The Autobiograhy of Charles Darwin: 1809 to 1882 edited by Nora Barlow

For some time now I have wanted to find out more about Charles Darwin, both about the man, and also about his work. Before I read this autobiography, I knew that Darwin had taken a voyage on a ship called the Beagle, and that while on that voyage he collected many specimens, and then proposed a theory of evolution and natural selection. I wanted some more specific information about his collections, and his science, and also about his thought process. I don't remember when I bought the book, but I'm sure that this is why I bought it.

I have to say that I am disappointed. At the point in the narrative where he tells about the Beagle, he relates how the position of naturalist on the ship was offered, how his father was against the voyage, and how he was convinced to give his son permission to accept the position. Darwin says very little about the voyage itself, the chief impression one takes away from this section is that the captain of the ship was very difficult to get along with. The reason for his reticence in speaking of the scientific aspects of the voyage is that he had already written about them in The Voyage of the Beagle.

The autobiography begins with Recollections of the Development of my mind and character. I will include the first paragraph because it says a great deal about the state of Darwin's mind when he wrote it.

A German Editor having written to me to ask for an account of the development of my mind and character with some sketch of my autobiography, I have thought that the attempt would amuse me, and might possibly interest my children or their children. I know that it would have interested me greatly to have read even so short and dull a sketch of the mind of my grandfather written by himself, and what he thought and did and how he worked. I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life. Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pain about my style of writing.

I will attest to the truth of this last sentence. I exaggerate, and most of the time Darwin writes well enough, although sometimes I cannot follow the thread of an argument because his sentences are confusing. You might think that it is I who am at fault here, and you may be right, but I don't think so. You might also thing that I am frequently guilty of the same fault. I'm pretty sure you are correct.

This chapter proceeds with eight pages about Darwin's early life and then fourteen pages about his father. This is rather telling. Dr. Robert Waring Darwin was a large man with a personality to match, and he loomed large over at great deal of his son's life. He was very successful in his practice, and had a great gift for winning the confidence of his patients, especially the ladies. This is one of the most engaging sections of the book, and you would think after reading it that Darwin had a wonderful relationship with his father, but one later learns that there is a great deal of tension between father and son.

Dr. Darwin was frequently disappointed with his son, and his disappointment is somewhat understandable as Charles was not a very good student. It seems that this was partly due to a lack of both ability and interest in his studies. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps as a doctor, but Charles had no interest in this. Dr. Darwin's second wish was that Charles would be a clergyman. Charles thought this might do, but it may be best that this never came about. While he was shirking the responsibilities of his studies, however, he stumbled upon the passion that informed the rest of his life.

But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow. I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.

This is the zeal that I was looking for in the book, and it is the only instance of it. A great deal of the remaining book discusses other famous scientists whom he knew, and their personalities and disagreements. The most important disagreement of all is known as The Darwin-Butler Controversy, and involves a series of misunderstandings between Darwin and novelist Samuel Butler, which were blown out of all proportion. The Butlers and Darwins had a relationship of several generations, and sadly this disagreement continued and was not resolved until after the deaths of both men when Darwin's son, Francis, and Butler's friend, Henry Festing Jones, communicated with one another and brought the whole sorry mess to a peaceful conclusion.

Darwin seems to have been very fortunate in his choice of wife, his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. They raised nine of their ten children, one having died in infancy, and the family was very close. When Darwin was 33, they moved to Surrey where they lived a very secluded life due partially to Darwin's frequent long bouts with some undiagnosed ailment, and partially with a disinclination for society. In later life, their main visitors were their grown children, who came often. When Darwin was trying to figure out how to respond to Butler's attack, he did nothing until he had consulted all his children. Their practice seemed to be not to make any important decision without the agreement of the whole family.

This edition, "The Only Complete Edition" of the autobiography, is 133 pages long. Originally, the family removed many passages that they thought would reflect badly on Darwin, and these have been replaced in this edition. After Darwin's text, there is an Appendix of 97 pages, two-thirds of which deal with The Darwin-Butler Controversy. Also found in the appendix are: an index of where all the formerly-omitted passages can be found, a list of Darwin's pros and cons with regards to getting married, and the correspondence that took place between Dr. Darwin and Emma's father over whether or not Charles should be allowed to undertake the voyage on the Beagle.

It was during the two years following his explorations on the Beagle that Darwin found himself questioning his faith. He had been a firm Christian previous to this, but began asking the familiar questions that people do ask, and decided against the Christian faith.  I'm not going to go into this, but I'm sure you can imagine the sort of things he briefly discusses in the book. Darwin says at one point in the book that he would not have made a good metaphysician, and this is likely true. At this time he considered himself a Theist, but later this conviction also began to fade, and he added an addendum so stating. His wife asked her son Francis that this addendum be removed from the book because it was painful to her.

In the appendix, there are two letters which Emma Darwin wrote to her husband expressing her sadness over his rejection of his faith. In the first she says:

May not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till it is proved, influence your mind too much in other things which cannot be proved in the same way, and which if true are likely to be above our comprehension. I should say also there is a danger in giving up revelation which does not exist on the other side, that is the fear of ingratitude in casting off what has been done for your benefit as well as for that of all the world and which ought to make you still more careful, perhaps even fearful lest you should not have taken all the pains you could to judge truly.

Darwin saved these letters all his life. At the bottom of this one he wrote, "When I am dead. know that many times, I have kissed and cryed over this. C. D." On the other, "God Bless you C. D. 1861"

I am currently reading The Voyage of the Beagle, which I find much more to my purpose.

AMDG

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

"Call me Ishmael." I think that when I was younger everyone knew that that was the first line of Moby Dick, even if they didn't know anything else about the book. I wonder how many people know that know, especially young people.

The thing is, it's not really the beginning of the book. Before we get to the story there are 79 quotes or "extracts" about whales from a wide variety of sources which take up 10 pages in my edition. This ought to be, but probably isn't for most people, a sort of foreshadowing of what is to come in the rest of the book.

Moby Dick is unlike any other book I've ever read. It's impossible to classify. It is fiction, and non-fiction; science, and history; geography, and anthropology; philosphy, and metaphysics; and much more besides with a great adventure novel making sporadic appearances in the midst of it all.

By the time you finish reading Moby Dick, you will know how to spot, harpoon, and cut up a whale; and how to render sperm oil. You will know the name and description, and habits of every sort of whale that Melville, who had been a sailor himself, knew anything about. You will have intimate knowledge of whales from head to toe: what their eyes, ears, spout holes, tails and innards are like. You will know about whaling ships, and the different jobs of the sailors who man the ships. You will know how to make a peg leg and a harpoon. You will know about friendship, and seafaring humor and stories, and fear, and obsession.

I'm not sure if I should have begun this post by telling you all this, because reading it might have put me off the book forever. I remember reading War and Peace which has constant interruptions of the narrative for chapters about Tolstoy's historical/political theories, and thinking, "Just get on with the #$%& story!" But somehow Melville gets away with it. I think it must be due to the enthusiasm of the teacher who loves his subject so much, and transmits his passion to his students.

I'm sure that most of my readers will know the outline of the narrative of Moby Dick, but briefly, in case it has slipped into 21st century obscurity somehow . . . . The story relates the voyage of the Pequod, a whaler out of Nantucket (Oh, you are also going to learn some things about Nantucket.), and its captain, Ahab, who on a previous voyage, lost his leg to the huge white whale, Moby Dick. The crew, including our narrator, Ishmael, signs on for a typical whaling voyage. They know it will be quite dangerous, and that they won't see land for three or four years, but they don't know that in the Captain's fevered mind, it is a voyage for vengeance.

I'm not going to say much about the narrative itself, because the way it unfolds is part of the reader's own voyage, but I want to say a bit about the characters, because they are so important to the book. We get to know several of the sailors on the Pequod very well, and it would be fascinating to sit down with any one of them and hear his story. The first mate, Starbuck, is a very upright man, who just wants to do his job well and get back home to his wife and little boy. The second mate Stubb, is more relaxed and generally of good cheer. We also really get to know Ahab, who sometimes begins to see through the cloud of vengeance that surrounds him sees that he could overcome it, but chooses not to. Because of these changes of mood, he is a much more rounded character than he might have been. Then there is the mysterious Fedallah, about whom we known nothing much, other than that he is a Parsee, and that he knows some secret about Ahab, and Moby Dick, and has prophesied how the captain's story will end.

My favorite character is Queequeg, the island prince, and harpooneer whom we meet at the beginning of the book, and my favorite aspect of the book is his friendship with Ishmael.

Ishmael, having arrived in New Bedford, from whence he will take a ship to Nantucket, is searching for an economical place to stay until the ship arrives. He finally finds the Spouter Inn, where he is told that there is no room available, except for one that he will have to share with another boarder. The landlord is rather mysterious about said boarder, and Ishmael is suspicious, but he has no other choice.

The other boarder has not arrived by the time Ishmael goes to bed, but when he finally arrives, Ishmael is taken aback by this large dark man with harpoon and tomahawk, who is tattooed from head to toe. Queequeg is fairly shocked himself, but they manage to settle down for the night.

On the second evening Ishmael and Queequeg have dinner, and then Ishmael tells us:

Soon I proposed a social smoke; and producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us.

If there lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.

I love this passage, and whole story of this friendship, but when I think about what it would be like to try to teach this book in a 21st century classroom, I just shake my head. Not only the friendship which would probably be given a very different interpretation in that classoom, and the political incorrectness of much of the book, but the sheer length of the book makes it seem very difficult to do successfully. I wonder if anyone tries.

It is probably obvious by now that I really liked this book, and would highly recommend it. I should caution you, though, that you need to have some good, long stretches of quiet time to spend with it. It isn't light reading my any means.

AMDG

Addendum: Amusing (I hope) disclaimer. I have a really difficult time reading old books with disintegrating pages. Immediately on opening them, my eyes begin to burn and itch, and my vision gets blurry--obviously not the best conditions for enjoying a book. As you can see above, my copy is one of those. So, after putting up with it for a bit, I decided to get a library copy.

Well, this is a big, heavy book, and as I have gotten older, it has been increasing difficult for me to read big, heavy books. The weight hurts my legs, and it hurts my hands to hold them, so I started reading a Kindle version that I've had for a long time, but I didn't really want to do that and I was spending a lot of time in the car, so I finally ended up listening to most of it on an Audible recording. The narrator was Frank Muller, and he was very good, so you might want to try this on your next long trip.

Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal by David Kline

On May 9, 2002, I made my first purchase from Amazon, and it was David Kline's Great Possessions; however, I did not know it was David Kline's Great Possessions. Friends on a listserv were talking about how great Wendell Berry's books were, so I decided to buy one. A search for Wendell Berry on Amazon turned up Great Possessions. I want to say that it was the only result of the search, but how could that have been? Maybe Amazon wasn't selling books from his publisher at the time. Maybe it was just the cheapest result. That might well have been it. I see I only paid $4.94.

Needless to stay, I was pretty unhappy when I started reading the book and realized that the author wasn't Berry, who wrote only the two-page foreword, but someone I'd never heard of before, and yet it was a fortuitous mistake. It's a wonderful book. I remember writing at the time that reading Great Possessions was like having a friend walking you around his property and showing you all the things he loved. I didn't, however, get very far into the book. I don't know why, but I always meant to get back to it.

Great Possessions is a collection of essays from Family Life, an Amish magazine. Because of this, the chapters are fairly short, and it is a good book to read in spare moments. Despite this fact, I did not read it in spare moments, because once I started reading, I didn't want to stop.

Kline has lived on, and farmed his property all of his life. He knows it in a very deep way. It isn't just the amount of time he has lived there, but the way he lives there. And he is so observant. I know less per square foot about the 1/6 acre that I lived on for 24 years than he knows about any square inch of his farm. This really makes me want to go outside and learn more about the 10 acres we have now, but, of course, I'm not going to do it until it gets a bit cooler.

The essays cover many different kinds of plants and animals that live on the farm, but the greatest portion of the books is devoted to birds: large and small birds, land and shore birds. It's amazing to me the 100s of different species that his family spots every year. Off the top of my head, I can only think of 18 that I see around here. Of course, I probably have several species of sparrows, but I can't tell them apart.

It's rather ironic that this book written by a man who uses very little modern technology in his life constantly sent me to my phone or Kindle. I had to find out, "What does a red-eyed vireo look like? A cecropia moth? A serviceberry tree? (Gorgeous. The next tree I plant will be one of these.) What does an eastern bluebird sound like? There were times when it took me ten minutes to read one page because I was looking up so many things.

I learned a lot of interesting things while reading the book, but I am only going to mention three. One is that the horned lark builds a little patio of pebbles on one side of its nest. (It is permissible to share the photo below for non-commercial purpose. I don't really understand how it works, so I put the we address in the rollover.)

Photo credit: Amy Evenstad

The second is that some birds, one being the American Golden-Plover, migrate to South America. I find this rather wonderful to think about. In the fall, the plover leaves the wintery arctic, where it breeds, flies through the fall, and the perpetual summer of the tropic, and reaches South America in their spring, and stays through the southern summer. If a human made this trip, he would have to take a huge wardrobe.

And third, many hawks migrating from the north follow the Appalachian mountains. There are a few spots, including Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, and Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve in Duluth, MN,where the flyway narrows due to the physical characteristics of the land, and so hundreds of thousands of hawks are funneled through these small areas. There are times when you can see more than 10,000 in a day.

Most of the essays are beautiful, or informative, and mostly upbeat, but the essay titled Farewell to the Giants made me tear up a bit. Kline tells of making a visit with his son to an old-growth woodland that abutted their property, and which was soon to be logged by new owners.

Arising from our cushiony bed of moss, we walked through the woods to look and admire for the last time. We paused beneath red and white oaks and poplars towering sixty feet to their first limbs. Their branches, joining high overhead, gave the impression of a green-and-gold cathedral ceiling supported by massive wooden columns. In autumns past, like my older brothers before me, I would often take a morning off on the pretense of hunting for squirrels to come here and revel in this grandeur--an experience both humbling and exhilarating.

The description reminds of Mallorn trees in Lothlórien (Lord of the Rings). It's not so much a physical resemblance, as the feeling that it evokes. 

There are some chapters near the end that are instructive and are giving me ideas. One is called Planting for Wildlife and one is Winter Bird Feeding. I tried some summer bird feeding this year with absolutely no success, but maybe I'll do better in the winter. I want to make a bird list. And I need a pair of binoculars. I am definitely keeping this book.

AMDG

The Shelf

August 1

A bit late posting this, but I did take it on July 1.

June 1, 2018