by Charlie Huenemann

Vasco da Gama was the first person we can name who successfully commandeered a voyage around Africa’s southernmost point, the Cape of Good Hope. It is a treacherous passage, where warm currents from the southern part of the Indian Ocean clash against the icy currents of the south Atlantic, leading to dangerous waves that have swallowed many ships. (Indeed, at the time it was known as “the Cape of Storms”.) Da Gama gave the cape wide berth, sailing far the sight of land, before turning northward and poking his way along the eastern coast of Africa, where many hijinks ensued.

This was in 1497, and Europeans were keen to find some route to Indian spices that didn’t involve crossing lands controlled by some sultan or other. Da Gama showed everyone the way, and the Dutch and the English rushed through and established colonies along the coasts of the Indian Ocean. Da Gama’s fellow Portuguese established colonies as well, of course, but not with equal success. Part of the reason was that Portuguese sailors as a whole were not very interested in following da Gama’s Cape Route because they knew damned well there was a monster down there that ate ships like snacks.

Sailors spend their lives and meet their deaths in the middle of huge and violent systems they don’t understand and can’t control (well now, who doesn’t?) and so they make up stories to pretend to make sense of them. Unsurprisingly, many of these stories feature ill-tempered monsters with gaping mouths. The nautical disasters clustered around the Cape of Good Hope was pretty clear evidence of some beastly demon, and in 1572 the great Portuguese epic poet Luís de Camões gave the dreadful beast a name: Adamastor. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mary Hrovat

In 1995, I made two Christmas mixtapes that I labeled A Very Mary Christmas. I had recently gone through a period of wondering whether it made sense to go on celebrating Christmas, given that I’d stopped believing in the Christian story years earlier. In particular, I’d thought about whether I wanted to go on listening to Christmas music—especially the old traditional carols I love, many of which have explicitly religious lyrics. In the end, I decided that there were other good reasons to celebrate the time around the winter solstice. I made the mixtapes in a spirit of enjoying winter and celebrating both the darkness and the light to be found in family and friends. I kept some of the traditional carols (some only in instrumental versions) and religious music—Handel’s Messiah, for example. In addition, I included music that’s not traditionally considered Christmas music or even winter music; hence the now mildly embarrassing substitution of Mary for Merry.

I put together four 45-minute playlists that covered two 90-minutes cassettes. The first playlist was essentially my very own greatest hits for December. I opened with Jethro Tull’s “Ring Out, Solstice Bells” and followed that up with Canzona per sonare No. 2 by Giovanni Gabrieli, which has always seemed particularly jubilant to me. This playlist included my favorite songs from two albums I remembered from my childhood: one of the Robert Shaw Chorale singing traditional carols a cappella, and a 1963 album called The Spirit of Christmas with the Living Strings. I’m not sure I’d like that one if I heard it for the first time now, but musical taste doesn’t have much to do with it. That album calls up my childhood Christmases as no other music does—a mixed blessing, but it’s too deeply embedded in my memories to ignore. Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

Why should history be a part of our core curriculum in high schools and colleges? A variety of arguments have been put forth to support a historical education. Most notably is how history can inculcate a better understanding of the world. It can help us become more empathetic people, and better citizens, too. The kind of history we teach is also up for debate. A post-colonialist urges people to focus on more inclusive narratives that highlights the subaltern. A feminist lobbies for more women’s voices, while an anti-racist argues for the importance of racism in understanding the modern world. All this matters, but I’d also argue that understanding history as made by people, and as such complicated and contingent, can helps us to shape our future more effectively.

None of us can predict that future. However, a deep familiarity of history can give us a general idea of how change over time happens and how we can make better choices than those made in the past. But given that more and more, our educational system has become captured by corporations seeking to build a better employee and by individuals looking to indoctrinate rather than educate (see the anti-trans and anti-CRT bent of the MAGA movement), this is becoming increasingly difficult. Even some well-meaning progressives tend to focus on objectifying history and making it seem like something that happened, or at best, a celebration of “great men” rather than events that everyday people made happen. Our love of heroic stories of individuals and our distaste of subjectivity and complexity has blinded us to just how critical it is that we understand how we got here. But by ensuring that our students have a better understanding of how people make the arc of history bend, we can learn to chart a better, more humane path into that unknown future. Read more »

Shadow self-portrait at the train station in Bruneck, South Tyrol.

by David Greer

My property on Pender Island is just a postage stamp of a lot by rural standards, but the immensity of the surrounding stillness of the Pacific rainforest feels more precious to me than the numbers representing its square footage. With no other human dwellings within sight or hearing, the stillness is the silence of a cathedral in these weeks before Christmas, with the murmurs of devoted parishioners replaced by the soft chatter of Pacific wrens among the sword ferns, the nasal queries of a red-breasted nuthatch marching down a fir trunk, the gravelly chuckle of a raven passing overhead, and the slow creaking of an antique carriage clock being rewound deep in a cedar—the winder being a Pacific chorus frog perilously close to dormancy on a day threatening a hard frost. Much less audible, high in the canopy, are the whisperings of the tiny insect-hunters and seed-eaters that depend on the treetops for food: chestnut-backed chickadees, golden-crowned kinglets, pine siskins.

In this part of the world, on this island in the Salish Sea, the trees grow very large indeed. The aptly named grand firs may reach 250 feet and Douglas-firs are frequently taller, over 300 feet in some cases. In height though not in majesty they overshadow the western red cedars and bigleaf maples that dominate the glade in which my cabin stands, a quarter mile from the Canadian edge of Haro Strait and within hearing of the largest of the massive container ships struggling against the incoming tide.

Every tree has its own character. Outside the cabin stands a massive bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum) that has been through the wars but has risen again to defy the next winter storm. From time to time she drops branches as big as smaller trees (I have watched them fall) yet still carries on like some old limbless veteran, surviving by sheer will despite gaping holes in her trunk that delight children with supple imaginations. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

Sleepless one Christmas Eve . . . monkey brain, coffee at 3 a.m. . . . then back to bed to stare at purple and green fireworks on the insides of my eyelids.

Meanwhile, my husband, the retired carpenter, saws wood loudly beside me. He is recovering from both cancer and stroke.

A chorus of human voices fills the room, no comprehension—it’s Latin—the words so swaddled in harmonic echoes they lift and disperse in the bedroom like smoke from a censer. The choir floats me to the edge of transcendence, sets me down like a feather. What is this?

From the radio turned down low, the announcer says: “This is what the season is all about—‘O Magnum Mysterium.’” No surprise here, the day before Christmas.

I think: This is what I should have heard at the Smithsonian a couple of years ago, at the Museum of Natural History, in the big, quiet room darkened but for spot-lit, black stone slabs, the Burgess Shale fossils, found a century ago in British Columbia by Charles D. Walcott, with his horses and pickaxes. These stones reveal life from half a billion years before present, give or take a few million.

This is my pilgrimage. But it’s sad to find myself alone in this exhibit, with this magnificent find. One must study the black slabs up close and judiciously, like the brush strokes of Old Masters, to appreciate the wonders there. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

When people take to the street to protest this is often supposed to be a sign of democracy in action. People who believe that their concerns about the climate change, Covid lockdowns, racism and so on are not being adequately addressed by the political system make a public display of how many of them care a lot about it so that we are all forced to hear about their complaint and our government is put under pressure to address it.

But what about this is democratic?

In a democracy we are supposed to accept the outcome of the democratic process, involving reasoned public debate and free electoral competition for positions of public power. The fact that people protest when they don’t accept the outcome of the democratic process is a rather clear sign that protests are a non-democratic activity at best, and at worst an attempt to override and undermine democracy itself. I have in mind particularly the recent climate change related protests in the UK which seem to be spreading and becoming increasingly aggressive, but also recent events like the farmers blocking roads in the Netherlands, the truck drivers blockading Canadian cities and borders, and so on.

At best public protest is non-democratic. It aims to get attention (primarily from the news media) and thus to get the protestors’ complaint higher up in the political agenda – the things the government is expected to have an answer to. Success depends on the quantity of attention the protestors can attract, and this is proportionate to the amount of drama they can cause rather than the quality of their complaint (i.e. its reasonableness). It is thus a kind of democracy hack, like the search engine optimisation companies engage in to get higher on Google’s search results and so get more attention from potential customers. Read more »

If you talk about it, it’s not Tao
If you name it, it’s something else
……………. —Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching

Lao Tzu’s Lament

At first I think, I’ve got it!
then I think, oh no, that’s not it,
I think, it’s more like a flaming arrow
shot into the marrow
of the bony part of everything

…. ah, but some summer nights
…. it’s hanging overhead so bright

then right there I lose it,
let geometry and time confuse it,
then it’s silent and won’t sing a thing,

…. but some summer nights
…. it’s croaking from a pond so right

then again, I lose it,
let theology and time confuse it
then it’s silent and won’t sing a thing

…….. I’m thinking I’ve been here before
…….. feet two inches off the floor,
…….. thinking, is this something true?

and sometimes I think, I’ve lost it!
though I never could exhaust it,
because it’s lower than low is
… and wider than wide is
……….and it deeper than deep is
…………….and higher than high is,

…. ah, but some fresh spring days
…. it’s cutting through the fog and the haze

…….. I’m thinking I’ve been here before
…….. feet two inches off the floor
…….. thinking, is this something true?

by Jim Culleny
© 2015

Rendering in song: Here

by Paul Braterman

In 1954, at the height of the McCarthyite Red Scare, the anti-evolution preacher John R. Rice asked his audience to whom Marx had dedicated The Communist Manifesto. The answer, he shouted out, was Charles Darwin. It is doubtful whether Marx had even heard of Darwin when he and Engels wrote the Manifesto in 1848, but that is the least of Rice’s errors.

Carl Weinberg, in his excellent Red Dynamite, an overview of the deep links between evolution denial and right-wing politics in America, points out that Rice had the wrong book; he should have been referring to Das Kapital. But as we now know, even if he had been he would still have been wrong. Wrong book, wrong date, wrong author, wrong about Darwin’s response to the request to dedicate.

The matter is well summarised by Richard Carter, reporting in The Friends of Charles Darwin on a paper by Margaret Fay in The Journal of the History of Ideas. The same conclusions had been reached, independently, by Lewis Feuer, and Fay’s paper has a long discussion regarding their relative priority, and describing differences of interpretation between them. As for the belief that Marx had wished to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, Fay traces this to Isaiah Berlin, probably misunderstanding what Darwin actually did say in a letter to Marx. Read more »

by Derek Neal

I write this essay as much for myself as for the reader. It is my conviction that one writes to find out what one thinks, not to put down fully formed thoughts that are floating inside one’s head.

Some sort of alchemy occurs when I put pen to paper, or in this case, pen to screen, as I set down the stuff knocking about my brain and give it a more solid, permanent form. But why do I insist that what I write comes from within me? To say that my words flow from my own head, down my arm, and into the writing instrument is simply the representation of a process I don’t fully understand. The bards who sang epic poems in ancient Greece did not view their creations in this way, as coming from within, but as being inspired from without, inspire in this case taking on its original meaning: to breathe into. The poets began their stories by invoking the gods, or muses, in the hope that the spirit might be blown into them, filling them up and allowing them to translate that spirit into words and music for the benefit of an audience. It may be that we could also think of writing in this way. Since I’m writing an essay, I might invoke the spirit of Montaigne, call upon him to breathe life into my pen and help shape my words, but it may also be that literacy itself precludes this, that literacy and the written mode of thought are fundamentally interior activities, a conversation with oneself, and that something about the written word lends itself to being thought of as coming from inside of oneself, whereas the spoken word seems to come from “out there,” with the speaker being a vessel giving form to something of which they are not the origin. Read more »

Loriel Beltran. P.S.W.  2007-2017  

Acrylic and latex paint on wood panel.

More here and here.

by Ada Bronowski

Why celebrate first times? If, admittedly, from the first time you have sex to the first time you taste escargots à la bourguignonne, hear Allegri’s Miserere or read Dostoevsky’s Demons, you, personally, undergo internal cataclysms which change you permanently, are not these moments blatant gulfs of ignorance and inexperience that you thankfully succeed in filling and should feel shame and embarrassment, if anything, about not having gotten done before? There always is a before, and the first time for you is the last for everyone else. So why do we nevertheless persist in sacralising first times both for ourselves and others?

One answer is that it is easier. It gives a fast-track meaning to our individual lives. First times map out each of our individual paths in life, fixes down memories and, with hindsight, provides us with explanations for our actions and more often than not, for our failings. But such doting smacks ultimately of self-indulgence, turning into meaningful exploits, essential steps required of us in order to realise our humanity – a task set upon all of us whether we like or not.

When Aristotle suggested that the way living beings are immortal is through the perpetuation of the species, he spelt out a hope and a burden. The hope that what individuals achieve in their short lives, lives on after them through the generations to come, like Archimedes’ eureka moment when he discovered the equal weight displacement in water of a solid body – no one after him can claim eureka about that: once discovered forever treasured. But it is also a burden: for every generation of the species has to catch up with everything that was done before, if it is to claim its right to the name of that species. And that is why the immortality of man is set apart from that of all other living species. For all other animals, the hope and the burden of immortality are one and the same: to survive, from sea turtles to sloths or canaries, animals must, but also cannot but, live up to all the promise of their species. Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

While watching a Christmas movie recently and hearing a character describe something as a “Christmas miracle,” my 8-year-old son scornfully exclaimed, “That’s not a Christmas miracle, that’s a Christmas coincidence!” He was right, of course, but despite that outburst, he’s not the kind of kid who would tell the other third-graders that Santa’s not real or ask uncomfortably pointed questions about baby Jesus. He’s the kind of kid who works on a project about Diwali and shows genuine curiosity and appreciation for the beauty of the ceremony. And he’s absolutely right about that, too. He has already learned to straddle the line that all secular people must learn to navigate: declining to accept extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence and honestly pointing out falsehoods, while respecting the social contract and generally being a well-adjusted and likable human being. 

This time of year is just as heartwarming for secular folks as it is for religious ones, even if there are a fair number of eye-roll-inducing “Christmas coincidence” moments. I have fond memories of singing in the choir during my college’s Christmas candlelight service, harmonizing in the darkened, musty-smelling, flame-flickered chapel and awkwardly turning sheet music while trying not to spill hot wax on myself. There is no requirement to believe in virgin births in order to feel the closeness and vastness of a moment like that, and it would be small-minded to insist that there is.

Whether you believe in Christmas miracles, Christmas coincidences, or don’t celebrate Christmas at all, it’s the time of year when we naturally want to nestle in blankets and compile lists, so that is exactly what I’m going to do. Here are a few secular comforts and joys that have lent their magic to the end of 2022 for me. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

Famously, the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead referred to all of philosophy as “footnotes to Plato.” Actually, he wrote that, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.” (Whitehead, Process and Reality)

Now, Whitehead intended this statement as a tribute to “the wealth of general ideas” that we can find in Plato. There is, however, another way to read the statement, a way that is not flattering at all to philosophy itself.

According to this other, less flattering reading, all of the major ideas that are still discussed by philosophers were already there in Plato, thousands of years ago. There are at least two ways in which this reading is unflattering for philosophy.

First, and most obviously, the statement suggests that there have been no significant new ideas in philosophy for over 2000 years. The big ideas, so the statement would have it, were already there in Plato; all the philosophers since Plato have only been able to add contributions worthy of nothing more than footnotes – that is, commentary or minor improvements.

Second, the statement paints an unflattering picture even when you consider the – plausible – point that not all philosophers after Plato have agreed with his positions. Here are a few reasons why. Read more »

The river Eisack flowing through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, a couple of days ago.

by Bill Murray

It’s 6:15 on the Erakor Lagoon in Vanuatu. Women in bright print skirts paddle canoes from villages into town. Yellow-billed birds call from the grass by the water’s edge, roosters crow from somewhere, and the low rumble of the surf hurling itself against the reef is felt as much as heard.

Every morning the sky is grayer than blue. Clouds hang close to the hills and the water is green glass, reflecting jungle. We’re staying on a tiny island near the capital city, Port Vila. Last night the heavens inflicted a pounding rain just as we arrived at the ferry dock.

We rise to gasp at the wages of yesterday’s folly – snorkeling from an outrigger in the midday sun. Good bet we’ll stay out of the sun today; we could plausibly be served up as steak tartare, and anyway there’s the thunder, the no fooling rumble you feel through your bare, pink feet in the grass, through the earth.

Vanuatu’s colonial name was New Hebrides. It’s about 80 islands a thousand miles east of Australia. When colonial hands came off, Port Vila was left more British than French. The two countries governed the New Hebrides in an arrangement they called a condominium from 1906 until independence in 1980. Read more »