Birds in Restored Campus Habitat

This fall, I have been conducting surveys at sites around Kirskville to study how birds use streamside vegetation (known as riparian zones) during fall migration. I designed the project because other students have led an effort to restore the native riparian vegetation to Truman's campus along a stream called Bear Creek. As preparation for eventual presentations of the project, I went out to get some pictures of late fall migrants foraging among the plants that have sprung up in the no-mow zone on either side of the creek on campus. 

A Red-winged Blackbird perching in a tree above the creek.

Zoomed out: so there was also an American Robin. That's less important, since the Red-winged Blackbird is primarily a wetland bird, while the Robin is more of a generalist. 

 These pictures are unfortunately a bit blurry, but they show a Red-winged Blackbird in the act of foraging on the seeds of Ambrosia trifida, otherwise known as Giant Ragweed (which I happen to be allergic to.)

A Dark-eyed Junco on a ragweed stem.  

  

A House Sparrow. Like the Robin, this is less convincing evidence of the quality of the restored habitat, since House Sparrows are urban birds, but it nonetheless shows a bird making use of the vegetation.

Two male blackbirds and a House Finch in the background.

Red Leaves, Yellow Cello Case

I don't think I could have posed a more autumnal scene on the Quad last evening. A cellist and a violist were playing pop songs and improvising around sunset.  

Truman Students Arrested at Nonviolent Protest

Photo by the LA Times. The two Truman students
are the first and third seated protesters from the right.

For this week's Truman Index, I wrote a feature on two students (one, Greg Fister, an old Prep News comrade) who were arrested during a nonviolent sit-in at the Shaw QuikTrip earlier this month.  For anyone curious about what it is like to be arrested for activism, take a look. Here's the first page (below the Halloween story) and here's the second page. In addition, here's the video referenced in the story showing the police officers using force on Greg to break the line of seated protesters. The Ferguson October events, which included this sit-in, produced a new wave of demonstrations that captured national attention. Depending on the outcome of the grand jury decision, we may soon see even more.

Index Ferguson Feature

Here's the link to my feature for the Truman Index on the Ferguson protests. For those of you who read the perspective that Nick and I wrote for the Prep News, it's mostly similar stuff, but this one is more from my viewpoint as a participant and less as an observer analyzing the situation at a remove, and is therefore a bit more personal to me. I also felt that the need for this kind of work at Truman was greater than at SLUH, since in Kirksville we are hours away from St. Louis, and many of us come from elsewhere and do not have a local angle on the story. 

I wrote this thinking it would just be in my normal opinions page column spot, but they made it a full-spread feature. I'm not sure how I feel about the design above the story, but I'm glad they used some of my pictures (recognize anyone in the bottom left corner?)

More importantly: the #HealSTL office, led by Alderman French, is open as of this morning in Ferguson. They are calling for volunteers from anywhere and everywhere to help work on solutions for St. Louis. Their website is due to launch soon, but their Twitter is live.

The Pony Express

In poetry workshop this semester, our professor told us that the only difference between us and published poets is the "pony express." In other words, the difference is that published writers send their stuff out. It's fitting, then, that the journal in which two poems I wrote for this workshop will appear is named after the saddlebags used by Pony Express mail-carriers: the Mochila Review. (Our teacher encouraged us to submit to this journal, published by Missouri Western, without being aware of the coincidence. Kismet!) Here's the link to the PDF. My poems are on pages 35 and 61. Shout-out to two of my classmates, Lydia Frank (pp. 52 and 78) and Paula Vaught (pp. 25 and 79) , who also are in print in this issue. Here's to the pony express!

We also published the 2014 issue of Windfall, TSU's undergraduate literary magazine, this past Thursday. Let me know if you want a copy (free but limited supply) and I'll try to put one aside for you.

The True Confessions of a Teacher's Pet

The most Notebookish of my Index columns so far considers the possible causes of lackluster class discussions and students' reluctance to answer certain questions. I also wrote but did not draw the notebook-scribble info-graphic below the column, which I feel like I should have made either more simple or more obnoxiously complicated. (It's a Catch 22!)

Unraveling Ukraine and Complicating Soccer

Militant Ukrainian protesters, which include both far-right
ideologues and moderate pragmatists. Photo:
Sergey Ponomarev, New York Times.

My last two Index columns have been a bit more political than past ones. In the first, I address the protests in Ukraine as an example of a complex news item that needs research and discussion to unravel. This piece received a very generous letter ("Response to Conor Gearin," middle-right) the next week from a Ukrainian former journalist living in Kirksville (who would have thought?) He cleared up a confusion in the way that I was understanding  the political left in Ukraine: I was using it to mean Ukrainian liberals, those wanting closer ties with the European Union and greater civil liberties, but according to him, to Ukrainians the left means communists more exclusively.

The info about the situation in Kiev is generally still accurate, but check out your favorite international news outlet for updates about what has happened over the past two days. Things are coming to a head, and nonviolent voices are getting edged out on the front lines, though according to the New York Times, nonviolent activists are still in the majority.

In the second piece (bottom of the page), a speech from Fred Gray, Rosa Park's lawyer and longtime activist, caused me to reflect on a place of both diversity and prejudice near me: pickup soccer games at the Student Rec center. Thanks for reading.

The Humanities and Sciences Depend on Each Other

My Index column from last week is my small addition to all that's been written about why we should not install medical and neuroscience research labs in all of our Humanities buildings just yet. To me, the debate of whether there is a major that is better, or more necessary for our society to study right now, often misses the point that we need many different ways of thinking to get any task done in any one discipline--be it a paper analyzing the motives of characters in O Pioneers! or a social psychology study on prejudicial attitudes towards a certain ethnic or cultural group. In all fields, we need data and insights from many different sources in order to say anything meaningful about the world. But for a less apologetic take on the need for English majors, and one that I like better than mine, read Adam Gopnik's "Why Teach English?" from the New Yorker this August. We need English students and teachers because people like to read, and to talk about what they read. Why would we need any more defense for the major than that?

Biology Metaphors in Popular Culture

Inspired by Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," in today's column I examine some biological concepts such as "survival of the fittest" and see if the way they are used as metaphors in popular culture actually makes sense anymore.

Hard Times for the Elfin Tailor

College students have a way of getting down on themselves about struggles with their subject. If I'm not able to do this, they say, how am I supposed to do something in this field as a job? Or perhaps it's more along the lines of How does what I'm doing here matter at all? Accordingly, sometimes it's nice to remember where we are and what we are working with—or, as Kay Ryan encourages us to do, balance the daily challenges facing the elfin tailor with the rarity of being an elfin tailor, of being trusted to work with enchanted cloth at all.

Bad Day

Kay Ryan

Not every day

is a good day

for the elfin tailor.

Some days

the stolen cloth

reveals what it

was made for:

a handsome weskit

or the jerkin

of an elfin sailor.

Other days

the tailor

sees a jacket

in his mind

and sets about

to find the fabric.

But some days

neither the idea

nor the material

presents itself;

and these are

the hard days

for the tailor elf.

Index Columns: Truman and Conservation

Last Thursday, I wrote about problems with Bear Creek, the stream that runs through Truman's campus, which the EPA considers an impaired stream. Today, my column considers the benefits of creating a wildlife watching license, as other states have done, that would allow birdwatchers to pay into conservation, which is traditionally supported by hunters and fishers alone. Again, apologies for the lack of paragraph indentation or spacing on the Index website ... Also, the website's teaser for my column describes me as an "enthusiastic" birdwatcher. I don't remember providing such an adjective.

Solving the Oxford Comma Problem: A Platonic Dialogue

After reading an excerpt from Gerard Manley Hopkins' "On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue," I was inspired to write a similar dialogue for the TSU Writing Center's blog on the use of the Oxford Comma. And as Hopkins' dialogue takes place at Oxford, what setting could be more fitting for a discussion of that ever so troublesome comma?

It's Not a Shame to Love a Morning Brew

Here's the link to the first of my weekly-ish columns for the Truman Index.  The web page doesn't seem to have paragraphing at the moment, so if you are on campus, just pick up a hard copy somewhere if you want to read it. This will also allow you to see the somewhat awkward juxtaposition of my silly observations about coffee culture next to a very serious, and I think well done, column on alcohol dependency ... I wasn't aware of that when I was writing my column. Oh well. I suppose you get both light and serious this way.

In Just-spring

A brief history of northern Missouri weather this year, for those interested.

Not so long ago, this was where we lived. Note the heavily laden trees, the nearly unrecognizable campus (this is in front of the health center, believe it or not), and the snow leopard in the bottom right.

And then we went through that long period of a few days of warm weather and then back to winter; meanwhile, the trees cautiously kept their leaves back.

 But then, very suddenly, "the world is mud-luscious" and "puddle-wonderful" (ee cummings).

Welcome to the Shire. I'm a big fan of these blue flowers at left. Also the pink ones above. A kind of cherry tree, perhaps?

(In my best David Attenborough voice) With the long-awaited departure of the migratory polar bears, the rabbit population of the southern prairie and its bordering forests at last rebounds--and bounds, and bounds.

I tend to take pictures of the same thing over and over again--you might remember seeing a similar view of the shelter in the Sunken Garden before. However, I'm not particularly apologetic about this habit--no, what I really want is a picture from the same view at the same time of day from every day of at least one year, but preferably seven.

Lately I've wondered what we are to make of transformations of this kind. As astonished as we are every time, spring happens every year. The popular short-sighted mistake is to see the turning of seasons as linear progress, conquering the preceding season--which would be about as silly as spinning around in a four-walled room and thinking that each time your sight passes a corner, the wall you're looking at is new and unique in the world. Then again, maybe not such a mistake. Doesn't each spring have a character of its own among all springs that have ever been? Do we remember enough of what is the same to really know what is different? And perhaps climate change is making our weather even more frantic and capricious, and perhaps there are more sinister implications for these seemingly more abrupt changes between the seasons. But even if it turned out to be scientifically irrelevant, I suppose I'd rather stay one of the foolish humans spinning in our enormous room of light, forgetful and amazed at the intricate green details each time around.

The Pope and the Sow

At my Catholic, all-boys high school, our theology teachers advised us students to be ready for people that would challenge our beliefs once we were turned loose upon the world. Probably the most prevalent reaction to this warning among us, for better or worse, was a sort of confused indifference; some of us armed ourselves with Catholic apologist thought, in preparation for future theological sparring matches; my personal feelings lay somewhere in the muddle between those two. I have little tolerance for some of the ossified social opinions that the Catholic church chooses to cloak in heavy dogmatic robes and impenetrable pseudo-legal prose. On the other hand, I didn’t look forward to the prospect of hearing the church criticized. I felt protective of it in a certain way, like one would feel protective of a relative with some odd habits. The purest dogmatic form of Catholicism is certainly not my spiritual center, but at the same time many of my strongest beliefs do come from the Catholic tradition. More traditionalist Catholics would likely criticize me as a “cafeteria,” or carelessly eclectic, Catholic, picking out beliefs like green beans, pizza, and chocolate milk at the dining hall.

But as Truman State’s Newman Center pastor Father Bill says, it’s hard to be in the middle. My beliefs, which I would never claim as the best or even particularly coherent, are just where conscience and experience has led me. Many of my friends in college are amused to find that I’m Catholic. The church seems to be regarded not so much with suspicion but with cautious interest, perhaps like the kind felt at a zoo when looking at a rare species of iguana. The iguana has little interest in them, but they are interested in its unusual form. “Huh,” they say. “Catholic. Interesting.” I have a tendency to offer fun facts in conversation, and when one of these is related to Catholicism, my friends acknowledge the occurrences by calling, “Catholic Fact!”

The one thing that non-Catholics have actually questioned me about in college is the tradition of saints. Why pray to saints when Jesus is supposed to be our personal savior, our direct link to the divine? I’ve never had a perfect, direct answer for that question, mainly feeling that such spiritual navigation is best left to one’s own working out. The idea of saints as good examples is too simple. Catholics and non-Catholic Christians are not likely to come to an understanding on that issue.

However, I do understand saints as stories. Many of our early saints are, plainly stated, made up. They are some of the countless mythic creations that are a large part of our story-telling species’ lives. That does not have to make the truths they represent less valuable, or that I don’t have great respect for most of the saint stories I’ve heard. Like any of our stories, saint stories begin with a seed of real-world experience. In some cases, it was the verifiable life of the person in question. In other cases, it is a re-working of messy experience into terms that can be communicated through a memorable story. Whether we realize it or not, we own the stories of our saints. They are what we will make of them.

Our new pope, Francis, formerly Arcbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, is the first pope from South America, as well as the first Jesuit pope. As my high school was Jesuit, this connects him to me. We share an important set of beliefs about living in the world. Many religious orders believe that a relationship with God is only possible through removing oneself from the world and living monastically. Jesuits believe that solitude is important, but that one must also find God in all things, particularly in the chaotic world of human society and of nature. The language of the Jesuits uses military metaphors because the founder, Ignatius, saw the new order as on the front lines of carrying out the Gospel, delving into the messiness of reality and doing their best there. Jesuits value connection with the world as it is. One of the first stories that CNN told about Francis is that, as Archbishop Bergoglio, he lived in an apartment and rode the buses of Buenos Aires to work. Anyone on the bus could chat with him if they wanted. That’s the mark of a true Jesuit.

Our new pope has chosen a name that no pope has ever chosen before. And he has taken partial ownership of a very important name and story, that of St. Francis. I’m thinking, as I would imagine the new pope was, mainly of St. Francis of Assisi than the other saints by the name of Francis (though, importantly, Francis Xavier was a co-founder of the Society of Jesus with Ignatius, and Francis Borgia was an early Jesuit.) The story of St. Francis of Assisi is to us very familiar—that animal saint. He is surrounded by happy, anthropomorphized smiling creatures when he is painted. It makes him a fun saint, and much approachable for non-Catholics than some of our bloodied martyrs or anti-Semitic crusader-saints (I’m looking at you, Louis IX, namesake of my hometown.)

You might be surprised to hear that St. Francis’s story was not always told this way—far from it. The original St. Francis had little patience for animals on their own, and much less for flawed humanity’s connections to the natural world that animals usually represent in our stories. One of the original, canonical tales of St. Francis was his interaction with a sow. The sow had killed a lamb with its muzzle, and Francis, linking the lamb to the metaphor of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God, vengefully cursed the sow and proclaimed that no man or beast would eat from its dead body. This curse led to its death just days later. This sow is our fallen nature, our inclination to destroy innocence. The historical St. Francis—and even the St. Francis of many legends—had no particular kindness for most animals. Though he believed in the communion of all creation in praise of the Creator, he did not believe that all creation was anything near equal, holding to the medieval Christian conception of nature, in which humans were the privileged stewards of creation. In the Victorian period, however, St. Francis began to be pictured as associating in a friendly way with animals, based on the “Canticle of the Creatures” attributed to him. In the 1960s and ’70s, during the environmental movement, ecologists, environmentalists, and theologians began re-popularizing these images of St. Francis emphasized caring for animals that were created long after his death. In 1967, historian Lynn White argued that St. Francis should become the patron saint of ecologists, for he saw St. Francis as a radical that brought about a new, more humble conception of the relationship between humans and nature. White viewed St. Francis as what is known as a deep ecologist, claiming that the “key to an understanding of Francis is his belief in the virtue of humility—not merely for the individual but for man as a species.” Though White’s goal was essentially to create a “new religion” of ecology, whose patron saint was St. Francis, the part of his paper that suggested a reconsideration of St. Francis as a medieval Christian ecological activist was accepted by the religious establishment. Pope John Paul II followed White’s suggestion and canonized St. Francis as patron of ecologists in 1979.

A year later, one of my favorite poets, Galway Kinnell, published a piece called “Saint Francis and the Sow.” (Yes, short and worth a read. I wrote a paper on it last year, which is why I’ve got all these fun facts about St. Francis ready to go. Catholic Fact!) In his poetry, Kinnell tries not to personify animals but to animalize humanity, and to seek out the natures of animals as valuable in their own right. In this poem, the reverse of the original story, St. Francis is depicted awakening the sow to its own powers of self-blessing, playing a surprisingly humble role for a saint. He “reteaches” the sow “its loveliness,” and the sow “flowers, from within, of self-blessing.” Kinnell’s St. Francis empowers animals. He does not presume to lift them above their animal-ness but rather affirms it, and in so doing affirms the cast-off, looked-down upon parts of ourselves.

Pope Francis the First reminded me of this humbler incarnation of St. Francis today when he asked the assembled crowds at St. Peters’s, as well as the millions tuned in around the world, to pray for him. The applause and hum on our TV gave way suddenly to a few moments of meditative silence as he and everyone else bowed their heads. It is a small sign, but it is a sign of a humble vision of the pope’s role, and a sign that perhaps this pope is participating in the continued creation of St. Francis’s story like Galway Kinnell and others. It gives me hope that I’ll be better able to explain why I am still a Catholic, and that the stories that we tell about this Francis just might have value for future generations. But we’ll have to see.

"Quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain"

It's been a while since I've put something up here. Don't think I haven't been working, though. I've been focusing on poetry lately, as well as looking into publishing in literary journals. It could be quite a while before the fruits of those efforts appear, though. For now, here's an essay I wrote for the Truman Writing Center's blog about choosing good verbs. I doubt that you folks need or want advice on the fundamentals of writing, but in this essay we get the chance to destroy a perfectly good poem, as well as explore the ways in which the original poem works.

On Verbs: Sink or Swim—Or Walk?

Trust your verbs. Always—and if you find that you can’t trust them, fire them and get new ones. You can’t have a sentence without a verb. Verbs are not always the showiest part of a sentence, not always the part of your writing that the reader walks away remembering, but they are the hub around which all the other parts of the sentence turn. To make a comparison to music, verbs are like the chords in a song, the essential foundation that gives just the right tension and shading to the ear-catching melody of nouns and adjectives.

The fundamental importance of verb choice is sometimes hard to see clearly unless you compare the disastrous effects of the wrong verb to the strong but flexible structure given by the right verbs. To see some verbs in action, let’s look at a poem by Billy Collins. He’s one of my favorite poets—the clarity and accessibility of his word choice often stands in sharp contrast to the surprising journeys his images take the reader on.

Walking Across the Atlantic

Billy Collins

I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach

before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic

thinking about Spain,

checking for whales, waterspouts.

I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.

Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what

this must look like to the fish below,

the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.

(from Sailing Alone Around the Room)

Lovely little poem, don’t you think? So that we can contrast the firm, flexible structure made by good verbs with the chaos, or inflexible, impenetrable wordiness, caused by bad and unhelpful ones, let’s ruin this poem by just changing some of the verbs to similar, but much less effective, ones. With apologies to Collins:

Strolling Across the Atlantic

I stand waiting for the holiday crowd to vacate the beach

before hopping onto the first wave.

Soon I am strolling across the Atlantic

dreaming about Spain,

watching for whales, waterspouts.

I feel the water keeping up my shifting weight.

Tonight I will snooze on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to visualize what

this must look like to the fish below,

the bottoms of my feet showing up suddenly and vanishing.

Well, yuck, right? It’s not meaningless, but it’s not poetry any more. Everything’s either gone flat, or gone silly. See how “stand waiting” adds an unnecessary word and changes the simple, deft stroke of “wait” to a two-word phrase with a clunky –ing ending? See how “strolling,” which might appeal to us at first as a more interesting action than “walking,” just made things far too silly and egotistical, in contrast to the determined but everyday tone that the original poem had with “walking”? See how “watching” in the second stanza gave the narrator an over-anxious Captain Ahab attitude, in addition to adding a third word beginning with ‘w’ to that line, overwhelming the subtle, wispy alliteration Collins intended with “whales, waterspouts”? See how “to visualize” in the third stanza is so much more wordy and businesslike and less dreamy than “to imagine”?

I could have changed the verbs much more subtly and still spoiled the poem. On the other hand, it could have been worse: I didn’t throw in any nasty passive-voice constructions like “I felt my weight as it was held by the water” that invert the usual clearer order of doer of the action followed by receiver of the action: “I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.” Picking ineffective verbs—too wordy or too extreme—can keep your writing tied to the ground. Or, to stay in the world of this poem, the surface tension created by the verbs that keeps you on top of the water collapses, and you sink into the waves like the rest of humanity, splashing about in a sea of unhelpful language.

Our choices with verbs are more limited than other word choices in English. When choosing a noun or an adjective, we often have dozens of alluring options. But finding the right verb for a situation has a pleasure all its own. While they are sometimes less flashy than the adjectives or the nouns—I’m more likely to remember the “whales” and “waterspouts” than that the narrator was “checking” for them—they set the tone in a way that nouns and adjectives simply cannot. “Checking” is the same thing we do when crossing the street—it’s casual, almost thoughtless. In our mind’s eye, we see the narrator turning his head every now and then to look right and left for a whale’s back or a spout of water, as if for an oncoming car at a crosswalk—just in case. We get the sense that the narrator has done this before. He has walked across the Atlantic so many times that it’s as habitual as crossing a street with light traffic. He has dealt with the fantastic so many times that to him, it’s just an everyday occurrence. This is the essential tension of the poem—the contrast between the supernatural journey taken and the simple, confident word choice of the narrator. It allows this poem to retain its mystery and offer up new pleasures even after many explorations. Verbs can take you across the Atlantic—as long as they’re the right ones.

The Know-Nothing Consumer

One day I was having lunch at my usual dining hall at Truman. Whipping a glass for milk out of the glass-tray (with a small, habitual, careless flourish that is sure to destroy a glass or glasses someday) I approached the milk dispenser. There are little labels for “Skim,” “Chocolate,” and “2%,” and also little labels that say “Full” and “Empty.” To my satisfaction, I noted that the 2%, my milk product of choice, was labeled “Full.” I confidently pushed up the lever, but found that only a dribble of milk descended from the spout. “What the devil are they about, labeling this ‘Full’?” I demanded (silently. Suspecting dining hall workers of malice is unfortunately an occasional pastime of Truman students.) “It is clearly not full, not by any measure.” I began to walk away, but then some neurons in my brain made a sudden and astounding connection: the “Full” and “Empty” labels were two-sided—they say “Full” on one side and “Empty” on the other. And yet the insight went even deeper: I realized that it is not the cafeteria workers but the students who are expected to flip the labels when a milk dispenser runs out, because, of course, they are the only ones who would know that.

This experience, in which I was a necessary (and defective) component of an economic activity, ended up being quite eye-opening. I began thinking about other things I did not understand. I could think of quite a few. You see, like most people my age, I live in an economy in which I as a consumer am not expected to know anything. I don’t need to know how to fix a car because we belong to AAA. The auto shop people can decode those mysterious orange lighted symbols mean on my dashboard. (Is that really what an engine looks like?) I don’t have to count out bills for most transactions because I use a check card. Think about that one for a moment: I don’t have to count. I don’t have to know the roads of St. Louis, Kirksville, or any other city, because I can look on Google Maps or borrow a GPS from my parents. The development of my cooking skills has been ponderous at best, due to fast food, freezer food and college dining halls. I don’t have to know how to fix my computer—either the ITS department or my dad can figure it out. And I didn’t have to pay attention to the labels on the milk dispenser—until at last they betrayed me. The architecture of our economy is designed to coddle young consummate morons such as myself, whose ignorant money leakages are enormously profitable.

Our parents had to know less than their parents, and we know essentially nothing. Examples of the helplessness of our generation in basic life activities abound. Tonight, while studying in a dorm, I printed off a guide for my genetics lab tomorrow morning. I galloped down the stairs to the lobby printer, confident that I would find the guide waiting for me there. It was not. The desk worker suggested to check if I had printed to the right printer. “Have I really done that again?” I asked myself. “Surely I checked before I impulsively clicked print.” I had not. In fact, when I brought up the print screen again, the selected printer was located in the library, a 5-minute walk away.

I set out for the library. When I got there, I found the first-floor printer belching out a six-page document every 15 seconds. All print jobs have a cover sheet with our serial username. The cover sheets showed that these were all coming from the same person. One of my friends was stacking the documents on the printer, anxiously waiting for her own papers to show up. Then I realized that I had not checked which library printer I had printed to, and that it was probably the second floor printer. I went upstairs and found my papers. Delighted, I returned to the first floor. The printer was still vomiting papers as if it had a sort of pulpy stomach flu. There were now a few nervous people standing around the printer. I offered to go explain what was happening to the students in the ITS office upstairs, one of those islands of experts to which we are continually having to hop so we can have our problems solved. But suddenly the printer started printing out other people’s papers. My friend left without ever getting her paper.

I’m willing to bet that the student who printed out a septillion of copies thought that he or she was only printing one. But the darn thing wasn’t coming out at the dorm lobby printer in front of which he or she was standing, so the ‘Print’ button got irritably clicked a few more times. And then a few more times.

It all just makes me wonder: first it was misunderstanding the milk system in the servery. But what will it be next time? I operate all sorts of complex and even dangerous machinery—a coffee maker, a car, a razor, a computer. What if next time I can’t just cross the room to the other milk dispenser? What if next time I’m faced with the certain disaster of having to rely on my own abilities? But that, of course, will never happen.

A Most Unworldly Fellow, 'pon My Word

Stephen Maturin as portrayed (quite well, I think) by Paul Bethany. Even if the plot of the movie has essentially nothing to do with the books, it brought the characters and the world of the Aubrey-Maturin series to thrilling life.

The year is 1804: Captain Jack Aubrey, R.N., is returning from a near-run victory over a French squadron in the South China Sea, and has anchored at a small island in order to fix his coordinates by planetary observation. His ship’s surgeon and particular friend Dr. Stephen Maturin is recovering from an exceptionally painful time in India that culminated in a pistol duel that nearly killed him; the until-recently raving feverish doctor is deposited under a large shade tree to take some air while Aubrey and his officers set up their instruments. After the sun has set and Venus has been successfully observed, Aubrey looks to collect Maturin, and finds that the doctor has wandered off and returned with company.

“My God, what is that monstrous thing?’ Jack cried out.

‘It is a tortoise, my dear. The great land-tortoise of the world: a new genus. He must weigh a ton. I do not know that I have ever been so happy. I am in such spirits, Jack! How you will ever get him aboard, I cannot tell; but nothing is impossible to the Navy.’

'Must we get him aboard?'

‘Oh, no question about it. He is to immortalize your name. This is Testudo aubreii for all eternity; when the Hero of the Nile is forgotten, Captain Aubrey will live on in his tortoise. There’s glory for you.’

‘Why, I am much obliged, Stephen, I am sure. I suppose we might parbuckle him down the beach. How did you come by him?’

‘I wandered a little way inland, looking for specimens, and there he was in an open space, eating Ficus religiosa. I plucked some high shoots he was straining for, and he followed me down here … See his gleaming eye! He would like another leaf. It does me good to see him. This tortoise has quite recovered me,’ he cried, putting his arm round the enormous carapace.”

Stephen has discovered a fictional tortoise apparently larger than the Galapagos species, winning himself (and of course the creature’s namesake) immortal fame. I searched the Internet for an illustration of the victorious Stephen, his arm round the dear tortoise’s shell: I searched in vain. Nonetheless, this scene, towards the end of H.M.S. Surprise, the third book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, is illustrative of Stephen Maturin’s behavior. His speech is full of praise for unusual plants—“vegetable magnificence!”—unusual creatures—“the tapir, the boa, the peccary! You may find it hard to credit, Jack, but never yet have I beheld a boa”—and disparagements of “vulgar-minded lubricious blockheads” with whom he disagrees, usually regarding his unpopular beliefs on the social contract, the abolition of slavery, the independence of the Irish and the Catalans, and other such hopeless causes near to his heart. Stephen’s wonderfully complex character, and the shocking political and personal messes into which he delivers himself, are some of the chief joys of the books.

Many of my friends know of my obsession, my long-carried love for this series: an affliction that seems no closer to ending than it did four years ago, the first time I picked up Master and Commander and was swept into the world of sun-struck port cities, proud tall-masted ships, an impossibly amusing late-Georgian form of English, and the weather-tested, year-seasoned friendship of  Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin—a friendship that began when Maturin drove an irritated elbow into Aubrey’s ample side when the good captain began to enthusiastically beat the time on his knee to a spirited Locatteli quartet.

What I was first enamored with in Master and Commander was a powerful sense, underneath the winding, globe-trotting plot and democratic sweep of characters, that Deus providebit—that no matter what happens, humor and humanity will carry us through it, and one way or another we will be carried to some kind of safety, be it our intended destination or not. O’Brian, I believe, saw heaven ordinant in the contingencies of history. The most important ship in the book is named Surprise. Friendships begin with blows, battles are won with barely-successful ruses, governments are a hair’s breadth from backing the wrong revolutionaries, squalls are survived by the improbable integrity of a single tiny sail. Though the books portray a time now gone, nothing seems inevitable; the sun brightening their sea is as young as ours. This is largely due to the way O’Brian relentlessly takes advantage of the many contradictions, blind-spots and blips in the historical record and creates whole worlds around them—believable alternate fates, 1800a or b, as he once put it, and always sparkling with intimate details of that time.

I often find myself re-reading favorite books in the series to experience this largely unspoken faith in Providence. But lately, the biggest draw has been the chance to commune with my alter-ego Stephen Maturin. Like me, dear Stephen is barely nine stone (well I am not even nine stone). Stephen plays the ’cello (one of the many things I have learned from these books is that cello is short for violoncello) and Jack the violin (as do I, a bit). A “learned cove,” he is trained as a physician and a Fellow of the Royal Society, with a keen interest in natural history. He has a sharp, often unexpected wit and is a polyglot of immense ability. His official employment is as ship’s surgeon. But his most memorable trait is his unworldliness: his inability, most of the time, to accept the basic tenets of social behavior in his contemporary culture; his shy and reserved nature, though open with a few close friends; his immensely varied academic pursuits.

He is set in sharp contrast to the books’ more widely celebrated hero, Jack. A big, boyish, red-faced lieutenant at the start of the series, Jack is infinitely more worldly than Stephen. He loves the noise and excitement of battles, fox-hunts, the strategy of making a ship go as fast as ever it can. But most importantly he develops a great heart and great affection for his unusual friend.  Somewhat given to whoring in his youth and overeating and drinking all his life, he somehow matures enough in book two to become engaged to Sophie, a wholesome, intelligent woman from a country estate, and has a stable family life all his days (in spite of the occasional quickly forgotten infidelity on the other side of the world.) Stephen, on the other hand, nearly destroys himself again and again in the pursuit of the dashing, capricious socialite Diana Villiers, and family is something that seems forever just over the next horizon.

Yet as different as they are, and as much friction as there sometimes exists between them, each develops deep appreciation for the other’s talents. Aubrey has an indefatigable, even blasphemous belief in Maturin’s medical abilities: “It is a great comfort to me to have you aboard: it is like sailing with a piece of the True Cross.” Stephen, likewise, has a wholly ignorant faith in Jack’s abilities as a sailor, often completely trusting his friend’s skills even as the ship sinks under them (though of course Stephen, a hopeless lubber, would like as not confuse the settling of a dying vessel for the natural movement of a ship at sea).

They both find themselves in need of the other many times; Stephen, in particular, desperately needs the home that Jack’s ships provide, though he is not even entirely aware of it. “Poor dear thing, how very much he is in need of darning—how very much he needs someone to look after him. He really is not fit to wander about the world alone; it is so hard to unworldly people … How little learning does for a man—he knows almost nothing.” So says Sophie of Stephen, her close friend. And she is quite right—though medically, academically, Stephen has few equals, he is much like a child in social matters.

This resonates with me every day of my life, though in less extreme ways. As soon as I think I’m clever, as soon as I think I understand my fellow humans, it all comes down on my head. I am absent-minded and misunderstand direct address many times each day; I ignorantly flout traffic and pedestrian laws and conventions; I attempt to convey something I find interesting, a book (like these), a little-known classical composer, and I am greeted with the familiar polite interest, the dubious promise to look it up someday. But I am not really that disappointed most of the time. I have learned to expect and accept that I am slow to absorb customs of behavior and that my interests are shared by precious few people. It makes finding those people all the more exciting.

Now, Stephen is not entirely my doppleganger. For one thing, he is much smarter than me, cleverer, and braver, and is employed by the Royal Navy as an intelligence agent. I am no polyglot, though I do study Russian, which can sound like Martian to those unfamiliar with it. Stephen was also addicted to laudanum until he took up chewing coca leaves. But he is the dramatization of a type, and we are one in our strangeness, in our peculiar and passionate interests in unloved facets of the world that often seem to draw us away from other people. Few other individuals could study beetles at such length, could nearly die in the pursuit of defecating gulls on a bare rock near the Equator, could adopt a sloth, could take such delight in successful suprapubic cystotomy. Not that I completely have all his same interests, nor do I pretend to know exactly what a suprapubic cystotomy is (except for shockingly painful without modern anesthetics) but I have my own set of strange passions and hobbies that I share with so few others that Dr. Maturin is about as close as I’m going to get in literature to a reflection of the peculiar part of myself.

That’s why I ran for these books towards the end of the second semester of college. At no other time had I felt more unready for the world, unsuited for even the basic, ubiquitous experiences of college students. I do not cope with change well, but often that was not what I was struggling with. Most often, I struggled with basic acceptance of myself. I wanted so strongly at times to just be a different person. The shy, quiet, observant, overly studious person must change, and change utterly, I thought. In hindsight, I do not think that I ever really needed to change in the ways that I thought I had to. Growth and change would come, but they would come from a more subtle engine than passing myself under the harrow again and again because I felt like I did not measure up to how others near and far were “adjusting.” The relentless, self-applied pressure on myself to be different wore me down incredibly; at the end of the year, I slowly began to realize my mistake and began to stumble back to the familiar. I had to read those books again. I had to call on my particular friend Dr. Maturin.

For all his originality, Stephen always finds a place in the ad-hoc family of Jack’s ships. More specifically, Jack and Stephen’s friendship is as close as a sibling relationship, such as ones that neither of them had growing up. Like brothers, with all the squabbles and shared experiences, but also in a sense stronger, because they chose and created their friendship themselves. And through the series, partly due to spending so much time around Jack, the accepting, bright part of Stephen’s nature becomes stronger; he always had a good heart, but before meeting Jack he was something of a cantankerous hermit vagabond philosopher who happened to have a good heart.

I’ve been exponentially more fortunate than Stephen as far as being accepted goes—in my family, first of all, who do not question when I raise a ladder to peer into a robin’s nest; in my high school’s newspaper staff, a group that in many ways resembles the ragtag band that make up H.M.S. Surprise’s company; in my friends in St. Louis and from Truman. I am grateful for these relationships, for all the people that support who I am, either by joyously living their own lovable peculiarities or with their large-hearted, Aubrey-esque appreciation for those different than them. Right now I’m particularly grateful to my new friends from school, who helped me through a rough time, and probably did not realize how much they were helping just with simple friendship and by being amused at my many quirks.

Ultimately, I think the power of Aubrey and Maturin’s friendship lies in the differences in their personalities. They are not the kind of differences that make a friendship impossible, though they seem to threaten to at times; ultimately, the differences bear witness to the truth that worldly and unworldly people can live happily alongside each other, and even be friends—that the paths of asceticism and affirmation are equally valid, that identity is not some sort of necessary evil we must overcome in order to be part of a community, but rather our greatest gift. So ultimately, I do not think it is such a bad thing that I spend much of my time reading peculiar books which have not yet been read by a single living soul among any of my acquaintances; or that the first thing I think of when I step out of the house is to search for peculiar birds in the yard; that I use semicolons (and artless parenthetical asides) too much; or that I remain, even in college, a relatively shy, reserved person. No, not a bad thing at all, to be unworldly: not a bad thing at all, to be myself.