries of historic and religious events and on the days we make history ourselves—we walk together, and the whole street is for stamping out the meaning of the day. Walking, which can be prayer, sex, communion with the land, or musing, becomes speech in these demonstrations and uprisings, and a lot of history has been written with the feet of citizens walking through their cities... It could be called marching, in that it is common movement toward a common goal, but the participants have not surrendered their individuality... Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

Do the right thing

"[L]ess than five per cent of a population engaged in resistance is often enough to cause huge shifts in the zeitgeist and make it much harder for illegitimate authority to rule."

Younger Daughter insists that participation in public demonstrations is something she has to do. In the current anxious environment in which so much is so unclear, when sinister provocations to violence arise from hidden nefarious sources, a parent wants to say no you don't. You don't have to be part of the 5%.

But a parent who remembers the fervent activism of his youth, and who has decried the complacency and disengagement of so many young people ever since, also glows with pride for the conscientious young adult who's willing to put it all on the line for social justice. You don't have to, but maybe you have to. The fact that you want to, for all the right reasons, speaks admirably of your character and commitment.

So do what you have to do. Just be smart about it, on "UN International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression."

LISTEN 
==

"...less than five per cent of a population engaged in resistance is often enough to cause huge shifts in the zeitgeist and make it much harder for illegitimate authority to rule" https://t.co/uqtmItNEFI

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 4, 2020

"I've been hearing a little bit of chatter in the Internet about voting versus protest, politics and participation versus civil disobedience and direct action," he recounted. "This is not an 'either or' — this is a 'both and' — to bring about real change we both have to highlight a problem and make people in power uncomfortable."

"Just remember, this country was founded on protest: It is called the American Revolution," Obama said. "And every step of progress in this country, every expansion of freedom … has been won through efforts that made the status quo uncomfortable."https://t.co/9dBofAy8XE

— NPR (@NPR) June 4, 2020

“Your lives matter,” he said, addressing young people in his virtual audience. “You should be able to learn and make mistakes and live a life of joy without having to worry about what’s going to happen when you walk to the store or go for a jog, or driving down the street, or looking at some birds in the park.”

 ==
Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and 2018 MTSU convocation speaker:

Bryan Stevenson on the Frustration Behind the George Floyd Protests

...as courageous black people began to advocate for civil rights in the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, when these older, nonviolent black Americans would literally be on their knees, praying, they were battered and bloodied by uniformed police officers. That identity of violence and oppression is not something we can ignore. We have to address it. But, rather than address it, since the nineteen-sixties, we have been trying to distract ourselves from it and not acknowledge it, and not own up to it, and all of our efforts have been compromised by this refusal to recognize that we need to radically change the culture of police.

Now, the police are an extension of our larger society... (NYer, continues)

So, defunding police or just focusing exclusively on them does not address the larger problem. As our last real president said, "to bring about real change we both have to highlight a problem and make people in power uncomfortable."
==
Postscript. The rally seems to have been peaceful and constructive, the right thing to do.

The kids are gonna be alright. https://t.co/htTMsRPjOO

— Dean Hall (@deanhallmusic) June 4, 2020

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23NashvilleProtests&src=trend_click

Hope and change, the next generation

It was very much in the spirit of yesterday's dawn post, specifically its confidence in the rising generation's capacity to finally grapple with the climate crisis and the other horrible challenges my generation has in its turn punted to them, that I sat down to draft and record a promotional blurb for my upcoming Environmental Ethics course in the Fall. Yes they can. 

For the past several years, in alternate Fall semesters, I've taught the Environmental Ethics course at MTSU--always a little differently, with a variety of texts and approaches, but always with the firm conviction that no greater challenge faces humanity than that of learning to live responsibly, respectfully, and sustainably on the earth, "the only home" (as Carl Sagan said of our "pale blue dot") we've ever known."

That conviction once again fuels the approach we'll take this Fall, along with a sobering recognition that, like the other pressing challenges of our time including the COVID-19 pandemic of the past several months and the recent civil unrest protesting tragic incidents of racial injustice, meeting the climate challenge will require mutual support and concerted, constructive action.

Environmental Ethics is not just another arid academic research subject, it's an existential roadmap to a livable future for our children and theirs, and for the myriad other forms of life that make up what pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold called the biotic community.

This fall's course will also reflect the hopefulness of a new generation, your generation, class of 2020-something, that in many ways is beginning to stand up, speak up, and insist (with the courageous young woman Greta Thunberg) that there is a tomorrow and you'll not stand for the short-sighted indifference of an older generation that acts, like Dr. Seuss's "Onceler" in The Lorax, as if their time was the only time that matters.

 I saw a tweet from Julian Castro last night that reinforces my hopefulness, not least because it shines a positive light on young people in the St. Louis suburb I grew up in, a place I never knew to be progressive in any but an avaricious booster's sense. It was red, before that color was co-opted by the Grand Old Party.

Jalen is only 17 years old, but organized a march in O’Fallon, Missouri, that brought together thousands.

Our country’s future is in good hands. pic.twitter.com/td43seYgot

— Julián Castro (@JulianCastro) June 3, 2020

I think Jalen speaks for many more of his cohort than has generally been appreciated. If they can march, they can vote. Again, the slogan of hope redux: Yes they can. 

Fixing the broken world

Waking the morning after your youngest child's 21st birthday ought to be a milestone-moment of deep life-satisfaction, oughtn't it? Especially when that young woman is smart, kind, charming, generous, and so evidently on track for a good and munificent future? And likewise, for her older sister?

It is. It really does seem like only yesterday, when people were cautioning that we'd "turn around twice and they'll be grown." Cliches exist for a reason.

But what a world young people are being handed. When the emergency alert sounded at 10 pm last night it was almost reassuring to discover that it was "only" reporting an extension of the curfew. The largest looming crisis on our global horizon, the climate crisis, had been shoved practically out of sight by the pandemic, which itself has now been eclipsed by police brutality.

The president's cupidity and stupidity, which in "normal" times would already have resulted in his disgraced ouster, barely get noticed now. Or rather, they're noticed in the same way gravitation and a breathable atmosphere are noticed -- they're taken for granted, for the way things just are. He literally attacks a peaceable crowd for a photo-op with a Bible he's likely never beheld in his life (not just that book, any book), and it's merely a fleeting social media meme signifying nothing.

So, I say to all young people today what I said to Younger Daughter yesterday, a jokey amendment to the jokey gift of Adulting: How to Become a Grown-Up in 535 Easy(ish) Steps:

#536 -- Always listen to your dad (and laugh at his jokes). Also, please fix the broken world. You and the best of your generation can do it.

It's increasingly obvious that mine can't. If hers will vote their consciences in November, though, change can come. Yes you can.

LISTEN

Right of way

An ugly weekend of violent protests, charges and counter-charges of extremist instigation, curfews, this scary headline -- "Protests Could Set Off a Second Coronavirus Wave, Experts Warn"...

But amidst it all, this weekend, there was an inspiring magic-carpet rocket ride, the most gorgeous weather imaginable here, my wife and I celebrated our anniversary at an actual sit-down restaurant, Younger Daughter turns 21 today, and I've just discovered two new books about the physiological and emotional upside of the peripatetic life -- In Praise of Walking and In Praise of Paths. "What interests me, however, is less physiological, more elusive: walking as a way of life." (David Ulin)

Always look on the bright side.

Ulin wrote a fine book himself, on walking in Los Angeles -- Sidewalking -- which I need to send to Older Daughter.

Ulin's review concludes with a line we'd do well to remember, as the "news"-worthy world continues to spiral frighteningly out of kilter: "Each stage of the journey has value on its own terms — which means it is the journeying rather than the arriving that offers the most necessary right of way."

The way John McDermott said that was: the nectar is in the journey.

The way I say it is: walk on. If you happen to be a young person who just attained the age of legal adulthood, walk in confidence of your ability to change a troubled world. You have the right of way. You are go for launch!

LISTEN