Nor in no other wise could offspring know
Mother, nor mother offspring- which we see
They yet can do, distinguished one from other,
No less than human beings, by clear signs.
Lucretius on the Emotions of Animals
classics
In the Palm of One’s Hand
When it comes to geology, I have long had what you might call “a bit of block.” For years I’ve tried to find the proper lever to shift that block out of my way in order to allow me to progress in my understanding – and enjoyment – of the subject, but nothing has quite […]
Reading Alexander von Humboldt
After completing my reading of Andrea Wulf‘s award-winning – and justly so – The Invention of Nature; Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, I not surprisingly found myself wanting to take up some of the works of von Humboldt himself. Unfortunately, as my French is very rusty from decades of neglect and my German all but non-existent […]
Christmas Stories
I was twelve when I first saw The Nutcracker performed. It was a community production presented in the high school auditorium by The Little Ballet Theater, the local ballet school in my hometown. The Sugarplum Fairy was portrayed by a girl in my class named Tricia. To be perfectly honest, she was the entire reason why the twelve-year-old son of a commercial fisherman in a Pacific Northwest fishing and logging town paid for a ticket and sat through the entire performance of the first ballet he had ever seen and about which he previously knew nothing more than that the name of it sounded very much like something he dreaded happening during dodgeball in P.E.