Tag Archives: Life

The Wednesday Blog

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This week, to conclude what I’ve been saying.

I’ve said over the four years that I’ve been writing the Wednesday Blog weekly that I would stop writing this when it ceased to be fun. That’s a good rule for life overall that I’ve found: devote your life to things you love doing and keep them fun in the process. I tend to put on a very dry public face; a friend recently commented that I didn’t seem like one to scream or cheer at a concert, I affirmed that statement and demonstrated my own gentle “hurray!” to great amusement. This blog has changed with the times. It began as a project for me to write about things I enjoy outside of my research. I like to point to an early blog post all about my favorite state highway signs as a good example of this.^[1] Yet I’ve found the topics I write about are changing, they’re becoming more academic, outlets where I can introduce some of the ideas I’m working on in my professional life and workshop them in a public forum. It’s a bald faced way of getting more readers to the Blog, I admit, yet so far, it’s worked.

I continue to cover politics here when I feel there’s a need to say something. Yet I’ve tried to balance what I’m writing to keep it positive, or at least to ensure that what I end up publishing suggests ways we can move forward out of the current crises we face. After all, there are enough writers out there pointing out the crises of the moment, some of us should be looking to the future to offer a light ahead that we all can reach for. This Spring, I was inspired by the commemorations in Boston of the 250^th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution and the rallies for democracy here in Kansas City to focus that positive attention on popular action, the root of any good political system. I believe that government must act with the consent and full participation of the governed, and that through our elected representatives at all levels we ought to consider ourselves both governed and government. It sounds paradoxical, I know, and to an extent I believe that paradoxes are often a good thing. I devised one of my favorite phrases, “the extraordinary acts of ordinary people” to express this sentiment, that it is people acting out of the ordinary, out of what is considered ordered, which propels political change and keeps our politics fresh.^[2] In 2023 one of the fads of the year on the internet was women asking men how often they think of the Roman Empire. I was asked this by one of my colleagues over lunch at the Nativity Parish School and remarked that because I was teaching the Romans at the time they were front of mind. Beyond this however, as much as I am familiar with the remains of the Empire, I am more drawn to the Republic and its ideals of popular government, even if they were never realized. The founders of the United States sought to model this federal republic on Roman models, yet they kept the Constitution they framed fresh for its day, an American constitution living in its ability to be amended to fit the changing times and passage of each generation rather than a Roman one deemed sacred through association with the old Republic’s gods and ancient institutions. Our republic is secular because for it to be sacred is to make it inviolate and unchanging, a monolith which will grow ever more distant from the people it was meant to govern, until like Shelley’s Ozymandias it is left as a mere pedestal of itself adrift in the sands of time.^[3]

I want to stay a while longer with this phrase because I am so proud of it. To trumpet the extraordinary acts of ordinary people is to say that everyone has a voice and an impact upon the rest of us. In the first few years of the Wednesday Blog, my political essays tended to get lower readership across the board. I started writing the Blog in March 2021, a year after the January 6^th insurrection showed how much the Republic was corrupted by the refusal to concede the 2020 election which caused that attack on the Capitol. I’ve seen a steady decline in political readership for my writing since the 2016 election, yet after 2020 that readership dropped off a cliff. American politics today is not a happy thing to write about, and at the moment it only seems to be getting worse. Yet by focusing less on the people in power and more on the people engaged for the common good I saw my readership grow on these political essays until they tended to be level with my other non-academic writing. A great inspiration for me here lies in the revolutionary era anthem Chester, sung by the New Englanders in the Continental Army and one of the older tunes in this country’s patriotic songbook. I’d been listening to it here and there without realizing for months, yet once I figured out what it actually was, when I was in Boston in March no less, I found that it spoke to my sentiment in a far greater way than I anticipated. I’m listening to William Schuman’s arrangement in his New England Triptych (1956) as I write this now, a New Deal era work intended to celebrate the democratic spirit of the cradle of the revolution.

There is a great deal of history behind my politics, naturally I notice that being a trained historian, and having taught American and British history on several occasions and having read a great deal in Irish history I can point out the various threads which I’ve coalesced into a logical genealogy of my political philosophy. Suffice to say, I believe it is better to look to the future and enact political policy which will build a future that we can all be proud of. At the core of this is listening to the people around us, hearing what they have to say, and listening to our own logic and empathy, two things which should always work together in our decisions. In writing about the extraordinary acts of ordinary people I look to those who will appear from the crowd as the leaders from my millennial generation and those coming up behind us in Generations Z and Alpha. We have inherited a great mess, and we have a lot of work to do. There are plenty of people arguing and advocating on what needs to be reformed, I feel better suited to provide an optimistic voice of what we could look forward to. By putting ordinary people front and center, I hope to make clear that policy should address problems from the bottom up, help reinforce and support the poorest in society that the whole structure grows stronger in kind. You might call this trickle-up economics, to speak to the Reaganites. We could build a future where everyone has good work, they can be proud of, enough to eat, a roof over their heads, and where every child learns how to read. We could have this future where people feel that law is meant to support them rather than push them down. I see this every day when I’m out around town: I suspect that the general sentiment behind people who run stop signs, red lights, or drive in transit only lanes is that the law has never worked in their favor, always rather beaten them down and stripped them of their humanity, so why should they follow the law? We must find our humanity in each other if we are ever going to grow out of this time of crises and begin to build a better future.

I enjoy thinking about the future in other languages, not just in the sense of the future tense but in the mentality of the language. How do they express things which haven’t happened but will come? In English we have the word future as a monolith on its own, derived from French and originally from the Latin futūrus, an irregular future active participle of the to be verb sum. In English, the future is as much a place as it is a time, it’s the destination we’re going to. Yet is it not better to think of the future as the scenery about to pass by as we go down the line like the trees and fields that we pass on a train? The present is momentary, here and gone in the blink of an eye, each millisecond the present, and the past a great gulf of memory whence we came. Yet the future is something both unknown and recognizable. It is both what we can see ahead of us along the way and what is just over the next horizon. It is an irregular version of being which will come someday. French expresses the concept of the future like this, whereas futur refers to the tense, l’avenir is instead the noun I’ve heard used most to describe the concept of the future. Yet l’avenir instead merely is the crafting of a phrase, temps à venir (time to come) into a noun, avenir, or that which is coming. We don’t know in truth what it is, what it will feel like when it comes, yet we know that someday we will see it and live in it. The future is inevitable, yet it is not singular by nature. Rather, if there is one past and present those are merely the choices made by actors in those moments which were chosen from the multitude that is possible from what could come.

Irish expresses this sense of the future well because Irish really has no specific word for future. There is a future tense, which in some ways is more regular in its formation than the Irish present tense. Instead, Irish uses a phrase which breaks down the future into its core concepts: An rud atá le teacht, or the thing which is coming. Therein lies the future in its baldest form: it is merely the thing that is coming next out of all the possibilities. Another topic which I seemed to write about a fair deal for a while was faith, self-help, and religion. My Catholicism is influential to my cosmovision and political philosophy in my core belief of the paradoxical nature of God, that God can exist yet also be omnipotent and omniscient. Because of this, I like to say, “anything is possible in the Eyes of God,” or for short, “anything is possible.” As I think about the end of my doctoral writing and needing a dedication to affix on my dissertation, I’ve found myself thinking about this phrase, and about who my audience is. After all, you now reading this sentence in my future, just as I wrote it in your past. It is possible that just about anyone could be reading this now, and so rather than dedicate my work to one person in particular in the moment in which I am writing it, perhaps I ought to instead dedicate it to the possible, or rudaí indéanta in Irish. That second word indéanta is a neat one because it comes from the verb déan, meaning to do, thus the possible is something that might be done. In English and French, I say, “I am studying” or « J’étudie, » yet in Irish, I say, “Déanaim ag staidéar,” or “I am doing study,” which makes the study more of an act than a state of being. The future has and always will be something acted, something done by individuals in our own small ways that creates great change in the collective form.

I study history because of all the things I am interested in it is history which brings them together. So far, history is a human creation made in our image and likeness which seeks to tell our story as best as we can recall it. We’ve devised historical methods of a similar manner to understand other histories, salvation history, church history, and natural history to name three. I returned to natural history as an adult yearning for the halcyon days of curiosity and wonder from my early childhood and built my career on my study of André Thevet’s (1516–1590) sloth. It’s become my gateway into the history of natural history, and through it I’m beginning to make my name as a sloth historian. I do not believe in prescriptivism, the notion that history in inexorably leading to some great moment in the future when the final form of human nature will announce itself. I think this is limiting, claustrophobic in fact. It’s far too simplistic to say that we will all wake up someday and find the morning sunlight is just a little bit brighter, the grass and trees greener, and the sky a prettier shade of blue because there’ll be somebody among us who will find something contrary about the experience. I for one an enjoying the gray skies outside my window today, it’s finally cool enough in mid-October for me to open the blinds in my room and let some sunlight in without making it too hot. Rather, history teaches us that the future is what we will make of it. I chose to not study the twentieth century because I felt this dolorous pain in my heart that there were so many things which happened in the last century which could have been avoided, choices which could have been different. In studying recent history, I worried I would be faced with the ghosts of the world wars, Great Depression, and all the troubles faced by humanity in general and my fellow Irish Americans in particular throughout my working life.

Instead, I looked deeper into the past, first to the Roman Republic with an interest in studying the expansion of Roman citizenship in the late Republic after the Social War of the 90s and 80s BCE and later to the Renaissance, a period that seemed similar enough, Latinate to be sure, yet full of people and stories who I felt I could relate to better than the ancients. I found Thevet almost accidentally, and through his sloth I feel that I’ve found balance in my life that sustains me today, makes me feel more fulfilled in my efforts than I was before. My history is fundamentally interdisciplinary, historical zoology adopts zoological methods and theories to determine the true nature of historical animals, layering their scientific taxa upon their far older human memory and legendaria. In Thevet I am able to work with the ancients, looking especially Aristotle and Pliny, yet soon after I can turn around and look ahead to Buffon and Linnaeus and see how they interpreted what Thevet wrote in order to establish a clear lineage through the historical record for the animal in question. There is nothing sure about this history, often the historical sources are lacking with detail about a given animal, or the zoological data may not have enough detail about an extinct species to offer a clear picture of what it is I am describing. Both are limited by the foggy memory of the human past, yet together they can offer a light with which to move ahead and keep exploring those parts of our cosmos which are still strange and unfamiliar to us today.

I write because it is the greatest way I’ve yet found to express myself. I can say far more in an essay such as this than I could in a conversation. The Wednesday Blog remains less formal than my academic writing, here I use the first person. Yet with the passage of time, I’ve found the Blog has become more academic to the point that friends have told me they got an education about Thevet that they never expected. The Blog has several antecedents, including earlier less regular blog posts which you can find on this same website from before 2021 that all form the roots of this project. I’m proud of the writing I’ve done here, the Wednesday Blog now is comprised of 238 essays and 200 podcast episodes, I’ve written 521 pages, and the total word count is over 300,000. The future is defined as much by its potential as the fact that once it comes to be what was present will then be past. To see an end gives all things meaning. It is for this reason, at the end of the sixth book of the Wednesday Blog, and fifth season of the podcast, that I’ve decided to end this particular publication. This remains a fun thing to write, yet I have so much more to do today, and I only see that workload growing as I try my hand at more peer-reviewed articles, books, and translations in the coming decades. I hope the Wednesday Blog will be a testament to who I was at this point in my life in the years after the COVID-19 Pandemic and during my long years of doctoral study. Let these essays remain a monument of the first half of the 2020s, a sign of where we’ve been and where I hope we will be going.

^[1] “Signs,” Wednesday Blog 1.10.

^[2] “On Servant Leadership,” Wednesday Blog 6.15.

^[3] Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” Poetry Foundation.

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On Little Things

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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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On Simplicity

On Simplicity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:Photo by Elizabeth Duke.[1] Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba, trans. Peter Bien, (Simon and Schuster, 1946, 2014), 81.[2] “Elephant Tails,” Wednesday Blog 5.24.[3] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.[4] “On Political Violence,” Wednesday Blog 5.17.

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This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.

Over the last several weeks I’ve written about forms of knowledge and knowledge collecting. Knowledge is easier to identify, as it is empirical in its core. Yet on a scale even beyond knowledge lies wisdom, the cumulative sum of humanity’s understanding of the underlying character of human nature. It’s very easy for me to get bogged down in words, words, words and tie myself in knots which I find nigh unbreakable and even more undecipherable. Yet amid all those layers of paint there are often gems which merely need good editing to illuminate. This is what fills my days today, a big edit which I hope will signal the beginning of the end of my years of doctoral study.

In these years, while I’ve devoted my days to reading histories of the Renaissance intersections between the Americas and France, I’ve made a point of reading for fun all the same. I need to read things not related to my research for the escape they provide. At times these fun readings have been more thoroughly connected to my research, as in my recent choice of Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing, yet in Binghamton I spent many happy evening hours reading Star Trek anthologies and novels while returning to my vocation each day. Of the stories that I’m drawn to, I enjoy reading books and watching films with characters that embody a certain lived experience that begats wisdom. Recently, this desire for such a character led me to read Peter Bien’s new translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba. This is phronesis. Zorba’s wisdom is one that’s been gathered over the sixty years of his life and funneled toward living a good life as he sees fit. His is a simple wisdom which recognizes the physical limitations of the body in opposition to the limitless potential of the soul. I loved the first dance scene in Zorba the Greek in which the old miner erupted upward from his dinner and began to leap about. Kazantzakis describes it as though his soul could not be contained by his body and that it was that spiritual essence which spoke so fervently and wordlessly of its own joy. Kazantzakis can make even the simplest of scenes appear elegant and luminous. His description of the passage of time on the Mediterranean reaching up from Africa to the southern shore of Crete is one of my favorites. Here, I quote from Bien’s translation with the affection that beautiful prose deserves:

“The immense sea reached African shores. Every so often a warm southwest wind blew from distant red-hot deserts. In the morning the sea smelled like watermelons; at midday it vented haze, surged upward discharging miniature unripe breasts; in the evening, rose pink, wine red, eggplant mauve, dark blue, it kept continuously sighing.”^[1]

The wisdom inherent in Kazantzakis’s prose lies in his ability to evoke the variable texture of nature, the changing face of it with the passage of the day. I remember once in Binghamton I have the idea to take a selfie once an hour throughout the day to see how my face, hair, stubble, and what not changed as the hours passed. I know for instance that if I want to have a lower register in my recordings of this Wednesday Blog that I need to record first thing in the morning when my tenor is closer to a baritone. This week, owing to a general sense of exhaustion, I haven’t gotten around to writing this essay until nearly 90 minutes before when the podcast normally publishes. Rather than force myself to write something earlier in the day I waited and gave myself the time to think of something good.

Wisdom is knowing that worrying won’t get you anywhere; it lies in the peace of mind and heart that keeps us happy and healthy. This evening, while I was having dinner with one of my best friends and his wife and young son, I brought up my particular conundrum of the day. Jokingly, the suggestion that I write about simplicity was made. I shrugged, thinking of William of Ockham, one of Bill Nye’s favorite history of science examples to use, and decided to run with it. After all, often the wisest people that I’ve met are the ones who embrace the simplicity of living a life embracing their own nature. The wise know that they are going to grow old and die and don’t worry about it. I find myself thinking of this as I watch without much resource as my hair recedes. I’ve joked that my particularly follicly impaired genes may require an eventual investment in a variety of hairpieces for different degrees of formality. I’ve grown in my own comfort with taking care of myself, applying sunscreen before going out on walks around the neighborhood now to mitigate the inevitable that comes from having largely Irish genes and living in the far sunnier Midwestern climate than my ancestors’ rain soaked home soil in Mayo. In his Saint’s Life, Alexis Zorba often doesn’t worry about these things and expresses frustration and even anger when the narrator, his boss, frets about the things he cannot control. I’m better at this than I have been, which is reassuring in some ways of looking at things, yet I still have room to grow.

Wisdom is trusting the people around you to do what they feel is best. If the simplest solution is often the best, then why aim to make things overly complex? Complexity requires forethought, or sometimes is the result of a lack of forethought. Last summer I delighted in writing several essays for the Wednesday Blog attempting to adapt chaos theory to explain human behavior.^[2] We need both complexity and simplicity to understand ourselves and the world in which we live. Think about it: we cannot narrow things down to binary options. More often, the binary is one of a series of binaries which together form a logical thought or series. I marvel at the fact that computers most fundamentally work in the binary language of 1s and 0s, and that in this manner language and thought are boiled down to so rudimentary an interpretation. It’s for this reason that while I’m concerned by the rise and development of artificial intelligence and its misuse, I feel a sense of assurance that it is still limited by its basic functions and limited by the abilities of its artifice.^[3] The human brain is a wonderous and ever complicated organ which evolved to fulfill its own very particular needs. On the simplest level the brain thinks, it sends directions to the rest of the body to keep the body operating. In a theological framework, I’ve argued that the brain may be the seat of the soul, the consciousness that is at the core of our thought. My earliest memory that I’ve written about here was the first time I recognized that particular voice of my own consciousness, which occurred sometime when I was 3 years old.^[4]

Wisdom is intangible, it’s something that you have to learn to recognize. This is perhaps the most complex tenant that represents something simple. In order to truly become wise, one must understand that wisdom isn’t something you can buy off the shelf or write your way into. For all the words which Zorba’s boss writes, allowing them to consume him, he remains feeling unfulfilled in life. It’s why the narrator of the novel struck out from his books and sought to live among ordinary people, buying a stake in a lignite mine on the southern shore of Crete. On his way there in the Piraeus he met Zorba, the man who within a few pages became his foreman and the one who’d realize his idea of finding wisdom in the living world. The simplest explanations are often best. Zorba lives to enjoy the life he has, and when things go wrong––as they often do––he finds something to build upon and start over again.

A couple of months from now I’m going to be contributing my own experiences to a tacit knowledge panel at the History of Science Society’s conference in New Orleans about how I’ve been able to maintain a full research load and writing all year round with hardly any funding at all. I recognize that the circumstances of these past few years have been marked by my own poor decisions and mistakes that I’ve made along the way. Yet in spite of those, and bad luck in many respects, I’ve been able to continue with my work and to produce historical studies that are beginning to make a decent contribution to the history of science in the Renaissance and specifically to the history of animals in that same period. I’m looking forward to that panel, and to the two papers I’m presenting during the same weekend. Maybe, like Zorba, when things feel like they are about to go well I’ll feel the need to rise to my feet and leap into the air as though my soul were attempting to escape from my body. Simply put, for all the trouble that life has brought, joy is overpowering when pure.

^[1] Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba, trans. Peter Bien, (Simon and Schuster, 1946, 2014), 81.

^[2] “Elephant Tails,” Wednesday Blog 5.24.

^[3] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.

^[4] “On Political Violence,” Wednesday Blog 5.17.

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On Skepticism

On Skepticism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I express my dismay at how fast time seems to be moving for me of late and how it reflects the existence of various sources of knowledge in our world.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, (University of Chicago Press, 2025), 603.[2] If this word epistemology leaves you confused, have no fear, for my own benefit as well I wrote a blog post explaining this word alongside two of its compatriots. “Three Ologies,” Wednesday Blog 6.6 (podcast 5.6).

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This week, I express my dismay at how fast time seems to be moving for me of late and how it reflects the existence of various sources of knowledge in our world.

I first noticed the passage of time on my tenth birthday, that is to say I remember remarking on how from that day on for the rest of my life, I would no longer be counting my years in single digits. I remember distinctly the feeling of surprise at this, a sense that I could never go back to my earliest years. That was especially poignant for me as those first six years lived in the Chicago suburbs held a nostalgic glow in my memory then as they do now. In those early years I felt that time moved slowly; I remember once as a kid I fretted over a 3 minute cooking timer, worrying that I would be unable to stand there and watch the flame over which I was cooking eggs for a full 3 minutes. Today that sounds silly, yet I believe it is vital to remember how I felt all those years ago lest I lose my empathy with my past self or anyone else I may encounter with similar concerns over things I see as minute.

Soon after my tenth birthday, I found a new method of getting through things that I found tedious or even odious to endure. I realized that if I tricked myself into enjoying the moment that the tedium would pass by quicker than if I wallowed in my annoyance and misery. Perhaps there was a degree of pessimism in this realization: that the good moments don’t seem to last as long as the bad ones in my recollection of things, or that it’s in fact easier to remember the bad more than the good. This is something I’ve been struggling with lately, that when I find my thoughts sinking to these depths of my greatest uncertainty and grief that I need to remind myself of all the good in my life. Time seems to move faster today than it did before. The days fly by more than linger, and there’s always something new or old that I need to do. I’ve long thrived on work, a trait I inherited from my parents. Often my happiest days are those spent dedicated to a specific task; those days are made happy by my sense of accomplishment once the task has progressed or even is done. I’ve learned to accept that good things won’t often be finished in a day. I’ll push myself instead to do as much as I feel I can do in the span of a day and see where that leaves me when I go to bed at night. With the new introduction to my dissertation this meant that it took me 9 days to write all 105 pages of it. This is one of those times where I feel that I’m on a roll and in my writer’s paradise when I can write and write and write and not run out of ideas to commit to paper.

Yet I worry about that quicker passage of time because I feel that there are less things that I’m able to do in a given day than I would like. I sacrifice rest sometimes in order to see a project to completion, or I choose to try and find a balance between my work and the rest of my life only to see one side, or another overwhelm its counterpart leaving me feeling unfulfilled when I retire for the night. I do worry that the time I’m afforded is limited, and that I’m not going to do everything I want to undertake. There are plenty of things I want to write, so much I want to say, yet so little time in a given day to say it. I’m still young, just a few weeks over halfway to my 33^rd birthday. I have this lingering feeling that there’s so much that I want to do with the life I have and an indeterminate amount of time with which to do those things. Am I content with what I’ve done with my life so far? Yes. Is there so much more I want to do? Absolutely.

I suspect this shock at time moving faster is my own realization of my mortality. Everything has a beginning and an end, the mystery lies in not knowing either terminus directly. How many of us can remember our own birth? I certainly can’t. By the same token we can’t necessarily interview the dead after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil because, in the words of Dr. McCoy, they’re dead. Thus, we remain doubters of our own mortality, our limits. I often hear older friends talk about how the young feel invincible and immortal and make mistakes which reinforce that sentiment of invincibility all while, if they’re particularly bold or just unlucky, asserting their mortality with a sudden abandon. Our doubts are aimed at established sources of knowledge, authorities to whom we feel no particular duty to abide even if we begrudgingly accept their precepts out of bare necessity. I see enough people every day ignore pedestrian crossing lights even though they are there on the city’s authority to protect us pedestrians when crossing the streets that we’ve abdicated to vehicles. It usually leaves me at least frustrated at the ignorance of the driver, at most even angry when I’ve gotten close to being hit by such an ignoramus.

Skepticism is a significant marker in Renaissance studies as a transitional element from the classically inspired scholarship of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries into the empirical knowledge-making that traditionally we’ve said was emblematic of the Scientific Revolution. I have many colleagues who are working now on disproving the existence of that Scientific Revolution; I admire that cause and yearn to read what they’re writing even though one of my stock courses to teach is called “the Scientific Revolution: 1500-1800.” Ada Palmer calls Michel de Montaigne, in some ways the inspiration for my Wednesday Blog, “the avatar of this moment” when skepticism became a driving force in Renaissance thought.^[1] I argue in my dissertation that the American experience drove the course of skeptical thought in the Renaissance; all the things which André Thevet called singular in the Americas represented a dramatic break from classical standards of knowledge which required a new epistemology to explain them.^[2] The key here is that we should never be complacent that our current knowledge is all there is to know, after all a well-lived life is a life spent learning. I’m skeptical about many things and have a drive to continue learning, to continue exploring. Curiosity hasn’t killed this cat yet.^[3]I find then that my time is best spent in pursuit of this knowledge, and as much as one can learn alone in the solitude of their study reading and thinking quietly to oneself like a monk, it is far better to learn in communion with others. Since the pandemic began, I’ve grown particularly fond of Zoom lectures, webinars, and workshops as much for the expertise on show as for the community they build. Even if we only communicate through these digital media I still look forward to seeing these people, to experiencing that one part of life with them. We learn so that we might have richer experiences of our own lives, so that we might find comfort in our knowledge, so that we might, in Bill Nye’s words, “change the world.” In the time that I have afforded to me I want to learn more than anything else, to learn about the people around me, about our common heritage, about what our future may hold, and about myself. If I can do that, then when I am “no more, cease to be, expired and gone to meet my maker, become a stiff, bereft of life and resting in peace” I’ll be content in my leave-taking. Hopefully unlike the dead parrot they won’t nail me to my perch like Bentham’s auto-icon which greets knowledge-seekers in the South Cloisters of University College London, though that could be a rather humorous way to go.

^[1] Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, (University of Chicago Press, 2025), 603.

^[2] If this word epistemology leaves you confused, have no fear, for my own benefit as well I wrote a blog post explaining this word alongside two of its compatriots. “Three Ologies,” Wednesday Blog 6.6.

^[3] Meow.

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On Universals

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This week, I discuss some of the things which are common to all of us, problems we all share, and why I think we ought to look at solving those problems.

I don’t rest much these days, there’s so much I have on my mind from my work to my hopes for my life to the state of our world boiling in tumult around us. I sleep, yet I rarely feel rested when I awaken. I suspect it’s worse on those mornings when I’m pulled awake from the middle of a dream, that is from REM sleep into my waking reality. Perhaps this is the same for you if you’ve noticed it. This morning was one such occurrence and I’ve been tired throughout the day, even drifting off to sleep midday while watching the Cubs game and later riding in the backseat of my family’s car to an event. These days, I have a lot on my plate, and as one of my best friends pointed out to me recently, I’m probably due for a vacation of at least a week in length. When I have the time and the money to do so I’ll probably slip away somewhere as suggested.

I’ve always thought that the more technologically advanced our society becomes the better life will be for we humans who crafted these machines and machine intelligences which are the hallmarks of our civilization today. I suspect many, if not all, of you would both agree and disagree on some level with this statement. Life is easier on some counts, yet we still haven’t found a way to relieve the burden of human labor through invention. This is one of many universals we all have in common, one of many things we can look to and nod at as signs of our humanity. We all struggle in our own way, and we all have things we love and fear. I think at the core of our problems today is the desire to divide us into camps armed to the teeth to defend their own circle from the other circles out there in the fog of doubt. How often I’ve worried about nothing when someone doesn’t respond to a message, email, or letter when the person on the other end was simply busy! We all dream, don’t we? In our waking moments as well as in our sleep we dream about the life we want to have in our future. There does lie a difference between those who see those dreams as blueprints for what they can create and those who merely see these dreams as figments of an overactive imagination. Yet that difference can be overcome with enough courage and determination to see a better tomorrow.

I do believe that we all want to be happy, the question lies in what we each believe on our own terms will make us happy. In America, a country with capitalism so deeply baked into our collective consciousness, happiness is often quantifiable in dollars and cents. I went to college with a lot of people who chose their majors out of a conviction that their happiness would come if they became rich. I also know other people who are happy with quiet, unassuming lives. In my case I know I am capable of doing great things, of making an impact on our society, and I want to do all that. Yet as I’ve grown, I’ve found that what makes me happiest is being comfortable in my living, having choice in what I do and who I live my days with, and always seeking new knowledge and even wisdom from time to time. I know I need to earn my keep to do these things, something I’m presently not doing, yet as I often say when I’m feeling especially dour about the current state of my life at 32: I have many long years ahead of me, let’s take one step after another to get to that point of comfort that I seek.

Another universal emotion for humanity is fear; in fact, it’s one of the most powerful emotions we can feel. I know fear well, as Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Starship Voyager said to an embodiment of Fear in one of the finest episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, “I’ve known fear, it’s a very healthy thing most of the time. You warn us of danger, remind us of our limits, protect us from carelessness. I’ve learned to trust fear.” Fear is a seed of knowledge, yet hope is the fertilizer needed for wisdom to flower. We’ve been fed so much fear by one camp of all others that it is nearly all we hear today. Yet that fear lacks the depth which is needed for true societal growth to occur. The power of the fearmongers will remain brittle and fragile until at long last it crumbles again as it always does.

So, let me ask you this: what would it be like if we let our guard down even for a few moments and talked with one another about the things we have in common? What if we lowered our banners proudly proclaiming our camps and sought out the universal ground upon which we all stand? At the end of this time of change, whenever whatever is coming next is settled, we’re going to have to do just this. We will need to talk with one another and recognize our common humanity. What’s more, we will have to learn not only to talk with one another but listen to one another again. I’ve been in meetings in the last few months where I certainly could’ve contributed my own thoughts about the state of things, yet I’ve found it far better to be attentive to the people there with me and hear what they have to say. Often, we have similar concerns and similar hopes in kind. To do any of this takes a tremendous amount of courage but not anymore than we’ve mustered in the past. I’ve seen it after big storms when people help dig each other out of the damage. You may ask, “Why would we care about our neighbors if we don’t even know them well?” That question is simple: you do it because it’s the right thing to do.

There was a series of television commercials several years ago which purported to show a potentiality where it was normal to prefer pain or trouble over pleasure and comfort. I wonder if we aren’t in fact living in that world where we accept the pain and trouble because we can’t work up the courage to face that pain and trouble and find solutions to remedy it? Take for instance the trouble we go to in the United States to travel between our cities: we put up with uncomfortable day or multiday long road trips or quick yet rickety short-haul regional flights because we’ve dismissed the potential of trains to connect our smaller and larger cities together. Last month, I drove up to Chicago in the backseat of my Dad’s small pickup truck and returned home in a sleeper class roomette on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief. I appreciate the ride back to the city of my birth, yet the benefits of having more legroom, being able to walk about the train, lounge access in Chicago, and complimentary service in the dining car can only be outweighed by the convenience of being able to choose when I want to leave my origin and arrive at my destination by car, especially when as of now there’s only one direct train per day in each direction between Chicago and Kansas City.

We can use particular answers to solve universal problems, if only we have the courage to consider those particularities. I worry today that we may be short on the courage to solve our most universal of problems, the rot at the heart of our civilization that we’ve too long ignored until it’s oozing there right before our eyes. A house with rot in its foundation will eventually fall and crumble into ruin. Can we face our own rotting foundations before we lose what is most universal, what we most love and appreciate about our lives? Or can we do what we know to be right, what we know we must, and begin the process of rebuilding to craft a better version of the old edifice of our civilization, a more equitable edifice indeed, for our posterity to enjoy?I’ll leave you with those questions, because often the best conclusion to any essay ought to be the provocation of more queries rather than definitive answers.

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The Poetics of Finality

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This week, some words about endings.

On the morning of Flag Day, I went to the Linda Hall Library with my parents to see the classic 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still. I knew about this film, but this was my first time seeing it. Beside the story, what struck me most about this film was its tone, pacing, and overall character. After I finished my other two events of the day, the Plaza No Kings Rally where I watched the crowd of 11,000 people rally for democracy, and Mass that afternoon, I returned home tired yet eager to find that same tone. I went looking for it in Rod Serling’s classic series The Twilight Zone. Released between 1959 and 1964 in its first incarnation, this series had scared me a bit the previous times I’d sat down to watch an episode or two. It has an air of fear to it that is reminiscent of the reasons why I generally stay away from horror films. And yet on closer inspection, Serling’s stories tell something that is far less frightening than I first imagined because it’s a theme with which I’m all too familiar.

I came to indirectly know more about Mr. Serling when I moved to his hometown, Binghamton, New York, to undertake my doctoral studies in August 2019. His image isn’t all over town, but it’s a visible reminder of Binghamton’s history and place in the fabric of American culture. In fact, much of the stories that I’ve now watched in The Twilight Zone fit the character of that interior part of the Northeast where I lived from August 2019 to December 2022 quite well. In some ways, not too much of the built environment has changed from Serling’s day 60 years ago. Still, I noticed time and again how the optimism of that postwar era had faded. The same town was there, but some of the energy it once knew was long gone. Having lived my life to date in Chicago, Kansas City, and London, all cities with layers of history and memory, I’ve seen how the current generations have chosen to craft their own layer.

London is a city that holds mementos to its ancient and medieval past while largely built in the form of its eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century growth at the height of the British Empire. Yet today there are enough futuristic buildings and settings in the capital that it was used as a setting standing in for the space-age galactic capital of Coruscant in the latest Star Wars series Andor. I delighted in seeing familiar places from the Barbican Estate and Canary Wharf in the show.

Chicago has some of the same American character of Binghamton and the Northern states as a whole, a common history. Yet Chicago is the powerhouse of this country, the beating heart of our transportation network, the real crossroads of this nation. Where other industrial cities in the Great Lakes faltered in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s Chicago instead continued to power on for its sheer size and the diversity of its industry. Today, it has a very particular character which I believe makes it the most American city this country has to offer for its marriage of American settler culture and all the different indigenous, migrant, and immigrant communities that make America the patchwork of peoples in one great republic that it is.

Kansas City meanwhile saw more of the downturn for its smaller size and some of its traditional industries haven’t translated as well into the current information revolution. Kansas City once thrived as another great railway hub: the Gateway to the Southwest as the last major Midwestern metropolis along the Santa Fe Railroad as it drove across the prairies toward New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California. Today, our interstate highways direct traffic through Kansas City more from Texas, Colorado, the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, and points east than in the old northeast-to-southwest alignment of the rails. Recently while I was in downtown Kansas City, I remarked on how underwhelmed I felt visiting there for the first time after the business and thrill of going with my parents down to the Loop on weekends when we still lived in Chicago. Kansas City however has seen a renaissance of its own in the last twenty-five years that has filled in many of the gaps left by urban renewal and restored this city’s vitality. That more than anything else made my move to Binghamton a tremendous culture shock: going from a growing city to one that was a shadow of its former self struggling to invest in its future.

For every Twilight Zone episode there seems to be a fearsome unknown menace looming over the story; something that the character can perceive the effects of yet can’t quite see. Yet if there is any common thread to this menace it’s that it is a fear of the unknown. In the original pilot that launched the Twilight Zone, titled “The Time Element,” Serling’s rational psychoanalyst foil to the main character trapped in his dreams concludes through his logic that his dreams that he goes back in time from 1958 to Pearl Harbor on December 6^th, 1941 could not be real because any incident that happened in this dreamed 1941, if real, would impact the patient as he lived in 1958. Yet reason is proven unequipped to address the irrational, how can it explain what it intrinsically is not? I’ve argued time and again here in the Wednesday Blog that this is where there exists room for belief in a life lived rationally. Still, having watched a fair number of Mr. Serling’s stories now, I think I can say something to this menace’s true character.

There is an intrinsic fear that comes with knowledge of seeing that we do have an ending. On a biological level, our bodies can only continue working for so long. We drift apart from our lives as they were in one moment or another, apart from friends who we admired and loved in a given moment, apart from jobs that consumed our waking and sleeping thoughts, apart from situations which challenged us to become better versions of ourselves. Yet, all those lived moments will continue on in our memory, at least for a time. I was stunned to find how well I could remember very particular moments of minute detail earlier this year when prompted by a sudden and wonderful realization about how I want to live in my life to come. Even the smallest of details that my senses perceived were there, locked away. The antidote to any fear is joy, and for me it was the most radiant joy I’ve felt in years which unlocked those memories for me of moments which led to that jubilation. Still, fear in moderation is a good counsel, a wise friend. It’s what makes me watch for traffic when I’m crossing the street here in Kansas City, or that advises me to make certain decisions over other ones at a very fundamental level to keep me alive. This is one interpretation of what the infamous tree in Genesisportended: that once humanity ate its fruit we would never again be able to be innocent from seeing flaws in the beauty of nature and in the beauty of ourselves.

Over the weekend then, I went to see the new Stephen King film The Life of Chuck starring Tom Hiddleston as Charles Krantz. I particularly grew to like young Chuck’s grandfather played by Mark Hamill. If I were to compare Stephen King’s writing to any other American storyteller of the last century it would be Rod Serling. Both tell stories of this same menacing fear. Yet in King’s Life of Chuck, the monster who’s revealed in the last scene is far more familiar, ordinary, and known to us all that I saw it less as a menace and more as a companion. There is intense poetry in both Serling’s Twlight Zone and King’s Life of Chuck around endings. They tell us that the finality of moments in our lives and of our lives all together give our lives greater meaning and purpose. I’ve found in the various projects and events I’ve helped organize that we get more done when we have goals we’re trying to achieve and a timeline by when we want to achieve those goals. I often work better when I have deadlines because if I begin to feel impatient at how long something might take, I know there’s an end date to look forward to. I feel that about little things but not the big ones, not the experiences that’ll one day make for good stories or about my life itself.

I for one don’t want to live forever, I worry that’d take some of the meaning out of my life. I would like to be remembered for my writing, for being a good person, for the history I research and leave for generations of graduate students to muddle through in their coursework. On a recent digital security Zoom call that I attended we were asked to search our names on several search engines and see what came up. Should there be anything we didn’t want searchable we could then get that removed. I was delighted to see that after my website, social media profiles, and various conference programs came page after page filled with essays published here on The Wednesday Blog. I suppose that’s one benefit of writing this weekly for the last four years: my thoughts written here will be remembered at least by the search engines. Yet I think the Wednesday Blog will have more meaning when I decide to set it aside and turn my staff to other facets of “my so potent art” to borrow from Prospero. Because then anyone who is curious enough to glance through these pages will be able to see them in their totality and know these essays are artifacts of the time when they were written in the early 2020s at a time of my life of doctoral study that feels so very close to ending.

This is not the last time you’ll hear from me on the Wednesday Blog, rather I’ve decided to end my weekly publication of this blog at the end of the current season. This is Season 5 of the podcast, or Book 6 of the blog itself. I feel that it’s had a wonderful run, and it’s been a great outlet for me while I’m biding my time as my career slowly begins. Yet now, I’ve got a lot more writing to do from new research papers to submit for peer-review to book reviews that it’ll be nice to take this off my docket. This is the 25^th issue of this season, and I have a further 15 issues planned before the end. Thank you to all my readers over the last four years and all my listeners over the last three. I hope this will be an ending worthy of your curiosity.

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On Vanity

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This week, I reflect on the role of love in balancing between self-praise and community in a discussion of vanity.

Today, in Rome the College of Cardinals will convene for the new conclave to elect our next Pope. By the time you read this we may have already seen white smoke rise from the chimney and met our new pontiff by his papal name on the balcony of St. Peter’s. Or more likely when you read this the cardinals will be amid one volley or another of voting rounds and deliberating their right course of action. Since the death of Pope Francis, I’ve felt rebuffed by the electoral speculation over who will be the next pope; by and large I’ve avoided reading any of these articles or watching any of these analyses. On the one hand, in my lifetime these lists of papabili have often been wrong. Francis was an unexpected choice. Yet on the other hand I see a sense of vanity in all this speculation which seeks the political power of the Papacy while ignoring its pastoral nature. I’ve long heard that the eventual choice of Pope is supposed to be directed by the Holy Spirit, whispering perhaps into the ears of the men in red like God did to Elijah in the cave. In my own experience, I’ve seen this most in the realization that the best path for me to take often is the strangest or most winding in character.

It takes a great deal of humility to take that particularly uncertain way in life, to not know where you’re going to end up. You have to learn to trust in yourself and in the people around you to make that path work. I’ve learned to expect things to break, and nothing that I try to work, and to figure out how to move forward in spite of what I’d dreamed and hoped for. I try to learn from my experience even when it is painful or heart wrenching to see dreams vanish and new realities, perhaps less glowing than what I hoped for, take their place. Still, the best way in my experience is to be patient and let things grow naturally around you and within you. The initial instinct isn’t always accurate, yet it should not be discounted either. There are days when the useless is best just to let your mind rest and decide where to go next. The late Renaissance French humanist essayist Michel de Montaigne (he actually wrote “I am no philosopher”) wrote in his essay “Of Vanity” of the men of his own time when France was wracked by forty years of civil war, “a time when it is so common to do evil, it is practically praiseworthy to do what is merely useless.”^[1] I am often focused on resolving questions by finding immediate solutions, even if they are smaller steps leading to a greater whole. Yet in recent weeks I’ve found those solutions aren’t always needed or warranted, for they can sift the complexities of a problem so far down that the problem itself slips through the strainer and remains unresolved.

I recognize a degree of vanity here; I figure I have a strong mind and being reasonably well educated that I can attend to any problem and find a logical solution. Yet logic cannot account for humanity in all our chaos and charm. The character and nature of humanity is to spy ourselves in the glass and be marveled by it. We can be so caught in imagining our own glories and our own defeats that we miss the lived moments in between when we are surviving the daily fare and writing even the smallest of verses which will contribute to the song of our lives. I’ve learned to accept that my wishes for things are not always going to happen, and that as much as I warm my soul with dreams of wonders to come those dreams will only be realized by living with the people around me, learning about them, trying to understand them, supporting them, and appreciating them for who they are. Why enforce my own persuasions on you when I could appreciate you, dear Reader, for your own self and your cosmovision? This is a word I only recently learned, I saw it first in Surekha Davies’s new book Humans: A Monstrous History. It seems to originate in Spanish as a way of expressing the way in which reality is subjectively understood through our sensory perceptions. Descartes’s famous maxim for knowledge, “I think, therefore I am” means in this sense that we know what we know because we can perceive it. The cosmos in all its wonder is familiar to us through our sight, hearing, smell, and touch. I would much rather wait to hear your song and listen to it harmonize with mine than pull your voice into my own melody against its own nature.

Montaigne admired those in his generation who kept up the good nature of humanity, its customs, laws, and mores in spite of the world around them losing so much of that common purpose. In quoting Cicero, “not by the calculation of your income, but by your manner of living and your culture, is your wealth really to be reckoned,” the essayist speaks the greater value of a good life enriched by a passion for community and a charitable outlook on our pursuits.^[2] While I’m a practicing Catholic, ever striving to be more faithful in my life, I firmly believe with my whole being that the state should be secular, the better to reflect the totality of the people from whom government derives its power. I would be vain to demand that the state reflect my Catholicism at the detriment of all my neighbors, even my fellow Catholics, whose faith is personal and distinct from my own. A good person recognizes this and seeks communion through mutual respect and appreciation. The most central tenant of my faith is that God is love, άγάπη, φιλία, and ἕρως alike in the original Greek, and the greatest expression of this love is in our liberty to make our own lives, our free will. If we are meant to live in this image then surely we ought to lower our pride and our vanity and hail the liberty of those around us to live their own lives and make their own choices?

For much of my life I’ve had a hard time taking criticism. I’m better at it today, yet it still is a something I know I will always need to work on. I’m no longer in a state of mind where I feel that I need to justify my actions or choices to everyone. On the inverse side, several years ago I finally caught myself trying to deflect praise with a witty quip that deflated some of the experience. This is something that I’d been doing for a long time perhaps to not inflate my ego too far. I went through my phase of wanting to be important, wanting to be a leader, and to be at the front of things and today when I am in that position in so many organizations, I’ve found that it’s much more fun to be a part of a team working together to achieve our common ends. Together these twin forces pull me toward a humility that I hope keeps me grounded, in which I’ve allowed myself to experience my successes while embracing the troubles that occurred in the course of those victories.

In my academic career I’ve published to date one public-facing article about my historical zoology research into the three-toed sloth and an encyclopedia entry titled “Amerindians in Brazil” for the volume South America: From European Contact to Independence which was published earlier this year. In both instances, I’ve since found things that I got wrong. It was a bit of a shock at first to realize this. In the case of the encyclopedia entry, I made a rather large error in misgendering a god, the Tupi deity Maire-Monan who I interpreted as feminine following the lead of the sixteenth-century Portuguese authorities, only to realize while I was writing a book chapter last summer about magic in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest the error I’d made. As such, the correction to the encyclopedia entry appears in the footnotes of that forthcoming chapter. Likewise, in the editing stage of a forthcoming article of mine, my first peer-reviewed article to be published, I was presented with conclusive evidence that my prior conclusions that the three-toed sloth found in my sources cannot be definitively identified as a southern maned sloth (Bradypus crinitus) as I’d written in that article “The ‘Sufficiently Strange’ Sloth” for EPOCH Magazine’s June 2024 issue but is in fact more likely either a northern maned sloth (B. torquatus) or a brown-throated sloth (B. variegatus). That prior assertion in favor of the southern maned sloth stands corrected now not only in my forthcoming article “A Sloth in the First French Colony in the Americas” but also in the latest draft of Chapter 3 of my dissertation.

A few years ago, I would have still had significant trouble accepting these critiques out of a strong sense of embarrassment at making such a mistake. In the case of the sloth’s historical zoology, I thought I read all there was to read about the different three-toed sloth species which live in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, yet I was proven wrong by a generous reviewer who even offered a bibliography of where I could look to find more reliable information. Were, I always fixated on the looking glass of my successes I would surely miss the flaws that pronounce my humanity and not see the ample room for growth. I know that I’m not perfect, in fact I revel in the fact. And while my faith exists, I challenge anyone who claims to know definitive things about matters of belief whether they can really know the mind of God, a concept which as I wrote previously in my blog post from 12 March titled “The Divine Essence,” that divinity extends in scale far beyond human comprehension.

These last few years I’ve long felt a sense of disconnect between the two poles of my life. On the one hand in Binghamton, I felt a sense of professional accomplishment, I was at a good university conducting research and teaching, and a part of an academic community, however disparate that community was in practice. Yet I missed my family, I missed the Midwest, my home cities of Chicago and Kansas City became longed for isles of the blessed far to the west on the flatlands beyond the Appalachians. I longed to be active in my parish and to offer my talents to my brother Hibernians in elected office. I missed the regularity of the live music in Kansas City, the greater presence of the Kansas City Symphony in this city than anything I could find in Binghamton. Yet when I left Binghamton at a moment when I know I needed to leave, I found that I gave up more than I necessarily wanted. I lost that sense of professional accomplishment and surrounded myself by friends from beyond the academy who appreciate what I do but don’t necessarily understand the nuances of it. In the last few months, I’ve found something of that professional community through the learned societies that I’m a part of and at academic conferences where once again those two poles seem linked by a common axis. That axis is essential to a good life because it provides the balance which allows the individual to truly live to their fullest potential as a part of a wider community. I’ve known true solitude, a mantra of mine in recent weeks has been the simple Irish phrase, “Is mé i m’aonar,” or “I am alone.” It’s a plaintive call of sorts, yet it’s also a moment to learn from, that as much as I’m used to this existence that I want to grow out of it. Montaigne wrote in “Of Vanity” that “it is pitiful to be in a place where everything you see involves and concerns you.”^[3] This is the solitary life, a life where about you all things revolve, and what’s worst about it is that it can be lived in community. Alone together was a phrase I read time and again during the recent pandemic. Yet even then with our need to stay apart we found ways to be together. I spent much of the pandemic years here in Kansas City rather than in Binghamton and still felt far more closely attuned to my professional community and the friends who populate it.

In these past few weeks, I’ve been happiest when I’ve had that connection with my family and friends, when I’m with other people and experiencing their lives, their passions, their perceptions of our shared world. I put faith in the currency of human connection and community because that is the most valuable coinage I’ve yet seen. All the gold and silver that humanity has ever mined cannot compare with the value of community and the humility it brings out in all of us. I have many highly accomplished, brilliant friends, and I’m delighted to count myself among them. There is some vanity in these friendships, after all we approach each other with our own experiences and stories to share, highlighting the things we’ve done, yet in a good relationship we do so to elevate our friends and encourage them to seek greater things for themselves. I feel fortunate to have met these friends, and to be able to put my talents to use serving our common cause.This week then as the cardinals vote in Rome, I hope they will look not just to their own personal interests, theological bent, or political persuasion. I pray they will listen for that suggestion that seems just strange enough that it could be right, and that they chose a Pope to lead our Church who will continue to build bridges that may close the divides erected for millennia between ourselves and so many of our fellows. I hope for a pope who will be a friend to all, a good diplomat who can unite disparate peoples together into one common cause. May his humility guide him to be the pope we need now in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, and when he is elected may we rise to the occasion to better ourselves.

^[1] Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, (Stanford University Press, 1965), 3.9., p. 722.

^[2] Montaigne, Essays 3.9., p. 724.

^[3] Montaigne, Essays 3.9., pp. 725–26.

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Dominion or Cultivation of Nature?

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This week, how our relationship with the natural world reflects on our relationships with each other.

A line in the Book of Genesis that comes into play in my dissertation is in the very first chapter of that first book of the Bible in the first Creation story in which God made humanity “after our likeness” and gave us “dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth.” In the context of my research this divine proclamation of human dominion over the rest of Nature in Verse 26 was used to justify the conquest and colonization of the Americas by Europeans beginning in the last decade of the fifteenth century. Here these newcomers from across the sea found worlds that to them seemed less touched by human hands. Brazil in particular stood out for André Thevet, the man at the heart of my dissertation, because its great forests seemed unaltered by its human inhabitants. The Tupinambá had in fact been living and using the great Atlantic Forest for generations, yet to Thevet coming from a France covered by cities, towns, villages, and a countryside that’d been farmed and ploughed for thousands of years he beheld something that to him seemed primeval in this world on the far side of the Atlantic.

I grew up hearing the adage that before settlement of the Midwestern states in the Early Republic and Antebellum decades that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River leaping from tree to tree without ever setting foot on the ground, and that these great forests were ancient and unspoiled by human hands. I now know that while there once were great forests in the old Northwest Territory, the Great Lakes states where I was born, those forests seemed far deeper and darker to the European explorers and colonists of the 17^th and 18^th centuries because the diseases which their predecessors introduced on North America’s coasts in the 16^th century. Those pandemics killed vast potions of this continent’s indigenous populations such that by the Revolution the old indigenous forestry efforts of controlled burns were fewer and farther between.

I was born in the western suburbs of Chicago, a city which is famous for its engineering triumphs that shaped the natural world on which it was built. Chicago stands on the borderland between the Eastern Woodlands and the Prairies. Generations of engineers and innovators created an environment suitable for the building of one of the greatest metropolises in all of human history. I remember as a child listening with a sense of awe and pride to my Dad’s retelling of the story of how engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River at the turn of the last century to keep Lake Michigan, the city’s drinking water source, clean from all the pollution in the river. The western suburbs where I grew up were largely built as bedroom communities for downtown commuters. Our home was 26 miles west of the Loop, which in a preindustrial context would’ve take a pedestrian nearly 9 hours to travel. Wheaton, my hometown, became accessible from the city thanks to the railroad, in this case the Union Pacific which as of time of writing continues to operate trains for Metra through Wheaton’s two commuter stations into the Ogilvie Transportation Center, or Northwestern Station as I knew it. On the Metra you can today get from Wheaton to the Loop in 45 to 50 minutes, making it a viable commute for many. This sprawl is possible because of industry and the ways in which we’ve grown in our civilization with this mentality that we have dominion over nature and ought to use it and change it to our needs.

An even more radical transformation of nature can be found in my adopted home city of Kansas City, a metropolis of 2.2 million built around the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers about 400 miles southwest of Chicago as the crow flies. The land here is a mix of old glacial hills and prairie, yet unlike in Chicago where the city and suburbs were built from the old forests which survive as preserves in various pockets, in this drier region trees normally only grow in those few places where rivers, creeks, and streams flow. Kansas City is on the easternmost edge of the arid western half of North America, and so this region’s original state could not support the same kind of verdant canopy nor the large population which it does today. Brookside is a beautiful place; I love my neighborhood in particular for all the old trees which line our streets. The oldest of those trees were planted by developers working for J.C. Nichols between 1906 and 1950 when he built the Country Club District, of which Brookside is one part. The Kansas City Public Library’s history collections contain photographs of my neighborhood when it was just being built in the 1920s and while I recognize the contours of the hills, I find the lack of tree canopy to be somewhat alien to my recollection.

In developing neighborhoods like Brookside, our ancestors sought to create lived realities which fit what they knew in the Northeast, where too as William Cronon so expertly wrote in Changes in the Land, the landscape there was transformed by the first generations of colonists to resemble something of England, the Netherlands, and France depending on whether the colonists were in New England, the Hudson Valley, or along the St. Lawrence River. I find something reassuring and communal in seeing similar neighborhoods to my own in cities across this continent, from Atlantic to Pacific; this tells me that there are others whose lives might be something like mine, and that I’m not as alone as I often feel. It’s the same reason in fact why I like watching Jeopardy! or the national evening news broadcasts, because I know millions of others are also watching these programs, and maybe even a few people I know & love are among them.

What I hope I’m getting at here is a sense that I have that we’ve built up our world and transformed the nature of the worlds ours replaced in order to better fit some sense of normalcy which has been brought further and further toward the fringe of our world from some idealized source. I for one am drawn to the sense that this source is English, owing to the prevalence of English names in so many of these neighborhoods whether drawn in the Midwestern case from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, or the Old South, or in each of those cases from England itself. Yet with that embrace of a nostalgia for an idyll that may never have fully existed, of the idealized American town whose cultural roots fall in the idealized English market town, do we also carry on the sense of ownership over nature? This dominion after all caused English forests to be so depleted in the early modern period that wood began to be imported from New England and Canada for the building of ships for commerce and war alike.

I’ve grown used to expecting a less than favorable reception from other people. I’m ready to flinch and to put up my defenses whenever necessary. I suppose this is a learned hesitation; I’ve met a lot of people throughout the years who were interested in me only for their own benefit. Recently I loaned out a pen to a friend and immediately reawakened a 20 year old memory of doing the same thing in middle school only for the classmate to declare that pen was theirs now and not mine, leaving me to write the rest of the day with an old stubby pencil that was barely longer than my thumb and forefinger are wide. Last week, I wrote about how traffic even in Kansas City seems to have gotten worse, and the behavior of drivers across the board more aggressive since the recent pandemic. Unlike my Dad who learned to drive in Chicago, I never use my car’s horn out of a general knowledge that in this country other drivers are likely to have guns, and I’d rather my frustration at their conduct remain unannounced to them in the name of self-preservation.

The great trial of the present moment seems to me to be one of ordinary people like you or me just trying to survive amid a deluge of unnecessary troubles brought on by the greed of a few. I believe that before profits or efficiency that empathy must always come first in all our deliberations. I hope for the best intentions in all people whom I meet, and in many cases I see the good in their eyes and posture and in the way they interact with our world. Do we allow for the flood to persist because we are so jaded to the naïve hope that love could actually be the most powerful emotion? I know that love is more potent than greed, and that in the end it’s flame will always burn brighter than one fueled by fear. Yet love requires patience, as St. Paul wrote, and patience is not something which industry can well afford to have.Should we then look for other ways of living? If we are to begin anywhere, it’s to remember that we are natural beings ourselves, yes made in God’s image, yet evolved out of the same natural materials that begat all other life on Earth. I don’t know where the Divine comes into play in any of this, you can read my recent blog post on that topic for more. In fact, I see myself as much a hopeful skeptic as a believer. What I do know is what I’ve experienced, and that is that there is no more powerful emotion than love which burns so bright as to blind the mind and senses to any other voice. I for one love the aspiration and mission of studying how the innate and fundamental in nature was understood in our historic past, and I hope to continue learning more about this. Yet I feel the weight of our world on my shoulders, and like many others who feel isolated from the higher pursuit of wisdom in all its philosophical pulcherity, today I’m just trying to keep that love which I feel burning bright while I also do what I can to survive in this world we’ve built. It is our dominion, which is a triumph to our humanity, yet its roots are still in nature and nature will outlive anything we build.

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Tóg go bog é | Take it easy

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This week, a few words on taking life slower.

Where I grew up first in the Chicago suburbs and later on the western edge of Kansas City, Kansas the average speed limits were around 35 mph (56 km/h). I think there’s something to be said about a life that’s taken at those sorts of speeds, that the speed we drive from place to place reflects in how we approach other aspects of our lives all the same. By comparison, in the year that I lived in London I fell out of practice with my driving, instead I knew how to navigate by walking speed, closer to 3 mph (5 km/h). Perhaps this is one of the reasons that I found Binghamton to be such an incongruent place to live because the average speed limit is 30 mph on the local streets and roads in that valley.

When I learned to drive then, the average speed that I found myself at hovered around 35 mph. Furthermore, I learned to drive on the highways before I learned city driving, as most of my early daily drives were on the highway K-7 between our home in Piper and my high school in western Lenexa, Kansas. It was a 30 minute commute each way to school every day, and one that I don’t remember getting that old too fast. In more recent memory, I found that driving a good 20-25 minutes every day down to the school I taught at in Leawood, Kansas did grow taxing to the point that now I’m less willing to drive quite as far in town as I did even a few short years ago.

I’ve noticed several types of driving and several variations on speed that my car will embody depending on how I’m feeling on a given day. There are times when I am so attuned to my surroundings and to my car, which I lovingly named the Mazda Rua 6 years ago, that it will feel as though we are one in the same, that my car will adjust its direction and speed with the slightest turn of my hands, or the flick of my eyes from one direction to another. This feeling was especially pronounced on my 14 long drives between Kansas City and Binghamton that I undertook between August 2019 and December 2022. On those drives, I would usually keep a steady pace of around 75-80 mph (120-129 km/h) on the Interstates between the Catskills on the eastern edge of my route and the Great Plains to the west. When I’m out on the open road I’ll still sometimes set my car into cruise control at this sort of speed, which tends to be the pace of highway traffic anyway and let the day’s drive go by.

Yet I’ve noticed more and more in my drives around town, I’m not going quite as fast as I used to. I tend to drive a few times per week between my home in Brookside and my place of work in the Crossroads, always on the city streets and always in a decent amount of traffic for Kansas City. Yet the pace of traffic has slowed somewhat; where before I’d keep to that 35 mph threshold, now I’m fine if I’m hovering between 30 and 35 mph (48 and 56 km/h). Just before writing this, I drove home from a haircut with my cousin Richard Morrissey at his salon in Mission, Kansas and I found that I didn’t particularly care that the traffic was going 30 mph, especially when I crossed the border and merged onto the northern reaches of Ward Parkway. Nor did I mind the slower speeds when I decided to turn off that major boulevard and onto a side street that goes up Sunset Hill toward Loose Park where traffic really ought to be moving no faster than 15 mph (24 km/h). I didn’t mind the slower pace because I didn’t feel the need for speed.

My generation grew up with the role models of our parents and grandparents whose generations worked day in and day out for decades and who built our sprawling metropolises in which we need cars to get around. I’ve accepted this world that I was born into and its hurried tempo and made myself far busier than I probably need to be. On a recent day when I had 3 meetings in a row in the span of 3 hours I was struck by the fact that when I was still in Binghamton I was busy but not this busy; that the reason why I’ve not been keeping up with podcasts or TV shows the way I used to is because I simply don’t have as much time in the day for them.

The key here is a learned moderation which goes a long way to what I find is a happier life. There are things which I hope for and want with an eagerness that inspires me to plow on forward yet I’ve learned that the best things I can hope for are those which occur in the quiet moments of calm between those rushing evocations of the modern life. I for one would much prefer to just be an academic spending my days reading and writing about historical zoology and having deep and enriching discussions with friends and colleagues. I would much rather listen to my colleagues about what they’re researching, and about the things they’re learning in their own particular topics. And yet, when I was with my colleagues at the Renaissance Society of America’s conference the week before last in Boston, I felt that I stood out in some ways from them by all the different fires I have going at once. I’ve always been one with many different projects in the works. Even now, alongside this weekly blog and my dissertation I have two articles in the review and editing stage, a third that I’m hoping to submit to a journal soon, two books on the way that I will be reviewing, and a short story I’m plodding through writing.

On top of this I hold several different committee assignments in the Fr. Bernard Donnelly AOH alongside my primary recording secretary duties. I also work part-time as an usher team captain for the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts and now have somewhat of a hands off approach to my Mom’s efforts in leading and organizing a local progressive protest organization called Blue Brookside. Simply put, I have to persist at this higher speed to keep track of everything.

One of the first phrases I learned when I started studying Irish in 2007 was one which I initially misheard: Tóg go bog é, which translates as “Take it easy!” This is a nice sentiment, and one which I’m trying to live, to be less worried, to inflict less stress upon myself. Perhaps even though I didn’t identify it as such this may well be what I’m trying to give up for Lent this year. You might say it’s working in some stripes yet not in others. What remains is a key question about how I can grow from finding this balance between busyness and nonchalance? Maybe this is something we all need, time away from the constant stream of information and news and worry. I’ve recently begun responding when people talk about social media that I admire those who’ve dropped away from it; were it not such a good way of staying in touch with friends and family near and far I probably would do that too.Let this be a motto for us to aspire to: tóg go bog é, take it easy.

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Homeownership

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This week, a few words on homeownership.

For most of my adult life I never really thought that I’d ever own my own house whether through the pure economics of trying to buy a house in the neighborhoods that I like here in Kansas City or in the other cities I’ve applied for jobs in. There have been the odd moments though when homeownership seemed within reach, as a sort of mirage just on the edge of my vision. In these instances, the circumstances that would’ve allowed me to buy a home faded away, yet by getting that taste of the possibility of it this future still feels probable.

The arguments for homeownership are financial, having a stake in the local economy through your home value, and aspirational of having control over your future in this fortress that you can truly make your own. To every man his castle, right? I do have ideas for a dream home, ways I’d decorate it, ways I might even add onto it. There are ways that I could modernize one of the century old homes here in Brookside to be more energy efficient, to run on renewable power, and to feel futuristic for even the 2020s. I want to have lots of color in my home, whether in patterned tilework or in the art that I’d hang on the walls. I also want to have a room set aside as a library for the practicality of needing to store all my books, yet also as a place to work.

There are days when I still sometimes think about the houses I considered buying. Now it’s as if I’m remembering the memory of these places where I was thrilled to imagine myself living. That hope at the heart of all of this is what keeps me engaged and actively trying to move my career forward. Today, writing this it’s hard to imagine me owning a house as my professional life continues to exist in its malaise waiting for things to happen. I’d rather not be so rooted in one place as the potential for my life to wander from place to place is too good to let pass by.

To this end, Jennifer Denbow, a Professor of Political Science at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo made a very strong case for renting or even condo ownership in her recounting of her family’s struggles to buy a home in their city in an article in the February 2025 issue of Commonweal. I usually don’t underline text in magazines, the better to preserve the physical artifact for someone else to read. Yet in this instance, I was drawn to Professor Denbow’s affirmation that living in a multifamily development allows the “building of community and solidarity,” something much needed today. The investment here is in the community itself, less in the property which can drive individuals to support restrictive housing policies which keep the housing stock low and house prices high.

In my experience the reality of this community and solidarity depends upon the people living in close proximity with one another. I knew many of my fellow tenants in my building in London, yet I knew them far better than I did my downstairs neighbors in Binghamton. In London we had more in common, all of us were students––a mix of undergrads and postgrads––and all of us were new to that city and learning about it as we lived in it together. The same could be said for my dormmates at Rockhurst and during my summer study abroad session at Westminster. We became fast friends through our mutual situations and interests. This common bond is necessary if any solidarity is to be achieved.I suppose homeownership for me is one of those standards of American life that wavers in and out of range for me. I might buy a house or a condo someday, but it’s never been a guarantee. I know the sorts of places that I like in the cities where I want to live. Where the next year or two will take me remains uncertain.

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Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

New Posts on Wednesdays

Tag Archives: Life

The Wednesday Blog

The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to conclude what I’ve been saying.

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.

On Simplicity

On Simplicity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.

On Skepticism

On Skepticism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I express my dismay at how fast time seems to be moving for me of late and how it reflects the existence of various sources of knowledge in our world.

On Universals

On Universals – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I discuss some of the things which are common to all of us, problems we all share, and why I think we ought to look at solving those problems.

The Poetics of Finality

The Poetics of Finality – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words about endings.

On Vanity

On Vanity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I reflect on the role of love in balancing between self-praise and community in a discussion of vanity.

Dominion or Cultivation of Nature?

Dominion or Cultivation of Nature? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how our relationship with the natural world reflects on our relationships with each other.

Tóg go bog é | Take it easy

Tóg go bog é | Take it easy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a few words on taking life slower.

Homeownership

Homeownership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a few words on homeownership.

The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to conclude what I’ve been saying.

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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.

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On Simplicity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.

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On Skepticism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I express my dismay at how fast time seems to be moving for me of late and how it reflects the existence of various sources of knowledge in our world.

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On Universals – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I discuss some of the things which are common to all of us, problems we all share, and why I think we ought to look at solving those problems.

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The Poetics of Finality – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words about endings.

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On Vanity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I reflect on the role of love in balancing between self-praise and community in a discussion of vanity.

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Dominion or Cultivation of Nature? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how our relationship with the natural world reflects on our relationships with each other.

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Tóg go bog é | Take it easy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a few words on taking life slower.

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Homeownership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a few words on homeownership.

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