I have had only one right brush, and the tip no longer points. It was in my father's desk, and we found it after he died. There is no way to know how old it is, or what brand. It is simply black with a brass sleeve to hold the hairs, which are lighter than those of many brushes. I knew the first time it was a right brush. The picture turned out to be so much better than my perceptions of my own ability would allow.
Harry Heron came into camp in a box. The first thing he tried to do was get cold and die. The second thing he tried to do was stab Jim's left eye out. He fell a little short of success in both cases. . . He smelled pretty bad, too, and it got worse. In fact, the more I try to remember what Harry was like, the grubbier he becomes. I will say this for him: he finally did become paper trained. He accomplished that when people moved him over to where the papers were and kept him there. All things considered, he was the filthiest, dumbest, ugliest, most bedraggled, hopeless case ever to arrive. . . Well, with all those things going for him, you couldn't help falling head over heels for Harry Heron.
Pops looked for a long time at the feather, the man off the highway, then back again at the feather. He finally took it gently, holding it in the light for a moment, turning it over and over, holding it back in the shaft of light, holding it over under the bulb by the cash register, flattening it against his palm, holding it up to the window to look through, and at last smiling.
"That's a yellowshanks feather," he said, "come off up by the wing."
I am reminded . . . of some decidedly simple yet brutally honest and practical advice I received at the start of my doctoral work. I was on a tour through the National Institutes of Health in the tow of my mentor, Dr. J. Teague Self. I had at that point been Teague Self's graduate student for about two weeks. Walking down the hall, he cocked an ear at a blustery Irish voice emanating from an office, poked his head inside, then turned back to me and said
"How'd you like to meet Coatney?" [G. Robert Coatney, in his office with A. M. Fallis and J. F. A. Sprent.]
I can think of no time since in which I've seen any other student so suddenly flung alone into a room full of his heros. . . . Coatney issued the advice which put all idealism into perspective, the hindsight of a long and successful career, and which spoke of a hazard never imagined by the young.
"Always," said G. Robert Coatney, "be finishing something."
The fear of failure keeps so many thoughts inside a head, so many men and women in their chairs, silent, acceding, not wanting to be thought a fool, or stand out, or gather social species' hate for doing well, or poorly, or any other way but average. How much raw intelligence, ability, vision, lies fallow in such fear? A world and then a world, is how much. Such a load to place on ball. But . . . what's lost is gone, no matter what it is. If you want them badly enough to drain your mind and soul in front of screaming mobs and pounding drums, the points become all things lost through the ages: Pride, love, hope, and most importantly, the fear of failure itself.
I get the sense, from reading Pablo Martinez, that regular psychic interactions with landscapes such as that north of Cataviņa had a way of building a shield between humans and the forces that sought to domesticate them. In my experience such sacred places still function in that manner. Natural scenery associated with difficult, but deeply satisfying, intellectual endeavor reminds me of the positive feelings that come with tangible accomplishments, with personal discoveries.
But the people who've walked into my laboratory are rational beings who have enormous faith in their own very human talents, and little use for prophets. They attack gigantic problems with only their minds and hands. They are models for a type of human being that takes pride in its brain, in its ideas, instead of in its weapons or power. So I've set about to tell their stories. We need to know where these kinds of people come from, how they are shaped, and how they think, with the hope that in the telling, we'll discover how to generate some more of them.
The third important property of dirt is its organic content, that is, living organisms and their products . . . A partial list of soil dwellers includes: bacteria, algae, fungi and their spores, amoebas, nematodes, earthworms, tardigrades, rotifers, mites, insects, rodents, tapeworm eggs, roots of surface vegetation, pollen, and seeds. . . A brief list of organic products includes bark, leaf pieces, cell wall pieces, egg shells, hair, and dead bodies. A common organic component of soil is feces. All animals, no matter how large or small, defecate regularly, and the overwhelming bulk of their feces ends up in dirt. In fact, insect and worm feces are among the most frequently encountered components of our environments.
Strange as it seems, some people like to eat dirt.
What would I do if I were a professor of English instead of invertebrate zoology? Where is that intellectual paradise for a teacher of modern fiction? Of poetry? And once I find it, how do I take its pedagogical power and give that power to my students. I'm going to step beyond my bounds and try to answer those questions, then step even further beyond those bounds and try to answer them for history, economics, engineering, music, and art. I believe that along with literature and science, these five fields encompass all of the basic domains of reality found in human scholarly endeavor. I don't have a professional's, or a professor's, knowledge of these seven disciplines. But if, with respect to these seven areas of intellectual pursuits, we ask the following questions: What is a fact? What is an observation? What evidence do we need in order to make a decision? How do we interpret information? What use do humans make of our products? And what is the fundamental nature of [our] prevailing paradigms? Then the answers will tell us most of what we need to know to build Eden.
Echinostoma trivolvus is distinguished by a rather remarkable list of definitive hosts, including several species of ducks, geese, hawks, owls, doves, flamingos, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, pigs, rats, and of course mice. . . For anyone who thinks all the world's systematic problems are solved or easily solvable, a journey through these discussions in the echinostome literature would be exceedingly educational.
The second piece of advice for males is to make sure you can speak the English language with simple grammatical rules in place. I don't know why males tend to use incorrect grammar more than females, and maybe my 40 years of college teaching and 20,000 grades awarded don't represent a good sample. But I can assure you that one of the quickest ways to create a bad impression on any teacher is to say "I've went . . ." or use the non-word "alot" in a written assignment. A chapter on dress may not seem like the best place to talk about grammar, but clothes and speech go together, and a male student who comes in to a faculty office wearing his cap on backwards and saying "I've went . . ." might as well be writing C or D on his grade sheet right now.