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Bear arms

We’ve had a bunch of bear sightings this summer. On my drive home from work two weeks ago, I saw a bear wandering around the soccer field of a local grade school. I called the police about it when I got home a few minutes later, since the field was right around the corner from their station.

That weekend, one of my neighbors told me that they saw a bear in the yard beside our house. When they looked an hour later, the bear was still there, just hanging out.

Last Tuesday night, during Rufus’ evening walk, one of my neighbors was raking up trash in the woods about 15 feet back from the street. He told me, “I live across the street. My wife called during my drive to work and told me that a bear had just picked up our trash can and was carrying it over to the woods for breakfast.”

Tonight, we decided to walk down to the local CVS during Rufus’ evening walk, so I could pick up a Cherry Coke. About a third of a mile from my house, I noticed a jeep parked on the side of the road. The driver reached out the window as if to tap a cigarette. We walked up to her car, and she said, “He’s over there. Do you see him?” Pointing again, not tapping a cigarette.

I thought she was talking about her toddler, with whom I’d seen her walking many times. I wondered why her toddler was meandering around in someone’s yard, while she and her husband sat in her jeep. I looked where she was pointing, and realized that there wasn’t any toddler to be found.

However, there was a very large black bear beside the house across the street, in the process of emptying a trash can.

I said, “Wow, that is one giant bear!”, took Rufus’ leash from my wife, and trotted briskly on to CVS. As we got over the next hill, Amy asked, “Is there a reason we didn’t just head back home?”

Seriously, that bear would’ve towered over me on its hind legs. “Because . . . I wanted to get a Cherry Coke?”

We kept walking. As we approached the drug store, a pair of kids (around 10-11 years old, I think) were playing with their skateboard and scooter. One said to us, “There’s a bear back up the street.”

I told him that we’d passed it already, and thanked him for the warning. Amy went into the store and got my Cherry Coke. She asked, “Should we walk back the same way, or try the back road instead?”

I pondered for a moment. We’d seen the bear beside a house that let out onto that back road, so I figured there was a 50/50 chance he’d have come out on that side by the time we got back. I decided we’d go home by our regular route. The two kids left with us. I figured the bear would go after them first, since they’re trashcan-sized.

We approached the area where we’d seen the bear, and I figured that if it was in the same location, about 35 or 40 feet back from the road, chomping on trash, the five of us would be fine. Rufus gave no sign of sniffing him out, but he didn’t react during the walk down the street, either.

A neighbor across the street from that house called to us, “Be careful! There’s a bear out!”

“We know,” one of the kids said.

“No, he’s right over there!” the neighbor said, pointing to a stand of pine trees about 10 feet from the road.

I turned and bolted up the front yard of another neighbor and rang his doorbell, Amy and the kids racing behind me. The man of the house, whom I believe is a policeman, answered the door, and I hurriedly said, “There’salargebearacrossthestreet. Isitokayifmywife,dogandthesetwokidsstayinsideforaminute? I’llgogetmycarsoIcanbringeveryoneupthestreet.”

He assented, but started looking over at the trees, trying to catch a glimpse of the big bear. He offered to drive us all, but I impulsively decided a good run was in order. I handed Amy the leash and sprinted (as best I can) back to the house. The bear had already retreated from view, probably heading to that ‘back road’ area. On the way, I warned a neighbor who was just taking his little terrier out, “Gotheotherdirection. Blackbeardownthisway.”

He let out a yelp and hurried back into his garage.

I got to the car and drove down to the house. The two kids were getting into one of their mothers’ cars, since she was out looking for them. Amy & I got Rufus in, thanked the gentleman, petted his dog (he and Rufus got to make friends while I was gone), and drove back to the house.

And that’s life in Ringwood. Come visit!

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Monday Morning Montaigne: An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Take 3

I made it through the longest portion of the Apology, dear readers! And while it was as depressing and sermonistically strident as the preceding 60 pages, some light popped up at the end of the tunnel!

This segment of the Apology — go back to previous installments of this series (1 and 2) for the background on this part of Montaigne’s essays — is titled by our translator as Man has no knowledge (pages 449-508 in this edition) and examines the failures and inconsistencies of philosophy to explain, um, anything. M. focuses on the Greeks, which makes given the state of philosophy at the time he was writing. He breaks out three schools of “wise men,” since his project is to show that the learning of man is worthless. Or, as he puts it:

To really learned men has happened what happens to ears of wheat: they rise high and lofty, heads erect and proud, as long as they are empty; but when they are full and swollen with grain in their ripeness, they begin to grow humble and lower their horns. Similarly, men who have tried everything and sounded everything, having found in that pile of knowledge and store of so many various things nothing solid and firm, and nothing but vanity, have renounced their presumption and recognized their natural condition.

Back to the three schools. We have:

  1. “Peripatetics, Epicureans and Stoics . . . [who] established the sciences we have, and treated them as certain knowledge,
  2. “the Academics . . . [who] despaired of their quest and judged that truth could not be conceived by our powers,
  3. “[Pyrrhonians and] Skeptics . . . [who] say that they are still in search of the truth . . . [and] judge that those who think they have found it are infinitely mistaken.”

M. starts out by denying skeptics their skepticism, concluding that their radical doubt is too aware of itself to truly be doubt. He also contends that their doubt is purely for argument: “They use their reason to inquire and debate, but not to conclude and choose.” To M., the doubts of the skeptics are about the branches, and not the root.

Throughout the section, the core of his argument remains that the nature of the infinite is so far beyond our senses that our reason can’t hope to grasp it. It’s only our faith that brings us close, while reason’s presumption separates us from that higher self: “All that we undertake without his assistance, all that we see without the lamp of his grace, is only vanity and folly.”

M. contends that, if forced to bestow a material body on the divine, he would have worshiped the sun, since “[besides] its grandeur and beauty, it is the part of this machine that we find farthest from us, and therefore so little known that [its ancient worshipers] were to be pardoned for regarding it with wonder and reverence.” He later remarks that it’s such folly to personify the diving that he’d prefer to worship a god patterned after a serpent, dog, or ox.

This point follows an entertaining segment where M. lists no fewer than 25 philosophers and each one’s view on God and the divine (some of which have multiple views on such). The point, of course, is that these were the greatest minds of their time, and they couldn’t settle on an idea of the divine.

From there, he lambastes them for coming no closer to an understanding of man. If anything, he opines, shouldn’t we have knowledge of ourselves?

It’s a long and exhausting chapter, especially when M. turns his attention to Aristotle. I was inclined to think he wrote that section in a particularly boring style to mimic Aristotle’s notes, but that may’ve just been my own wandering attention. By the time I reached its conclusion, I wondered why he needed to go on at such length, to dismiss so many targets, unless his commission was paying by the word.

* * *

I found myself greatly relieved at the conclusion, not only because It’s Finally Over, but also because it leads into a two-page passage that the translator titles Warning to the Princess (the Apology being written for Princess Margaret of Valois). In this brief segment, it’s as if the mask falls from M. He admits that the Apology is “so long a work contrary to my custom” and proceeds to distill his message:

People are right to give the tightest possible barriers to the human mind. In study, as in everything else, its steps must be counted and regulated for it; the limits of the chase must be artificially determined for it. They bridle and bind it with religions, laws, customs, science, precepts, mortal and immortal punishments and rewards; and still we see that by its whirling and its incohesiveness it escapes all these bonds. It is an empty body, with nothing by which it can be seized and directed; a varying and formless body, which can be neither tied nor grasped.

Indeed there are few souls so orderly, so strong and wellborn, that they can be trusted with their own guidance, and that can sail with moderation and without temerity, in the freedom of their judgments, beyond the common opinions. It is more expedient to place them in tutelage.

The mind is a dangerous blade, even to its possessor, for anyone who does not know how to wield it with order and discretion.

It’s not a sentiment I necessarily agree with, but I’m happy that M. is able to cut it down to a few paragraphs this way. Still, there are another 46 pages ahead comprising five more sections, so I’m afraid it’ll be another week before I can build up some enthusiasm for this project.

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What it is: 9/1/08

What I’m reading: Montaigne’s essays, Berlin: City of Stones, and The Great Outdoor Fight.

What I’m listening to: The first Scissor Sisters album.

What I’m watching: Started up the fifth season of The Wire. Not liking it so much after two episodes, because a lot of the characters are speechifying, rather than talking. And only eight left!

What I’m drinking: Rosenblum 2007 Appellation viognier.

What Rufus is up to: His first hike! And a BBQ party where he was awfully well behaved (except for his chow-hounding)!

What I’m happy about: I got to see some longtime friends on Sunday and got to see one of my work-pals get hitched on Saturday. And I don’t have to go to work today!

What I’m sad about: That two people at the party I attended on Sunday talked about how it was “poetic justice” that Hurricane Gustav might wallop New Orleans & environs at the same time as the Republican Convention.

What I’m pondering: How this is any different from evangelicals contending that Hurricane Katrina was God’s revenge on homosexuals, Southern Decadence, etc. They’re all douchebags who ignore human suffering in favor of making their narrow political point.

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The Deadliest Pick

I don’t venture into politics too often on this blog, but here’s my prediction for the Sarah Palin effect: it backfires on McCain because women will actually want to vote against her the more their husbands point out how hot she is.