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.