19th Century Green Writing: Teaching the Art of Fascination

A lover of plots, action, drama, passion, tension, mystery, deception, climax, conflict and resolution, might have trouble with Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain. Much of Green Writing has very little interest in what is expected of the most basic novel. But if we are to judge Austin's book by the measuring stick of the novel, we would be entirely missing the essence of the genre, which aims to teach a whole new way of looking at the world around us. What then, we might ask, holds our interest in this book? What moves us?

Austin's style is a formally anti-progressive style, in the tradition of contemporary and earlier Green Writers such as John Burroughs, Emerson, and Thoreau. In an anti-progressive style, there can also be no narrative progress. These writers were downright sick and tired of “progress” in all its forms; they were sick of efficiency, of the never-ending search for the next frontier, of the silly belief that the history of man was one of gradual advancement, that everything was moving forward to some great, more-perfect evolution of man (as many gleaned from Darwin). Green writers were sick of trains, steam boats, coal, tanning, power lines, and Speed, that popular God whose worship would flower into the awful cult of Futurism, a cult beheaded by the realization of its own desires: war; progress; efficiency. Future-oriented narrative, plot-oriented writing, the obligatory exposition, rising action, denouement, and resolution, which pull the reader along in anticipation of the next page are not sufficient to convey the values of a Green Writer. Slow down, dear reader, slow down. Don't worry about what is on the next page; instead, enjoy what is on this one.

Rather than plot, the Green writer prefers observation-driven writing. Austin, for example, examines very closely the world around her, her local environment, and she analyzes those everyday details that the casual observer would quickly relegate to the realm of the mundane. Her sentence structure is similar to Burroughs’ in its directness and simplicity; she is not trying to dazzle or confuse, she merely presents what she sees. Her vocabulary only verges into the esoteric out of necessity: she needs Latin binomial nomenclature to differentiate all the different species of flora and fauna she discusses. She presents a close, detail-oriented analysis of generally overlooked topics in a very accessible manner, giving us readers matter-of-fact wisdom in the trappings of humble diction and syntax.

The name Austin gives to her role as a nature-observer is the “true idler” (Land of Little Rain, 12), which is a name that has similar connotations to what Burroughs calls the “Sharp Lookout” (Signs and Seasons, Ch.1), the “keen-eyed observer” (“Art of Seeing Things,” 146), or what Thoreau called the “saunterer” (“Walking”, 592-3), all of which derives from Emerson's “transparent eyeball” (“Nature”, 6). These names all share in common the idea of slowing down, looking, closely observing, and waiting. By means of this waiting and watching, we as waiters and watchers might obtain a sort of transcendental enlightenment (as with Thoreau and Emerson), or at least a certain level of wisdom (as with Burroughs and Austin).

I would argue that there is a very definite connotive shift between Emerson's and Thoreau's idea of the “saunterer” or the “transparent eyeball” and Austin's and Burroughs' “idler” and “sharpshooter.” The former pair attaches a very religious and moral set of implications to the role of the nature-observer, that the nature-observer has the potential to become a sort of wiseman, prophet, or achieve some sort of union with God that is beyond what Austin and Burroughs are willing to admit. Following in the tradition of realism, and moving away from the moralizing/sermonizing force of Thoreau and Emerson, Austin and Burroughs are content simply to observe, and through observation achieve a more muted, toned-down sense of wisdom. They are less likely to make a statement about the world or nature of man and more likely to simply record the observation, allowing the reader to make his/her own extrapolations—though often, they too cannot resist the temptation to take an observation and apply a more universal metaphor to it. Take the following quotes for example:

As the weather grew hot, her position became very trying. It was no longer a question of keeping the eggs warm, but of keeping them from roasting. The sun had no mercy on her, and she fairly panted in the middle of the day. In such an emergency the male robin has been known to perch above the sitting female and shade her with his outstretched wings. But in this case there was no perch for the male bird, had he been disposed to make a sunshade of himself. I thought to lend a hand in this direction myself, and so stuck a leafy twig beside the nest.
(S&S, 73-74.)

The quick increase of suns at the end of spring sometimes overtakes birds in their nesting and effects a reversal of the ordinary manner of incubation. It becomes necessary to keep eggs cool rather than warm. One hot, stifling spring in the Little Antelope I had occasion to pass and repass frequently the nest of a pair of meadowlarks, located unhappily in the shelter of a very slender weed. I never caught them sitting except near night, but at midday they stood, or drooped above it, half fainting with pitifully parted bills, between their treasure and the sun. Sometimes both of them together with wings spread and half lifted continued a spot of shade in a temperature that constrained me at last in a fellow feeling to spare them a bit of canvas for permanent shelter.
(LoLR, 7-8.)

We see in the above paragraphs Burroughs and Austin observing the same phenomenon of birds keeping their eggs cool in a hot environment. Both authors have the same impulse to give the birds some sort of parasol to ease their plight. But note that these paragraphs avoid any moralizing statement. Rather than mention something about the relationship between mother and child, the natural, self-sacrificing altruism of mother bird to baby egg, the intimate relationship that is built during this crucial period of incubation as an edifying metaphor for human relationships or for the world at large, Austin and Burroughs are content to simply make the observation. Observation perseveres for observation's sake; the metaphor that is extrapolated from it is left for the reader to put together on his own. This is not to say that the extrapolation is unimportant, merely that it is left to the reader to apply the analogy to his or her own circumstances:

Man can have but one interest in nature, namely, to see himself reflected or interpreted there, and we quickly neglect both poet and philosopher who fail to satisfy, in some measure, this feeling. (S&S, 37.)

Nature remains the engine of metaphor for these later Green Writers, but they refrain from the antebellum tendency to do the moralizing for the reader. We have moved into the realm of realism, where the goal is to depict objective reality in a clear, literal fashion. What we glean from the observations (and we most certainly are supposed to glean all sorts of various connections and comparisons from these observations) is entirely up to us as readers.

It is important to note that, following the trend of realism, Burroughs and Austin also describe the unpleasant sides of nature. Austin spends a fair share of her pages describing the unfriendliness of the desert, the death that haunts it, its pitilessness. Nature is described not in the terms of the sublime, as it so often is in Emerson and Thoreau, but as it is: thorns, vultures, death and all. This is the post-Melvillian understanding of Nature, that Nature, beautiful though she may be, is not simply a place of butterflies, sunshine, and transcendentalism. The Melvillian perspective is much more akin to the Puritan relationship with Nature, and takes into account that Nature is full of all sorts of dangerous things; that if you go out into nature, all the time looking for some sort of sublime experience with God, you may just get your leg bitten off. Burroughs and Austin have thus shifted to an unidealized relationship with nature, a very respectful one. The “dark side” of nature is faithfully portrayed, and presented as further metaphorical inspiration.

While we as readers have an experience that is one of quiet pleasure, of slow marvel at another ecosystem likely different from our own, we are not meant to want to go to the place described. Austin and Burroughs are not writing a travel guide; their primary concern is not enticing tourism to their neck of the woods. There is no mention of monuments, or specific “must-see” natural phenomena as in Bryant's Picturesque America; indeed, a tour guide interpretation of these works would be completely contradictory to the anti-progressive outlook. Rather, these essays aim to teach how one without any training (for surely, Austin's and Burroughs' writing is relegated to the realm of the naturalist rather than that of the scientist) can, by spending time and careful examination, find such wonders in his or her own backyard. Their message is much more profound than the travel guide, which simply states “come here and look at this!” Austin and Burroughs are saying that there are all sorts of natural phenomena to be studied, that there is fascinating stuff happening all over the world all the time, and if Austin can find it in the middle of the desert, and Burroughs can find it in the Hudson Valley, then surely we as readers can find it wherever we may be. The Progressivist travels to Paris in order to have a fascinating experience; the Green Writer recognizes that wherever you go, there you are, that “one has only to stay at home and watch the process pass” (S&S, 3).

Ultimately, that's the brilliance of late-nineteenth century Green Writing: it teaches us how to become fascinated with where we are, how to become satisfied with what we have. It is trying to bring about a whole new way of life. Stop looking for plot. A plot is a destination, and a destination implies a purpose, and a future-oriented world view; not everything needs to be viewed in terms of progression; not all who wander are lost. By becoming fascinated with where you are, there are all sorts of wonderful things to be learned. Lewis Mumford notes the outcome of regionalism:

With local history as a starting point the student is drawn into a whole host of relationships that lead him out into the world at large: the whaling ships that used to cast anchor at Poughkeepsie and other river towns will carry him to the South Seas; the discovery of the Hudson will take him back to the Crusades; one begins to follow the threads of local history, local manners, local industry, local peoples, one finds that they lead in every direction. And that is the proper method. ("The Value of Local History", 25.)

The Green Writer is thus saying by example, by the explanation of his or her observational processes, the following to his reader: “This is my place, and here is how I love it. You too can find a similar love for your place, wherever that may be. And as you love your backyard, soon you shall love also your neighborhood, your city, your country, indeed, soon you'll find that you possess a love for and responsibility to the whole world.” They are conveying a sense of pride in regionalism; they are demonstrating a non-narrative way of life. Austin and Burroughs are not just teaching the art of observation, they are teaching the art of fascination.

Bibliography

Austin, Mary H. The Land of Little Rain. The Modern Library classics. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

Burroughs, John, and Jeff Walker, ed. Signs & Seasons. Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 2006.

Mumford, Lewis, & Marranca, Bonnie, ed. "The Value of Local History," A Hudson Valley Reader. Woodstock, N.Y: Overlook Press, 1995.

Thoreau, Henry D, & Carl Bode. The Portable Thoreau. Viking portable library. New York: Viking Press, 1964.

Inspiration and Transcendence as an Aspect of Monumentality: The Courtyard of Louis Kahn's Salk Institute

Creating an environment designed to inspire inspiration itself is no easy task. In many ways, it is equivalent to creating a religiously transcendent place. How does one represent inspiration in form? How does one prepare a place for enlightenment to occur? This paper strives to analyze Louis Kahn's Salk Institute as a place of both rational and spiritual transcendence; that is, how Kahn links inspiration in architecture with his understanding of monumentality.

The Purpose
The Salk Institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine. He hired Louis Kahn as the chief architect in order to create an institution that would unite people “from different disciplines and backgrounds” to explore “the organization and processes of life.”¹ Kahn sought to construct a space that would facilitate collaboration and synthesis across the sciences as well as foster thought, meditation, and genius; the challenge was to create a space for the greatest scientific minds to work, and also to think. Perhaps the most interesting concept Kahn tried to realize was the idea of “a lab fit for Picasso”.² Science and art were meant to meld at the Salk Institute; intuition, inspiration, and rational thought ought to blend; genius must be accommodated, nurtured, and given space to roam. In order to achieve a space that supersedes these boundaries and combines these various elements, whether they be disciplinary, rational, or divine, Kahn had to find a way to seamlessly integrate poetics and science into a single unit, a transcendent but utilitarian architectural chimera.

The Plan: Beaux-Arts
The Salk Institute is a Beaux-Arts plan: perfectly symmetrical. Perhaps Kahn chose a Beaux-Arts design because so many successful monumental structures have employed symmetry in achieving timelessness. Kahn himself was educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and its influence is visible in Khan's revival of the reflective plan.³ In essence, the Salk Institute is two identical, parallel buildings, each lined with five wings of offices. The two buildings are separated by a wide, concrete courtyard which itself is bisected by a long, narrow strip of water that drops off into a lower-level fountain and sitting area. The courtyard below terminates into a sloping canyon of sandstone Southern California coastal sagebrush which leads out to the Pacific Ocean a half-mile or so away. When one stands at the head of the fountain, one cannot quite see the termination of the courtyard, and the gray concrete seems to meld with the Pacific, as if the whole ocean were pouring into the Salk institute through this narrow strip of water, or as if the fountain were flowing directly into the ocean. This is the great moment in art in which Kahn incorporates the ocean, horizon, and sky as integral parts of his architectural whole, or perhaps visa versa—the Salk institute becomes an integral part of the sea and sky.













The Open Courtyard and Infinity
The overall design of the Salk Institute in many ways parallels Thomas Jefferson's plan for the University of Virginia. With the University of Virginia, Jefferson used a Beaux-Arts, neoclassical design on top of a small hill with a central lawn that terminates on one end with the famous Rotunda (the pinnacle of education), and on the other end with an open view of the beautiful Virginian landscape. Jefferson thus directly incorporates a symmetrical layout with a central garden for meditation, reflection, breathing space, and clarity of mind. The one end is closed by the architectural symbol of knowledge (the library), and the other open into the wide world of nature and the sublime.⁴ The central courtyard area in both cases delineates clearly between places for work, study, science, and places for thought, relaxation, and meditation.⁵

The power of Jefferson's famous lawn relies heavily on the incorporation of the surrounding landscape and the connection of the building to the larger world, just as Kahn's open courtyard derives its perspectival force in part from uniting the courtyard with the sea and sky beyond. The Salk Institute is an example of the Renaissance conception of correspondences, that the microcosm of the earth is a reflection of the macrocosm of the heavens, that all things are are connected within some great, cosmic synecdoche. Kahn's thin fountain seems to extend into the infinity of the Pacific, and even further to unite with those blue sunny San Diego skies. It is the miraculous nature of infinity (the perspectival wonder), that reminds the viewer standing in the Salk Institute courtyard of his place in the world, his smallness or greatness, that his actions, ideas, and study will extend outside the property of the Institute into the infinity beyond, and conversely, that this power of creation and infinite propagation seems to be a divine gift, handed down from the sun itself.

Infinity is a quality that relates both to monumentality and inspiration. According to Kahn, “The sense of wonder is so very important to us because it precedes knowing. It precedes knowledge... The immeasurable is the one thing that captivated the mind; the measurable makes little difference.” It is those many aspects of the universe that are simply beyond human comprehension (the profound, the infandum) that confound and dumbfound the human mind and create a sense of wonder in man. To comprehend something is to have knowledge of it, and to have knowledge of something is to ruin its mystery. When one looks down the thin fountain stream that divides the courtyard, the illusion of infinite continuation is created as the concrete and horizon blend. Rationalizing the courtyard, measuring and quantifying it potentially destroys the phenomenon. Kahn's fountain, set within the grid of the courtyard, creates a one-point perspective in concrete and water, the vanishing point disappears in the sea. Kahn gives any person standing in his courtyard the opportunity to experience the sublime, to transgress the empirical, scientific perspective and instead to become captivated, fascinated, to hand oneself over to the wonder of infinity.⁶


















The Elemental Temple
Part of the greatness of the Salk Institute is the way it combines all the classical elements (earth, wind, water, fire, air) in a modern structure. The element of water cuts through the textured concrete, which is the structural, earth element of the institute. From here, the sky brings us into the element of air and finally, burning in the sky, the fiery sun illuminates the whole structure. Each element interacts and depends on the others. Water we might take as a symbol of the flow of energy, the lifeblood of the Salk Institute, while the concrete is the bones, the structural form. The sky then becomes the realm of the divine, the space the courtyard seems to extend infinitely into, while the sun's rays make the whole structure visible. Kahn said that “Integration is the way of nature. We can learn from nature”, and though this quote isn't referring specifically to the merging of the primeval elemental forces in his architecture, it fits nonetheless—by integrating the primordial elements into the Salk Institute, he achieves the feeling of ancientness and timelessness requisite for any monumental work.⁷

Kahn uses water in the Salk Institute to give it a zen-like atmosphere, and he employs the element in a way not unlike Mies' Seagram Building in New York City. The Seagram Building, which Kahn described as “a beautiful lady in corsets” used reflecting pools in front of the skyscraper to attain a temple-like atmosphere, tranquil, calm, separating the building from the street and muffling the noise of the chaotic New York hustle and bustle.⁸ Water is integral to the creation of a silent space. And silence, in turn, is integral to meditation and the birth of inspiration.
















Light, “What slice of the sun does your building have?”
Kahn paraphrased the above line from a poem by Wallace Stevens to express his understanding that structure is defined by light. He felt light is a magical substance. Light is utterly invisible, undetectable unless it reflects off of something. It seems not to exist unless there is something for it to bounce off of, and reciprocally, any object must also remain invisible unless there is light to bounce off it. We might also note that the immeasurable quality of light, the paradox of its simultaneous existence as a wave and a particle, fits it neatly into the realm of the immeasurable, and thus the awesome. Perhaps Kahn's sensitivity to light and shadow was particularly acute on account of the fact that he regularly hid his scarred face under a deep hat as a young man, thus his eye for light and shadow became particularly well-honed.⁹

In any case, his tour in Greece reveals his unique perception of light as it plays across the ancient temples, their forms shifting with the lability of the sun. Note how the forms of these ancient temples become colorful, and attain an almost mirage-like ephemeralness, as if they might evaporate into steam. Kahn's point here is that, while these structures are solid, permanent and mute, they come alive, speak, change colors, moods, even seem to have movement when hit by the sun. Light gives life to their form.





















Natural light is therefore paramount in Kahn's works. The Art Historian Alexandra Tyng relates the following anecdote regarding Kahn's fascination with natural light:

Kahn was intrigued by the nuances of mood created by the time of day, the weather, and the seasons. Scorning the static artificiality of electric light, he would often sit at his desk between the tall windows of his office, waiting until the daylight was completely gone from the room before deigning to reach for the light switch. He believed that the changeable quality of daylight gave life to architecture because one's relationship to a building changed according to the light surrounding and penetrating it. For this reason, no space was truly a space unless it received the life-giving touch of natural light.¹⁰

If, as Kahn thought, form is a result of the interplay between an object and light, then we can say that the form of architecture changes depending on variations in light, color, intensity, as a result of the time of day and year. And what a perfect place to observe the power of light: San Diego has one of the most moderate climates worldwide; it is sunny almost perennially. As a result, Kahn angles the windows of his parallel office/lab towers westward toward the sea and setting sun; each window reaches out to grasp its own slice of sun; the whole structure is heliotropic.

















Silence: the Void
Kahn believed that silence was the opposite of light, and the combination of the two creates inspiration. Silence, strictly speaking, is the absence of sound; it is a void, emptiness, nothingness. It can be compared to structure: structure has no form without light, it too is nothing, a void; without light, structure and silence are merely the potential for form. In Alexandra Tyng's words, silence is “the desire to express” whereas light is the “means of expression.” At the point where these two forces meet lies the instantaneous moment of inspiration. Tyng extends the analogy further to compare the relationship between silence and light to the poetic versus the rational, the yin versus the yang, the feminine versus the masculine:

The poet, who is comfortable in the realm of feeling and intuition, will follow his urge to express for as long as possible before finding the means of expression that would put his images into concrete words. On the other hand, the scientist, who is at home in the rational world, might stay as long as he could in the realm of light, collecting facts and figures to prove his hypothesis before acknowledging its connection with wonder and mystery.¹¹

There is something almost Blakeian about Kahn's sense of duality and paradox in the universe. The idea that something can come from nothing, that the void is a vast expanse of potential that merely needs to be animated or illuminated is an almost mystical conception of architecture. To many, it might seem an implausible philosophy—yet miracles often seem dubious to those who have never experienced them.

Poetics and Inspiration
The poet and teacher Dr. Gideon Rappaport argues that the relationship between inspiration and the human mind is a reciprocal one: “It takes two, the poet and his muse. But the muse cannot be compelled. She may be invoked or appear uninvited, but she can dwell only where a place is prepared for her.”¹² The courtyard of the Salk Institute is a place uniquely prepared and equipped for the arrival of the inspiring muse. Inspiration is an ephemeral, divine phenomenon. It is an enlightenment in the miniature. One can only prepare one's mind, make a place ready for the muse—but inspiration cannot be forced.

Similarly, monumentality is a quality that is eternal, but also seemingly random. One can beg for monumentality, incorporate all the attributes whose aggregative force seems to make monuments monumental, but the quality itself simply cannot be compelled. Monumentality is a divine phenomenon, a transcendent feature of a work that usually is not present, and seems to only occur by thaumaturgy.

Furthermore, inspiration takes effort, patience, and time—thus, for 360 days of the year, the sun sways north and south along the western horizon of the Pacific as the seasons pass and the Earth tilts on its axis, and it does so out of alignment with the line of the fountain. Only for a brief few days does the sun perfectly line up with the fountain, and the whole structure takes part in a galactic alignment, an inspirational equinox. By incorporating the essential element of time into the architectural experience, the building becomes part of time itself, and achieves monumentality through the melding of eternity and form. The whole structure is a monumental metaphor for inspiration, a metaphor for the rare, divine moment when the muse speaks to man and ideas are born from the void.

It's been said that part of the difficulty with discussing architecture is the fact that buildings are, in and of themselves, inexorably mute. And so is Kahn's Salk Institute. It is monumental in the gravity of its silence. Yet when the right moment hits, when the light suffuses it and ignites the strip of fountain, the structure comes alive in a transcendent event that speaks volumes to those present to witness, volumes that must remain in the realm of the unspeakable.

End Notes

¹ Vincent Scully, “Works of Louis Kahn and his Method”, Louis I. Kahn, (Tokyo, Japan: Architecture and Urbanism, 1975) 288.

² Qtd in Ezra Stoller, The Salk Institute, (New York, NY: 1999), 2.

³ Jonas Salk, “A Proposed Institute: A Statement [in connection with consideration by San Diego City Council of proposal to make land available...],” typed manuscript, March 15, 1960.

⁴ Unfortunately, as a result of one of the world's many architectural travesties, the quad is now closed on all four sides on account of the construction of a new building, blocking Jefferson's intended view of the landscape.

⁵ Stoller, 6.

⁶ Louis I. Kahn, “I Love Beginnings,” Louis I. Kahn. (Tokyo, Japan: Architecture and Urbanism, 1975) 279.

⁷ Qtd in Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1966) 50.

⁸ Louis I. Kahn. “Architecture is the Thoughtful Making of Spaces”, (1957) 272.

⁹ Ravi Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India, (U of South Carolina Press, 2004) 77.

¹⁰ Tyng 265.

¹¹ Alexandra Tyng, “Silence in Light”, Louis I. Kahn: l'uomo, il maestro. (Rome, Italy: Edizionie Kappa, 1986) 271.

¹² Gideon Rappaport, “While Standing on One Leg”, 8 Nov. 2009, http://raplog.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html.

Bibliography

Kahn, Louis I. “Order in Architecture,” 1957.

Kahn, Louis I. “Architecture Is the Thoughtful Making of Spaces,” 1957.

Kahn, Louis I. “Monumentality,” 1944.

Kalia, Ravi, Gandhinagar: Bulding National Identity in Postcolonial India. University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

Louis I. Kahn. Tokyo, Japan: Architecture and Urbanism, 1975.

Ed., Latour, Alessandra, Louis I. Kahn: l'uomo, il maestro. Rome, Italy: Edizionie Kappa, 1986.

Giurgola, Romaldo., Mehta, Jaimini. Louis I. Kahn. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1976.

Maki, Fumihiko., ed. Futagawa, Yukio. Louis I. Kahn: Richards Medical Research Building, Pennsylvania. 1961 and Salk Institute for Biological Studies, California, 1965. Tokyo, Japan: A.D.A EDITA Tokyo Co., 1971.

Stoller, Ezra. The Salk Institute. Friedman, D.S., “Introduction”, New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

Tyng, Alexandra. “Form, Order, Design: The Inspiration Process”, Beginnings: Louis I. Kahn's Philosophy of Architecture. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1984.

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.

Cornelisen Fellowship Report

My experience during my Cornelisen Fellowship was a blast. I went with three goals: to improve my Russian; to study post-Soviet states; and more generally, to examine all those parts of Russia that aren't relegated to Moscow or Saint-Petersburg. My program was in two parts. First I spent three weeks enrolled in the Tallinn University intensive Russian program, and then I spent the following two weeks traveling across Russia on the trans-Siberian railroad, all the way to Vladivostok.

In Tallinn, I tested into the advanced Russian course with a motley crew of two Italians, one Finn, and two Americans; our teacher, who was born in Russia but emigrated to Estonia, was an involved, dedicated woman who never got tired of my constant strings of questions about Estonian identity and her own migration. Our discussions generally revolved around the summer school cultural program, which we participate in during the afternoon, and involves a number of lectures (my favorites were on the Estonian economy—who knew Skype was an Estonian company?—and the history of Estonian art), weekend trips to neighboring Estonian cities such as Tartu, guided tours in the local art museums, tours of the cities bastions, and its winding Medieval streets. Historically I was most impressed by how this country, whose entire history is defined by subjugation, still manages to define itself as a unique cultural and political entity.

Estonians have a fascinating history. In a nutshell, from the very founding of the Medieval city of Tallinn, Estonia has been successively occupied or controlled by one of its powerful neighbors, such as the Danes, the Livonian Knights, the Swedes, the Imperialist Russians, the Nazis, and the Soviet Russians, with only very brief respites of independence. True independence was established after the fall of the Soviet Empire. The Soviet occupation was so brutal, (it was based on a program of cultural genocide, eradicating all things Estonian, even bulldozing graveyards to erase cultural memory), that when the Nazis briefly took power, the Estonians welcomed the Nazi armies as liberators. You know you are in hell when the prospect of a Nazi invasion inspires hope.

Nothing, however, was more inspiring than watching videos from the 1991 “Singing Revolution”, which stretched across all the Baltic States as a result of the fall of the Soviet Empire. As its name implies, the revolution was a remarkably peaceful one, and Estonians were faced with the challenge of establishing their own system of self-government, economy, and culture. The Kumu Art Museum was in my opinion the most valuable representation of this effort to define Estonian identity, as it demonstrated the winding route Estonian art took from the fascination that early 19th century German artists took with the idealization of the Estonian peasant, to the Soviet period where large, formal paintings depicting happy Estonians freely and graciously handing over Estonia to the communists, to present art which, while often very personal and specific in subject matter, as a whole is constantly struggling with the difficulty of creating something uniquely Estonian without relying on the precedents set by another people. By far my favorite work of art in Tallinn was the Jewish Synagogue, a testament to freedom of speech with architecture that speaks for itself.

The trans-Siberian offered me a number of epiphanies. While I spent the majority of my time looking out the window, reading, walking up and down the train meeting passengers, and stepping off to bargain with babushkas, these ideas dawned on me slowly. The first of which is the most obvious: Russia is enormous—plainly enormous. And when you sit there on the train for a really, really long time, looking out the window, just chugging away the landscape, you start to come to a new understanding of this fact. Your sense of time gets pretty zonked while you are on the train, and one thing I noticed was the vast majority of the cities we stopped at were small, post-industrial cities, cities that had been built because of the railway, and whose economies depended on the railway. Yet these many cities are still few and far between when you look at what an expanse you're traveling across—Russia, for all its size, holds almost all its people and money in the two nodes that are Moscow and Saint-Petersburg. Out East, these people are practically off the map of government concern, apart from major lumber and oil industry operations.

The other thing I realized was the border between Mongolia, China, and Russia is, for all intents and purposes, defined by this railway; tensions over Chinese border encroachment would make the trans-Siberian a modern Rubicon. Finally, and this was the most harrowing realization, because the trans-Siberian runs primarily along the southern border of Russia, you forget that there is a huge amount of land up north in Siberia, enormous tracts of land that, as far as I can tell, there is only very limited access to. The Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka, for example, has no infrastructure with the main body of Russia, and is only accessible by ship and by plane (though it is physically connected to Russia). Looking at this enormous amount of mostly empty territory, I still marvel at the fact that Russia’s control here was established by the construction of the railroad, and to this day depends on it. While on the one hand, one might look at the untapped wealth of land and natural resources in Eastern Russia as indicative of Russia's ability to remain a world power well into the 21st century, I am skeptical. Government corruption makes such a venture extremely difficult. Moreover, I still cannot tell to what extent the Russian government directs its gaze eastward. Powerful neighbors such as North Korea, and especially the booming economic and military power that is China seriously threaten Russian dominion over these lands, and whether or not they remain in Russia’s control over the course of the next century is, in my opinion, extremely tenuous.

I'd like to conclude by thanking the Cornelisen Fellowship fund for providing me this experience. It was a once in a lifetime journey, and I learned so much from it. What an expanse!

John Burroughs Q of the W: Santa Claus

Vol. 9, pg. 36; Dec. 19, 1886 (morning)

19 Julian said this morning soon after waking up that he felt as if a great change was coming — "as if a great joy was passing away" — he is beginning to doubt the existence of Santa Claus! Poor boy! Such a discovery does leave a void.

Burroughs spends a fair few pages of his journals railing against organized religion in favor of his agnostic, semi-transcendental religious beliefs.  When his son, Julian, first came to doubt the existence of Santa Claus (above), Burroughs followed up with eight straight pages in his journal comparing the belief in Santa to the belief in an anthropomorphic God.  In fact, the majority of the journal is consumed questions of religion and god... nonetheless, even after such persistent argument and refutation of the existence of God in any biblical sense (such ideas, he would say, are the result of mankind's imaginative childhood), he still found himself trumped at what to do when his own son became and apostate of Ol' Saint Nick.

Vol. 9, pg. 44; Dec. 19, 1886 (evening)

-- The same evening Julian remarked with a sadness that went to my heart, "The world has told a great many lies if there is no Santa Claus; making pictures about him and telling so much about him in books."

Needless to say, it was a rough Christmas at the Burroughs family home that year.

Forget the Princeton Review.

Forget Kaplan. Forget Barrons. Forget Peterson's. Forget Sparknotes.  I like standardized testing about as much as I like a rousing bout of dysentery.  I did it their way for the SATs, but for the GREs, I'm doing it my way -- with one book, and only one book:

Leviathan Melvillei

Things used to be bigger on our little planet.  Everything: trees, animals, fishes, all bigger.  I wonder if there is an evolutionary explanation as to why organisms are overall smaller than they were in, for example, the Triassic Period.  Was the Earth simply more fertile millions of years ago, such that it could support such organisms?  Well damn.  They discovered this little guy, the whale-eater-of-whales, two years ago and just published the discovery yesterday. Awe-some.

Update: more on this prehistoric whale.

John Burroughs Q of the W: Round 2

Vol. V, p.56 [June 19, 1884]

It is a greater consolation to me to know that the universe is governed by unalterable law, than that it is subject to any capricious and changeable will. I like to know that what we call God is without variable-ness or shadow of turning. We know now what to depend on. Strict justice is and must be done to every creatur else life and nature would miscarry. I ask but justice, yes, I demand it, and let me not flinch and whimper.

Vol. V, p.65 [July 18, 1884]

- Ours is a mechanical age. Its voice is the steam whistle loud, dissonant, hideous.

Vol. V, p.74 [July 22, 1884]

- Some people are not susceptible of much culture. Some of the most learned men have little culture; it all stops with the memory and does not reach the spirit. The person who remembers the most of the book he reads, is probably influenced the least by it; its words stick in his memory, but its spirit fails to sink into his heart.

Vol. V, p.79 [July, 1884]

- The newspaper gives currency to all manner of flippancies, levities, irreverences, ephemeries; its tendency is undoubtedly to beget a shallow, gossipy, loud, tonguey, irreverent type of mind. In the course of generations, the most serious consequences must flow from it - elephantiasia of the lip and tongue, metaphorically speaking.

Vol. V, p.78 [July, 1884]

- Up to certain grade of intelligence, I consider it a good sign if a man belongs to the Church. Then there is a higher grade in which belonging to the Church implies a certain hypocrisy, or insincerity. An intelligent, disinterested seeker of the truth cannot be found inside the Church in these days.

Vol. V, p.80 [July, 1884]

Rousseau was in many ways like a bee drowned in his own honey. His imagination swamped him.

Moby-Monday: Sea Fever Blog

Go check out my blurb on Peter Mello's Sea-Fever blog. A photo I took from the John Burroughs Sharp Eyes Conference made it into the Moby-Monday series.

Burroughs Quote of the Day: On Death

Jan 5 1885, VI p.57

Tis a year to-night that father had his stroke. How surely the present and the future become the past, and how surely the past becomes sacred - the cemetery of our days.

Jan 1885; VI p.59

The stages of an orb's life, say the astronomers, are stages of cooling. So are the stages of a man's life. It is a process of cooling and hardening from youth to age. The gassy, nebular youth out of which the man is gathered together and consolidated! Fiery, strong, vapery, at first; then cold, hard, impoverished at last.

Nov 6 1884, VI p.11

- If I can look with complacency upon the eternity past, when I was not here, when I existed only potentially, I can look with complacency upon the eternity to come when I shall not be here, when I shall exist only in the memory of nature.

March 1885; VI p.86

- I shall live in the future, just as I have lived in the past, namely, in the life of humanity, in the lives of other men and women. When the last man perishes from the earth, then I perish — to reappear in other worlds, other systems. No doubt that man has always existed on some of the myriads of worlds of space, and no doubt he will always exist. So far as consciousness or personality is concerned this life is all. We do not know ourselves again, we do not take form again, except in others.

Inappropriate?

Maybe. But a really good gift.

The Burroughs and the Bees

John Burroughs was one of the foremost nature writers at the end of the 19th century, and is credited today with being the inventor of the modern nature essay and a huge proponent of modern environmentalist movements. In his day, he was enormously popular, and traveled in the same circles as Walt Whitman, Thomas Edison, John Muir, Edward Curtis, Louis Fuertes, Henry Ford, R. Swain Gifford¹, Edward Harriman, Harvey Firestone, etc. As the great wheel that is the canon of American Literature turned, he fell into relative obscurity after his death in 1921.

Fortunately, he left behind a huge amount of writing. He also left behind some 53 journals, all of which are available in the Vassar College Library Special Collections. These journals have been transcribed twice already, once by Clara Barrus, the woman who took care of him in his fading years after his wife Ursula died, and once again by his granddaughter Betty Kelley. While these transcriptions are invaluable, full of information, and make clearly available Burrough's often cryptic handwriting, they also have their downsides. Both of these transcriptions were highly edited, punctuation added, spelling corrected, and only selections published. Essentially, until the advent of my project (thanks to the work of Dr. Jeff Walker), these journals were available only in the glimpses that Clara and Betty felt appropriate.

My voyeuristic research scholarship comes from a grant Vassar received to scan these journals in toto, all 3,300 leaves. I essentially transcribe these journals while staying as true to Burroughs word as possible. These transcriptions are then uploaded to a website [http://www.hrvh.org; search "John Burroughs" and select one of the journals] in which one can view an extremely² high quality scan of the journal page. Thus, for easy legibility, my transcription is available alongside the image of the real thing. In short, my job is to carefully read the personal journals of a great, wise old American author.

His journals are extremely interesting. He is constantly noting the weather, and changes he perceives with the seasons, trees, animals, etc., but more interesting to me is his musings on what makes good writing, who the bests authors/poets are, the dual nature of the soul and the body, the place of science and religion, Darwin, his visits with Walt Whitman, his troubled relationship with his wife -- I've managed to find a way to get paid to study!

For the remainder of my project (my goal is to transcribe a decade of his journals this summer, the next student will tackle the following decade), I'll be publishing his gems of wisdom on my blog here, and perhaps commenting myself on the words of the great Naturalist.

To start:

If I can look with complacency upon the eternity past, when I was not here, when I existed only potentially, I can look with complacency upon the eternity to come when I shall not be here, when I shall exist only in the memory of nature. The past concerns me just as much as the future. An immortality that begins is not immortality.³

¹ Whom I will be writing my Art History these on.

² By "extremely", I mean 8 megabyte image files that you can zoom in so close, the grain of the paper is visible, any palimpsest discernible, and one might argue that you couldn't get better resolution even if you had the actual journal sitting in front of you.

³ Vol. VI, p.11, November 6, 1884

Summer Session at Fairmont University

Ah, hot days, warm summer afternoons! Lazy lazy lazy. What a summer it is going to be. I've got two main things I'm up to this summer, and a number of goals.

I'm so glad to move onto summer. Watching all of 2010 graduate was very difficult, and then I had to move all my stuff a very, very long ways all by my lonesome, which was made particularly difficult by the fact that I claimed an enormous amount of furniture from SWAPR (a Vassar program which reclaims all the furniture students throw out, stores it for the summer, and then resells it to next year's students) all of which was very heavy. But now that I'm moved in and all my stuff is safely stored away, this summer is cruising.

All my stuff on the lawn of Fairmont where it remained and I quietly prayed for no rain.

For the first half of this summer, a Ford Scholarship with Jeff Walker, an awesome professor of Earth Sciences, one of a handful of experts on our project (John Burroughs), and a remarkable human being. He is one of those people who you want to be: if all the dice were rolled, and I ended up like Jeff Walker, I'm pretty sure I'd be a happy man. He is a legend around campus, highly respected, extremely knowledgeable, and a titan of sustainability and locavore mentality. He lives on a farm nearby Vassar known as the Walker Family Farm, has a huge family of talented, good-hearted children (two of whom I've had classes with; they really are remarkable people) who all play music together in the Walker family band. This is a rare, wise man to get the chance to know. I am lucky.

Then, for the second half of my summer, I'm headed off to Estonia (via Berlin, where I will take a day to see Shinkel's Altes Museum, and whatever else I have time for—probably just a day or two) where I will take intensive Russian courses for three weeks in tandem with a culture program that guides me all around the city museums, and even to the outskirts of the little country. At the end of those three weeks, I'll be getting on the trans-Siberian Railroad from Saint-Petersburg (where I will have another day or two) all the way to Vladivostok by way of Irkusk, Lake Baikal, and numerous other spots. The best part about this whole scheme is it is completely free on account of me winning a scholarship. I've been inspired to apply to every scholarship under the sun from here on out, because my luck is downright absurd and I need to keep capitalizing before my well runs dry.

I've matriculated into Fairmont University, which is absolutely the coolest place to live at Vassar. I've learned the value of porches on a house—so shady for hot summer afternoons, fresh lemonade, crushed garden grown mint, a splash of rum (or two), kicking back with my bad guitar playing; I'm in Evan-heaven. Fairmont University is off campus with my best pal Misha – and what a pal he is. He is an amazing chef, and is going to be teaching me as we cook our summer away. So that's the first goal (and the rest, in no particular order of importance):


1. Learn to cook; do it well.
2. Plant a garden. So far, I have some 25 tomato sprouts, three or four sweet pepper sprouts, and am looking to plant a hedge of sunflowers to block some of the more or less unsightly sides of our college house.
3. Work on my Ford Scholarship work, transcribing the Journals of John Burroughs.
4. Get my essay published. And the other one too, if possible.
5. When in Saint-Petersburg, organize a way to get into the basement of the Hermitage and see if I can't find the missing Rockwell Kent piece in their collections (more on this later).
6. Exercise a bunch; soundness of body : soundness of mind – consult Bruce Lee's Art of Expressing the Human Body.

It's my Birthday

Yeah! Made it another year.. I'll have to write something later. Why, this time last year I was in Russia. And it looks like I'm going back.

The Omnipresence of the Gods

Whether by means of the Sortes Virgilianae or simply by choice, every Latinist has his favorite line from the Aeneid. My favorite line has always been from Book IX, when Nisus asks Euryalus the following question:

Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,
Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?
(184-85)

Do the gods not give this fire to our hearts, O Euryalus,
or does each man’s mad passion become to him a god?

This question is one of the seminal questions of the Aeneid and one of the great questions of all philosophy: what is it that ultimately motivates man? Is the source of what moves man divine, or is it simply himself, his own psychology? While Virgil never explicitly answers this question, he sets a number of equivalent situations where he entertains this question, and how the reader understands this question is pivotal to the understanding the final scene in Book XII, in which Aeneas slays Turnus.

Nisus’ dira cupido (“mad passion”, “dread desire”) refers to his wish to abandon his guard post and venture into the sleeping ranks of Rutulian troops. Nisus knows perfectly well that this wild risk is a nearly suicidal endeavor, but the payoff is glory—and that is the stuff of heroes. To win glory, or at the very least, to bite the dust in the flames of battle is the goal of any Classical warrior worth his mettle. To die anonymously at sea (as Aeneas almost does in Book I), or with a whimper after days of siege wear down the battlements, is abhorrent.

The Nisus¹ and Euryalus episode is a retelling of a scene from Book X of the Iliad, in which Odysseus and Diomedes spy on the Trojan camps at night. Capitalizing on the vulnerable sleeping Trojans, the pair behead their victims, sending a mess of Trojans from Hypnos to Thanatos. Both Homer and Virgil recognize this scene as distinctly heroic, but to Virgil, it is Greek heroism, an example of timê. Roman heroism is something which Virgil spends the entirety of the Aeneid defining, but might be truncated to the idea of pietas: a combination of personal responsibility to the gods, family, and homeland. In the context of a Greek war, the heroism of Diomedes and Odysseus is therefore highly effective. In the context of a Roman war, however, the Greek heroism embodied by Nisus and Euryalus ultimately leads to nothing. While the Trojan pair successfully murder a slew of sleeping Rutulians, they fail to achieve the primary objective of informing Aeneas that their camp has been surrounded, and also fail to obey orders and keep guard.

Nisus' question touches on the idea of gods as both anthropomorphic figures physically living within the heavens and affecting the course of humanity, while simultaneously being projected representations of aspects of the human psyche and other phenomena. Thus, Hypnos is both the god who controls sleep, as well as sleep itself; Thanatos is both the god of death, and death itself; Venus is both the goddess of love, and love itself; Juno is the goddess of wrath (among other things), and wrath itself. Nisus' question is similar to the dilemma of the chicken or the egg: did the gods give him the impulse, or did his impulse give him the god?

Virgil explores the mystery of the source of human impulses further at the end of Book I, where Eros disguised as Ascanius breathes poisonous love into Dido's heart. On one level, this scene is entirely the result of divine will. Venus tells Eros to poison Dido so that she falls in love with Aeneas, and by doing so Venus guarantees Aeneas' safety in this foreign land ruled by Juno. On another level, this scene can be described entirely within the context of human emotion. Dido certainly cannot deny being a tidbit smitten with Aeneas long before the arrival of Cupid. The first time she lays eyes on him, she is described as obstipuit aspectu² (“standing agape at the sight”, “marveling at the sight”) and immediately addresses him as nate dea³ (“goddess born”). Her words give away her attraction to Aeneas long before Eros crawls into her lap. When Ascanius/Eros eventually does sit in her lap, can we blame Dido for thinking of her own empty womb, her own dead husband, her sworn widowhood, (all of which she will lament later in the book)—is not this hero, who washed up on her shores, the perfect suitor for her? Is it not only natural that she fall in love with Aeneas, a proper king for her new land, leader of seasoned warriors to help defend against Iarbus and other surrounding enemies?

The next time we see Dido is in Book IV, where “burning” nearly becomes her epithet as her passion is associated with fire and madness. She is compared directly to the raging Bacchante (the wild hedonist worshipers of Bacchus), howling in their orgies as she herself bacchatur (“rages”)⁴ through the entire city of Carthage. The flame of love “eats at her marrow”⁵, driving her more and more insane. She is described repeatedly as infelix⁶, “unlucky”, a word which implies that Dido is a victim of bad luck, that she could not have controlled this situation. Her passion, as with Nisus dira cupido, has become her god. Fittingly, she ends her life by making literal the metaphorical wound referred to in the second line of Book IV.⁷

Another example is drowsy Palinurus at the end of Book V, whom Hypnos persuades to fall asleep at the tiller of Aeneas' ship. Palinurus initially rebukes Hypnos' argument, so the god takes drastic measures, enchanting him to sleep and pushing him off the stern of the ship (but not before the determined Palinurus rips off a piece of the tiller). Here, it seems that the situation is more a matter of direct divine intervention, yet the description of this scene (as with Dido) is allegorically equivalent to the human phenomenon of drowsiness. It is not for nothing that we “fight” sleep, “struggle” to stay awake, but ultimately, capitulate, “falling” asleep or, in Palinurus' case, off the taffrail.

Examples of this conundrum are numerous. For example, Allecto drives the firebrand of wrath into Turnus' heart, and releases the viperish snake of hatred on Amata.⁸ Yet it is important to note that every action taken by any character in the Aeneid can be read both as effected by the gods, or as a psychological phenomenon. Thus, even in scenes where the name “Juno” might not ever be mentioned, we can still see the presence of Juno via actions, thoughts, or impulsions that are Juno-esque. Seas cannot storm without the permission of Neptune, so if we see a storming sea, we must assume Neptune is present. Though the gods may be absent in name, they are omnipresent in numen.

Understanding the above paradox is crucial to understanding the final scenes of the Aeneid. When Juno is told to stay out of the fight and quit interfering with the war between Trojans and Rutulians, she complies, and we don't see her name for the remainder of the epic. Bodily, she is absent; yet the emotions she represents are terribly present. Thus, when Aeneas stands over the suppliant Turnus, sword hanging above the vanquished man's head, he has to decide whether to kill or spare Turnus. Turnus begs him, ulterius ne tende⁹ odiis (“stretch no further with hatred”), and asks him to consider the grief his father Daunus would feel, and notes that Anchises would have had pity in his situation (no doubt this is true—the last time Aeneas talked to Anchises in Book VI, the shade of Anchises reminded Aeneas that the powers of Rome will be to battle down the haughty, and spare the suppliant).¹⁰ This is the moment of stillness, the brief pause of consideration where, in a way, the whole future of Rome hangs in the sway of this one, crucial decision. Whether Aeneas kills Turnus or spares Turnus will set the example for all future generations of Romans.

And then Juno swoops in. Seeing the baldric of Pallas, Aeneas is furiis accensus et ira terribilis (“enflamed by rage and terrible anger”)¹¹—Aeneas is at last overcome by Juno; whether or not he realizes it, his apotheosis into the annals of Roman history is adorned with the attributes of Juno, Queen of vengeance. Juno, while ceding the fight to Jupiter, is more present here than ever before, becoming the conquering emotion of Aeneas himself.

Furthermore, Nisus' great question is just as present as ever, and we as readers are supposed to ask this same question in all scenes of the Aeneid, and perhaps too within our personal lives. Perhaps Virgil found himself asking the same question of Nisus—do the Muses inspire the poetry of his pen, or does his poetry create the very Muses that inspire him?

¹ nisus, us m. a pressing or resting upon or against a) a striving, exertion; b) step, flight, push, ascent; c) a giving birth; Virgil is no stranger to etymological puns.

² Book I: 613.

³ Book I: 615.

⁴ “Saevit inops animi totamque incense per urbem
bacchatur, qualis commotis excit sacris
Thyias ubi audito stimulant trieteria Baccho
Orgia noctuernusque vocat clamore Cithaeron”,
Book IV:300-303.

⁵ “Est mollis flamma medulla”, Book IV: 66.

⁶ “Uritur infelix Dido totaque vagatur / urbe furens”, Book IV: 68-69.

⁷ “vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni”. Book IV: 2.

⁸ One might further compare the scenes between the poisoning of Amata by wrath/Allecto and the poisoning of Dido with love/Eros. Analysis of these scenes reveals that, despite these two emotions seeming to be opposites, the effects they have on Dido and Amata are remarkably similar: both women burn with the emotion, both rage, both go insane, and both can only be cured of it by suicide. If we read the competition between Venus and Juno as a competition between Love and Vengeance, there are some very interesting implications for the end of the Book XII, when Aeneas stands over Turnus and must decide between Love (thus, sparing Turnus) and Vengeance (slaying him).

⁹ We might recall the first book of the Aeneid, line 205 tendimus in Latium (“we stretch into Latium”), where this word tendimus appears for the first time. Aeneas heroic speech is the mark of his leadership in Book I, and here Turnus reminds us of that speech by the use of the imperative form tende. We are reminded that the question of the epic has never been whether or not Aeneas will make it to Italy and found Rome, but rather how he will go about doing it.

¹⁰ tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.
(Book VI, 851-3)

¹¹ XII, 946-47.

Daisy to Daisy

When reading Henry James’ Daisy Miller, one cannot help note the influences the story has on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works, particularly in regards to the character of Daisy Miller, transformed into Daisy Buchanan. In this comparison, we see the two figures are much alike in terms of name, description, and even speech patterns. It is almost as if these two ladies were the same person, as if Fitzgerald picked up Daisy Miller, gave her a new last name, and pretended she hadn’t died of malaria in Rome.

I propose that Daisy Buchanan is modeled closely after Daisy Miller, to the extent that the former can be said to be an older version of the latter. Fitzgerald must have been captivated by the figure of Daisy Miller, and wondered what sort of girl she would have become had she not been so tragically struck down by malaria. Daisy Buchanan is his answer to that question.

I always think it best to start with the name “Daisy” itself and consider its etymology and what, therefore, the reader can expect from a so-named character. “Daisy”, as William Carlos Williams notes in the first line of his poem by the same title, comes from the combination of the two words “day’s eye”, given because its petals close at night and reopen with the sun. Williams notes some important qualities of the daisy, as the speaker of the poem closely examines one, that it is fascinatingly delicate, the petals thin to the point of translucency—a mere touch and it is bruised! The daisy is a beautiful, ephemeral flower, carefree and careless, in and of itself, a thing to be admired and looked at, growing from rich, fecund earth but reciprocating with nothing but its own radiance. Daisy Miller is such a flower. Our first description of her regards her physical beauty:

The young lady meanwhile had drawn near. She was dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon. She was bare-headed; but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep border of embroidery; and she was strikingly, admirably pretty. (393)

This entire description is distinctly visual, and could literally be a description of a flower. She is entrancing from the first moment we meet her on account of her lavish dress and appearance, and Winterbourne soon finds himself stealing glances at her lovely features, particularly her “wonderfully pretty eyes” and her “eminently delicate” face. Daisy vainly spends much of her time smoothing out her bows and ribbons, rigorously attentive to maintaining her complexion. Fitzgerald takes the same visual route when we first meet Daisy Buchanan:

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew the curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as a wind does at sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.” (8)

Here, Fitzgerald paints an ekphrasis of Botticelli’s famous Birth of Venus, in which Daisy Buchanan becomes the golden-haired goddess herself, the enormous couch is her seashell, which she floats upon, buoyant, gently tossed by the windy Zephyr flowing through the open windows. What an extraordinary vision Fitzgerald paints for us, what an extraordinary way to introduce a character.

From the beginning, we know that both Daisies are distinctly physical specimens of feminine beauty. And, given we have the ideal daisy flower in our hands, we must assume that it is growing from only the finest, richest soil. Neither girl, I suspect, could survive without and enormous amount of wealth readily available for disposal. Daisy Miller is the daughter of a wealthy businessman from New York, a member of what Henry James calls the “reckless class”. She is empowered with money to travel abroad with her careless mother (a woman who rarely seems to have any control or concern for Daisy Miller’s situation) and meet the acquaintance of whomever she finds pleasing. In this act, she fosters a degree of boldness along with an air of innocence; she possesses what might be called the audacity of innocence, the sort of forgivable ignorance that leads to one ask inappropriately forward questions, and generally fail to understand the circumstances from which others are speaking.¹

Daisy Buchanan grows from the same pot of wealth, having married the successful Tom Buchanan, and having come from an upper-class home. She too comes from the reckless class, or as Fitzgerald describes it, she is a person who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into…money and…vast carelessness.” She is moved by Gatsby’s mansion, impressed by his wealth, and pivotally brought to tears by his shirts (“’They’re such beautiful shirts’, she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘it makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.’”).

Nick Carraway is often taken aback by Daisy’s voice, the “inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle in it, the cymbals of it”. It is Gatsby himself who recognizes that her mellifluous voice is “full of money”; its beauty a function of meretricious material charm. She is, on all accounts, the epitome of Madonna’s “Material Girl”, living in a material world.

Both Daisy Miller and Buchanan share a very peculiar—and similar—way of speaking. The first thing one notices in their speech is a general prolixity. Daisy Miller is more than ready to speak—at length—about any topic regarding herself without hesitation, discretion, or even thought.² She seems to say things merely to invoke a response, to get a rise out of people, telling Mr. Witherbourne she was engaged just to see his reaction, or “prattling” on about her own affairs, or hoping for a “fuss”—“that’s all I want—a little fuss!” Daisy Miller has little concern for public reputation, and thus has little concern for what she says. She is a girl who says whatever pops into her head, with the assumption that it is both worth saying, and worth hearing. Daisy Buchanan is guilty of the same crime:

“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me helplessly: “What do people plan?”
Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.
“Look!” she complained; “I hurt it.” (11-12)

Daisy Buchanan literally says everything that comes to her mind, and we are given open view of her entire thought process, spelled out before us. Fitzgerald adds an extra twist, noting her short attention span, as an alarming object catches her eye, completely overriding her previous thought processes in favor of the more pressing matter that has come to light: she has cut her finger, so slightly she didn’t even notice. But this is the nature of the Daisy flower; utter vanity inspires deep concern in even the most minute physical deformation, and allows room for very little actual thought.

Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing. “I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation: “An absolute rose?”
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. (14)

Here we see another example of Daisy Buchanan’s lack of thought in her comparison of Nick Carraway to a rose. She repeats it to herself, as if the repetition will affirm the statement itself, and when she finds this method of corroboration doesn’t work, she turns to Jordon Baker for help. Nick, of course, notes that this comparison is completely false. It is meaningless speech—words said for the sake of saying something.

Fitzgerald reiterates this point a number of times in the scene where Daisy attempts to speak words of wisdom. Relating the story of her daughter’s birth, she says:

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’
“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.” Her eyes flashed around in a defiant way…and she laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated—God I’m sophisticated!”

In this, we get the Daisy Buchanan motto: be a fool. Intelligence never got a girl anywhere, so why waste your time trying to sound smart when you can just use the powers of Venus? Again, she repeats herself a number of times, indicating a degree of self-affirmation, as well as uncertainty in what she is saying. Her source to back up her statements is narrowed from “everybody” to the vague concept of “the most advanced people.” Realizing this is not necessarily a reliable source, she then falls back on personal experience as the basis of her wisdom, ending in an exclamation that seems painfully ironic. We are left to wonder if she believes any of this herself, or if she is just blowing hot air.

Henry James focuses on Daisy Miller’s naiveté in a more indirect way, as Winterbourne notes that she could care less for visiting castles or historical landmarks.

The young man asked Mrs. Miller how she was pleased with Rome. “Well, I must say I am disappointed,” she answered. “we had heard so much about it; I suppose we had heard too much. But we couldn’t help that. We had been led to expect something different.”

Daisy and Mrs. Miller reach Rome in all its majesty, walk around, see the sights, and find themselves disappointed. They believe they have been let down, that it is the fault of the art, not the fault of their own ignorance. Daisy and Mrs. Miller forget that the art is not on trial. They are so self consumed that they cannot appreciate the great city of Rome, full of some of the most magnificent art and architecture in the world. The daisy flower, as we have already noted, is not meant to admire other things—it is meant to be admired. Its ability to appreciate anything beyond itself or without direct relation to itself is incredibly limited.

Note also that both Daisies are, by their nature, flirty. Upon arriving to Nick’s house, Daisy Buchanan asks Nick if she has secretly invited her over because he loves her. Daisy Miller coolly flirts with Winterbourne, specifying that she wants him to visit her in Rome not because of some side trip to see his Aunt, but because she wants him to want to see her. Indeed, Winterbourne spends the vast span of Daisy Miller debating whether the young lady is innocent, or a coquette.

“Coolness” is an attractive trait for both Daisies. For Daisy Buchanan, it is this word that publicly reveals her love for Gatsby: “Ah,” she cried, “you look so cool.”… “You always look so cool.” For Daisy Miller, the first quality she points out in her young Italian suitor is his coolness: “But there’s Giovanelli, leaning against that tree. He’s staring at the women in the carriages: did you ever see anything so cool?” For both of them, there is something about coolness which they find distinctly alluring. Note that in both cases coolness is something they observe, not something that is necessarily there, just appears to be there. The sense of this word in both cases is “deliberate, calm, not hasty,” which seems to be—apart from wealth—a winning quality for a man to possess, perhaps because any other sort of man would be too much for the delicate flower, anything but careful deliberation would undoubtedly lead to tragedy—and it does.

It does not take much to see that there are many parallels between Daisy Miller and Daisy Buchanan. Clearly, Fitzgerald saw something in the character of Daisy Miller, something about he wanted to explore, namely: what happens to all the Daisy Millers in the world who do not die young of malaria? How does such a person proceed into later stages of life? Daisy Buchanan is his answer.

¹ “But Daisy, on this occasion, continued to present herself as an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence.” (415)

² “Of her own tastes, habits, and intentions Miss Miller was prepared to give the most definite, and indeed the most favourable account.” (407)