[MUSIC PLAYING]
[Music]
Greetings and salutations to all you friends of entitled opinions,
Vittori Amollo and I are in the studio of KZSU for the last time this season,
before our program goes on hiatus for a few months.
As many of you know, summer marks the beginning of our hibernation period,
but before we go down under, I thought I would honor a request from our very good friend, Andrea
Nightingale, who besieged me to end this season with some thoughts of my own,
since she felt that I have been holding back on them somewhat this season.
And you know me, I was educated at the school of the Dolce Chistilinova, a coterie of poets who
called themselves the Cavallieri Damore, or Knights of Love, to whom our comrade Dante belonged,
and among these Vittori, when a lady asks the Knight of Blajas, "Don nami Praga, a lady requests of me,
is the title of Guido Cavacantes most famous poem."
And since Andrea gave me permission to speak about anything I want, I thought I would take the
occasion to say something about the summer season, that's upon us. We're recording the show
on or around the summer solstice, and I want to think a little bit aloud with you about what is
a summer solstice and draw some of the cosmic consequences of what we take for granted on a daily basis.
Now, I don't need to tell you that the summer solstice is when the northern hemisphere
is in the direct sunlight for longer than any other day of the year.
It's the time when the sun rises the earliest and is the highest in the sky, and it's also the longest
day of the annual year. And the reason we have a summer solstice, as well as a winter solstice,
is because the earth does not spin upright. It actually leans 23.3 degrees or 23.5 degrees
on its tilted axis, and that obliquity, believe it or not, is probably responsible for the fact that
there is life on this planet. Holy contingent and accidental for sure. So let's think about this for a
minute. A planetary body can have any amount of tilt. There are some, I think, Mars, for example.
It's at Mars or no, it's Mercury. The planet Mercury has a tilt of 0.03 degrees, so it hardly
tilts at all, while Uranus leads, you know, slouches at about 82.23 degrees. And it seems that these two
extremes make life quite uninhabitable on either of those planets.
Certainly when a planet that had no tilts like Mercury wouldn't have seasons, but not only that,
it would be so cold at the poles of the planet that carbon dioxide would be pulled from the
atmosphere or the sky, and this would cause the planet to lose its precious greenhouse gas so
that liquid water could never form. And if liquid water could never form, it's highly unlikely that life
would ever arise. If you take the other example of a planet that spins on its side, it's not impossible
that life could arise, but certainly you would have a bizarre situation where for six months out of
the year, if it's rotating at our rate, it would be blazing hot, and the other six months would be
placed, you know, frigidly cold. So astronomers tell us that the optimal tilt runs from about 10 to 35
degrees, and our Earth is kind of like in the middle of that sweet spot, and it enables not only
the seasons to rotate as we're used to, but it also allows for life to arise in a way that might not
be possible under other conditions. We know that the tilt of the Earth is an accidental contingent
phenomenon. When Dante, our friend Dante, whom I mentioned already, has a canto in his padadizo,
canto 10 of the padadizo, where he asks his reader to raise his and her eyes up to that point in
the sky where the celestial equator intersects with the ecliptic, and there that point which he
took to be this moment of the the not the summer solstice, but rather the spring equinox and the
autumn equinox, there are two points in the year when the intersection occurs. For him,
there was a way in which that evidenced the grand design of God who had created things in such a way
that the Earth would have just the right tilt so that we could have a spring summer winter and autumn,
and that had he not designed that universe in such a way than life on Earth as we know it would not
occur. I'm going to read you canto 10 just so you can hear the man himself in his own original
Italian guardando no no suafilio con la moric el uno el a lao trater en al maine des pira
la primo de en fábile valor de quanto per meno e per loco cajera
contanto organ a fé que ser non pót des sancagustar del lúi qui chó remira.
So lift your eyes reader with me to those high wheels, gazed directly at that part where the one
motion strikes against the other and there begin to look with longing at the master's art,
which in himself he loved so much that his eye never parts from it.
He's essentially addressing the same phenomenon that we've been talking about in terms of the
tilt of the Earth. And when I say there's scientifically shown to be utterly accidental and not part
of a grand design, we have to bring in another phenomenon into this. And that is our beloved sister
moon. It seems that billions a few billion years ago,
a heavenly body, the size of Mars crashed into the Earth and broke away a piece of the Earth that
then subsequently became the moon. The moon is about a quarter of the size of the Earth.
And that moon is what is responsible for the tilt or a bliquity of the Earth.
And it's the gravitational forces between the Earth, the moon and the sun. But especially the moon
is the gravitational force of the moon that really keeps the Earth's a bliquity at a kind of
constant degree. And that constancy is what we take for the laws of nature and the unfolding of the
seasons. Life on Earth owes more to the moon than you might suspect because we're at not
obviously for those gravitational forces, it wouldn't favor the emergence of life.
At the same time, we know that it's the tidal phenomenon of the ocean tides that are also caught up
in the gravitational forces between Earth, moon and sun. And without the tides to create these pools
in which life first originated according to our best guess, again, we have to thank the moon
for the fact that it created certain conditions that enabled us to be where we are now here on Earth,
on a planet that is totally and absolutely alive. So speaking of life and all that it owes both
to the moon and to the tilt of the Earth and given that the fact that we are coming to you on
on or around the solstice, let me say a word about life. Actually, a graduate student here at Stanford
in our department of the DLCL, the Division of Literature, Language and Cultures,
Pow Guinar, he went around asking a few faculty members from the DLCL to go on video and answer
one simple question in about five minutes. The question is, what do I think about life?
What do I think about life? So I sat in and allowed myself to be videotaped for that, but
let me return to that question because the first thing I think about when I hear that question is,
does thinking have something to do with life? And I raise this question here on this program because
you know how committed I am to preserving the space of thought in our own lived worlds.
So does thinking have something to do with life? Or what form of life
thinks or better yet? What kind of life form can think about a question like what do I think about
life? And the mystery here is that life happened once and once only in the whole history of the
earth. And the initial spark of Genesis was never repeated. And this, despite the fact that the
tilt of the earth has remained constant for a few billion years and we've had a moon and we've had
tides and so forth, the actual spark of Genesis happened once and once only. And why is that?
We live on a planet that is chock full of life for what Stephen J. Gould called a full house,
a full house of endless organisms and different life forms that have populated the seas, the air,
the earth, and it all has one common origin. And again, it only happened once. No one has ever been
able to reproduce that moment of Genesis and no one has any truly definitive or perhaps even probable
theory of how it all began. What we do know is that the planet was not hospitable to life
in its early history far, far from it. We also know that the first sparks of life,
the first primitive cells with membranes containing RNA occurred within common clay minerals,
which provided the basic platforms for the formation, growth, and division of some of the earliest
living cells on earth. In the beginning, there was clay. In the beginning, there was clay.
You find that in Genesis, where the first human was made out of this clay, you find it in the
Epic of Gilgamesh, you find it in all sorts of world myths. But it is actually scientifically
true that in the beginning, there was clay and that it was the labor of living organisms fighting
every inch of the way that turned that clay into humus, into the animate soil that sustains so much
of the life on this planet. And with your permission, let me quote one of the writers and human beings
who I most esteem among the moderns. I have in mind the 20th century Czech author, Karl
Chapek. I don't know if I've ever mentioned him over the last 12 years of this show, but
Karl Chapek, this Czech author, political activist, and profound Democrat Republican.
He was in many respects the founder of Modern Czech Literature, which is an incredibly rich tradition
that has not received anywhere near its proper due. And that's because the Czech Republican
interwar period when he was writing. And subsequently was never a big powerful populist nation.
But it's literary tradition in the 20th century is really quite almost incomparable, I would say.
In any case, Chapek invented or refined a wide variety of genres. He wrote plays, novels,
short stories, pamphlets, political discuisions, newspaper columns, and some other unclassifiable
testimonies such as his little book called The Gardeners Year. And it's a passage from that book
that is about gardening and about the meaning and philosophy of gardening that I'd like to quote
from, because they're in a discussion about the humus or the soil in which gardeners immerse
themselves as they go about their business of nurturing plant life. Chapek writes that soil
is a battleground where the forces of life confront the merciless resistance of the lifeless and
inanimate. I tell you, he writes, "To tame a couple of rods of soil is a great victory."
And he goes on to declare the following, "If you have no appreciation for this strange beauty,
let fate be stole upon you a couple of rods of clay, clay like lead,
squelching, and primeval clay out of which coldness oozes, which yields under the spade like
chewing gum, which bakes in the sun and gets sour in the shade, ill-tempered, un-maliable greasy and
sticky like plasters of Paris, slippery like a snake and dry as a brick impermeable like tin
and heavy like lead, and now smash it with a pick axe, cut it with a spade, break it with a hammer,
turn it over and labor, cursing aloud and lamenting. Then you will understand the animosity and
callousness of dead and sterile matter, which ever did defend itself and still does,
against becoming a soil of life. And you will realize what a terrible fight life must have
undergone, inch by inch to take root in the soil of the earth, whether that life be called
vegetation or man." So cultivating his garden plot somewhere in a corner of the city of Prague,
Tropic came to understand intuitively what science now knows with theoretical certainly.
Namely that in the beginning was an earth that aggressively resisted life's colonizing
adventures, and it took the tremendous self-affirming struggles of life itself to transform the earth,
see and air into elements hospitable to life. Life itself first brought about the conditions
that favor life on the planet today. This is the great paradox, and this is the great miracle,
like I said, it's life itself that actually transformed the earth into a planet favorable for life.
Because it was thanks to the discrete and relentless metabolism, a primitive bacteria,
over untold millions of years that allowed an atmosphere rich with oxygen and carbon dioxide
to slowly form around the earth. That atmosphere in turn made possible the process of photosynthesis,
which in turn transformed the planet as a whole into a living organism. So if over time
earth became a thriving garden of sorts, primitive life was the original gardener who worked its
soil and made it fit for growth. The human gardeners are late-coming participants in,
as well as the beneficiaries of this primordial chemistry of vitalization.
Now I don't want to ascribe care in the human sense to primitive organisms,
I would rather say that care are human care that makes it matter that we are on the earth.
That makes us gardeners or farmers or educators or cultivators of virtue and so forth.
That human care in its self-transending character is an expansive projection of the intrinsic
ecstasy of life. Why do I call it the ecstasy of life? Because what distinguishes life from the
inanimate matter in which it has its origins is the continuous self-exceeding by which it bursts
forth from the lifeless and extatically maintains itself in being through expenditures that increase
rather than deplete the reserves of vitality. Life is an excess, call it, the self-exstacy of matter.
And in that respect I'm convinced that our thinking minds participate in this excessive surplus
that allows life to always precariously situate itself just beyond the condition of inanimate matter.
It is this constant struggle that keeps us and everything else that is alive in a perpetual
state of anxiety and even terror. That in itself is a thought-provoking matter and who knows maybe it's life
itself that thinks through us when we think about a question like what do I think about life?
[Music]
I've talked a lot about thinking in this regard but let me also say a word about sentiment and seasonality
because I we're talking here about the summer and the spirit of the summer and there's
a certain kind of music to each of the seasons and perhaps even our music owes something to the
obliquity of the earth's axis and to all these forces that I was speaking about earlier.
And I don't know why Virginia Woolf comes to mind in this regard. I think it's because
I'm really very impressed by her book of room of one's own and something in that in the earlier
pages that book has been kind of coming to my into my ear and it's really a passage in that book
which is about things coming into the inner ear so that are somehow dependent on or correlated with
the seasons and not only the seasons and the literal sense but also the seasons of history
because history too it goes through its springs and summers and falls and so forth. And towards the end of this
strange book a room of one's own which is about which is this kind of half fictional book about
giving a lecture at a university called Oxbridge about women in fiction. Virginia Woolf is
describing a luncheon that she was at with a lot of good food and it's a late October so we're talking
about a fall season here. And she says if by good luck there had been an ashtray handy in the
luncheon hall where she was dining with a number of other scholars and hosts and so forth.
If by good luck there had been an ashtray handy if one had not knocked the ash out of the window
in default so obviously she was putting her cigarette out the window to knock the ashes. If things
had been a little different from what they were one would not have seen presumably a cat without a
tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal paddling softly across the quadrangle
changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me.
It was as if someone had let fall a shade perhaps the excellent hawk was relinquishing its hold
certainly as I watched the manks cat paws in the middle of the lawn as it too questioned the
universe. Something seemed lacking something seemed different but what was lacking what was
different I asked myself listening to the talk around me and to that question I had to think myself
out of the room back into the past before the war indeed and to set my said before my eyes the model
of another luncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these but different.
So let's pause there a moment. She's thinking about another time back in the past before the first
war war had begun. She's writing this I think in the 1925 so we're talking about seven years after
the war and that first war war of course had changed the entire mood it had changed the season of
western history at that moment and she's evoking another luncheon party that would be more like a
summer luncheon party and those of you who have read to the lighthouse know that that extraordinary
novel is a summer story about lunchons and dinner parties and this kind of strange summer
enchantment that takes place in part one of the book before the disasters of the first war war
that are in the aftermath of that in the second part of the book so there's a number of
indications that she's going back to a kind of summer season of the spirit so let me continue
everything was different she says meanwhile the talk went on among the guests who were many and
young some of this sex some of that it went on swimmingly it went on agreeably freely amusingly
and as it went on I said it against the background of that other talk and I matched the two together
and I had no doubt that one was the descendant the legitimate air of the other nothing was changed nothing
was different save only here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said
but to the murmur or current behind it yes that was it the change was there
before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things
but they would have sounded different because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of
humming noise not articulate but musical exciting which changed the value of the words themselves
could one set that humming noise to words
perhaps with the help of the poets one could a book lay beside me and opening it I turned casually
enough to Tennyson and here I found Tennyson that's Lord Alfred Tennyson was singing
there has fallen a splendid tear from the passion flower at the gate she is coming my dove my
dear she is coming my life my fate the red rose cries she is near she is near and the white rose
weeps she is late the larkspur listens I hear I hear and the lily whispers I wait
was that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war and the women
my heart is like a singing bird whose nest is in a water chute my heart is like an apple tree
whose bows are bent with thick set fruit my heart is like a rainbow shell that paddles on a halkyon sea
my heart is clatter than all these because my love is come to me
was that what women hummed at luncheon parties before the war
I'm going to continue there was something so ludicrous in thinking of people humming such things
even under their breath at luncheon parties before the war that I burst out laughing and had to
explain my laughter by pointing at the manks cat who did look a little absurd poor beast without a
tail in the middle of the lawn pause and parentheses that cat without a tail seems highly symbolic
of something that has been lost between one season and another I would say no was he really
born so or had he lost his tail in an accident the tailless cat though some are said to exist
in the Isle of Man is rarer than one thinks it is a queer animal quaint rather than beautiful
it is strange what a difference a tail makes you know the sort of things one says at a lunch party
breaks up and people are finding their coats and hats it is strange she goes on how a scrap of
poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road those words
there has fallen a splendid tear from the passion flower at the gate she is coming my dove my
dear sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along towards headingly and then switching off into
the other measure I sang where the waters are turned up by the rear my heart is like a singing bird
whose nest is in a water chute my heart is like an apple tree what poets I cried aloud as
one does in the dusk what poets they were in a sort of jealousy I suppose for our own age
silly and absurd though these comparisons are I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two
living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rosetti were then but why I continued moving on
towards headingly have we stopped humming under our breath at luncheon parties why has Alfred
ceased to sing she is coming my dove my dear why has Christina ceased to respond my heart is
glatter than all these because my love has come to me then she goes on to ask shall we lay the
blame on the war and the guns of 1914 and it goes on from there into a meandering kind of stream of
consciousness narrative that I could spend the next two and a half hours reading aloud to you
and that would probably be a welcome sort of strange episode of entitled opinions but I'd like to
just kind of wrap up some thoughts here about the humming inarticulate music that one can hear
in one's head that corresponds or resonates with or that is in some kind of sintany
with a season and how the poems that she chose to invoke in this part of her narrative were
clearly summer poems recalling some of the summer scenes of to the lighthouse and let me just
since I'm into reading from chapick and virginia wolf I'm just going to read you the whole section
of that poem from Alfred Lord Tennyson it's a long poem mod and this is part one and he calls it
a monodrama and it's a poem that is profoundly summarized like a sense of summer of the season
and it's there to remind us that were it not you know for the tilt in the earth's axis were it not for
the fact that the moon keeps the slouch of the earth constant through the millennia and the
millions of years if we were not for the fact that life had originated thanks to all these precarious
circumstances and accidents that happened once and once only on the planet then we might
never know what this kind of cosmic music that resounds in our minds if not our thinking
minds and our feeling minds and that has its most immediate sort of manifestation in this kind of
poetry summer poetry in this case come into the garden mod for the black bat night has flown come into
the garden mod I am here at the gate alone and the wood bind spices are wafted abroad and the
musk of the rose is blown for a breeze of morning moves and the planet of love is on high beginning
to faint in the light that she loves in a bed of daffodil sky to faint in the night of the sun
she loves to faint in his light and to die all night have the roses heard the flute
violin bassoon all night has the casement jessamine stirred to the dancers dancing in tune
till the silence fell with a waking bird and a hush with the setting moon I said to the lily
there is but one with whom she has heart to be gay when will the dancers leave her alone
she is weary of dance and play now half to the setting moon are gone and half to the rising day
low on the sand and loud on the stone the last wheels echo away I said to the rose the brief night
goes in babble and revel and wine oh young lord lover what societies are these for those that
will never be thine but mine but mine so I swear to the rose forever and ever mine and the
soul of the rose went into my blood as the music clashed in the hall and long by the garden lake I
stood for I heard your rivulet fall from the lake to the meadow and on to the wood our wood
that is dear than all from the meadow your walks have left so sweet that whenever a march wind
size he sets the jewel print of your feet in violets blue as your eyes to the woody hollows in which
we meet and the valleys of paradise the slender acacia would not shake one long milk bloom on the tree
the white lake blossom fell into the lake as the pimpurnal dewused into the lee but the rose was
awake all night for your sake knowing your promise to me the lilies and the roses were all awake
they sighed for the dawn and the queen rose of the rosewood garden of girls come hither the
dances are done in gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls queen lily and rose in one
shine out little head sunning over with curls to the flowers and be their son
from the passion flower at the gate she is coming my dove my dear she is coming my life my fate
the red rose cries she is near she is near and the white rose weeks she is late the larkspur
listens I hear I hear and the lily whispers I wait she is coming my own my sweet word ever so
area tread my heart would hear her and beat were at earth in an earthly bed my dust would hear her
and beat had I lain for a century dead would start and tremble under her feet and blossom in purple
and red as far as I'm concerned if all the wild accidents that gave us a moon and an earth that
tilts at twenty three point five degrees and the rise and fall of the sea levels caused by the
combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the moon and the sun and the rotation of the
earth if all these can create the conditions for the musical hum that tennis and poem transcribes
into words it will all have been worthwhile toward the end of his life Samuel Beckett was asked
whether any of it was worthwhile his answer precious little of those two words I would ask all of
you friends of entitled opinions to think about the word precious even a cat without a tail
is precious enough
I love you, the best, bettles at all, the rest.
But I'm mean, in the song, in the end, in the end song.
I'm mean, in the song, in the end.
In the end, in the end, in the end, in the end.
I love you, the best, bettles at all.
The rest.
[BLANK_AUDIO]