Ice Shanty Village 2026

The official name is “Art Shanty Projects” but I prefer to call it the “Ice Shanty Village.” It’s been a yearly gathering since 2004, though the location has changed a few times: Medicine Lake, then White Bear Lake, and now Lake Harriet. I’m wondering if it might even have been held in Stillwater at some time in the distant past. A few years ago, when the weather wasn’t cooperating, they set up the shanties on land.   

Wherever it pops up, the village consists of whimsical and sometimes elaborate structures—ice houses, basically—that have been created to advance a civic value, a scientific concept, or a mode of personal expression, and spread out across the ice with no apparent order or logic. Some function as performance venues. One shanty invariably serves as a Digger store, offering second-hand hats, scarfs, sweaters, and gloves to anyone who’s ventured out on the lake without the proper wraps.

Though the themes of specific shanties are often serious, the entire operation is conceived in the childlike spirit of “let’s build a fort.” Bike races are held from time to time—they provide the bikes--and there’s a kite day, too. In previous years we’ve come upon aerobic exercise classes, lip-synching contests, flamenco mini-juergas, and scenes from La Boheme. Years later, I’m still ruing the day we arrived too late to see a performance of “Waiting for Godot” on skates.

It was cold yesterday—we’d decided not to go—but patches of blue were appearing in the sky here and there, and next week is forecast to be colder. We were reading in front of the fire when it suddenly seemed like the perfect time to take a break before the afternoon got too dark.

“Let’s drive down the parkway to the ice shanties,” I said. “Maybe we’ll snag a good parking lot near shore. And if we don’t, we can just call it an afternoon drive and come home.”

By the time we got to Lake Harriet the clouds had returned, but we got lucky with the parking. (In previous years we’ve chosen to park in the neighborhood nearby, usually too far away.) And it wasn’t really that cold. The bad news was that the ice on the lake had only a thin veneer of loose snow on top, and it was slippery. But there were plenty of people wandering around, reading the signs, entering the shanties to warm up, or chatting with the creators about their shacks.

The shanties drawing the largest crowds seemed to be highly interactive. One was a witch’s candy house, inside of which they were concocting some sort of potion. Outside, a second group had formed to recite a curse together—perhaps to rid the city of demonic ICE agents. (Good idea!)

A few shanties away, a three-piece rock band was pounding away aimlessly on some bass guitars, as if they were just learning how to play. But perhaps they were just expressing their frustration that their shanty was located in the far corner of the village, a little off the beaten path.

Inside the Yellow Submarine shanty, you could get a look at images taken at the bottom of Lake Harriet through fake portholes. Not far away, a large group of heavily clothed visitors was square-dancing to a three-piece string band enclosed in a plastic bubble.

promenade left with your left hand ...

The caller was standing on a small stage outside with a mic. “Second-hand left, dosey-doe, and round the corner.” She was good.

A biologist was giving a lecture in the beaver dam house, constructed mostly of thin reed window-blinds. it was too crowded to enter, but we spent some time admiring the colorful papier-mache fish dangling from strings outside, designed to evoke the beaver’s largely underwater habitat.

One shanty focused on the notion of inescapable trade-offs. In order to feed the fire, you had to pull a slab of firewood off the wall outside, thus increasing the draft inside. Another option would be to spend some time outside in the cold, sawing new planks for the walls … or the fire.   

Near the entrance to the village, we passed a booth consisting of a large array of small chalkboards, upon which passers-by had taken the time to complete somewhat personal statements. Most of the statements were phrased as double-negatives, and I had a hard time determining precisely what was being said. For example: “I don’t try to not need ….” One of the answers was “drugs.” A second, scrawled on the same slate, was “financial planning.” Another statement began: “I know I want to not try ….” One of the answers was “gourmet mac and cheese.” A second was “insomnia.”

From first to last, it was a cheery and heartening scene. And the fun continues next weekend. Details here.

 

Homage to Mercury

There’s moisture in the air again. I'm sure you've noticed. It's raining. It’s still dark at 6:45, but on a clear day, Jupiter is bright and high in the western sky, and the sun is brilliant on the ungainly heaps of snow. On a clear day, it also streams in above the piano on a lower plane than at any other time of the year, shoots across the room, and comes to rest on the light switch in the hall. 

Mercury is the god of quick changes, I think. They say you can see it just before sunrise in the southeast these days. I haven't made the effort, but I can see its influence everywhere.

It all began with a dreadful cold snap. During that bitter spell, we sat in the den by the warmth of the Jøtul stove, though we might just as well have been up on the North Shore. As usual in such situations, I had a stack of books by my side on the couch, including Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen, a biography of Erik Satie, a slim book about aesthetics by Bence Nanay (part of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series), and a collection of essays by John MacQuarrie called Studies in Christian Existentialism.

Also near at hand was my journal, into which I occasionally jotted a few notes. For example:

“Nanay rejects both beauty and pleasure as foundations or standards for aesthetic judgment. In fact, he rejects judgment itself, preferring the term “analysis.” He quotes Susan Sontag, who characterizes aesthetic experiences as ‘detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation or approval.’ Evidently Sontag didn’t go to the movies much.”

The weather turned that night, and the next morning we went on a spectacular ski, following Tornado Alley south in bright sun through the woods, under Highway 55, across Bassett Creek, and around a loop through the white pines just north of Glenwood Avenue. We've walked these grounds many times, but had never skied them before. The freshness in the air was genuinely intoxicating. 

In order to make the most of it, I shoveled two feet of snow off the deck and oiled the track on the garage door, which was squeaking something terrible. (Alas! It still is.) Then I split a few pieces of the firewood stacked in the garage  into narrow strips for kindling, which will come in handy sooner or later. It won’t stay this warm for long.

The next morning the air was just the same, but the snow had crystalized during the thaw, and we left the skis at home during our morning ramble down alongside the creek.

Last night the rain arrived, slightly weird, but still atmospheric. 

This morning I was cleaning up some emails from Earth/Sky News and was cheered to learn that the universe, like me, is slowing down. The theory had been that it was not only expanding, but accelerating. New research offers a more reasonable view. In findings published November 6 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers argued that “the universe is in a phase of decelerated expansion.” 

Here's the gist: Early arguments for accelerated expansion were based on measurements of distance to faraway galaxies using Type 1a supernovas. These supernovas were regarded as the universe’s “standard candles,” but new research suggests that their brightness is related not only to distance, but also to the age of the stars that created them. Once you factor that information in, the data suggests that the universe expands and contracts like an accordion, rather than expanding and thinning out with relentless and ever-increasing speed.

I like that idea, and Empedocles would have liked it, too, I think.  

Minnesota State Fair — Questions of Space

I would never volunteer to join a mission to Mars. (I already saw the movie.) But that’s one of the questions they ask you when you visit the fascinating Journey to Space exhibit at this year’s state fair. To judge from the poker chips piling up in the plexiglass voting tubes, more people are claiming they would go than wouldn’t. I doubt it.

We went to the fair on opening day, to beat the crowds, and we approached in our usual way, from the west, down Larpenteur. The line was longer than usual; it took us an hour to get in, probably because they’ve put a new policy in place by which those who park on the streets in Falcon Heights are being charged $25. I suspect that many who used to park there are choosing to park in the lot, which is closer to the fairgrounds and now costs the same amount.

Once inside, our usual route is to begin at the eco-building, followed by the art building. Then hotdogs and maybe a Kiwanis chocolate malt. Then education, crafts, and out into the passing stream of hot bodies, on our way to agriculture, fish, milk, and four-legged creatures.

The Journey to Space exhibit threw a wrinkle into the itinerary. It's housed in a building just inside the north gate. As we were passing Hilary said, “Why don’t we stop in? The line's not that long.” I’m glad we did.

Inside the building we stood in another line for ten minutes--not bad. Then we were ushered up some stairs and into a re-creation of one wing of the international space station. We stood with eight or ten other people on a stationary gangplank while the walls of the eight-sided room slowly rotated around us and various science experiments and TV screens moved slowly past. Scenes from 2001: A Space Odessey flashed through my mind once or twice. I found myself gripping the hand rail, as if I might otherwise fall over. It was all slightly destabilizing, but it was also cool. It made me a little queasy, but it was something new, and the talking heads of genuine astronauts on the screen were interesting to listen to. The lights went dim several times, I’m not sure why.

Back on the exhibit floor, we wandered from one hands-on exhibit to the next. One of them recreated the effect of trying to use your hands to manipulate two toy blocks under conditions of weightlessness. There were also immense screens on which videos of solar flares were being projected, and others showing the northern lights as seen from various locations above earth.

Hilary was especially taken by the one explaining that if we lived on Saturn, we’d only be six years old. (We could have gotten into the fair for free!)

Back in the lobby, we took a look at some of the spacesuits worn by genuine astronauts while in space. But the highlight of that part of the exhibit was the discussion we had with a NASA volunteer who was standing by a small, pyramidal piece of moon rock embedded in plexiglass.

He knew all about various probes that were exploring the planets, their moons, and the asteroid belt. He seemed genuinely interested when I told him about 31/ Atlas, the new object that arrived from deep space just three weeks ago. We were soon discussing how speculative much of cosmology remains, and how important it is to make assertions that will secure grant money, regardless of the actual strength of the claims being made.

All in all, it was an unusual and stimulating start to the day. By that time we’d worked up an appetite, and Giggles Campfire Grill was right down the street. The walleye cakes were as good as I remembered them, and the smoked salmon on a stick wasn’t bad either. When we got our food, I took one look at the glass of pink lemonade and said, “But we ordered a large.”

“That is a large,” the woman said with a winning smile. “Have a nice day.”

_________

The science on view in the eco-building seemed modest indeed to someone who'd just been blasting through outer space. The art building offered an engaging mix of styles and themes, as usual. We chatted at some length with a highly enthusiastic couple at the Friends of the BWCAW booth, and registered to win a new tent.

"I hope we win that," I said. "We're still using a Marmot backpacking tent. The ceiling is only four feet high, and my back gets so stiff I have trouble crawling out in the morning."

"I just bring a folding cot," the woman said. "And a folding chair." As we were leaving she gave us each a dark green plastic spork.  

The knitted sweaters and quilts in the handicraft building were impressive, but a little hard to admire with the temperature outside pushing eighty. We stepped out into the glare and surveyed the colorful scene. Strange aromas were drifting our way from O'Gara's Irish Pub, where the sounds of a man playing the bagpipes rose above the din. We opted instead to find some shady seats at the bandstand nearby and caught the last number of Davina and the Vagabonds' set. That was enough for me. 

The thing that impressed me most in the agriculture building was the very long line of people waiting patiently to view the crop art. (Are we getting tired yet?) You never know quite where you are when you emerge from that eight-sided building, but we somehow made our way downhill to the DNR building to see the fish. 

Inside the cool and cavernous log cabin nearby we discussed buckthorn eradication methods with one of the volunteers. Clearly, it was time to go home.

During the long walk back to the car we passed the parade, which was heading in the opposite direction: Farmington, then Rosemount, then Worthington. Some of the kids weren't even playing instruments. Were they having a good time? Why did they sign up? Well, at best, high school is a bundle of confusion, anxiety, and mixed emotions. Under the weight of those conditions, listening to a bunch of trombones and trumpets blasting in your ears to a regular rhythm is probably good for your health.

Low-Riding Moon

Moon events tend to be low-key and inconsequential. Blue moons—a second full moon in a single month— aren’t astronomical events at all, but merely the result of our current calendar conventions. And “super” moons are hardly more exciting. Sometimes the moon looks big, sometimes it doesn’t.

But lunar event that’s fast approaching takes place only once every 18 years, as the moon arrives at the low point of its almost two-decade swing up and down the horizon.  

This event has no practical significance, either, and it’s not impressive to witness. But I find it fascinating to consider that a thousand years ago residents of the area we now call the American Southwest were aware of it, and found it so intriguing that they built an observatory to pinpoint and perhaps even celebrate the occasion.

I’m referring to Chimney Rock, located amid the austere and haunting landscapes of southern Colorado. Hilary and I visited the stark contours of the ruins years ago. It rises above the pines, both strange and awesome, like a towering knobby ridge. 

Archeologists had long been puzzled by the presence of sophisticated core-and-veneer masonry at the top of it, typical of the Ancestral Puebloan culture centered in the high desert a hundred miles to the southwest. The mystery was compounded when scientists who surveyed the site in 1988 discovered that the buildings rested on solid bedrock. This meant that not only the stone and timbers, but also the soil and water for making bricks, had been laboriously carried by hand up the 1,200-foot escarpment from the river valley below. Why? The slightly longer growing season on the ridge could hardly justify such an enormous expenditure of labor. There had to be another explanation.

Before long someone noticed that if you stand in the courtyard of the loftiest and most elaborate pueblo you could watch the moon rise directly between the two “chimneys” further east along the ridge. Could Chimney Rock have been a lunar observatory?

Perhaps. But there was a hitch. The moon rises at a slightly different point on the horizon every month. Its position also changes from year to year, moving from north to south and back again following an 18.6-year cycle. At each end of its path, it pauses for two years before beginning its slow journey in the opposite direction. Astronomers, rather unimaginatively, call this pause the Major Lunar Standstill.

The archeologists studying the site in 1988 happened to witness the moonrise during just such a “standstill.” This meant that the moon would soon begin to rise further south along the horizon, and it would then be sixteen years before the quasi-dramatic sighting became possible again.

Clearly, the infrequency of the event was a mark against the theory that Chimney Rock had been used by the locals as a lunar observatory. But an archeologist from the University of Colorado determined, by analyzing the tree rings of the beams used to construct the buildings, that the site had been in use first in 1076, and then again in 1093, after a sixteen-year hiatus. Could it be merely a coincidence that the northerly lunar standstills of the late eleventh century began in 1075 and 1094?

Although the correlation in dates doesn’t prove that Chimney Rock was used to observe the moon, the evidence is intriguing; and the fact that sophisticated devices for tracking the moon’s rhythms have also been unearthed at Chaco Canyon, the capital of that now-lost Ancestral Puebloan world, lends further credence to the idea. It wouldn’t have been necessary for the Chacoans to calculate anything—they might simply have put sticks in the ground to chart the moon’s shambling peregrinations.

  

 It remains to be explained why anyone would care to track the moon so precisely in the first place. Well, modern observances of Easter, Passover, and Ramadan are all dictated by lunar cycles, and many pre-literate societies have developed even more elaborate correspondences between events in the night sky, seasonal farming and hunting activities, time-honored myths, and ceremonial observances. Even today the Pueblo tribes of the Rio Grande and Black Mesa have a particularly rich set of such associations.

We’ll never know for sure what part the moon played in the lives of the Chacoan people—they lacked a written language—but the efforts they took to establish an observatory, and presumably a ceremonial center, at the top of a towering ridge of inhospitable rock, many miles from the bustle of life at Pueblo Bonito, testifies to their keen interest in the moon’s movements. Considered in that light, it becomes easy, when visiting Chimney Rock today, to envision the purpose of at least a few of the ninety-one structures that have been exposed by the excavations on the ridge.

Chimney Rock is now a national monument. If you’re interested, you can sign up to participate in programs there anytime, though it seems they’re hosting a special festival to celebrate the Major Lunar Standstill on September 23. The event may not carry the significance for us that it did for the Ancestral Pueblans, but what it lacks in spiritual overtones is compensated for by its historical resonance.

As we watch the golden orb appear between the twin peaks of Chimney Rock, we’re being moved by the same event that touched the local residents a thousand years ago.  

 

Christmas Moods

Scanning the shelves to find just the right book before heading off to the waiting room of a dentist, barbershop, or doctor's office can be a challenge. The one you select must be small enough to stick in a pocket, yet engaging enough to hold your interest, while also being dull enough so that you can let it go at a moment's notice, and perhaps forever. I can attest from experience that such a deliberation often takes place at the last minute

On a a recent trip to the doctor's office I selected a mid-sized trade paperback I hadn't thought about in decades: Ernest Gellner's Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History. (I'm tempted to admit that I had never thought about it at all, except that when I began to read it, I came upon passages I underlined decades ago, even a good ways into the book.)

Gellner divides human activities into three categories—the productive, the coercive, and the cognitive—hence the title: plough, sword, book. And he has a lot of insightful things to say about the follies of modern economists, atavistic hippies, and tendentious anthropologists. For example, he typifies Marx as the "ultimate bourgeois," and offers sound reasons for doing so. He pokes holes in the then-fashionable theories of Marshall Sahlins concerning the lifestyles of the Hadza people.

Where Hayek damns early man for his gregarious social morality, Sahlins praises him for his freedom from greed and, even more perhaps, for his freedom from the work ethic. Where nineteenth-century populists idealize the peasant, Sahlins' neolithic populism goes much further back and idealizes the hunter/gatherer. The rot had set in not with the first bourgeois, but with the first peasant.

 Here we catch a whiff of Gellner's wit, which can often be heard gurgling just beneath the surface of his prose. All the same, large sections of the book remain a bit abstract, because Gellner is writing a typology of cultural and social forms, not a history of civilization. For example, at one point Gellner asks: "How can it happen not merely that the weak, the swordless, overcome  the swordsmen, but that the whole organization and ethos of society changes, that Production replaces Predation as the central theme and value of life? Everything in the standard condition of agrarian life militates against such a miracle. Yet it did happen."

Gellner lists as many as fifteen factors that might have made such a transformation possible. He analyzes them, rejecting some, accepting others as possible, others still as even probable.

It strikes me that Gellner's analysis of the cognitive aspects of human life, while riddled with insights, also suffers somewhat from a failure to clearly distinguish between concepts, categories, and ideas. On the other hand, he's adept at ferreting out the contradictions inherent in nostalgic and utopian attitudes toward the past, for example:

The tendency of societies, especially small and simple societies, to have reasonably coherent visions of the world, to inhabit such a cosmos, has often been noted. The passing away of such coherent visions in complex and unstable societies, and its replacement by an impersonal, law-abiding, indifferent Nature, is a source of much recent romantic regret, poignantly expressed. The coherence of the world we have lost was thematic or stylistic rather than strictly logical. A fairly coherent picture was sustained by devices which evaded or ignored logic.  

This remark highlights Gellner's appreciation of patterns of social organization that "work" fairly well even though they don't really "make sense." He returns to the same theme at one point late in the book:

A man following traditional ideas is at least deploying something unlikely to be wholly false, and will at least fall in with the social proprieties of his culture. By contrast, given the infinity of possible truths, a man experimenting with new ideas is unlikely to be successful ... and at the same time is likely to be socially offensive.

We live in an age when the scientific method is strangely under attack by paranoid and often aggressive nay-sayers.

But Gellner's analysis, multifaceted and brilliant though it may be, inadvertently offers a clue as to why this might be so. In his treatment of cognition—concepts, categories, ideas, and empirical information and analysis—he has nothing to say about the important realm of images, imagination, and vision. That realm continues to be important, and available to us. Many people find both solace and meaning in the material that religions offer along those lines.

*   *   *

It being Christmas time, the current of my thought naturally drifts in that direction. One scholar who can supply the perspective to flesh out this dimension is the English philosopher and critic Terry Eagleton.

To call Eagleton merely a critic is to damn him with faint praise. The man is uncommonly erudite and he writes with singular panache—so much so that when reading him we’re reminded of philosophers and social critics on the order of Voltaire and Nietzsche, with touches of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis thrown in for good measure. Like those brilliant and scurrilous gadflies, Eagleton is a counter-puncher. He feigns and jabs, often hitting his mark, while seldom planting his feet on the mat long enough for us to figure out where he really stands.

But perhaps this is a false impression, based on the fact that I’ve read only a few of the essays collected in his book Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others. (I’m so out of touch, I thought  Spivak and Žižek were the same person!)

My favorite line from that book: “For postmodern thought the normative is inherently oppressive, as though there was something darkly autocratic about civil rights legislation or not spitting in the milk jug.”

That remark strikes me as both funny and true.

I recently stumbled upon Eagleton’s book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009) It was written largely in response to the then-popular works of Hitchen and Dawkins trashing religious sentiment. Reading the first chapter, “The Scum of the Earth,” I was impressed by Eagleton's grasp of Jesus’s mission, Aquinas’s analysis of first causes, and so on. He’s well aware, as few thinkers today are, that we live in the midst of several different "categories of being" and often partake of several simultaneously without contradicting any of them. Gellner would have agreed, I'm sure.

A few Eagleton sallies:

In Nietzsche’s view, the death of God must also spell the death of Man—that is to say, the end of a certain overweening humanism—if absolute power is not simply to be transplanted from the one to the other. Otherwise, humanism will always be secretly theological. It will be a continuation of God by other means. God will simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of respectable suburban morality, as indeed he does today.

He responds to Christopher Hitchens assertion that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important” as follows:

But Christianity was never meant to the an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.

Pursuing the issue of God as creator, Eagleton continues:

God for Christian theology is not a mega-manufacturer. He is rather what sustains all things in being by his love, and would still be this even if the world had no beginning. Creation is not about getting things off the ground. Rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever. Not being any sort of entity himself, however, he is not to be reckoned up alongside these things, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

In case we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around this concept, Eagleton lays it on a little thicker, jumping from point to point as if he’s afraid our attention might be wandering.

God and the universe do not make two. In an act of Judaic iconoclasm, we are forbidden to make graven images of this nonentity because the only image of him is human beings. There is a document that records Gods endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it.

He goes on:

Or, as one might say in more theological language, for the hell of it. He made it as gift, superfluity, and gratuitous gesture—out of nothing, rather than out of grim necessity. In fact, for Christian theology there is no necessity to the world at all, and God may have long ago bitterly regretted succumbing to the sentimental impulse which inspired him to throw it off in the first place. He created it out of love, not need. There was nothing in it for him. The Creation is the original acte gratuit.

The danger implicit in this position is that morality relinquishes pride of place to delight. But once again, do we really have to choose between the two in every case?

If we are God’s creatures, it is in the first place because, like him, we exist (or should exist) purely for the pleasure of it.

And where does Jesus fit into all of this? The radical Romantics (according to Eagleton) including Marx, find in Jesus a character who fully grasped this radical disjunct between instrumental reason and the ontological freefall we actually live.

 Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdain­ful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pa­riahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerrilla fighter.

Excesses of energy about, and Eagleton's insights and combativeness are both ever-present.

At this holy time, I'm not much in the combative mood. I enjoy seeing a pine tree covered in lights and colorful glass balls, tiny ceramic statues of the Holy Family sitting on top of the stereo, from which  the sweet, mellow harmonies of Dufay, Victoria, Palestrina and others waft across the room.

It's a different zone of thought, of being. Cookies get made, friends stop by, we take a walk in the pre-dawn snow. And a poem by Thomas Hardy drifts into view that I haven't thought about in years. I think you know it. Hardy spends a few stanzas describing a manger scene in which the oxen kneel before the infant Jesus. He concludes:

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

 

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.     

 

Chasing Comets

A comet is a ball of dust and ice—mostly dust—that has fallen into an orbit around the sun. Usually that orbit takes a long time to complete, and it sometimes happens that the comet disintegrates before completing a c iruit.. Hence, most people have only seen Halley's Comet once, if at all, because it only come around every 76 years or so. It sped by in 1986, and I saw it. It looked like every other comet, I suppose, a distant, fiery ball with a faint smudge of light tailing off into the darkness behind it. I don't remember exactly what Halley's comet looked like, but I referred to it in a poem I wrote at that time—a very bad poem—so I must have seen it. Right? 

Does it matter? Not much. Then again, those who have seen something rare and distinctive have a slight edge over those who haven't. And those who were at Woodstock? You never hear the end of it!

Hilary and I had a more memorable sighting in 1997, when were camping at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. It was a dark night; there are no towns within 30 miles of the desert site in any direction. And there is was: Comet Hale-Bopp. It has been referred to as the brightest comet of the twentieth century. I associated it at the time with the death of Laura Nyro earlier that year, a bright star zooming off into the cosmic night.

My best photo of Neowise

Just a few years ago Comet Neowise showed up. We drove down to Lake Louise State Park, a few miles from the Iowa Border, and went out into the night to the campground dumping station. From there, looking north across 30 miles of largely uninhabited farmland, we got an excellent view of the comet while standing in the dark next to a green dumpster. It had a nice long tail.

And just recently, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS showed up. It took its time swinging around the sun, offering plenty of opportunities for enthusiasts to see it, but it suffered from an unpronounceable name, and people began referring to it as simply A-3, which is easier to say but hardly glamorous or enticing.

One night recently we went out at sundown to Valley View Park, a long grassy sward near our house that points roughly west, to see what we could see. Nothing. Pondering the situation later, I determined that a better viewing site would be the east shore of Medicine Lake, a fifteen-minute drive away, where we could look out across the lake to the broad sweep of the western horizon. The next morning, leaving nothing to chance, we drove over there to familiarize ourselves with the route and choose a viewing spot. Hours later, just as the sun was going down, we returned.

A flock of geese was drifting a hundred yards off-shore, silhouetted in the golden sunset. Four or five people were already standing in the grass above the beach. One man—a high school geography teacher, we later learned—showed us a photo of the comet a friend of his had taken the previous night. Out across the south end of the lake Venus was shining brightly. That was a good sign, because the comet had been described as "just to the right of Venus."

There was a short squiggle of gold above the trees on the far side of the lake, just above the horizon. "Is that it?" one woman asked.

"No," I said, "You can see it's sort of broken and bent. That's a contrail."

"I'm glad I asked," she said. "I would have taken a picture and gone home."

A man came over to join us and soon conversation turned to the saw-whet owl everyone had seen in Sochaki Park last winter. But soon the man was telling stories about the random ducks his daughter had seen at a swamp nearby. We stepped down into the shadows on the beach to get away from the chatter. As it happened, the shadows also cut out most of the peripheral light from the parking lot behind us, making it easier to see objects in the darkening sky.

Another couple came down to the beach. They seemed to be speaking in some Slavic language, and I couldn't help asking them where they were from. "Ukraine" was the short reply. But we soon learned that she was from Georgia and he from the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine. She hastened to inform us that they arrived in the United States a quarter-century ago, as if to disassociate themselves from any misunderstanding. She made a random comment about Andropov—I don't remember the context—and I replied: "Don't forget Brezhnev and Kosygin."

"Good heavens. You remember Kosygin?" she almost shrieked. She seemed pleased.

They told us about a midnight excursion they'd taken recently to see the Northern Lights. "It was so colorful," the woman said. "White and green and even shades of red! We drove west for an hour to get away from the lights."

"Where did you actually stop to view the aurora," I asked.

"In a cemetery," she said.

"Did you see any ghosts?" I couldn't help asking. She laughed dismissively.

Back up on the grass, the geography teacher had spotted the comet.

"You see that house across the lake with the bright windows? It's up from there and a little to the left."

Soon everyone had found it. The trouble was, if you looked away, it wasn't easy to find it again. It was a faint glow with a smudge of a tail, and the tail was short. But it was definitely "cool." Now the task became to conceptualize what we were looking at.

The comet appeared to be streaking toward the sun with an exhaust trail behind it, like an image from a comic book, but we all knew the comet was actually on its way out of the solar system. The so-call "tail" was caused by solar radiation evaporating the comet's gases, causing it to emit dust and micro-particles. These particles almost invariably appear on the far side of the comet, regardless of the direction it's moving, due to the pressure exerted by the solar radiation.

But that's not a fun thing to think about. I prefer the Flash Gordon version.

As we were leaving the beach we passed a man fumbling with a camera fitted with an eyepiece and mounted on a tripod. The tripod was only four feet tall, and the man had to hunch over to look through the eyepiece. "I can see it with my binoculars," he said, "but I can't find it in the eyepiece." Frustrating.

Then again, all comets look pretty much alike. I will remember Tsuchinshan-ATLAS as the comet with a name I can't remember that we saw on the beach surrounded by a bunch of friendly strangers. They say it won't be back for 80,000 years.  

A Promising Time for the Library

I got an email a few days ago from someone named Kristi bearing the title, "This is a promising time for your library." That struck me as a pleasant thought. I wasn't aware that anyone really cared much about my library except me; I wondered who Kristi was, and what she meant, exactly. 

It's true that several books have come my way recently via the de-acquisition cart in the lobby of the Golden Valley Library, including a handsome coffee-table book of Seth Eastman's paintings. And the other day, when Hilary and I were shopping for gifts at Magers & Quinn, I also picked up two books for myself: a collection of poems by Joyce Sutphen, Carrying Water to the Field; and Existential Monday by an obscure French philosopher named Benjamin Fondane.

To top it off, a few weeks ago I conceived the notion that it was necessary to have a decent hardcover edition of Samuel Johnson's writings at my disposal. I'm not sure why, though the Penguin paperback edition I own is looking pretty ratty. I consulted a used book consolidator online and discovered that Amazon was offering a recently compiled hardcover edition from Yale at half-price. How could I resist?

The book is handsome, but also formidable. It weighs in at a little less than four pounds, which makes it unwieldy and somewhat difficult to read. Selected essays from Johnson's two-penny sheets, the Rambler and the Idler, make up a good part of the book, and they've been arranged by theme—moral choices, men and women, war and imperialism—which is convenient.

Johnson was formidable himself, though he wasn't handsome. He's known today largely for his curmudgeonly one-liners about the weather, writing for money, and other commonplace subjects. Few read his works, I suspect. Many of the essays are occasional and short, which is good. But the language in which Johnson expresses himself tends to be wordy, syntactically complex, and riddled with specious generalities. Not so good. But right or wrong, suave or clumsy, you've got to give credit to an author who chooses a weighty subject, explores it in terms the common reader can understand, and arrives at a conclusion without unnecessary references, complications, or digressions.

The first essay I turned to happened to be about awe. It surprised me that Johnson would take up such a subject. Not so long ago young people referred to everything as "awesome," and I sometimes come upon articles offering tips about how to revive that precious yet elusive emotion. It doesn't strike me as a typically eighteenth-century topic. But his approach to that issue does fit the era in which he wrote, in which astronomic discoveries, steam engines, and spinning jennies were all the rage.

Johnson's theory is that the awe we feel in the face of an unusual phenomena is the result of our ignorance as to how it works. "The awful stillness of attention, with which the mind is overspread at the first view of an unexpected effect, ceases when we have leisure to disentangle complications and investigate causes." Johnson reiterates this argument several times and also seems determined to castigate those who are simply too lazy or too conceited to humbly and patiently investigate the inner workings of things. "To expect that the intricacies of science will be pierced by a careless glance ... is to expect a peculiar privilege, a power denied to the rest of mankind; but to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence ... is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles."

It's worth reminding ourselves that in Johnson's day, many words had different shades of meaning than they do today. For example, nowadays the word "awful" carries connotations of disgust, whereas Johnson defines it in his famous dictionary as "that which strikes with awe, or fills with reverence." But it seems the primary association of awe with reverence hasn't changed much from his day to ours.

On the other hand, Johnson's notion that awe is inspired by ignorance, and evaporates once we've familiarized ourselves with a phenomenon, strikes me as doubtful at best. Our modern world is full of mechanical and electronic devices the workings of which remain incomprehensible and mysterious, yet we rarely hold any of them in awe. Maybe we should.

Meanwhile, I have found that if I do happen to develop a layman's understanding of how something works, it usually increases the admiration and awe I feel for it. Just now I pulled my copy of the plates created for Diderot's encyclopedia, which were designed to illustrate how everything from plate glass and rope to upholstery and marbled paper was made. Incredible.  

Nothing is more likely to inspire fleeting feelings of awe than aspects of the natural world. But perhaps this supports Johnson's thesis, insofar as such phenomena will forever remain largely inexplicable. Evolutionary theory can offer clues as to how the myriad life forms that surround us came to be, generally speaking, but it will never be able to "explain" the miraculous presence of a deer who beds down at nightfall in the back yard, much less a particular being whom we have come to know and love. 

By the same token, even a lifetime of astronomical study will do nothing to dissipate the awe we often feel when we contemplate the depths of space.   

The poets of Johnson's day had hardly begun to explore this realm of beauty and mystery. Wordsworth's "Westminster Bridge" and Keats "To Autumn" were still a long ways off. 

Johnson himself was perhaps wary of what he calls "the tyranny of fancy." I wonder what he, who loved words so well, would have made of this brief poem that I came across in the second of my purchases, Joyce Sutphen's Carrying Water to the Field:

It's Amazing

 

Another word for that is astonishing

or astounding, remarkable, or marvelous.

 

It's also slightly startling, which leads to

shocking and upsetting, perhaps a bit

 

disquieting, and that is troubling and

distressing—you could say outrageous

 

and deplorable, which leads to wicked

and more precise equations such as

 

sinful and immoral or just plain bad

and wrong. It's amazing, which is just to say

 

bewildering and unexpected, that

it happened out of the blue, and that we went

 

all the way from miraculous to absurd,

within the syllables of just one word.

 

Opening my third purchase, the slight volume of essays by Benjamin Fondane called Existential Monday, I suddenly found myself immersed in a realm driven not by awe and reverence, but by anxiety and dread. This is entirely understandable, given that Fondane was a Romanian Jew living in Nazi-occupied Paris. But Fondane's theories predate that dreadful circumstance by several decades. Writing in the zany Dada era and drawing heavily on the theories of Kierkegaard and the obscure Romanian philosopher Lev Shestov, Fondane emphasizes that every philosophic system, and especially Hegelianism and it's cartoonish offspring Marxism, will miss the mark unless it not only recognizes but also emphasizes the significance of the maverick, the outcast, the unique individual, and the once-in-a-lifetime event that shatters all systems. For example, the Resurrection. 

Fondane refers to Shestov so often that I requested a few of that thinker's books from the Hennepin County Library. And they actually had some! Now there is an amazing institution.

Meanwhile, taking a closer look at the email I mentioned above, I see that it comes from Kristi Pearson, executive director of the Hennepin County Library system. It was her library she was referring to, not mine. Then again, her library is also mine. 

She wants me to contribute, lend them of hand. Gladly. 'Tis the season.  

Does Aging Improve Brain Function?

The New York Times reported recently that researchers have discovered significant differences in the way young people and middle-aged people process information and solve problems. When young people undertake a cognitive task, the part of the brain they activate tends to be "highly localize." Older people draw upon a broader spectrum of cognitive facilities when approaching the same task.

The researchers—who probably wish they were still young, so they could be doing something  more fun than looking at brain scans—have come up with a perversely inaccurate acronym for this phenomenon: HAROLD. This stands for "hemispheric asymmetry reduction in older adults." According to the article, most researchers agree this phenomenon represents "a general reorganization and weakening of the brain’s function with age."

Weakening? I'm afraid it represents nothing of the kind. Unless it can be established scientifically that the solution arrived at most rapidly, and using the least amount of brainpower, is invariably the best, which I doubt. I think it's more often the other way around. Young people tend to have plenty of energy, but they often mistake their own infinitesimal corner of the world for the world itself, and as a result, they make snap judgments that often prove to be inaccurate and can sometimes be personally harmful.

Older people, tempered and enlightened by years of experiences, are much better at seeing the connections between things, reserving judgment, pondering alternatives. Due to these qualities--which, prior to the age of acronyms, went collectively under the name "maturity"--older men and women often become adept at charting a safe, effective, creative, and reliable course between A and B.

Rather than burdening older folks with yet another dreadful syndrome, HAROLD, researchers ought to be studying, and celebrating,  HEART—this is, Hemispheric Equilibrium and Reflective Temper.

(And by the way, have you notice how this gray weather has been bringing out the muted brilliance in the multicolored leaves, especially when a bit of sunlight makes them glisten with moisture?)

On the methodological level, the study once again reminds us that it isn't easy to design experiments involving the complex tasks that people typically have to deal with, where one of the options might be wait, or to ignore the task altogether.

I've become adept at such delayed responses. For example, a few weeks ago the "check engine" lit up on the dash of our 2015 Corolla. Our go-to mechanic tracked it down to an aging carbon canister, and proposed a $700 replacement. "You don't really have to do it," he told me, "if you don't mind looking at that light."

The "occulus" in the new Vesterheim visitors' center.

We pondered the expense all the way to Lanesboro, and on to Decorah, Iowa, to see the new visitors' center at the Vesterheim Museum. On the way back, somewhere near Zumbrota, the light went out. It stayed out. Problem solved. (For now.) 

Meanwhile, it may also be worth pointing out that the brain does lots of things besides solving problems. The "hemispheric asymmetry reduction" that the researchers refer to as a defect might be just the thing that many of us are looking for. Books appear almost daily giving us advice as to how to find serenity and inner peace. Centuries ago Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius followed the same track. It's matter of learning how to see the world, and our place in it, as an ensemble of more or less harmonious elements rather than the interminable series of crises that the purveyors of news are so good at describing hourly.

But there is one thing to avoid: it would be a mistake to become too adept at counterbalancing this and that, adjusting to every situation, putting things off, staying "in the moment," while slowly sinking into a quietistic stupor.

On some occasions, there really is something wrong with the car. And there are always more than a few things wrong with the world.