with an intimate
protective privacy both
cool and sweet-smelling

Attempting, in a recent issue of Mushroom: The Journal of Wild Mushrooming, to explain his compatriots’ obsession with gathering wild mushrooms, Alexander (“Sasha”) Viazmensky tells how, during the peak of the season, Russians drive their cars right off the roads into the forests, in single-minded determination to cover as much ground as possible. This image has its downside—from the perspective of both the ecologist and the foot-borne mushroom gatherer—but from a distance it also has a certain perverse, surrealistic charm: black-beetle Soviet automobiles, like a swarm of 1948 DeSotos, their headlights glowing in the murk, weaving between the tree trunks of a forest that extends as far as the eye can see.

This image also captures something of what the landscape of western Russia is like: immense—and immensely flat. Its forests dwarf the imagination without themselves being all that impressive, for the ground is often damp, the soil poor, and the trees aspen, pine, and birch. They provide the Russian wanderer not with dramatic vistas or a sense of savage charm, but with an intimate, protective privacy — healingly cool and sweet-smelling. Boris Pasternak spoke for all native Russians when he wrote: “Included in the saintly order of pines/We become immortal for a while.”

From Outlaw Cook by John Thorne (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994).

If you have never read a cookbook for the writing instead of the recipes, any of John Thorne’s 4 cookbooks are a great place to start.

The recipes are also worth the time.

Over the years I have formed the theory that a good cookbook needs to have at least one good recipe.

And there are many many bad cook books out there.

Outlaw Cook has at least three recipes that I remember fondly with my stomach.

The Gingerbread Recipe, easy and served warm with ice cream so it melts into the cake is what Gingerbread is supposed to taste like.

The lemon ice cream is so easy and so refreshing you will wonder why you don’t make it every week.

The chocolate cake recipe is so simple.

Its formula is 1 – 1 – 1 – 1 -2 and bake.

1 Box of Chocolate Cake mix/

1 Box of Chocolate Pudding Mix

1 package of Chocolate Chips.

1 16ox tub of Sour Cream

2 Eggs.

Mix.

Pour into bundt pan.

Bake at 350 for a hour, maybe an hour and 10 minutes.

You will never make another chocolate cake.

But you can also make a lemon version by using lemon everything and white chocolate chips.

I invented that.

All three recipes will leave you with an intimate, protective privacy — healingly cool and sweet-smelling.

meddling, ungrateful,
violent, treacherous, envious,
and unsociable

Okay I fudged the middle stanza with 8 syllables, I just love the way the words roll off your tongue.

Anyone feel left out?

Say to yourself at the start of the day, I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people.

They are subject to all these defects because they have no knowledge of good and bad.

But I, who have observed the nature of the good, and seen that it is the right; and of the bad, and seen that it is the wrong;

and of the wrongdoer himself, and seen that his nature is akin to my own —

not because he is of the same blood and seed, but because he shares as I do in mind and thus in a portion of the divine —

I, then, can neither be harmed by these people, nor become angry with one who is akin to me, nor can I hate him, for we have come into being to work together, like feet, hands, eyelids, or the two rows of teeth in our upper and lower jaws.

To work against one another is therefore contrary to nature; and to be angry with another person and turn away from him is surely to work against him.

From Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Translated by Robin Hard with an Introduction and Notes by Christopher Gill, Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, 2011.

From the Introduction:

MARCUS AURELIUS (AD 121–80) was born (as Marcus Annius Verus) into a distinguished Roman family; after his father died in his childhood, he was adopted first by his grandfather and then by his uncle, Aurelius Antoninus, who became emperor in 138. Marcus married Antoninus’ daughter, Faustina, in 145 and they had several children, including Commodus, his first and only surviving son, who succeeded Marcus as emperor. On the death of Antoninus in 161, Marcus became emperor, along with Lucius Verus, who had also been adopted by Antoninus. They ruled together until Lucius’ death from illness in 169. Marcus’ period as emperor was dominated by confronting serious external threats to the boundaries and stability of the empire, especially from the Parthians in the east and the Germans in the north. Much of the period 168–80 was spent by Marcus in the Danube region, campaigning against the Germans, mostly successfully. In 175 there was a short and unsuccessful rebellion against him by Avidius Cassius. He died from illness in 180.

Marcus had the normal Roman aristocratic education in oratory and literature; his teachers included Fronto, and an extensive correspondence between them survives. But he was attracted from an early age to philosophy; the Stoic teachings of Epictetus were a special influence. The Meditations, probably written in his later years, served as a philosophical notebook in which he set down short reflections, based on Stoic ethics, summarizing the principles on which he based his life.

at times seems there are
no national principles
just partisan ones

I recently read the New York Times Opinion Essay, This Prophetic Academic Now Foresees the West’s Defeat by Christopher Caldwell.

Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”

The “Prophetic Academic” in the headline is one Emmanuel Todd, who is, according to Wikipedia, a French historian, anthropologist, demographer, sociologist and political scientist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris. His research examines the different family structures around the world and their relationship with beliefs, ideologies, political systems, and historical events.

The article itself was interesting in its gloom and doom for the United States and it had many interesting points, it was one short paragraph that had me take notice.

Mr. Caldwell writes that Mr. Todd has said:

Fighting a war based on values requires good values. At a bare minimum it requires an agreement on the values being spread, and the United States is further from such agreement than it has ever been in its history — further, even, than it was on the eve of the Civil War. At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.

At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.

At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones.

I grew up in a time there WHERE principles that transcended politics.

At my Church there were both Republicans and Democrats as members of the congregation.

Can’t see that much today it seems.

I cannot imagine two sides of the same party being members in the same Church let alone, opposite parties.

Well, for a least one party one section of the Church.

(According to Pew Research More than eight-in-ten of this one group of voters who attend religious services frequently (85%) voted for this one feller in the most recent election.)

Mr. Caldwell also writes that Mr. Todd says: “… educational progress has brought educational decline, because it has led to the disappearance of those values that favor education.”

I don’t know quite what to do with this.

I had to read a few times to get to the understand the point.

It reminds of something John Cleese once said along the lines of you to have be smarter than you can be to understand how stupid you really are.

You have to have national principles to understand just how fair we have fallen from having national principles.

You have to have values, shared values to understand just how fair we have fallen from having any shared values.

And that’s where we are.

Hard to see any comeback.