Monthly Archives: September 2025

A glass of Rioja red wine drunk by the author in March 2025 in Boston.

On Drink

On Drink – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, bringing together my research and my life through wine.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D Thevet, Singularitez, 14v.%5B2%5D Thevet, Singularitez, 15r.%5B3%5D Thevet, Singularitez, 159r.%5B4%5D Thevet, Singularitez, 15v.%5B5%5D Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 4 vols., (Paris, 1873-1877) s.v. « mignol. »[6] Florike Egmond, Eye for Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630, (Reaktion Books, 2017), 30; Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance, (University of Chicago Press, 2022), 101.[7] Thevet, Singularitez, 18v.[8] Thevet, Singularitez, 19r.[9] Thevet, Singularitez, 19v.[10] Thevet, Singularitez, 19v-20r.[11] Homer, Odyssey 9.403, trans. Fagles.
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This week, bringing together my research and my life through wine.

As I progress in my efforts to prepare my translation of André Thevet’s (1516-1590) Singularitez de la France Antarctique for publication, I find myself often laughing at Thevet’s own comments about his world and the worlds he visited on his 1555 voyage from France to Brazil and his 1556 voyage home (the one with the whales). Thevet was a Frenchman through and through, yet while he referred to “our countrymen” on several occasions in the Singularitez he more often identifies himself alongside other Europeans as Christians, distinguishing them from the African and Amerindian peoples he described in various forms of other. Thevet used the broadest possible perspective to craft a story which would resonate with his reader, a story which told of the influence and impact of his fellow Christians from “our Europe” upon these distant worlds across the “Ocean Sea.” I like Thevet’s perspective because as contemporary to the middle of the sixteenth century it is, it still feels contemporary to our own time all the same. If the frontiers of mapped knowledge were just beyond the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the Americas in Thevet’s time, today they lie in the vastness of Space above us. The parallels between the First Age of Exploration to which Thevet contributed and our own Second Age of Exploration now underway are many and ought to be explored further in academic scholarship.

I’ve long loved reading about explorers, pioneers, and settlers. Over the weekend then, when I drove west with my Dad to Hutchinson, Kansas for the 2025 State Convention of the Kansas Ancient Order of Hibernians I made a point of us going to visit the Cosmosphere, one of Hutchinson’s jewels. This museum of spacecraft, memorabilia, and historical artifacts from the 1940s through the end of the Cold War is something worth visiting if you’re in Central Kansas. We’d been there before in about 2007 or 2008 with my Boy Scout Troop to do our Astronomy merit badge. The rest of the weekend was spent enjoying the company of our brother Hibernians and their wives, and in a long business meeting on Saturday in the Strataca Salt Mine Museum just outside of town. While I was in Hutchinson, I made a point of continuing my work on typing out the French original of the 1558 Antwerp edition of Thevet’s book for my impending book proposal. The chapter I worked on in Hutchinson, “On Palm Wine” was one such boozy treatise that made me laugh.

Thevet diverted on several occasions from his cosmographic endeavors of describing the botany, ethnography, geography, and zoology of these places to rest instead on their local wine, or wine substitute. He began these series of diversions on Madeira, still today famous for its wine, “which is first among all other fruits of usage.” Thevet made his case concerning wine plain from the start, writing of the Madeiran variety that it is “necessity for human life.” Vines grow on Madeira, Thevet wrote, because “wine and sugar have an affinity for Madeira’s temperature.”[1] Its wine is comparable to Cretan wine and “the most celebrated wines of Chios and Lesbos,” which Thevet identified as Mitylene. Here, he equated a modern creation, the plantation of Portuguese vines into the soils of Madeira, to the famed wines of antiquity which were prized by the Greeks, Romans, and Persians alike.[2] Thevet couched his qualifications of the greatness of modern things on their parallels with or roots in antiquity. A humanist, Thevet’s cosmography was reliant on these classical framings to assess the proper place and due of these things of which were “secrets most admirable, of which the ancients were not advised.”[3] Maderian wine was better aged, Thevet wrote, “for they let it rest under the ardor of the Sun kept with the times so that it doesn’t keep the natural heat in the wine.”[4] In a place such as this warm enough where sugar cane could be planted in January, Thevet found a paradise where even he and his countrymen could appreciate the local grape.

Two chapters later, as Thevet moved on to describe the coastline around the Cap-Vert in Senegal, the westernmost promontory of Africa and the place whence the island Republic of Cabo Verde derives its name, he stopped again to discuss their local drink, in this case palm wine. Thevet recorded an indigenous name for this drink, Mignol in his Singularitez, which Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française recorded is a “spirited liquor extracted from a species of palm.”[5] Perhaps then, Thevet’s use of the term may be the first introduction of this word into French. He writes, with a hint of a sigh that “the vine is unfamiliar to this country where it has not been planted and diligently cultivated,” resulting in a dearth of wine and the preference for liquors extracted from palm trees. This makes wine one of the most human of inventions, something that needs labor to be crafted out of natural things. It is a bridge between the twin categories of collected objects in the cabinets of curiosities of Thevet’s time: artificalia, that which was made by human hands, and naturalia, that which was made by God.[6] While the palm “is itself a marvelously beautiful tree and well accomplished, larger than many others and perpetually verdant” Thevet contended that its fruit still requires less cultivation and work than the fruit of the vine or barley.[7] “This wine is excellent but offensive to the head,” he wrote, noting that it “needs a hot country and grows in glassy sand like salt, lest its roots end up salting when it is planted.”[8] Unlike grape wines, palm wine is “prone to corruption” because, Thevet wrote, “humidity rises in this liqueur.”[9] It is similar in color “as the white wines of Champagne and Anjou and tastes better than the ciders of Brittany, helping the locals who are subjected to continuous and excessive heat.”[10] I infer in here a slight toward the Bretons, who were only recently made subjects of the French crown in 1547 upon the coronation of Henry II of France as both King of France and Duke of Brittany.

Thevet’s point is that while alcohol can come in other forms than just the fruit of the vine, that is far superior to any other drink. I myself prefer wine, especially reds from Chinon, Rioja, and the Burgenland. I’ve had my fair few opportunities to enjoy a glass or two, or perhaps more. Polyphemus put it well when he cried out that Odysseus’s full-bodied wine must be “nectar, ambrosia [which] flows from heaven!”[11] The holy vines whence come wine carry into Christianity and in particular the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Through transubstantiation the wine becomes the Blood of Christ. To me, this is the greatest mystery of the Faith, or at least the greatest mystery of our liturgy and rite. I find it amusing that other churches have non-alcoholic grape juice rather than wine fill this role, as in our Catholic culture there’s a certain degree of pride in the fact that we use wine proper, and that everyone partakes (if they so choose) in that wine as early as 8 years old at their First Communion. I for one think that a gradual introduction to alcohol within the right guarded circumstances can be healthy; this at least avoids the taboo that can lead to underage drinking as an act of rebellion. Yet by making drink a central tenant of our ritual life, we give it a clear place where it should remain and distinguish it from those places where it should be avoided. For instance, I customarily only drink whiskey in toasts at weddings and funerals or other special events. It’s not something that I want to have on a regular basis.

This regularity is central to our society’s relationship with alcohol. I grew up with the image of drink being embodied in the alcoholic model of Fr. Jack Hackett, played with a finesse by the late great Frank Kelly on the Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted in the 1990s. Fr. Jack’s favorite word was “drink!” always said in an exclamatory manner. Drink has its charms to be sure, yet like anything it should be taken in measure. Too much and you lose control of yourself or even your sense of self all together. Too little and you cannot really enjoy it. A century ago, American society responded to alcoholism by trying to stifle its main fuel through prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited the sale of alcohol, yet it was hardly effective in this effort. One of the funnier papers I wrote in my undergraduate made the satirical case that Catholicism has advantages over Protestantism because we didn’t think that Prohibition would actually work. Granted, we are the Church that had the Index of Prohibited Books, so we all make mistakes. I think a similar mistake can be made in the idea of wholesale prohibition of actions and things that are controversial today. I for one am more in favor of restricting gun sales, yet a ban simply would not work in the United States. Likewise, my Church is a loud and vocal advocate for the prohibition of abortion. In both cases, these feel like measures at undertaking a complicated surgery with a battleaxe. Instead, let’s consider the underlying societal causes of these issues and address those. Let’s bring together this country’s finest minds, experts in their fields, and have them work together to find a solution that will improve our lives and leave this a better place for our descendants to live.I do enjoy a good glass of wine. I’ve had both good wine and the bad wine to compare it to. I’ve drunk wines so bad that they make your typical communion wine taste like a nice, aged vintage. A good glass of wine elevates a meal for me. On New Year’s Eve during my prix fixe dinner at Paros, a Greek restaurant in Leawood, Kansas, I enjoyed a well-rounded Cretan red with at least one of my five courses. At the end of the meal after the lamb shanks and the octopus and the baklava and everything else I was so content that I didn’t feel the need to continue the festivities. Rather, I let the rest of the night pass by in peace and quiet. A good drink can add in the sweetness of the day, an evening’s amber glow that could just as easily be missed. It remarks on the passing opportunities that if only we saw them we might make different decisions that would make our lives even just a little bit better.

[1] Thevet, Singularitez, 14v.

[2] Thevet, Singularitez, 15r.

[3] Thevet, Singularitez, 159r.

[4] Thevet, Singularitez, 15v.

[5] Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 4 vols., (Paris, 1873-1877) s.v. « mignol. »

[6] Florike Egmond, Eye for Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630, (Reaktion Books, 2017), 30; Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance, (University of Chicago Press, 2022), 101.

[7] Thevet, Singularitez, 18v.

[8] Thevet, Singularitez, 19r.

[9] Thevet, Singularitez, 19v.

[10] Thevet, Singularitez, 19v-20r.

[11] Homer, Odyssey 9.403, trans. Fagles.

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Roasted lamb shank, mashed potatoes, and vegetables cooked by the author in May 2025.

On Little Things

On Little Things – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, recent events have inspired me to think about the wide, wide world on a smaller scale.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Click here to buy a copy of my book Travels in Time Across Europe which tells the stories from my year living in London that began 10 years ago this week.
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This week, recent events have inspired me to think about the wide, wide world on a smaller scale.

Last Wednesday, after publishing “On Democracy, Part II” I took my place in the driver’s seat of my car, the Mazda Rua, and went out on a day trip to Jefferson City to join the protest against the congressional redistricting underway here in Missouri. I wanted to drive long distance at highway speeds again like I used to four times a year on my Long Drives East and West between Kansas City and Binghamton. There’s a lot of little things about those drives that I miss now that I’m more rooted here in Brookside. Today, I don’t drive every day. Often times if I can I’ll choose to walk to wherever I want to go in the neighborhood. It’s healthier to be sure, and I get the same free time away from the obligations that crowd my desk to listen to music, podcasts, birdsong, or to just think. These walks aren’t terribly taxing, Apple Fitness likes to remind me that the difficulty is “easy” to “moderate,” yet each one adds up into a sum which says that I am healthier today in mid-September than I was in mid-February or mid-March, let alone a year ago now. Moreover, I loved driving even just about town for that free time. Drivetime was often my podcast time. Now, I’m also reassured that I’m not operating a large and potentially dangerous vehicle while I’m listening to an engaging conversation or story; instead, I can focus on the story itself and not split my attention between that and the road.

So, last Wednesday I did try to recreate the things I loved most about those road trips that marked the beginning of this decade. On the outbound drive I listened to a fascinating discussion about political philosophy and space policy on Planetary Radio and on my return trip I listened to the pilot of the new audio drama Star Trek: Khan. Yet as much as I was thrilled to be back on the road and experiencing things that I felt like I had lost, even at my own volition, I still found that some of the little things got to me. For one, I was annoyed at getting stuck behind a semi-truck on the outbound drive for about 10 miles east of Sedalia and even more frustrated that I couldn’t pass a pair of semis that were ahead of me on the return drive as we transitioned from the two-lane divided highway in Cole County back to the one-lane country road that is US 50 in between the state capital and Sedalia. I know well that I control how I react to things, and therefore that I ought to react better to most things today than I did in my younger years, yet getting stuck behind those larger, slower vehicles on the stretch where passing was far more difficult really annoyed me. The beauty of a country drive is lost somewhat when you’re staring at the same big box retailer’s advertisement on the back of their vehicle for mile after mile.

These little things are what give our experiences life. The great, grand gestures that get remembered are one thing, yet they cannot be sustained without the small tokens of affection or whispered advice that comes from living and making the choices that define who we are. I believe that we are fundamentally formed by our experiences for good or ill. I’ve often ended up resorting to grand actions to try and solve questions or puzzles that find their way onto my desk. Marking something off a checklist is one of the most satisfying things I can do in my life. Those grand acts often become boxes which I can fill with the little things that I undertake. Currently, I am working on editing my translation of André Thevet’s (1516–1590) book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique to send its book proposal off to an academic press. I have enough of my translation edited to send to them now, the first 16 chapters to be precise, yet there’s more still I need to do. This publisher prints page-facing translations and requires that the original text be sent alongside the translation. So, now I am spending my time typing out the original Middle French text of these first 16 chapters to be included in my proposal. There is a Wikisource page for this book, taken from the 1878 French edition that I could copy and paste from, yet it lacks the folio numbers from the original that are vital signposts to navigate the text and has enough nineteenth-century re-renderings of the sixteenth-century French original that I decided it was better if I just went ahead and typed it out myself. The first chapter took me about an hour to do, so I figure in all I might be able to have most of this typing done by the time I publish The Wednesday Blog next week.

Each character here is a little thing that together add up to the surviving thoughts and memories of a man who lived 450 years ago who exists in the scholarly memory of his time yet rarely in the spotlight. In my work, I hope to turn that spotlight on him and demonstrate his erudition and centrality to the cosmographic profession as it existed in the 1550s and 1560s. All this boils down to the same solution I’ve used to get through big projects for years. On Monday I smiled hearing a friend say essentially the same thing with her work in the history of mathematics, that the best way to solve a problem is to break it down into its constituent parts and figure it out piece by piece. A decade ago, this week when I moved to London, I found that the only way that the move was not overwhelming was to think of each thing I needed to do separately. My frustration rose when I found that I couldn’t make sense of a particular facet of one of the things I needed to do. One particular moment of note here was when I was summoned to the international student office to provide visa papers to confirm that I could legally study in the United Kingdom well after I’d started my coursework. Something got lost in the shuffle, but it was serious enough to scare me a little. When I moved to Binghamton, I had similar bureaucratic problems from issues getting my New York residency owing to my Missouri driver’s license having cracked in two, to a year later having big issues proving my residency to my university because I forgot to cross a t somewhere on a form.

Again, I choose how I react, and in the years since I’ve learned to take little things in stride and think of them in the broader context in which they exist. I believe doing the little things can show fidelity to a greater cause because it shows that I’m there for the long run, not just in the good moments. That’s something I learned from Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, one of the finest movies I’ve ever seen. I think perhaps the best metaphor to explain what I’m trying to say to you, dear Reader, is that we should approach the things in life like we approach cooking. Recipes break down the task of cooking into smaller pieces that are more easily attainable. In May I made an Easter roast for some of my best friends that comprised several recipes I’d never tried before that day, and I truly didn’t know if it had worked until I finally sat down and took a bite of it. The roasted lamb shanks were perfect, as were the mashed potatoes, and the flourless chocolate cake that I rounded things out with was excellent and just as good the following day. In each recipe, I not only took things one at a time but even experimented a bit here or there based on my own experience from cooking similar things. For one, I had to quickly rethink how I was going to cook the lamb shanks because they were larger than nearly all of the pans I had. For another, I realized later than I wanted that in melting the chocolate chips for the cake I should’ve encouraged the process along with a spatula here and there. Each of these little things rounded out with a fine Tempranillo wine from Rioja to make one of the best dinners I’ve yet cooked.

I have a lot to do right now, and in every respect I’m on course to complete the things I have in my docket. The work would be overwhelming if I looked at it as a great mass, yet it is far easier to approach in small bites. That’s the big reason why I’m ending the Wednesday Blog one month from this week on 15 October. I’ve said what I wanted to say, and looking ahead I can use the time that I devote to writing this blog and recording the podcast working on other things great and small that need my attention. This publication is made up of a great many little things, small ideas that flower with their peers and culminate in an essay each week that I usually feel proud of writing. Little things make the lives we live.

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A photograph of the Missouri State Capitol building taken by the author in January 2017.

On Democracy, Part II

On Democracy, Part II – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, on the current round of redistricting sweeping through Missouri.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources%5B1%5D “On Democracy,” Wednesday Blog 5.39.[2] “We, Irish Americans,” Wednesday Blog 6.10.[3] “On Servant Leadership,” Wednesday Blog 6.15.[4] “Freedom from Fear,” Wednesday Blog 2.6; “Embodied Patriotism,” Wednesday Blog 6.26.[5] “Governor Kehoe announces special session on congressional redistricting and initiative petition reform,” Office of the Governor of the State of Missouri, 29 August 2025.[6] “A Scary Time For Chicago | Trump Gets FOMO Over China's Military Parade | Donald's Life Lessons,” The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (3 September 2025), YouTube.[7] “A Defense of Humanism in a Time of War,” Wednesday Blog 6.24.
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This week, on the current round of redistricting sweeping through Missouri.

When I wrote my essay “On Democracy” last December, I anticipated that it would be the only thing I wrote concerning the most recent Presidential election.[1] I wanted to say more, in fact I went back and forth on saying something stronger and more forceful, yet what I ended up with turned out to be just right for the moment. It remains one of the essays I’m most proud of from the Wednesday Blog. The first half of 2025 was marked by a series of essays which followed up on “On Democracy” and commented on the growing number of political crises blowing across this country and here in Missouri and Kansas especially.[2] I even found that the usual low readership numbers on my political essays was mitigated somewhat with these essays; I attribute that in part to my choice to stay positive and focus on the extraordinary acts of ordinary people that have proven essential to the course of American democracy in the last 250 years and remain vital to the continued survival of our Republic today.[3]

All that said, and as much as I am a political animal, I would much rather write about my research and about my English translation of André Thevet’s 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique which I’m currently editing. Those are the things which make me happy today because when I’m engaged in my historical work, I feel connected to my friends and colleagues who I’ve met in academia over the years. I want to be known a historian first and a writer second. I’m learning things everyday about Thevet and his worldview that I only barely noticed when I was deep in the effort of translating his book in the first place.

Yet current affairs in Jefferson City are pressing enough that I feel it is my duty to speak up. I know there are very real risks to publishing, saying, or writing anything political today. I’m in a precarious place now as a Ph.D. candidate approaching my dissertation defense and looking at a job market that feels smaller and more threatened than it did a year ago. I know that saying anything political could make me a harder sell for many hiring committees to accept. I take this risk because it is the right thing to do.

Today, 10 September, the Missouri Senate is set to vote on a new congressional map drawn by an uncertain cartographer, possibly in Jefferson City, possibly in Washington, with the intention of ensuring that the Republican Party secures a clear electoral victory in the 2026 congressional midterm elections in spite of learned expectations that the president’s party always loses seats in the midterms after they assume office, and the living reality of our moment in which the majority party is acting to preserve its own power and the wealth of a few at the expense in the political rights of everyone else. I’ve written time and again here that my America in its purest form is embodied in the New Deal and Great Society, and in FDR’s Four Freedoms speech.[4] Sure, we haven’t gotten there yet, all that means is we should keep working for it. America is a shining beacon of democracy for all the world to see, even if that beacon’s shadow often also shows our flaws played out before it like hand-puppets on a screen. Democracy requires participation; it’s the greatest form of government we’ve yet invented because it requires the most of the governed to understand how government works and to participate in their own government for the common good.

This new congressional map is not democratic. In fact, it is the anthesis of democracy. In his statement announcing the Republican supermajority’s push to force this map through the Missouri General Assembly, Governor Mike Kehoe openly stated that this map is intended to protect “Missouri’s conservative, common-sense values should be truly represented at all levels of government, and the Missouri First Map delivers just that.”[5] This was expected, yet still bold by a sitting governor to be so openly one-sided. On Thursday, 4 September, the window to submit written testimony on the redistricting bill opened on the Missouri House of Representatives’ website. I sent in the following statement:

In his statement announcing this new mid-decadal redistricting effort, Governor Kehoe explicitly said this was to preserve “conservative values.” With that out in the open, I want it to be known that if this map is intended to support conservative party politics in Missouri, then it impedes on the rights of all of us moderate, liberal, and progressive Missourians. It is a blatant abuse of power that targets us Kansas Citians in particular. I want to see Missouri create a nonpartisan independent board which draws the electoral maps, so they are fair for all Missourians. I ask the committee to reject this redistricting map for its blatant partisanship and the fact that this redistricting process is costing the taxpayers’ money that could and should be spent elsewhere.

This is the sum of it. I do not think it is hyperbole to say that my own political rights are under threat by this bill. Rather, what was once extreme is today expected because any rules we had for electoral fairness have been thrown out the window. It’s true that both parties gerrymander their congressional maps, but the Republicans do it far more. It’s also true that the Democrats are gerrymandering congressional maps in the states that my party controls. I want independent redistricting maps in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and every territory. That should be our goal. Yet in this moment we need to fight for democracy to save it. This is a struggle here in the United States, yet it is being felt around the globe. Who else is as influential in world geopolitics today who could take up the mantle of democracy if we discard it? What keeps striking me about what the Republicans are doing is that it is all for short-term goals that masquerade as solutions to the country’s problems. What I and many like me want are long term solutions that will actually resolve many of those problems.

With this new congressional map, I and every other moderate, liberal, and progressive on the Missouri side of Greater Kansas City will lose all federal representation. We currently are represented in Congress solely by Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver II, who has served this city for many decades. I regularly send emails to our senators, Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt about a variety of issues that I care about from restoring funding to the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (NEA, NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), to my fears of presidential overreach with so many executive orders which seek policy changes that by law can only be made through acts of Congress. In every instance, the response I receive has nothing to do with what I wrote. In the case of an email I sent to Senator Hawley concerning my fears over my profession’s long-term viability in this country as federal funding to universities and research institutions is threatened for political reasons, I received an email back lauding the Big Beautiful Bill and all the good it will do for America. A screenshot of that email is included below.

Meanwhile, Senator Schmitt’s office only responds with campaign emails pretending to be official senatorial correspondence. This ought to be illegal in my opinion, and a version of the Hatch Act of 1939 should be passed for the Legislative Branch to keep Members of Congress from using their official correspondence to actively campaign for their offices. I have a folder filled with all of the emails I’ve received from his office since April 2024 and normally they will go directly into that folder. Yet there was one email his office sent me in response to my concerns over cutting funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which was such a blatant example of his dismissive approach to his constituents who disagree with his views that I became pretty angry. 

So, I called his Washington office, realizing as the phone was ringing that it was after business hours in the East, and left a voicemail. In summation, I challenged him to actually address his constituents’ concerns. I borrowed what I imagine is the lingo of the manosphere, a foreign corner of the Internet to me and challenged him “man to man to stop being a coward and do his job for all Missourians, not just those in his own party.” I haven’t gotten a response to that one, whether by email, phone, or letter. This is not how I like to talk to people, let alone write to them. I would rather find ways to speak to people in their own language to lift them up. I’m my worst when I lose that sense that I can say or do something that will make the lives of the people around me better.

It’s in this spirit that I decided to write again this week about democracy. Any form of representative government requires that we trust in each other for it to function. This is one of the central tactics of the current majority party. The President recently called the city of my birth a “hellhole,” something that I take personal offence to. I appreciated Stephen Colbert’s response, especially the heartfelt final two words of it.[6] In my essay “A Defense of Humanism in a Time of War” I wrote that I don’t want to be known as a pacifist because there will always be schoolyard bullies to contend with.[7] The people in power today here in Missouri and the slim governing majority in Washington are the biggest bullies this country has seen in a long time. They evoke the worst aspects of America, the greed that embodied both the First Gilded Age and the garishness of this Second Gilded Age in which we live. Not content with letting the democratic process that brought them into office work as it has for over two centuries, they insist on doing what they’ve accused their opponents of doing: rigging the electoral process in their favor. They clearly do not trust us, so why should we trust them?

Democracy is nourished by a love of neighbor. American democracy in particular is built upon a bedrock of idealism that we are still trying to achieve. That is what we need to work on. Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor, argues that we are on the verge of a second Progressive Era, a time of tremendous political reform. We who oppose the Missouri supermajority and the thin ruling majority in Washington need to remember that end goal. We need to sustain the democratic spirit through this time of trouble so that we can have a better tomorrow. I’m writing this knowing the risks because I feel it’s my duty as an American. I will always stand up for my neighbor regardless of if we agree or disagree on a given topic just as I will stand up for my colleagues, students, friends, and family because it’s the right thing to do.

[1] “On Democracy,” Wednesday Blog 5.39.

[2] “We, Irish Americans,” Wednesday Blog 6.10.

[3] “On Servant Leadership,” Wednesday Blog 6.15.

[4] “Freedom from Fear,” Wednesday Blog 2.6; “Embodied Patriotism,” Wednesday Blog 6.26.

[5] “Governor Kehoe announces special session on congressional redistricting and initiative petition reform,” Office of the Governor of the State of Missouri, 29 August 2025.

[6] “A Scary Time For Chicago | Trump Gets FOMO Over China’s Military Parade | Donald’s Life Lessons,” The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (3 September 2025), YouTube.

[7] “A Defense of Humanism in a Time of War,” Wednesday Blog 6.24.

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The Lotus-Eaters

The Lotus-Eaters – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, comparing the benefits of pleasure with the rewards of good work.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:Photo: © Juan Valentín CC BY-NC 4.0 https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/427040191. No modifications made. Available under public license. Image slightly cropped length-wise for podcast episode art.[1] André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, (Antwerp, 1558), 4v ; Aristotle, Situations and Names of Winds 973b, 12–13.[2] Homer, Odyssey 9.106–110, trans. Robert Fagles, (Penguin, 1996), 214.[3] Homer, Odyssey 9.110–117, trans. Fagles, 214.[4] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1118a.[5] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1118a, 8.

Photo: Ziziphus lotus, © Juan Valentín CC BY-NC 4.0 https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/427040191. No modifications made. Available under public license.

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This week, comparing the benefits of pleasure with the rewards of good work.

A recurring challenge of my life is finding a good work-life balance. Perhaps central to this conundrum is the fact that I simply enjoy the work that I do, so I’m more willing to approach something work-related at all hours because it brings me joy. There are plenty of things that I need to do with my time, and plenty more that I know I will someday accomplish, yet I feel less pressed to push through any weariness or writer’s block to finish a given project today than I have in the past. For most things, I have a wide enough gap leading up to project deadlines that I can afford to work as I will on a given project. This is a luxury of the moment, which was foreign to me even a year ago, and I know well that the ample time I have now is a singular moment in my life that will likely not repeat often again. So, as long as I have the time to spend working on the Wednesday Blog and the handful of articles and book chapters that I’m writing, I’ll use that time to the best of my ability.

Each of us operates within the structures of our civilization, and within the cultural edifices built up over millennia that define our very identities. No one exists in true solitude everyone comes from somewhere. There are plenty of stories of loosening the burdens of life for the splendid abandon. Life is hard for all of us; one of the great unifying factors of the human experience is struggle. I doubt that either the richest or the poorest people alive today are fully happy and content in their present state. There are certainly things I would like to change about my life, things that I’m now approaching with the same resolve that I dedicate to my work and I see that among my family and friends too, such potent dedication to completing tasks difficult and easy alike that when all is said and done the doer can rest proud of their work.

Still, there is value to taking time to rest. I’ve developed a bad habit of sitting at my desk until I’m so tired that I can’t sit up straight, or even to the point that I find one eye closing so that I can keep reading with the other. These make for good stories but they’re bad habits overall. It seems to me like there’s so much to learn and not enough time to commit it all. We Americans are particularly bad at our work-life balance. While we have a strong work ethic in this country, we don’t give ourselves enough time to enjoy the fruits of our labor. I now work at some of the places where otherwise I would go to rest, places like the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts where when I returned to Kansas City in December 2022, I was a frequent patron of the Kansas City Symphony’s performances until March 2023 when I signed on as a Team Captain of the Volunteer Usher Corps. Now, I work at the Kauffman Center and while I don’t get to relax and soak in the music there anymore, I’m proud of the work that I do and I work with people who I genuinely enjoy being around. In fact, working at the Kauffman Center has magnified the value of my historical research and writing even more. That’s what I love most in all the things that I do because it’s what I’m best at, and it’s through academia that I’ve met some of the people I most admire in all the world. The last two months then when I singularly devoted my attention to researching, writing, and editing a new and better introduction to my dissertation I poured all my effort and energy into the task and the work shows it. Yet I also drained myself of that same strength and realized that the working hours I kept four years ago when I was reading 12 hours a day in preparation for my comprehensive exams were no longer tenable. Life moves on, and with the changes in my life so too my stamina for these sorts of long hours have changed. I’m doing a lot more now than I was during the height of the pandemic in January, February, and March of 2021. Thus, it’s reasonable to say that I cannot do quite as much of the same things that I once did.

There are times when I can get so caught up in what it is I’m doing in the moment that I miss the world going by. I mourn a little bit how fast 2025 has been for me, there are things I wish I had done in the first half of this year that I failed to do for one reason or another. Often those reasons were out of my control. Yet they remain monuments to things that could have been. In other cases, though those things are goals which I turned away after finding better things to pursue. I’ve learned that I must remain open to change, flexible in my ways of living and doing things. How many times have I thought I was done with my dissertation only to be told that there was still more work to do? I know that endeavor defines my career and will continue to do so as long as I’m contributing to the scholarship of Renaissance natural history. Still, at times the idea of abandoning my efforts and falling into a state of rest has its appeal. At this moment, I would appreciate a vacation, even if only 24 hours away from my work. I took some time to enjoy the friendly company of my brother Hibernians and their families, and my Gaelgeoir friends this weekend at the Kansas City Irish Fest. It was lovely using that time to be with people whose company I enjoy, yet it was just as great a joy to return to my work this week and especially now that I’ve finished this round of work on my dissertation’s introduction to return to editing my translation of André Thevet’s 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique. I had a delightful day spent reading through the Loeb Classical Library and the Perseus database hunting down Thevet’s Greek and Roman references on the geography, ethnography, and zoology of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The legacy of those ancient authors lies heavy on the European perception of their southern neighbors. The Greeks especially perceived Libya, their name for Africa, as the great desert landmass on the southern edge of their world. Thevet wrote that Libya was named by the Greeks for the southwestern wind, or Lips (Λίψ), a notion he got from Aristotle’s book the Situations and Names of Winds.[1] Thus, while Libya was the Greek name for Africa as a whole in antiquity, that the name was associated more with the southwest than the south suggests that their notion of Libya was west of Egypt and in the general vicinity today known as Libya. Further west along the Mediterranean coast of Africa lay an island where Homer records that Odysseus’s ship made a beachhead born by the north wind across what Robert Fagles translates as “the fish-infested sea.” On the tenth day “our squadron reached the land of the Lotus-eaters,” who Homer described as “people who eat the lotus, mellow fruit and flower.” Odysseus’s crewmen “snatched a meal by the swift ships” and found as “they mingled among the natives” that they “lost all desire” to do their duties 

“much less return

their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters,

grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey home

dissolved forever.”[2]

The lotus-eaters of the Odyssey who live in bliss induced by the plant. Their worries carried far away they could bask in the glow of their sun and live out their days in a sense of peace. Yet Odysseus saw in this idyll a great distraction from what must be done, he and his crew needed to still return home to Ithaca. The king in his wisdom continued his story,

“But I brought them back, back

To the hollow ships, and streaming tears––I forced them,

Hauled them under the rowing benches, lashed them fast

And shouted out commands to my other, steady comrades:

‘Quick, no time to lose, embark in the racing ships!’––

So none could eat the lotus, forget the voyage home.”[3] (9.92-117)

The danger lay less in an immediate threat to life and limb but rather in a threat to mission, to vocation. Odysseus knew his charge was to shepherd as many of his men home as he could; what a tragedy it was that after all his efforts he returned home alone. The threat of the lotus-eaters lay in their carefree abandon of the need of self-preservation. Eventually, had the King of Ithaca and his men stayed on the island they would have faded in body and in spirit, dying not in war but by becoming stale and wasting away slowly until they had not even their memory to keep alive. Too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing, just as everything changes over the long dance of time.

Moderation then is the best way of living, to do things such that we humans not only survive but thrive in the conditions in which we find ourselves. Aristotle expresses this best in his Nicomachean Ethics that for every sort of action or feeling there is an excess and a deficiency and between them a mean which is the moral virtue. Thus, the lotus-eaters lived in a state of self-indulgent excess, born from their love of the lotus plant and the way it can make all their troubles disappear.[4] Aristotle argued that “temperance and profligacy are concerned with those pleasures which man shares with the lower animals, and which consequently appear slavish and bestial.”[5] It is human to have passions, desires, and urges to do one thing over another, yet it is an entirely different thing to give into those passions and abandon control over one’s own life. I think it is a greater sorrow to give up this control thoughtlessly than it is to have that control taken from you, even if the act of subjugation remains in the eye of the subduer and only as powerful as society wills it to be. This is something we too often forget: so many of the bad things that go on in our world are things of our own making. We choose to allow rampant gun violence in our country, or to let the institutions of our democracy crumble, or to let people go hungry, die from treatable diseases, and remain illiterate all because people in positions of power benefit from having others in need. I suspect that we don’t have to live like this. Perhaps the root of these societal woes comes from an understandable inability to understand death, that final act of life which often is so very unfair to the dying and those left behind. So long as the greatest inequity exists then why should we bother with trying to fix our own problems?Dear reader, I’ve been writing this Wednesday Blog now for four and a half years, and I’ve always said that my one rule for this publication is that I will end it once it’s no longer fun to write. Just before the pandemic during a family gathering, one of my uncles remarked that he had no interest in retiring soon because he loves the work he does. This struck me because it explains why I’ve stuck around in academia in spite of all the trouble I’ve been through in these past few years. I do this work because I love it; I write because I enjoy writing, and I’m writing to you today to suggest that we could make our world a better place to live for ourselves and our children and grandchildren who’ll come after us, we just have to leave the island and its lotuses and climb back into our boat and set out onto the fish-infested sea again. For all that I’ve learned about a great many topics, I still often need reminding to do basic things like stop reading or writing late at night and go to bed. I suspect that’s the case for most of us, that we get caught up in the worries or passions of the day and lose sight of the good things that we can do to really find true peace. Here in the United States the first big step that we ought to take is reconsider how we prioritize work to such a degree that it becomes life itself. We ought to work to live, not live to work. On this Labor Day week that’s as good a starting place as any.

[1] André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, (Antwerp, 1558), 4v ; Aristotle, Situations and Names of Winds 973b, 12–13.

[2] Homer, Odyssey 9.106–110, trans. Robert Fagles, (Penguin, 1996), 214.

[3] Homer, Odyssey 9.110–117, trans. Fagles, 214.

[4] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1118a.

[5] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1118a, 8.

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