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Margins as Message

Margins as Message

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In a retrospective mood after yesterday’s blog anniversary, I pulled out an old hard-bound journal and started reading. 

It was summer. The previous fall, I’d accepted an editorial position downtown, my first office job in 17 years, though I hadn’t yet extricated myself from writing freelance articles. I had three- to four-hour roundtrip commutes and deadlines when I got home. My daughters were 10, 13 and 16. Every few minutes, I was driving them to band camp or track practice or the movies. 

Still, my first thought on reading the loopy entries from those crazy days was … why didn’t I leave wider margins?  Every available inch was pressed into service. I had trouble reading my own writing. 

It took me a minute to realize the connection, the appropriateness of the typography. The pages were as busy as I was. The margins were the message. 

(Above, some halfway-margined class notes from last week.)

“Not So Different”

“Not So Different”

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As part of our readings for the course I’m taking this semester, we’re learning about animal behavior to enlighten our view of human behavior. The basic point is that we are more like bonobos and dolphins and many other animals than we might care to admit. 

Many species mourn their lost loved ones, from the chimp Flint grieving his mother Flo, as described by Jane Goodall, to reports of elephants crying from the loss of a parent or child. 

Animals have an innate sense of justice, proved by studies in which primates refuse to solve a puzzle to earn a grape because the same treat is not being offered to their cage-mate. Vampire bats will feed each other even if it means giving up 20 to 30 percent of their own calories. Yes, there is an element of reciprocity in this. They do it, in part, because it might ensure their survival on a bad hunting night. But not all of this behavior can be explained away as quid pro quo. 

A basic question Nathan Lents asks in his book Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals is why must we prove animals have these emotions — rather than prove they do not?

(Photo of bonobos courtesy Wikipedia) 

Proud to be … Bipedal

Proud to be … Bipedal

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In class last night we talked about our earliest ancestors, about Australopithecus, Homo Erectus and the whole gang, the distant relatives on our ever-so-shaggy family tree.

A key trait, of course, is bipedalism, walking on two legs. In Maps of Time, David Christian talks about the hazards of this posture, especially for women, who had to bear children with large heads that required turning as they passed through the birth canal. 

For this, they needed help. Thus did a physical trait engender cooperation, social behavior, the collective efforts of women helping women during childbirth. And later on, the collective efforts of raising young humans, who are far more helpless at birth than most mammals. 

We don’t walk on two legs because we’re human. We’re human, in part, because we walk on two legs.

(One of my favorite toddlers shows off her stride.)

10,000 Books

10,000 Books

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A quick trip before school starts later this week lands us in Asheville, North Carolina, a place I’ve always wanted to visit. And when you visit Asheville, you visit the Biltmore, the Vanderbilt retreat and largest private home in America. 

There are four acres of floor space in the mansion including 250 rooms (43 of them bathrooms), 65 fireplaces, a bowling alley, swimming pool, pipe organ and a banqueting hall with a 70-foot tall barrel-vaulted ceiling. The mansion is crammed with priceless art, portraits by Whistler and Sargent and landscapes by Monet, and during World War II it housed treasures from the National Gallery of Art. The garden and grounds were landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted. 

Opulence is not my style but there is one room in the house I seriously covet — the library with its collection of 10,000 books. I stood a long time in that room, imagining the guests who visited, including writers Henry James and Edith Wharton, the conversation that flowed, led no doubt by Biltmore’s original owner George Vanderbilt, fluent in eight languages. Ah yes, I could spend some serious time in the Biltmore library.

Once More to the Breach

Once More to the Breach

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There is something both unsettling and gratifying about charging into a project that you’ve left idle for a month. Never mind the explanations for your idleness — a research paper due, the holidays to prepare for — the work itself has been left behind, and it lets you in on its annoyance. 

Surely nothing else can account for the way a once-admirable essay shrinks in power and perceptiveness. Nothing else explains the inelegant phrasing, the lack of insight.

And yet … with the power of time and distance, suddenly there is potential again, too. A new overview, perhaps even a revised table of contents. It’s a good way to enter the new year, with rolled-up sleeves. 

Stars in the Darkness

Stars in the Darkness

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“To take a walk at night in a city that has settled into silence and a darkness that has become far too rare is to return to something precious, something lost for so long you’ve forgotten to miss it.”

— Margaret Renkl, Graceland, at Last

Thus does Renkl describe the days after tornadoes ripped through Nashville in March 2020, bringing the city, already Covid-bound, to its knees.

Or did it? It was a lovely, early spring that year, as it was here, gentle and rainy, and neighborliness was flourishing along with the flowers. People lingered outside because there was only darkness to go home to — and they could look up and see the stars.

But then the power company arrived, and life was back to normal. It was something to celebrate, but I picked up on a gentle melancholy in Renkl’s description. There is something to be said for stepping out of the routine, as long as you don’t step too far. Because once the lights came on … the stars went out.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

A Tide of Books

A Tide of Books

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In a way, it’s tidal. Or at least it should be. A rhythm of inflow and outflow. During the semester, books trickle into my office, barely noticeable at first, then building in strength and volume as the assignments mount. At the end of the semester, they’re supposed to flow out.

As it stands now, books  have piled up on the floor and on my desktop. They’re teetering on top of the filing cabinet and bedside table, threatening to tumble every time I open a drawer. 

These are textbooks, volumes I collected for my research paper (due today but submitted a few days ago — whew!) and other volumes I’ve checked out of the Georgetown library because … well, they have just about everything the public library does not.

This year’s secret weapon in book removal: the textbook rental plan. Some of these treasures are due back in days or I’ll pay a penalty. Now, if only all the other books in my house were rentals, too.

Suspect

Suspect

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Most of my walks are in the suburbs these days, which makes sense given the title of this blog, but when I commuted downtown, a fair number of my forays were in the city. This allowed for more constant comparisons between the urban and suburban stroll.

One of the major differences is that in the city we walk to get somewhere, but in the suburbs we walk to walk — because there are few errands we can run on shank’s mare. For that reason, the long-distance suburban walker, the one who dares hoof it along a major road, can be suspect. This is true for people of all races. 

In his book The Lost Art of Walking, Geoff Nicholson tells the story of a well-dressed man stopped by a sheriff’s patrol car on the one-mile walk to his office in Los Angeles County.  It was on “a completely empty stretch of suburban sidewalk, at midday,” the man explained, and he was dressed in a coat and tie when he was ordered to identify himself and explain where he was going. “As a pedestrian,” the man said, “I was suspect.”

According to his definition (minus the coat and tie), I’m suspect, too.  

Burying the Lead

Burying the Lead

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Last night I read Erling Kagge’s Walking: One Step at a Time, and I did so blind, you might say, unaware of the Norwegian explorer’s biography and significance. 

It was the journalist in me that wanted to shout “you buried the lead” when I came across — on page 155 of a 166-page book — the acknowledgment that “I had a bit of luck in that no one else had yet managed to walk alone to the South Pole.” Uh, what?! 

Still, it was an interesting exercise to make it almost to the end of this slim volume before learning why, in essence, this slim volume was written. Which is not to say that Kagge doesn’t have a lot to share even as an “ordinary” walker. But being the first human to reach the North Pole, South Pole and the summit of Mount Everest — the “Three Poles Challenge” — on foot does give him a certain authority. 

However, I do believe that the revelations he experiences are available to those of us who only trudge around the block. “And this is precisely the secret held by all those who go by foot,” he says. “Life is prolonged when you walk. Walking expands time rather than collapses it.” 

(A diagram of the South Geographic Pole, South Magnetic Pole, South Geomagnetic Pole, and the South Pole of Inaccessibility. Courtesy Wikipedia.) 

Smart Books?

Smart Books?

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I was about halfway through Paul Auster’s Notes from the Interior when I realized … I’d read it before. Or at least parts of it. 

Maybe libraries should issue subtle notifications when patrons check out books multiple times. Something like, “Last borrowed November 2016.” Nothing as overt as, “Are you completely unaware of the fact that you’ve already checked this book out, plus renewed it, so there’s a good chance you’ve read it before?!”

I suppose this falls into the category of the”smart” features I often decry. How many times have I joked that I don’t want my TV or refrigerator to be smarter than I am? So why should my library be?

Which means … I’m back to relying on good, old-fashioned, oh-so-fallible human memory.