Main Body
June
June 1
When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, translated by Lewis Galantiere
June 2
Phenology (phenomena plus logy) represents the human eye, the human grid, within the long-playing figure 8 of the sun’s seasons. It is the observation and application of relationships within repetition, relationships between the advance of the season and the timing of its particulars. In its purest forms phenology has always been found in the simple correlated memoranda of rural people: “Plant corn when oak leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear.”
Phenology is also a gambit against omnivorous abstract time, a human placement within the cyclical, within the drone of the hammered-home. Phenological time is a flexible external time, luxuriant and practical, with no sharp edges. It moves through a matrix of full-bodied particulars infinitely more viscous than calendar time. It is rendered in the eyes and ears and body rather than fermenting in the mind.
The co-incidences on which phenological time rests invite, demand, the inclusion of space. As the Pawnees ranged the upper Smoky Hill country on their annual summer hunt, someone, the women no doubt, watched the progress of the milkweed pods. When the pods reached a certain stage of maturity the Pawnees knew it was time to return to their villages on Loup River, 400 or 500 miles northeast, to tend to their corn fields. This is lush, concrete time in a perfect plains setting: kneeling in the wind, checking the milkweed time; doing one thing in reference to a distant other.
— Merrill Gilfillan, Magpie Rising
June 3
One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
June 4
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
June 5
Still, I think our old, good woman Earth, though torn by political conflict, is the only world we have and we’re all her tenants depending in one way or another on each other. … I want to be a mail boat for everyone divided by the ice of estrangement, a craft before the coming of large navigation, moving through the drifting ice with letters and parcels.
— Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Being Famous Isn’t Pretty,” the introduction to Stolen Apples.
June 6
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