I spend more time sitting at the table thinking about things than I do writing. Our dog walk today (yesterday now) was nearly disastrous for Dexter and Frollie, for example. There was the perspective offered in an email I received, "stats to note." Tonight and tomorrow night the Geminid meteor shower is taking place. I remember that Annie Dillard had an interesting perspective on meteor showers in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, though I read that a long time ago too. After I read it I never failed to pick up any penny I found. Well, I picked them up before I read her book, but it was more fun after. The observed behavior of white-throated sparrows on our board walk is worth noting. Dexter takes thyroid pills every morning, with cheese; remember Wallace and Gromit? Everyone likes cheese, especially Kraft's American cheese slices, into which I fold his pills. Of course everyone shows up for cheese. The list grows. But my neck hurts and it is 4:39 am. Still, there is one more thing to say about The Tempest too (and my inability to deal effectively with italics for titles; see?). Ah, later note: I have learned the double tap on the words I need to italicize. Technology, ain't it grand?
More later, whenever later is.
We have a lot of bird feeders just outside the back of our house, beside the enclosed deck, and nicely placed on the other side of an L-shaped boardwalk, and visible from our dining room window. We feed birds and watch them. Always in the back of my mind is the idea (from C. S. Lewis) that everything is a clue and that if properly followed will lead back to its source. I'm not sure where I read that, which of his many works, but I will try to find it as I liked it well enough to copy and stick on the wall next to my desk downstairs. Though I do not use that desk anymore I suspect the quote is still there. Later: it isn't there. I sort of remember (Ha, everything, sort of) taking it down to use somewhere. It is probably stuck in a book now.
In any case, this particular day I was watching white-throated sparrows whose numbers were significant. They are ground feeders: scratch scratch nibble nibble run. The running takes place on the boardwalk, the scratching on the ground around it. Their behavior was funny. These little fluffy brown balls of feathers would scratch and eat and suddenly hop up on the boardwalk and race down it for three to five feet before hopping off and digging some more. Their behavior was such that they looked like windup toys, and they were that fast. Their running was actually hopping at something approaching light speed, for they were so fast that their little legs and feet seemed to disappear in a blur. Quick little dashes, and not just one of the sparrows, but all of them, sooner or later dashing, and at different angles to one another. White-throated sparrows.
Growing up in Ohio, all I remember are English sparrows and lots of them. Nuisance birds along with starlings, my parents called them. When I got married and moved to Athens, Ohio, I now had a wife who liked birds too, and a bird book. And we had six or seven varieties of sparrows, all distinct, just as the white-throated sparrow is distinct from the English sparrow, the song sparrow, and the fox sparrow. I seem to remember that there is also a sparrow with a red head. Here I cannot reconcile intellect and emotion. Intellect says variation accounts for the separate species; I counted fish scales in a workshop on evolution one summer for a general studies course I taught during the school year. Variation occurs: 41 scales on this fish, 46 on the next one. However, the different kinds of sparrows are distinct, to say nothing of the fish, and each mates with its own kind, presumably. Emotionally, the idea of variation does not feel right as a way to account for (I have forgotten the correct terms for species, etc. though I had to memorize them in college long ago) the different kinds of sparrows, and wrens, and finches, purple and gold, and hawks, red-tailed and otherwise. On one end of my spectrum I have variation within the species, leading to a new species; on the other end I see distinct species without any apparent connecting links. I am not trying to prove or disprove anything here, simply present what seems to me to be a fascinating and complex mystery. Oh, and if I were to follow one of the winged wonders as clue, it would be the Carolina wren; they are lovely in so many ways.
Ah, I just read Wordsmith for today, well Sunday, and truly there are no accidents. There is an interesting "thought for the day" quote from physicist Freeman Dyson; he is using all the terms: species, genus, class, phylum. Apparently, it takes a million years to evolve a new species, if he is correct. That is what the nineteenth-century scientists gained from the fossil record for evolution to be a viable theory: time.
For another perspective on the importance of time here (again?) is the quote from Dante's Purgatory in the circle of Sloth: "Quick, quick! Let not the precious time be lost for lack of Love."