The Thinking, Walking Biped, part six. Famous Nature Walks: Rosseau's Passion for Botany

In his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau was depressed nearly all of the time until he was rescued by botany. The study of plant diversity in nature saved him from complete depression. It works for me, and I highly recommend it. Botany is, among many other things, the pursuit that saved Rousseau from insanity.

Rousseau did not just glance at flowers and grass and say, yeah, they are pretty. He looked closely at them. He observed them and thought about them. Above all, he wanted to know what they were. In Walk 2, he describes his joy at seeing Picris hieracioides the hawkweed; Bupleurum falcatum, the hare’s ear; and Cerastium aquaticum, the mouse-eared chickweed. These are all very common weeds, but Rousseau noticed their beauty. Alas, in Walk 2, he slipped back into depression, and these flowers just reminded him of how much of his life he had wasted by not being a botanist. I think.

Rousseau spent the two happiest months of his life on St. Peter’s Island in Lake Bienne in Switzerland. He thought that, on that isolated island, he was free from the condemnation of the government authorities in Berne. In Walk 5, he describes his “botanical fervor.” He was particularly enchanted by the alder-buckthorn (Frangula alnus), the willow-weed (Epilobium ciliatum), and wild thyme. He also mentioned the toothwort (Dentaria), wild cyclamen, the bird’s-nest orchid Neottia nidus-avis (which has no chlorophyll), Laserpitium gallicum, and the lycopodium clubmoss. He ate the very tart berries of the sea buckthorn tree (Hippophae rhamnoides). I tried them, and didn’t like them, but they are raised commercially for cosmetics. He was as happy as a child playing with the exploding capsules of the Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera). I can attest to the surprising joy of having these capsules explode in my hand, and my grandkids liked it even more. Rousseau briefly returned to childhood happiness. This was his one happiness, aside from sex.

I got lucky. My job (as a university botany professor) required me to spend a lot of time looking at and for plants in natural habitats, and leading students on field trips.

But Rousseau’s stresses could not be completely forgotten, even in paradise on St. Peter’s Island. Actually there were two islands, and Rousseau imagined that, because the big and the powerful always consume and destroy the small and weak in this world, the big island would someday consume the small one. My own experience coincides with Rousseau’s. When I was sitting on a rock in the middle of a rushing stream in Wyoming, in the middle of teaching a field botany course to some of the best students I have ever had, I could not ignore the pain I felt from the office politics back at the university where I worked, where our department chair enjoyed making people feel bad about themselves (according to other people who knew him).

Rousseau would use his botanical ecstasies to launch into thinking about other topics. Walk 6 begins with a wildflower hike near Fontainebleu. He was enjoying doing this good thing—but did it really count as personal goodness if he enjoyed doing good things? He wanted his enemies to suffer—but he could think of no greater suffering to visit upon them than for them to know he was happy in spite of them.

He wished he could know all the plants on Earth. They are, he said, the clothing of the Earth. They are the only spectacles of Nature of which we cannot grow weary. He much preferred the Greek philosopher-botanist Theophrastus, who loved plants for their own sake, over Dioscorides, for whom plants were only valuable because of the medicines they contained.

 I find this 1888 line drawing fascinating. Notice the botanist, despite his serious demeanor and despite the shabbiness of his house, is happy explaining a thistle (?) to two fellow seekers of wisdom. One of them is a winsome young woman. The wonders of botany can, in fact, attract a mate—worked for me. But notice also that Karl Marx is listening to him! I didn’t think Karl Marx listened to anyone! Oh, the wonderful things that botany can do!

It turns out that St. Peter’s Island was actually part of Berne, and the authorities made Rousseau leave. He went back to being depressed. But years later, he would look at his herbarium (pressed plant) specimens and relive his erstwhile joys. I have done this also. I could not bring my specimens with me to France, so I left them in university herbaria, as shown in these photos.

These specimens are: Acer macrophyllum, Alnus rhombifolia, Umbellularia californica (all from California), Rumex venosus (Nebraska), and Ipomopsis aggregata (Oklahoma).

“I see only animosity on the faces of men, whereas nature always smiles at me,” Rousseau wrote.

Uncommon Happiness

How many people are really happy? Assuming we can even define happiness. The one thing we can be sure of is this: far fewer people are happy than appear happy.

Among the countless examples I could cite, here are two that I found when looking through the works of Robert Ripley (see previous essay) (Believe It Or Not). These two examples are of men whom the world thought must surely be rapturously happy. But they were not.

The first is the story of Grimaldi the clown. A man came to a psychologist back in the early Freudian days and said he was depressed. The psychologist said the best cure would be for him to go watch a performance by the funniest man in the world, a clown named Grimaldi. The man said, “I am Grimaldi.”

The second is the story of Caliph Abdurahman III, who ruled for 49 years and had 6,321 wives. This sounds like the ultimate fantasy of many men. But in his will he said that he had, during those years, only fourteen days of complete happiness.

I immediately thought that I should never be jealous of the prosperity and conquests of other men. I wrote this on the day of the coronation of King Charles III. I do not believe that he is nearly as happy as I am. Can you say the same? Statistically, at least among my readers, there is a good chance that you can.

 

 

I recently retired from being a professor. Press a button and out comes a lecture or an essay. I will spare you both. I just urge you to think about happiness, about your happiness, about the happiness of others, and about the happiness that you can create in others.

Each of us is Two People: Insights from Earl Nightingale

When I was in high school, I made it a point to never miss the five-minute radio program in which the deep-voiced Earl Nightingale explained surprising and uplifting things about the world. I had to miss a few, but only a few, from 1972 to 1975. Radio stations (worldwide) that carried his program offered to send free copies of his scripts in a self-addressed stamped envelope. Of course, today, the programs would all have been on a website, which Nightingale, who died in 1989, did not live to see. I sent for all of his scripts. The secretary at the radio station wrote to me, wanting to know more about this unusual, perhaps unique, little boy who listened to every show.

Nightingale talked about anything he wanted to. A common structure of his programs was, I’ve been reading a book by x entitled y. I think you would enjoy hearing about it. And he was usually right. He seemed to like Eric Hoffer and Abraham Maslow a lot. He usually talked about successful business and personal life, and how to have a healthy mind—for example, how to not be a mumpsimus. But he sometimes threw in things that were a bit puzzling, such as how there might be UFOs, about the Bermuda Triangle, or about an article called “Secret Thoughts of a Happy Husband.” Not sure where that came from. But we all listened to whatever he said, and most of the time were enriched by it. One of his broadcasts was about the dangers of smoking. In the photo above, notice the absence of an ashtray—a noticeable absence in the mid-twentieth century.

Nightingale knew by experience what he was talking about. When he was twelve, in the middle of the Depression, his father abandoned the family, and he lived in a tent city with his mother outside of Los Angeles. But it was not long before he worked his way into successful military and business careers.

Nightingale’s messages were simple, often obvious—at least, obvious after someone says it. They were based upon the secrets of his vast success in business. He would give examples of how you have to treat your customers with respect, give them what they want, convince them that you care about them, and then really do it. As he was the first to admit, his ideas were not new; they sound strangely like the Golden Rule. But at the time, like today, many people in business thought that the path to success was to beat down your competitors and to get every nickel out of your customers that you can. Nightingale explained that this was a sure path to failure.

As it turns out, in the decades after Nightingale’s death, exactly the kind of oppressive corporate atmosphere that Nightingale hated, one that leaves us customers feeling like the scum of the earth, has become the dominant experience in the marketplace. He would not have liked to see what has happened to our economy in the twenty-first century. When Nightingale was recording his programs, he said that executives really deserved getting paid more than the average worker. But at the time, executives got paid only ten times more; today, it is more like two hundred times. I doubt that executives are twenty times as valuable to their companies today as they were in the 1970s. The modern American economy, dominated by TBTF corporations, would have outraged him.

Nightingale was definitely a conservative, as the concept was understood at the time. He was always defending free enterprise, and was puzzled at the counter-culture people who thought that working for monetary reward was bad. He even said that socialist countries like Sweden were an economic disaster and suffered massive crime waves. Maybe they did at the time, but socialist democracies have since that time flourished. He had the typical mid-century male view of women, they should be secretaries etc., but he was also open to them progressing to an equal status with men, someday. He championed female college education. But he never mixed religion with his conservatism, and he never said one word about the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon, as I recall. He was the kind of conservative we wish we still had.

This is one of several websites with Nightingale quotes.

One of his images that stuck with me is that each of us is two people. One is the person that everyone sees, which I might call the biological person. This is the person who goes to work and fills his or her role in society. The second person is like a ghost hovering over and around the first, invisible but real. This is the potential person, what he or she could be by using all the creativity and zeal that he or she has, looking for and capitalizing upon opportunities. When I look out over a classroom of students, I sometimes I imagine seeing this second person. In many cases, the first person joyfully fills the space created by the second, but in many other cases I see students wanting to get their education over with so that they can walk unprepared into the world where they will have actual responsibilities and not be ready for them.

In some ways, Earl Nightingale was the world’s first blogger. He posted short essays on whatever topic he wanted. Anybody can do a blog now, for free, but back then, Nightingale had to convince sponsors to pay for his show. Maybe my blog posts are my way of doing what the great Earl Nightingale did.