Nothing very profound here--just an observation by Joseph Wood Krutch on the long northern winters and various ways that some animals have found to handle them.
...as usual it is the cats who are provided with the most perfect mechanism. They are, to be sure, capable of a kind of short-range impatience--when, for example, food is being prepared. They seem at time to suffer momentarily from boredom, as a wild animal perhaps never does. But when the weather is too bad to go out, or when for any reason there is absolutely nothing to do, they can simply curl up and sleep almost endlessly, for days at a time if necessary, with perfect ease. Even going to sleep seems to be a process entirely under their control, as voluntary as shutting the eyes is for us. Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many different ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.
Cats with insomnia: sounds self-contradictory or mutually exclusive to me.
Showing posts with label The Twelve Seasons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Twelve Seasons. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Friday, October 14, 2016
Joseph Wood Krutch: Some thoughts on autumn
Joseph Wood Krutch, prior to moving to Tucson, lived in New England, and some of his finest writings about nature relate to that
period. The excerpt below is from The Twelve Seasons.
"One day the first prematurely senile leaf will quietly detach itself in a faint breeze and flutter silently to the ground. All through the summer an occasional unnoticed, unregretted leaf has fallen from time to time. But not as this one falls. There is something quietly ominous about the way in which it gives up the ghost, without a struggle, almost with an air of relief. Others will follow, faster, and faster. Soon the ground will be covered, though many of the stubborner trees are still clothed. Then one night a wind, a little harder than usual, and carrying perhaps the drops of a cold rain, will come. We shall awake in the morning to see that the show is over. The trees are naked; bare, ruined choirs, stark against the sky." (See Shakespeare, Sonnet 73)
--------------
(What follows is an expression of Krutch's attitude towards those who admire autumn. I must admit I'm one of those whom Krutch considers a bit perverse in my thinking.)
"To me there always seems to be something perverse about those country dwellers who like the autumn best. Their hearts, I feel, are not in the right place. They must be among those who see Nature merely as a spectacle or a picture, not among those who share her own own moods. Spring is the time for exuberance, autumn for melancholy and regret. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness? Yes, of course, it is that too. But promise, not fulfillment, is what lifts the heart. Autumn is no less fulfillment than it is also the beginning of the inevitable end.
No doubt the colors of autumn are as gorgeous in their own way as any of spring. Looked at merely as color, looked with the eye of that kind of painter to whom only color and design are important, I suppose they are beautiful and nothing more. But looked at as outward and visible signs, as an expression of what is going on in the world of living things, they produce another effect.
'No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace, as I have seen in one autumnal face'--so wrote John Donne in compliment to an old lady. But Donne was enamored of death. Send not to know for whom the leaf falls, it falls for thee." (See John Donne, "Meditation 17: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions")
What Krutch doesn't mention is that the appreciation of the fall colors is also frequently tinged with sadness or melancholy. In addition, autumn is the harvest season, the culmination of the farmer's efforts for the past six or seven months. I think autumn is the most complex of the seasons, joy at the colors and the fullness of the harvest and also sadness at the end of the cycle, or at the inescapable sign of the end of the cycle.
"One day the first prematurely senile leaf will quietly detach itself in a faint breeze and flutter silently to the ground. All through the summer an occasional unnoticed, unregretted leaf has fallen from time to time. But not as this one falls. There is something quietly ominous about the way in which it gives up the ghost, without a struggle, almost with an air of relief. Others will follow, faster, and faster. Soon the ground will be covered, though many of the stubborner trees are still clothed. Then one night a wind, a little harder than usual, and carrying perhaps the drops of a cold rain, will come. We shall awake in the morning to see that the show is over. The trees are naked; bare, ruined choirs, stark against the sky." (See Shakespeare, Sonnet 73)
--------------
(What follows is an expression of Krutch's attitude towards those who admire autumn. I must admit I'm one of those whom Krutch considers a bit perverse in my thinking.)
"To me there always seems to be something perverse about those country dwellers who like the autumn best. Their hearts, I feel, are not in the right place. They must be among those who see Nature merely as a spectacle or a picture, not among those who share her own own moods. Spring is the time for exuberance, autumn for melancholy and regret. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness? Yes, of course, it is that too. But promise, not fulfillment, is what lifts the heart. Autumn is no less fulfillment than it is also the beginning of the inevitable end.
No doubt the colors of autumn are as gorgeous in their own way as any of spring. Looked at merely as color, looked with the eye of that kind of painter to whom only color and design are important, I suppose they are beautiful and nothing more. But looked at as outward and visible signs, as an expression of what is going on in the world of living things, they produce another effect.
'No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace, as I have seen in one autumnal face'--so wrote John Donne in compliment to an old lady. But Donne was enamored of death. Send not to know for whom the leaf falls, it falls for thee." (See John Donne, "Meditation 17: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions")
What Krutch doesn't mention is that the appreciation of the fall colors is also frequently tinged with sadness or melancholy. In addition, autumn is the harvest season, the culmination of the farmer's efforts for the past six or seven months. I think autumn is the most complex of the seasons, joy at the colors and the fullness of the harvest and also sadness at the end of the cycle, or at the inescapable sign of the end of the cycle.
Friday, August 19, 2016
Joseph Wood Krutch: drawing the line, sorta, kinda
Joseph Wood Krutch
The Twelve Seasons
This summer I have been looking again at Paramecia and Lacrimaria and Opalina, as well as at the flora amidst which they live. But I do not know what kind of relation I have with them or just how I feel toward them. I marvel and I admire. They are beautiful. They are, quite literally, lovely. But in what sense do or can I love them? After I have peered for a while at a drop of water, I wipe it off with a piece of tissue and put it into a wastebasket. I should not be telling the truth if I said that I feel much compunction at such wanton killing. Why don't I? Is it simply because responsibility cannot bridge the gap of that discontinuity established by nothing but size? Do I, like my woman friend, doubt that the protozoa are real?
-- Joseph Wood Krutch --
from "July" in The Twelve Seasons
Paramecia, Lacrimaria, and Opalina are organisms visible only with the aid of a microscope.
The Twelve Seasons
This summer I have been looking again at Paramecia and Lacrimaria and Opalina, as well as at the flora amidst which they live. But I do not know what kind of relation I have with them or just how I feel toward them. I marvel and I admire. They are beautiful. They are, quite literally, lovely. But in what sense do or can I love them? After I have peered for a while at a drop of water, I wipe it off with a piece of tissue and put it into a wastebasket. I should not be telling the truth if I said that I feel much compunction at such wanton killing. Why don't I? Is it simply because responsibility cannot bridge the gap of that discontinuity established by nothing but size? Do I, like my woman friend, doubt that the protozoa are real?
-- Joseph Wood Krutch --
from "July" in The Twelve Seasons
Paramecia, Lacrimaria, and Opalina are organisms visible only with the aid of a microscope.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Joseph Wood Krutch: Where to draw the line. . .
Joseph Wood Krutch
The Twelve Seasons
Joseph Wood Krutch poses an interesting question, one which I had never really directly asked myself but had only thought briefly about it and then put it off for the future.
Krutch had just given a visitor the opportunity to look at a drop of water through his microscope. After viewing the various critters swimming around in the drop, the visitor asked if they were real. Krutch feels that the question really had a deeper meaning which the visitor was unable to express:
. . .whether or not acceptance of the microcosm as "real" means an obligation to expand still further the limits of that fellowship of living creatures which man has tended more and more to acknowledge. We, or at least many of us, no long treat horses and dogs and cats ruthlessly. We accept to some extent their right to live and to escape unnecessary suffering. But where does our fellowship and our responsibility draw the line? Most would probably agree that the refusal, recommended by the poet, to step wantonly upon even a worm is carrying things pretty far. "We are all in this together"; does that include the paramecium too? But if, to use Donne's now almost too familiar metaphor, a man is not an island but part of a continent, and if (to go one step farther) that continent is the continent, not merely of mankind, but of all living things; if, in a word, we feel even now an impulse to rescue a squirrel from a cat, shall we also come in time to turn away in horror when the hydra clasps a water flea? If not, then at what point do we call a halt? Am I being "sentimental" when I rescue the squirrel, or am I being "brutal" when I stop on the caterpillar?
-- Joseph Wood Krutch --
from "July" in The Twelve Seasons
I don't have any answers myself, but I guess I'm prejudiced or biased in favor of furry mammals, and also consider whales, dolphins, and all of our mammalian sea cousins as within the limits of that fellowship of living creatures. Feathered creatures are also within that fellowship. But, the others that share this planet?
Life is rare in the universe or so it seems, so, shouldn't all forms be equally valued?
The Twelve Seasons
Joseph Wood Krutch poses an interesting question, one which I had never really directly asked myself but had only thought briefly about it and then put it off for the future.
Krutch had just given a visitor the opportunity to look at a drop of water through his microscope. After viewing the various critters swimming around in the drop, the visitor asked if they were real. Krutch feels that the question really had a deeper meaning which the visitor was unable to express:
. . .whether or not acceptance of the microcosm as "real" means an obligation to expand still further the limits of that fellowship of living creatures which man has tended more and more to acknowledge. We, or at least many of us, no long treat horses and dogs and cats ruthlessly. We accept to some extent their right to live and to escape unnecessary suffering. But where does our fellowship and our responsibility draw the line? Most would probably agree that the refusal, recommended by the poet, to step wantonly upon even a worm is carrying things pretty far. "We are all in this together"; does that include the paramecium too? But if, to use Donne's now almost too familiar metaphor, a man is not an island but part of a continent, and if (to go one step farther) that continent is the continent, not merely of mankind, but of all living things; if, in a word, we feel even now an impulse to rescue a squirrel from a cat, shall we also come in time to turn away in horror when the hydra clasps a water flea? If not, then at what point do we call a halt? Am I being "sentimental" when I rescue the squirrel, or am I being "brutal" when I stop on the caterpillar?
-- Joseph Wood Krutch --
from "July" in The Twelve Seasons
I don't have any answers myself, but I guess I'm prejudiced or biased in favor of furry mammals, and also consider whales, dolphins, and all of our mammalian sea cousins as within the limits of that fellowship of living creatures. Feathered creatures are also within that fellowship. But, the others that share this planet?
Life is rare in the universe or so it seems, so, shouldn't all forms be equally valued?
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