Chilean Sunset--Riding in Another Country South of the Equator

For the next ten days I will be in Chile before returning to Panama.  I got a bike yesterday, so I will have a week of riding the hills above the beach in Valparaiso and along the beachfront.  This is  my first trip to Chile, the fourth country I have visited in South America. I have also been to Argentina, Brazil and Columbia on this continent.  

As with other countries south of the equator, riding in Chile is strange because the sun crosses the sky in the north, rather than the south.  Since the late 1980s, I have ridden more than 150,000 miles in the northern hemisphere and a few thousand miles either near the equator or in the southern hemisphere.  

Riding in the northern hemisphere, especially in cold weather, conditions me to feel the sun in the south. As I ride due west, for example, my left side is slightly warmer and the glare of the low winter sun is in my left eye. Tens of thousands of miles and decades of riding burned this into my mind as "normal."  

My first ride in the southern hemisphere almost 30 years ago was due west from Perth, Australia, to the Indian Ocean. It was mid July, winter, and barely above freezing. On that 20-km ride, I stopped twice. My body told me I had to be going the wrong way because my right side was warmed by the sun. Instinct led me to think I was somehow going the wrong way. I was not.

For the next week in Chile, I will have the same instinctual feeling of going the wrong way.  When I ride south and have the sun behind me, I will have to tell myself nothing is wrong. 

In the meantime, the view along the coast is spectacular. 

As an aside on travel, I have been to all six continents, and ridden in five. I have yet to ride in Africa. Chile is the 62nd country I have visited. I have lived in five countries including the US.  

Also, South American and Oceana are the two continents where I have ridden in all the countries I have visited. Four countries in South America. And in Oceana, I have only visited one country, Australia, and ridden in it.

I have only been in five countries in North America and ridden in just three:the US, Canada and Panama. I have not ridden in Mexico or Haiti.

Which means I have ridden in 43 of the 55 countries I have visited in Europe and Asia. 

I have ridden a bike in more countries that I have done any other activity I keep track of.  For example, I have been in an airplane in 43 countries, driven in 30, ridden in a train in 25, used a laundromat in 21 and swam in 14. My biggest decade for travel is the current one. I have visited 35 countries since January 2020.  

I'm not sure when I will ride in another country. I have no  definite plans to visit a new country in the near future. I have ridden in 35 of the 41 United States, so I have more states to visit sometime in future.  

Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts

For most of the last 20 years, I have attended the weekly discussions of the Evolution Roundtable at Franklin and Marshall College a few blocks from my home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The ERT reads two books each year on evolution, one each semester.  We have read books The Origin of Species, The Selfish Gene, and many other books on dinosaurs, DNA and how cells evolve. In the 1990s, before I was part of the group, Stephen Jay Gould visited one of the Monday noon sessions.

If I could recommend just one book of all those I read with the ERT, in fact any single book I read on science, it would be Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts.  I liked this book from the introduction, but the more I read it, the more I was drawn into the parallel lives of Carl Linnaeus and the Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon.  

These men both lived and worked through much of the 18th Century. Both devoted their lives to classifying every living thing, plus rocks and minerals and even the universe beyond the earth in the case of Buffon.  Both men wrote a single work in many volumes with many revisions for their entire lives, describing every sort of life they could find. 

During their lifetimes, both were well known. Both suffered tragic and painful deaths. But that's where Roberts tale really took hold of me. He tells the story of how the ideas and reputations of the two men rose and fell after their deaths.  This story shows how much science is influenced by culture and politics and the whims of people with an agenda having nothing to do with the work of the scientist. 

 Linnaeus died in 1778 in Sweden, a country that would remain relatively stable in the centuries ahead. Buffon, a rich French aristocrat, died in 1788 on the eve of the French Revolution.  Among the excesses of the French Revolution was erasing anything aristocratic, along with murdering aristocrats.  One of the revolutionary committees decided Linnaeus was a man of the people and Buffon should be erased.  

The revolutionaries promoted Linnaeus. Buffon and his multi-volume work went into eclipse. Right now on Amazon there are 50 books on Linnaeus plus children's books. Since Linnaeus was a creationist who believed all the species were created by God in the week described in Genesis Linnaeus has a Christian home-school following. 

In the mid 19th Century, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species it was clear that the work of Buffon had anticipated evolution.  When genes were found to be the inner mechanism of life and reproduction, Buffon's work again seemed prophetic.  In the 21st Century with millions of species and many more more types of life that are neither plant nor animal, the Linnaean system is being supplanted. Linnaeus thought God created 40,000 species. His system is overloaded with a thousand times more. 

Why this book above every other book on evolution? Because Every Living Thing shows the reader the obsession, the rivalry, the passion, the determination of scientific discovery and then shows how history and politics can promote or ignore a lifetime of work. Real science is always changing, always affected by the culture in which it works.  

Right now uncertainty will hinder science in America, maybe leading it to flourish elsewhere.  Germany was the center of the scientific world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Then the Nazis took over and German science never recovered. 

Chance and circumstance affect us all and science no less. 

 

 

Freedom by Sebastian Junger

 

Freedom by Sebastian Junger is first and foremost a Quest or Journey Away, an adventure leaving home.  Junger and his friends walk the railroad tracks that connect Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The fast-moving narrative takes the reader northwest up the Juniata River valley beginning where it joins the Susquehanna River, then at the headwaters of the Juniata turns southwest along the freight and passenger line that passes through Altoona's Horseshoe Curve on the way to Steel City. 

As the group strides alongside the tracks, we learn about the mechanics of long-distance walking, including why the spacing of the ties makes it so difficult to walk on the wooden crossties that support the steel rails.  

Before the path along the river was railroad right of way, it was a trail used by settlers moving west and the tribes who lived on the land before them.  Junger tells us some of history of the tribes and how they fought and allied with settlers. We also learn the history of tribes and individuals far from Pennsylvania. There is a long section on the Apache on the US-Mexican border.

One of these narrative asides describes how George Washington is reputed to  have started the French and Indian War. In 1754 Washington led an attack on a French detachment at what became known as Fort Necessity. Washington won the skirmish. The French surrendered, but the Mingo tribesmen led by the warrior known as the Half King slaughtered and scalped some of the French.  What became the Seven Years War arguably began with that battle and its bloody aftermath.  

The narrative is interspersed with meditations on what it means to be free in modern America and back through the history. 

On the history of freedom versus the modern democratic world:

“For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for, if not died for, and that raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all--rationing water during a drought, for example--are forms of government tyranny. They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat. The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.”

On leaders who exploit their freedom:

“But in any society, leaders who aren’t willing to make sacrifices aren’t leaders, they’re opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They’re easy to spot, though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards.”

Wealth erodes freedom:

“Wealth is supposed to liberate us from the dangers of dependency, but quickly becomes a dependency in its own right. The wealthier we are, the higher our standard of living and the more—not less—we depend on society for our safety and comfort.”

On the freedom of the journey at the center of Freedom:

“We walked around four hundred miles and most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them.”

On freedom and power:

“The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own. Power is so readily abused that one could almost say that its concentration is antithetical to freedom.”

Trump's Broken Boys

In the Spring of 2016, I met a rich, successful engineer who loved Donald Trump.  Still does, I am sure.  Like many well-educated conservatives my age, and Trump himself, Tom was a draft dodger.  But at the core of his love of Trump was resentment about busing.  He grew up in Chicago. He went to neighborhood schools until high school, planned to go to the high school in his neighborhood, then got bussed to the other side of the city.  

He hated liberals ever since and when Trump said he hated liberals, Tom found his man. The central appeal of Trump is hate and resentment.  Recently I was reminded that those who are bullied will attach themselves to a bully as their protector.  

I went to school with Denny from first grade to high school graduation.  He was short, not athletic, and had an ethnic eastern European name. He was easy to tease and never had many friends. When he graduated high school he left Stoneham and had a successful career. He retired to the very red state of Idaho.  

Since the election he has made a blizzard of Facebook posts, praising everything Trump does and says.

The experience of being bullied can either lead to loathing bullies or identifying with the bully. In this case, the marginal kid who got bullied anglicized both his first and last names, moved across the country and became an avid promoter of everything Trump does. If Trump farts, Denny will gush about the aroma.  

He clearly believes he is on the safe side of bullying now, taking the side of the biggest bully ever to occupy the White House. 

On Friday, Trump and Vance attacked President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office (their turf) surrounded by their worshipful staff.  In this two against one or fifty against one contest, Zelenskyy refused to bow to the bully. He fought off Putin for three years, Trump is a pale orange imitation.  Afterwards, Denny attacked Zelenskyy and has attacked Zelenskyy every day since.  

From the day Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015, the broken boys of America have flocked to Trump. "I am your retribution," Trump said.  

Some who were bullied and managed to survive and thrive were repelled by the game show host who can only punch down. Others saw their revenge in an old,  angry, broken man like themselves. They bought MAGA hats and cheered for hate.  

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Draft dodgers did not get lift from Bill Clinton. He apologized. But Trump bragged about being a draft dodger. He gave the cowards who let another man serve in their place an increase in status.

Russia Invaded Ukraine. Putin Murders and Kidnaps Children. Trump Loves Putin.

Since the moment Russia invaded Ukraine, I have admired the bravery of the Ukrainian people in defense of their nation. Vladimir Putin wants to destroy Ukraine and restore the Tsarist Russia of his disgusting dreams and destroy Ukraine.

For three years now, Ukraine has stood against everything Russia can do--killing hundreds of thousands of Russian troops and wounding even more.  For Ukraine, this war is existential.  If Russia wins, Ukraine and all of its history and culture disappear as Russia continues to murder, rape and dispossess the people of Ukraine.

At this critical moment, America is abandoning Ukraine. Trump is attacking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the same moment he giving the war criminal Putin anything he wants in regard to Ukraine.  

As we approach the Quarter Millennial Anniversary of America next year, we are on course to betray Ukraine, desert Taiwan, take Greenland, attack Panama and threaten our closest allies--and as the frosting on this shit cake, leave NATO. 

Forty-nine years ago, my tank flew a Bicentennial American Flag as we trained to face Soviet tanks on the East-West German border.  I enlisted during four different wars in the past fifty years. The Cold War was the only war America won.  And now Trump has given that victory away by siding with Putin against our allies. 

I hoped to celebrate America on July 4, 2026, but it is more likely I will be in DC protesting the betrayal of  Ukraine: assuming we still have Constitutional Rights next year. I wouldn't bet one way or the other. 

The Every-Other-Asshole Rule

 

My Dad, Lt. George Gussman, during World War II

My Dad had several favorite bits of wisdom he lived by.  “You can tell who boozes by the company he chooses” was one I first heard when Dad did not approve of my middle school friends.  “Volunteer for everything” was the last advice he gave me before I flew to Texas for Basic Training. He was right.  But the most useful advice when approaching a complex world was his Every-Other-Asshole Rule.  

I remember hearing this for the first time the day I took my driver’s license test.  I wanted nothing more in the world than to get my license and drive.  I had aced the written test and had years of practice driving warehouse vehicles and an old pickup truck for hauling trash in my summer job.  But I was nervous.  Just before I took the road test, my Dad said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Just look at every other asshole who has a license and ask yourself, is he smarter than I am?”

I passed.  

And for the rest of my life, when faced with something that seemed difficult or frightening, I would look around and see every other asshole who could do what I was about to do.  And it worked.  

Several years later I was training to be a tank gunner.  I had to fire a tank cannon (for the first time) and hit the target down range or redo gunnery training.  I was intimidated. I had never fired anything larger than an M16 rifle.  But I looked around at the other gunnery trainees who passed the test and even some of the training leaders who were not the brightest bulb on the chandelier and thought, ‘I can do this.’ I did. I was a tank commander less than a year later.

A decade after that, I was the first one out of the plane when a group of eight co-workers at an ad agency went skydiving.  We watched a group before us float to the ground. I looked at that group, remembered Dad's advice, and boarded the little single-engine plane last.  Last in, first out!   

In 2009 in Oklahoma, I went off a rappel tower for the first time.  Same drill. Look around, think of Dad, jump backwards and sail to the ground. 

In 2012 at age 59, I learned to swim. I had never swum the length of a pool. I went to the YMCA for lessons, not sure I could actually swim.  I met my instructor, looked around and thought at least half the human race can swim, I can too. 

Thanks Dad. 

Riding, Hiking Mountains in Western Panama

 

Coffee plants growing on a steep hillside above Boquete, Panama

After months of sea-level riding and walking with some small hills, I hiked and rode up and down some very long, very steep hills near Volcan Baru, a volcano last active about 500 years ago. 

The 13-kilometer trail to the peak of Volcan Baru 

The trail above is the beginning of the 13-kilometer hiking trail to the top of Volcan Baru.  I made  it to an overlook two kilometers up the hill. The grade is 23%. The descent was more difficult than the climb on loose gravel and rocks.     

The view from Volcan Baru

From Boquete, I rode past streams and waterfalls toward one of the peaks.  Several times I walked on grades that exceeded 20%.  I turned around at a point when I could not pedal and could see a half kilometer of very steep road. Total climb was 700 meters.  

The descent was slow.  The road was narrow and had delivery vans, minibuses and taxis climbing and descending.  The road was occasionally smooth, but would suddenly be broken and gravel-strewn.  

After a week of hikes and bike rides, I was very tired.  

Here is one grade I rode and walked up:

   

New Friend, New List of Favorite Books

Joseph Brodsky around 1970. 

A new friend here in Panama, a cyclist, Yogi, and round-the-world-sailor named Roger, asked me for a list of books I would recommend. He is an avid reader and looking for new books he has not read.  

Roger has read all the greats of 19th Century Russian literature. Today I found out why.  Roger was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1970.  He took a
semester of creative writing with Joseph Brodsky, the Russian emigre poet who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987.  Roger won the Russian lit. professor lottery! 

I have a few books with me in Panama. Two are Blindness, the terrifying dystopian novel by Jose Saramago, and Tribe by the journalist and war correspondent Sebastian Junger. Both are excellent, so I gave them to Roger. 

Now the list. 

1. Kazuo Ishiguro. Remains of the Day and Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro are my favorites. I have read everything Ishiguro has written, most recently Klara and the Sun and seen his movie Living.  His writing is brilliant. These two books are my favorite.

2. Hannah Arendt. Philosopher and historian and one of the most influential political writers of the 20th Century. Born in 1906, a German Jew, she earned a PhD at Heidelberg in 1929 and fled Germany in 1933 just after the Nazi takeover.  She lived in France until WorldWar II began, then escaped to America in 1941. In 1951 She published The Origins of Totalitarianism, her best-known work defining the new tyranny of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.  I have read all of her books. I most admire On Revolution a book that shows why nearly all revolutions devolve into tyranny, but America did not.  I love The Human Condition for explaining living in our world.  I am such a devoted fan, I am in a weekly reading group and go to Hannah Arendt Conferences.

3. George Orwell. I have read and re-read Orwell's novels.  A decade ago I read the 1200-page volume of his collected essays, finding endless entertainment.  His essay on brewing tea shows the utter snob that still lingered inside the Democratic Socialist writer. There is no better book explaining the rise of Stalin than Animal Farm.  A decade ago, I became convinced that 1984 was not prophetic after all, until I read about life in Communist China.     

4. Mark Helprin. I have been a devoted fan of Mark Helprin since read his novel Winters Tale in 1983.  I have since read every one of his novels, most recently The Ocean and the Stars.  His Paris in the Present Tense gave me a new and lovely view of my favorite city.  I plan to read Winters Tale for the third time this year.

5. - 12.  I love big books in which one author writes the entire history of humanity as in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.  

Or of recorded human history as in Why the West Rules--For Now by Ian Morris or another view Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. 

Or a history of American from the view of those without power, These Truths by Jill Lepore. 

Another delightful view of the past 500 years Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson.  

I recently read Titans of History by Simon Sebag Montifiore. I plan to read his The World: A Family History of Humanity.  But I also want to read his Jerusalem.

An aside on these books is that I believe recent histories are the best. The old histories did not have access to all the new data. That perspective here.

And another aside! If you read books in translation, read the newest translation available.  The latest translation will be clearest and will correct the mistakes of predecessors.  If you read Scriptures in translation, read a translation by one person.  A committee compromises. One person may be wrong, but they won't be tepid. 

Back to the list.  

13. (for the unluckiest author on this list)  The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. Son of a German father and French mother from territory between the countries. Enlists in the German Army at 17 in 1941. Spends the entire war in Russia. Returns home. Home is now in France. He serves in the French Foreign Legion to avoid prison. A soldier under any flag can be a good soldier.  

14. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli I re-read it for the tenth time last year, every Presidential election year since 1980.  I will read it again in 2028. Machiavelli's advice remains brilliant, relevant and chilling 500 years after he wrote it.  

15. Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin.  A 2006 novel that imagines Russia in 2028 as a restored Tsarist empire, complete with Oprichniks, the assassins of Ivan the Terrible. It is a crazy, funny novel, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine showed it has a dark, prophetic side. 

16. A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller Jr. shows us the world after a Soviet-American nuclear exchange kills 95% of the population.  A Catholic monastery in the ruins of Utah preserves books after the survivors of the nuclear war burn books and scientists. The irony in this book is amazing.

17. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.  In a nine-month trip beginning in1830, Tocqueville found the heart of American democracy and wrote a book that became the central description of America for the world--including every political scientist in America.  He said in the 1830s that the 20th Century would be defined by the conflict between Russian and America.

18. C.S. Lewis. I have read all of the 39 books he wrote in his lifetime, plus posthumous collections. His novel Till We Have Faces is so good it is one of the books I read aloud to my daughters. The central characters look at the same thing at the same time and see two entirely different things.  So much of the book looks at perception and reality in ways I have not read anywhere else. His book The Four Loves gave me a frame for seeing the different ways people express love...and reject love. 

19. Vasily Grossman. Since Roger has read about and is very interested in the Battle of Stalingrad, my first recommendation is Life and Fate the novel of the Battle of Stalingrad and it's second volume titled Stalingrad. Grossman was a Soviet war correspondent who arrived the first day of the battle and reported then entire terrible fight.

20. Leo Tolstoy. Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy. No book affected my view of life, death and eternity more than this one. I just re-read War and Peace, but Ivan Ilych is for me the best thing Tolstoy wrote.  

"War" by Sebastian Junger--Reading the Book 15 Years After I Saw the Movie

 

In August of 2010, eight months after I returned from Iraq, I went to see the documentary Restrepo with Jim Dao of the New York Times.*  Restrepo records the the men of 2nd Platoon of Battle Company, airborne infantry on the farthest outpost in the midst of the worst fighting in the War in Afghanistan.  The movie was filmed and directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. 

I wrote briefly about seeing the movie in 2010. War documentaries can be slow, wanting to get every detail right. Restrepo roars from one scene to the next. Hetherington and Junger captured moments when everyone around them was in a fight for their lives--they were armed only with a camera.  Even the moments of boredom had the feral, roaring feel of men waiting for a fight as if chained.  

And the candor, especially of the officers in charge of 2nd Platoon and Battle Company was amazing.  The default setting for talking to the press in the military is STFU (Shut the Fuck Up).  Most soldiers I have known hate the media. When I first served during the Vietnam War soldiers felt outright betrayed by the media.  

The officers and men said what they really thought. I would not have believed the candor if I had not seen it.  

Now fifteen years after seeing the movie, I read Junger's book War based on the same year in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan plus follow up with the soldiers of the Restrepo outpost.  

I have not seen a more visceral or candid documentary of any war. I would recommend the movie to anyone. The book had me laughing out loud at some points and then reading page after page never able to stop in the middle of a patrol or fire fight.  Usually I like either the book or the movie better (usually the book). In the case of the HBO series Band of Brothers I much preferred the series to the book. 

By contrast, War and Restrepo they are companions. I would watch Restrepo first simply to feel the rush of the story then read War to linger on the words and the detail.   

In 2011, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan. The deployment orders fell through, certainly for the better. War was published in May 2010.  I intended to read the book after seeing the movie, but forgot about it in the rush of life after returning from Iraq. In retrospect, if I had read the book I would have better understood why I wanted to go back and why I should not.

In October of last year, I met Junger at a conference where he was a featured speaker.  He spoke about his book Tribe which is very much informed by War and Restrepo.  The conference was on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. We had lunch together and talked about the Army, deployment, Army food, and how strange it was to return to the "real world" after war. And about how funny and terrible Army jokes are. 

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*Dao was the war correspondent of the Times and in the middle of a long-term assignment covering the 10th Mountain Division on a year-long deployment to Afghanistan.  The 10th Mountain is stationed at Camp Drum, New York.  Dao's coverage of a year at war is here. 

Tattoos are Rare in Panama

 

Sleeve tattoos like the one above are common in Panama City, Florida, not mention Philadelphia, Portland, Pittsburgh and Phoenix, but not in Panama City, Panama. Across the Central American region, tattoos are rare.  

One reason is the association of tattoos with gangs and drug cartels. People with tattoos were seen as part of those groups. 

A barista in Panama City who is college age said she and her friends don't get tattoos.  No particular reason, they just don't.

I have been living in Panama since November and just noticed that I don't see tattoos everywhere, as I would in any major city in America or Europe.  

Today I rode the both subway lines in Panama. The five-car trains are open. You can see from one end of the train to the other.  As far as I could see, no tattoos.  At one busy stop a security guard with a tattoo got on the train. If I rode a subway in New York, Philadelphia, or DC, I would have a hard time finding people without tattoos. 

It was a woman with sleeve tattoos that made me aware that I was not seeing tattoos.  When I saw her fully-inked arms in an outdoor restaurant I realized I had not seen sleeve tattoos for months--since I was last in Philadelphia. The woman with sleeve tattoos I saw here was an American tourist, not a Panamanian.

As perception, I know it is much harder to "see" what is absent than what is present so I don't feel too bad about not noticing that people in Panama don't have tattoos. I also wonder if I was simply seeing "normal" for most of my life.  Before this century, most Americans did not have tattoos. For fifty years, I lived in the world where tattoos were rare.        

Now they are everywhere--in the US.  

But not here in Panama. 

 

A Review of An Immense World by Ed Yong

In the fall of 2024 I read An Immense World with the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College, a group I have been part of for more than two decades.

It is easily the most beautifully written of all the books of more than two dozen books I have read with this group.  Rather than simply gush about it, I copied the review from The Guardian newspaper. If you read popular science this book is deeply informative and a joy to read.

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A Review of An Immense World by Ed Yong 

This magnificent book reveals the strange and mysterious ways that creatures sense their surroundings – pushing our understanding of them to the limit

Review by Killian Fox

20 Jun 2022

Scallops have eyes. Not just two eyes, like humans have, or eight, like most spiders do, but up to 200 of them, each clasped by a thin, wavy tentacle protruding from the inner edges of the corrugated shell. Considering how rudimentary a scallop’s brain is, these eyes are surprisingly sophisticated. Play a scallop a video of juicy particles drifting by in the water, as researchers at the University of South Carolina have done, and it will likely open its shell, as if to take a bite.

It’s possible, at a stretch, to say what’s going on here. The scallop’s eyes transmit visual information to its brain, which creates a picture, however fuzzy, of some juicy plankton approaching, and it springs into action. The shell opens wide, the plankton floats in, and snap! Dinner is served.

It’s a neat enough explanation, but it’s not true. The reality, as with most cases in Ed Yong’s magnificent new book on animal perception, is more complicated, more mysterious, more wondrously strange.

Yong has a knack for vivid similes, and here he invites us to think of the scallop’s brain “as a security guard watching a bank of a hundred monitors, each connected to a motion-sensing camera… The cameras may be state-of-the-art, but the images they capture are not sent to the guard.” What appears instead is a warning light for every camera that has detected something, and the guard reacts without actually visualising the prey. If this explanation is correct – and Yong is always alert to the possibility that it might not be – the scallop “doesn’t experience a movie in its head the same way we do. It sees without scenes.”

This throws up further questions, not least: why do scallops have such keen eyes if their brains can’t process the visual data? Yong doesn’t give us a conclusive answer, but the example raises a deeper point that lies at the heart of his book. We humans are so deeply embedded in our own particular way of seeing the world that we find it hard not to impose our perspective on other creatures – if indeed we bother thinking about them at all.

A British science writer based in the US, Yong is drawn to material that pushes our understanding to the limits. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, dove headlong into the world of microbes and made often punishingly complex subjects digestible to lay readers without oversimplification. While working on this follow-up, he broke off to report on Covid for the Atlantic, producing a series of deeply researched, often devastating articles that won him a Pulitzer prize.

An Immense World might be his most audacious undertaking so far. Humans, like all creatures, are trapped in sensory bubbles unique to each individual – what the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll referred to as our Umwelt – which means we “can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness”, as Yong puts it. Our eyesight is pretty good, but it’s nowhere near as panoramic as that of a mallard, which “sees the world simultaneously moving toward it and away from it” when flying. Nor can we perceive ultraviolet colours, as most animals can, or sniff out the topography of underwater mountains and valleys, like some seabirds seem capable of doing.

We may feel like we are the masters of our planet, having mapped every inch of its landmass and stared into the guts of an atom, but when it comes to understanding what it’s like to be a songbird using the earth’s magnetic field to navigate across continents, we barely know where to start.

Yong is up for giving it his best shot, not least because he understands how damaging it can be to disregard other creatures’ perspectives. When we unthinkingly flood the world with light and sound, we wreak havoc on bird and turtle migrations and disrupt owls and orcas in their search for food. Even scientists who have spent years working with a single species can botch research by failing to fully consider their point of view. But Yong also relishes stepping into other Umwelts just for the sheer fascination of it. “We don’t have to look to aliens from other planets,” one scientist tells him. “We have animals that have a completely different interpretation of what the world is right next to us.”

She has a point: who needs sci-fi when you’ve got a blind catfish with flow-sensing teeth all over its skin, or crickets with ears on their knees, or a dolphin that can perceive your innards through echolocation? Even everyday encounters seem extraordinary through the “magic magnifying glass” that Yong holds up. The jerky movements of flies buzzing around your living room aren’t random, but a response to fluctuations in temperature too minuscule for humans to detect. The hearing of chickadees changes with the seasons, speeding up in the autumn, while large flocks are forming, and becoming more pitch-sensitive in spring, to register the subtleties of mating calls.

The book is so full of these little astonishments, beautifully rendered, that Yong occasionally risks overwhelming our sense of wonder. By the time we get to the chapter on magnetoreception – easily the most confounding of the senses, in part because no one is certain where the relevant receptors are located – it’s almost a relief when he admits that he has “no idea how to begin thinking about the Umwelt of a loggerhead turtle”.

But it’s the attempt that matters, and Yong succeeds brilliantly in shedding light on these alien worlds – worlds that drift around us every day, like plankton around a scallop, but whose richness and extravagant strangeness we rarely pause to examine. Now, thanks to this book, we have scenes to help us see.

Bilingual Books and the Challenge of Lifelong Learning

More than a decade ago in a Paris bookstore I picked up French-Greek edition of The Gospel of John, Jean Evangile: traduit du grec, preface et annote par Bernard Pautrat.  I read it in 2017 after I took three semesters of Ancient Greek with undergraduates.  Most of the Christian scripture is easier to read than histories or philosophy in Ancient Greek and much easier than poetry or drama.

The Greek is a standard late 20th century international text. The French on the facing page is a contemporary translation.  Greek is the language in which the apostles wrote, but not the language Jesus spoke. So the gospels are a combination of narrative with quotes from Jesus (and any other dialogue) that are translations of Aramaic and Hebrew.   

When I began, I read the French first. I would read a sentence or paragraph then read the Greek. When I got stuck in both languages I would refer to David Bentley Hart's translation of the Christian scripture.  He has a lot of notes. Since it is a one-man translation, a committee is not deciding on word choice or the flow of a passage. I like that better.

As I went along the Greek I took two decades ago started to come back. I know a lot of Greek grammar. As I read more, I  remembered more vocabulary.  By halfway, I was reading a Greek sentence first, then the French.  By the end, Greek paragraph or two before switching to French.   

In fact, since the Greek in John's gospel is so uncomplicated, I was more likely to puzzle over the French grammar by the end.  

As a method of learning languages, I can only recommend this method to those who want to read. I know that if I really wanted fluency, I would have to immerse myself in one language until I was fluent.  It would have been better if I started my immersion before the first grade. But reading keeps languages in my head and lets me experience a little of  what a native reader of a language enjoys all the time. 

Also, I have tried reading a dual-language text in which one of the languages is English. It is difficult not to lean on the English.  

----

The Text Itself 

Of the apostles who wrote the gospels and letters of the Christian scriptures only Luke was a native speaker of Greek.  His gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which he wrote, are much better Greek than the rest of the book.  Which also means more difficult Greek. 

Between my two readings of Jean Evangile, I joined a synagogue for the first time in my life and became a somewhat practicing Jew.  This made the end of the gospel much more vivid and disturbing.  John makes very clear the plots and intrigues of the Jewish leaders are why Jesus was crucified.  

In the words of Jesus, it is very clear that Christianity should not have and money, power, buildings, or any connection to this world except to point people to the Kingdom of God.  So the Jewish leaders represent any religious leader that has money and power.  

But for the kind of person who thinks they can read a 2000-year-old twice translated book literally (Jesus spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, John translated his words in Greek, then the Greek got translated into English.) he would not look for the universal meaning of the actions of the Jewish leaders. The literal reading looks bad.  

Tribe by Sebastian Junger -- The Ancient Roots of Many Problems of the Modern World

In October, I went a conference on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism.  The first and featured speaker was Sebastian Junger, author of seven books that, in part, describe the lives of modern tribes in America including soldiers, commercial fishermen, and others who risk their lives in their work.  Junger said, "The real and ancient meaning of tribe is the community that you live in, that you share resources with, that you would risk your life to defend."

He is also the co-director with Tim Hetherington of the documentary Restrepo, the record of a year with soldiers on one of the most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan. The soldiers of Battle Company, 2nd of the 503rd Infantry Regiment 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team are the definition of a tribe.

Humans as a species are tribal.  Forming tribes and living as tribes describes most of human history. In the book, Junger shows that people who live without tribes, without the community and deep connections tribes afford, are adrift and often unhappy without knowing why.  

Junger said it was a commonplace in frontier America that people who went from civilization to Native American tribal life did not come back.  Whatever civilization could offer, those who left would not return. 

As I read the book, I felt I was learning the secret code of my life--the yearning for a tribe.  I grew up in a Boston suburb in the 1950s and 60s, not connected to extended family or religion or even a sports team.  I joined the military shortly after high school graduation in 1971 and loved being part of a group with a mission. I got out after being blinded in a missile explosion, but healed completely and re-enlisted within a year.  

After three years as a tank commander on the East-West border, I got out, went to college, got a professional job, then a quarter-century later re-enlisted and deployed to Iraq for a year.  That deployment ended 15 years ago this month.   

In an odd twist, I saw Restrepo right after it was released in late June 2010 in an NYC theater, a few months after I returned from deployment.  I walked out of the theater and wanted to go to Afghanistan.  

Belonging to a tribe has been normal for we humans in all of recorded history and before.  The cosmopolitan drive in us allows great learning, great invention, modern medicine and all the wonders of the modern world, but it does satisfy our need for deep human connection.  Tribes do that. Tribe, the book, explains the history and present reality of the tribal impulse in our lives.

The French Roots of Sinatra's "I Did It My Way"

In November 1968, Frank Sinatra told his friend and collaborator Paul Anka that he was tired and ready to give up show business. Sinatra had asked Anka several times to write a song for him, but Anka had been intimidated.  He saw himself writing teen songs.  During dinner Sinatra said, "You never wrote me that song."

Still reeling over the news at 1 a.m. in his apartment, he found himself toying with lyrics to a melody he had heard in France. “I thought, ‘What would Frank do with this melody, if he were a writer?’” Anka says. “And all of a sudden, it just came to me: ‘And now the end is near. I face the final curtain.’”

Anka knew the melody for these words.  A few months before,  Anka was in the  south of France and heard a song called Comme d'habitude which can be translated "as per usual."  More loosely "same old shit." The melody was written by Jaques Revaux with lyrics by Claude Francois and Gilles Thibault.  The sad song was about a man in his mid 30s who was left (dumped) by his much younger (teenage) lover.  Anka wrote a completely different lyruc on the same melody.

Anka gave the song to Sinatra who recorded it before the end of the year.  In  1969, I Did It My Way was an instant hit around the world and became a signature song for Sinatra for the rest of his life.  

Sinatra did not quit show business.  

In the 1960s most pop music traveled from from the United States and England to the rest of the world. I was fascinated to learn the story of a hit song in France that became a very different song in America.  

 

"Never Eat With Dirty Hands" Advice I Didn't Follow

 

In the 10th grade at Stoneham High School near Boston our biology teacher, Sonia Jones, told us "Never eat with dirty hands!" She explained all of the germs we were learning about would sicken and kill if we ate with dirty hands.  She was six feet tall and had a regal way of speaking. Her advice was memorable.

That class was in the 1968-69 school year.  Nine years later in the fall of 1977, my tank blew its engine in the early morning in the woods near the east-west border in Germany.  My crew and I got down in a hull full of oil and readied the tank to get a new engine. Then we waited for the M88 tank recovery vehicle to show up with our new 1750 cubic-inch, twin turbo, V12 power plant. 

We also had no food except our emergency rations. We had been in the woods for more than a month and had eaten most of the extra food we brought with us.  

Several hours later the M88 showed up and we got a new engine.  We were covered in grease and oil from the broken V12 diesel engine.  Just before dark, the first sergeant showed up in a Jeep with the last remnants of breakfast in a Mermite can.

He had bacon and eggs and white bread.  We all grabbed bread, scooped eggs and bacon onto one slice bread, made a sandwich with the other slice and started eating.  I looked at the black fingerprints on my white bread slices and thought of our tall, stern biology teacher and how horrified she would be at our sandwiches.   

I kept eating.  

NB: I asked my classmates about the name of the biology teacher. I got five suggestions before Steve Burke identified her as Sonia Jones.  We were sure of the ID because she had a unique way of sneezing: she sneezed ten times ina row with a sound like "wheeeeeeetz!" Thansk Stoneham High SchoolClass of 1971.

 

For the Sweep of History, Read New Books First

Asked about the five books someone should read to get a broad view of the history of the world, the historian Walter Russell Mead said we should read the Bible, Thucydides, Xenophon, other histories from the ancient world and, oddly, The Life of Lord Marlborough by Winston Churchill.  

(I have read several books by Churchill.  His book about his ancestor is the best thing I have read by him, but it seemed a strange addition to a short list. )

While I love Walter Russell Mead's take on many things, I disagree with his recommendations.

First, I strongly believe that reading ancient books in translation will leave the reader with more questions than answers.  Translation is interpretation, leaving many occasions for misunderstanding. Also, history written at the time it happens can never be comprehensive. Modern scholarship has added much the story Thucydides tells. Partly because Thucydides was a participant in the wars he wrote about, he seems to have taken Alcibiades at his word when Alcibiades was manipulating events to gain power. That story is very well told in The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan.   

Instead of beginning with the ancients, I recommend reading several sweeping one-volume histories of the world or a great era by historians of great reputation in the reader's own language--in my case, English. 

 

The most recent book I read in this genre is Why the West Rules for Now by Ian Morris.  A French friend told me about it. He read it in English. The book includes the parallel development of civilization in the East and the West. If I were to recommend only one book, Morris's book would be it. 

Another delightful book is The Dawn of Everything by the two Davids, Graeber and Wengrow. Much more biology than the Morris book so a wider perspective.  

In his book Prisoners of Geography Tim Marshall makes clear that where we stand in the world gives us a vastly different perspective on life and history.  I love this book and found nothing comparable in its focus.

Civilization  by Niall Ferguson covers just a half millennium from 1500 to now, but it's the one we live in so it's very important for us.  Ferguson, like Morris, explains why the plague-ridden western end of the Asian continent (Europe) rose from backwater to world dominance.  It took the Reformation and the Renaissance to break the hold of the Catholic Church on western culture and allow science to flourish freely. Ferguson then lists 29 great innovations in science between 1530 and 1789 that happened after two millennia of relative stagnation.  

These Truths by Jill Lepore traces the history of America from its discovery to the present with a focus on women and minorities. Her stories of the lives of slaves and native Americans and the first abolitionists are amazing.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, charts the history of the species Sapiens including highs like civilization and medicine and lows like all the misery that ensued when we left hunter gatherer lives to settle down and become the servants of wheat. (Originally written in Hebrew, Sapiens was translated into English with the author working on it.  Harari is multi-lingual and speaks and writes in English.)

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says geography is the reason western culture came to dominate the world in the past half millennium, along with as the title says, guns, germs and steel. 

Finally, if you decide to take Mead's advice and read the Bible, I urge you to read a translation by one man (I will be happy to recommend a one-woman translation when one is available.) NOT a committee.  I am currently reading Robert Alter's translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. He is very thorough and his footnotes on the complexities of the Hebrew are very clear and readable.

For the Christian Scripture, I suggest David Bentley Hart.  Like Alter, his notes are brilliant. He is an Orthodox theologian who has pissed off most of Christendom with his opinions expressed in many books.  He has even said Hell does not exist to make sure he has enmity from every direction.  I read The Gospel of John and the letters of John in Greek recently. I used Hart's translation when I was stuck. Which happened a lot.  

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter

In the hopeful world of self-help books the reader is drawn into the possibility of changing her life for the better.  We  could all be thinner, more organized, better read, faster, more calm, more mindful, less wasteful and any number of personal improvements.  

Much of the advice is incremental--the steps toward the goal, not the leap.  Michael Easter gives the reader the steps toward the leap.  The central event of the book is a month-long trek with 80-pound packs through the wilderness of northern Alaska hunting caribou.  

On the way he tells us how hunger, boredom, exhaustion, cold, dirt and other forms of discomfort will make our lives happier and better.  The book is full of the latest research showing how discomfort makes us stronger, smarter, tougher and happier.  

It is also very well written.  And if you are the kind of person who exercises a lot, fasts, endures boredom and strives to live better, the book will challenge you to do something even more extreme. 

I like this book for the obvious confirmation basis that I get from it. It also added walking with a heavy pack--rucking--to things I want to do more of. 

I would love to hear how you strain toward self improvement.  

I wrote two other posts responding to the book. They were on boredom and dirt.

"Blindness" by Jose Saramago--terrifying look at society falling apart

 Blindness reached out and grabbed me from the first page.  A very ordinary scene of cars waiting for a traffic introduces the horror to come.  The car in the middle lane doesn't move when the light turns green. The driver is blind.  I was surprised and then laughed asking myself, 'Why is a blind man in the driver's seat?' 

He has gone suddenly blind.  A weird white blindness. He cannot see anything except bright whiteness.  Pedestrians and other drivers help him from the car.  One drives the afflicted man home--then steals his car. His later retribution for his theft is horrible and final. We get the feeling of the terrible events to come from the first case of blindness.  

Very soon the personal tragedy becomes a wider and wider apocalypse of white blindness.  The first victim and many others are sent to an abandoned mental hospital. At that point, the story becomes The Lord of the Flies with adults.  Adults can try to impose order and care for each other, but when that fails, adults can be far more horrible than the worst children. In addition to theft, beatings and murder, rape adds another dimension of terror. 

The novel is gripping from first page to last.  I really wanted to know what would happen to the central characters as they and the world descended further and further into chaos.  In Blindness Jose Saramago shows us what life would be like with the whole world going blind. There's no water. No one cleans. Civilization breaks down. Tribes are all that is left. 

In the military, one of the expressions used to indicate a soldier is in very deep trouble is, "You are in a world of shit." The world of Blindness really is a "world of shit." Confined blind people shit in hallways. Walking means stepping in shit. Released from confinement blind people wander the streets of the city, and the streets and buildings become latrines.  

With everyone going blind no one can deliver food--or anything else.  Saramago writes vividly about this world of terror and filth. 

I will stop here. Endings should be experienced.  If you read dystopian books, I could not recommend this book more highly. 

My favorite dystopian novel is the post-nuclear-holocaust story A Canticle for Liebowitz. Blindness is just as brilliant, just as surprising, just as terrifying.

Blindness was one of the seventeen novels published by Saramago, a total of more than thirty books including poetry essays, diaries and children's books. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998 for his work. 

International Neighborhood Near the Panama Canal

 

Less than a kilometer from my AirBnb is a short road that connects a residential area with the main bus route to the city.  At one end is the massive 7-story Russian embassy.  At the other end is a little Russian Orthodox Church which is currently closed for construction. 

My wife and I walk by it several times a week after dinner.  Last night we met a young couple walking down the hill toward the church with their young toddler. We were walking up.  The family was Russian, part of the staff at the embassy.  

For many reasons, Panama is home to people who came from across the region and around the world.  Three blocks away is a Korean Church.  Every convenience store I have been to on the east side of the city is run by Koreans.  

The fresh fruit market nearby is run by Venezuelans. Cruise ships dock on both coasts bringing tourists from the whole world.      

Today I went to the convenience store closest to my house.  The young woman who runs the store (while taking care of two small children) has been very pregnant recently. When I walked in the store her husband, who is usually stocking shelves, was holding a very young baby. Mom had just walked into the  back room.  A teenage girl was at the counter.  I said "Felicidades! Dos dias?" He nodded and said  yes, two days old. 

A very international neighborhood.

Two Weeks of Fog Watch: There's No Boredom Like Army Boredom

In the spring of 1977, my tank unit, 1st Battalion, 70th Armor, went to Grafenwohr, West Germany, for annual gunnery training.  

Tens of thousands of tanks fired their guns every year on the huge range at Grafenwohr.  Wehrmacht tank crews trained there during World War II.  NATO crews from many nations trained there during the Cold War. 

The schedule of firing was full from January 2 until the end of the year. Tanks fire cannon and machine guns every day, year round, until German weather throws a wrench in the huge scheduling machine.  

My crew and the rest of Bravo Company had zeroed our guns, fired on a stationary range and were ready for Table VIII--the annual test of individual crews firing at multiple targets while moving down range.  

We rolled to the start area, loaded our ammo and waited.  

And waited.

And waited.

For two weeks we ate breakfast, climbed aboard tank Bravo 1-3 and waited.  Fog shrouded eastern Germany near the Czech border.  We could fire in rain or snow, heat or cold, but not fog. 

So we sat in the tank.  

And sat. 

We joked about being on Fog Watch. 

We could not leave the tank--what if the fog suddenly cleared? We had to be ready. 

The fog did not move.

I am reading a book called The Comfort Crisis which talks about the many virtues of boredom as well as cold, heat, hunger, exhaustion and other stresses in life. Day after day of thick fog gave me boredom at a level I have experienced few other times in life.    

In the 20-man tent where we slept there was a green Bible. I thought it was some kind of Army Bible with its green cover.  

But it was a Living Bible, and on Amazon right now, it is still sold in green. It was not a special Army Bible.  I had never read the Bible cover to cover so I decided to relieve the days of boredom with reading the entire Bible--from Genesis to Revelation. 

It turns out, the Living Bible is a translation by Kenneth Taylor in 1971. It is labeled a "paraphrase" rather than a translation and was supposed to be more readable.  It gets a lot of criticism from people who prefer a more direct translation, but every translation of every book, not just the Bible, is an interpretation. Looking down at a paraphrase by people who can't read the original languages is sadly funny. 

And no one could ever make the insane collection of rules and tent-making instructions in Torah readable in any paraphrase, translation or interpretation. 

I plowed through it day after day. Twelve days and 1,184 pages later there was a new heaven and a new earth at the end of the book, but there was still fog at Grafenwohr. The day after that, the fog finally cleared.  I stopped thinking about scallops as an abomination and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and got ready to fire.  

Boredom, according to Michael Easter, author of The Comfort Crisis is a spark of creativity. Boredom can leave our minds open to creative thinking. Within a year after that boring two weeks, I left the tank company and worked as a writer on the base newspaper.  Maybe boredom can lead to creativity.