Near Miracles

A few years ago, I was having no luck plunking annuals in the ground out front in an empty area.  Despite pretty diligent watering and fertilizing, they would grow feebly and burn up in midsummer.  So one year I spotted a pot of daffodils on sale and gave them the spot in which to do or die.  With even less water and fertilizer, they have dependably greeted early Spring with enthusiasm every year since.  Especially as the deprivation of Winter ends, we are very grateful for this spunky bulb family, and everything else green, growing, flowering, furry or feathered that is right outside the windows. 

Bird seed put out front and in the back on the deck rewards us with generations of squirrels, chipmunks and birds.  The pair of cardinals stop by most days, and later in the season the hummingbird pays a nervous visit.  Blackberry (the cat) twitches with excitement as busy groups of sparrows -- or best of all, doves -- peck and scatter the seeds.  No one is sure if cats feel gratitude, but it is clear he appreciates the show a great deal.

Cicero said, "Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others."  I think it does strengthen character, makes one more positive and happier, and thus may be a basis for other areas of self improvement.  It did not make the list in the ancient world (those virtues were: temperance, wisdom, justice and courage) or later on in the Christian Catholic era (there are seven, counterpoised to the seven sins: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility).  The Book of Wisdom in the Apocrypha holds that wisdom, not gratitude, is the font of the virtues; so it appears Cicero was alone in his estimation.  Gratitude is formalized in Thanksgiving Day and prayers of thanks, but like all the best things it's really free and unlimited and you can enjoy it any time.  Those best things can be big as the serene blue sky or small as a bee. And we should always be especially grateful for the bees.

Sometimes gratitude is hard to come by:  are children, prisoners, soldiers or the privileged very grateful for their food and shelter?  It is hard to feel positive when you have little control over your life.  Your perspective improves if you are in a different situation where you are more independent, secure and less distracted.

The motto of the Campbell family of Cawdor Castle in Scotland says it best:

  

    

No Burke, Please

"I'm a writer," Wade said.  "I'm supposed to understand what makes people tick.  I don't understand one damn thing about anybody."

-- from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye

A while ago I decided to read some of the classics I hadn't gotten around to, and that project has been aided by a rich harvest from local library sales.  In fact, last week I bought a sealed grocery bag labelled "classics" for one dollar.  Everything in it turned out to be good, so I'm set for the rest of the year (most are very long).

I had already started with several volumes from home and previous sales, but it's been disappointing.  For example, I began with one of Sir Walter Ralegh's histories of voyaging and exploration.  Yikes! the first paragraph was a distressing page and half long.  In his time, and continuing through the Victorians, more was definitely always more:  the vastness of your vocabulary and prolixity of your words demonstrated inarguably that you were an educated gentleman to be taken seriously by others.  Fine, but you're unreadable.

Next up was George Eliot's Middlemarch, picked due to my interest in the setting and time (Great Britain and the Reform Act era).  But I will never know what it had to offer since I could not get past the first overblown and pretentious page. 

I was beginning to think classics are like 1950s cars:  icons surely, but unsafe, uneconomical, unreliable and a pain to park.  Today professional restorers can retain the look (body and interior) while greatly improving the original badly executed parts and mechanical design.  A sorely needed corps of editors could do the same with those creaky literary classics.

Edmund Burke wrote what is considered the founding classic of conservatism, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which should definitely be on anyone's starting list of classics along with Adam Smith and many others from the Enlightenment.  It turned out, however, that Mr. Burke seems to have not noticed the Enlightenment at all.  His arguments seem to come from the medieval era instead.  The tone of the tract is emotional and outraged:  he is incensed that the Church was separated from the State by the revolutionaries, that the King was removed (government is divinely ordained and not to be touched by the unworthy governed!), and that titles and tradition were, to put it mildly, questioned.  He believed that power in government derived only from ownership of land.  He particularly loathed paper money (feeling it was illegitimate wealth not tied to land). In other words, change is not a challenge that societies should meet positively: though the Industrial Revolution had made the feudal order obsolete and dangerous, there were no solutions outside of established religious and aristocratic authority.  The wild emotions of the mob and the folly of the new self-made political philosophers in France were not good bases for the needed change in government, true, but Mr. Burke's devotion to the selfish, shortsighted and reactionary establishment at home was equally misplaced.  Extremism -- too much revolution or too much tradition -- is always bad, whether you're holding tight to the royal standard or the red banner.

(Why the illustration above?  I was going to write about gratitude and got off the rails.  Will try again.)