Tag Archives: sloth

A landline telephone in a classroom.

Electronic Signals

Electronic Signals – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, the coalescence of my thoughts over the last few months about how the way we communicate today in 2025 is so rooted in our technology.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, the coalescence of my thoughts over the last few months about how the way we communicate today in 2025 is so rooted in our technology.

For most of my life I tended to write a lot of ordinary quotidian things out by hand on paper either in notebooks, on notepads, or on the backs of receipts, envelopes, or whatever paper I had around. I kept up a good cursive hand and used it on a regular basis. Yet in the last decade technology has caught up to the humble notepad; a decade ago when I was living in London and trying to write out ideas for my first round of graduate essays on my phone’s Notes app while I was on the train or walking about, I often found that app in particular drained my phone’s battery at a considerable and worrisome rate. Then again, that particular smartphone tended to die if the battery dropped below 40 percent, so it had a bad battery. Still, that led to me continuing with the practice of keeping notes and scribblings in little notebooks or on notepads that I carried with me in a pocket. 

It’s funny then that it’s only now in 2025 that I notice how little I write these same notes anymore by hand; in 2021 when my Mom came to visit me in Binghamton, she brought me a couple of notebooks emblazoned with pictures of various national parks on their covers, a new trend in notebooks that began around then. I was a little taken aback by this gift because by that point I’d largely done away with handwritten notes all together. In fact, my Binghamton years launched me head-first into doing as much as possible on the computer so that I’d have less paper and books to carry back and forth between Upstate New York and Kansas City. Like printed books over digital ones, when I returned to Kansas City I began to write handwritten notes again. This is largely thanks to my employers at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts; in our department we still carry around paper performance notes on our shifts. When I started, I was surprised to realize that at some point in the last 5 years I’d stopped carrying a pen with me on a daily basis. Since then, in April 2023, I’ve always had a pen in my pocket.

The pandemic reinforced our digital communications in ways which pushed us firmly forward toward more frequent videocalls and texting to the detriment of the telephone in particular. Most of my friends and family tend to prefer text messages over phone calls, especially among my fellow millennials, to the point that I often second-guess myself as to whether I should try calling someone in the first place. Is a phone call intrusive, whereas a text message is like a telegram or a letter? It can be replied to in the recipient’s own time, though with a text the response time is usually expected to be faster than with a letter that’ll take days to arrive, or even an email, which I see as slightly more formal. Since the invention of Samuel Morse’s electrical telegraph in 1838, our communications have moved into a realm of electricity which was foreign to our conversations and our lives beyond lightning strikes and the daily shocks one gets in a dry climate.

This Spring then, when I was regularly on videocalls–usually over Zoom–with friends, colleagues, and family alike a thought occurred to me that all of our communications are being translated down to electrical signals being sent over wires from one person’s device to another. Those messages, no matter the content, all buzz and fizzle through our wireless data signals and across our telephone wires, through our data centers and bouncing off our satellites all to better communicate to anyone whether on the planet or high above us in orbit or beyond. It’s made us all so much closer to one another. Today, I’m regularly in contact with people in North America, Europe, and Asia and that contact is often almost as instantaneous as if we were together in the same room. It’s what makes my solitary life feel lived in community with the people I like. And yet it’s also spoiled us for the slower communication of the written letter or even the face-to-face conversation that started all these “words, words, words” as Hamlet says that we “might unpack my heart with words.” We communicate to do just that: to speak our thoughts and to live in the strange and beautiful worlds we build around ourselves. So often now, those conversations are not only occurring with the aid of the electrical signals pulsing about our minds telling us how to react and what to say and do, but also through their extracorporeal currents which connect us through our technology across vast distances to one another.

You are listening to my voice filtered by the microphone and my audio editing software being transmitted to anyone with an internet connection. While naturally we aren’t supposed to hear it, as my hearing isn’t quite as good as it should be, I can now hear the differences between sound frequencies in a finer detail yet to the point that if two voices are speaking with the same frequency, I only hear ringing at that frequency and no words or other noise. This was demonstrated to me with dramatic and terrifying effect several years ago when I was nearly t-boned by a Kansas City fire engine roaring along at full speed because I didn’t hear its siren, which wails at the same frequency as the particular section of the 1st movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto that I was listening to in my car at the time. So, when you hear my voice what you’re hearing is an electronic recording of my voice being transmitted to you. Often, I sound higher pitched on the recording even by just a half-step, than I do to my ears when I’m doing the recording. I’m a tenor, so I’m okay with that. Still, it’s noticeable especially if I record later in the day or at night, or if I’m nervous.

After I began my graduate studies in History back in August 2017, I started making a practice of recording any conference presentation or invited lecture I gave. I’d usually only make a sound recording, not wanting to deal with a camera. This way too, if someone missed a talk and wanted to see it, I could lay the slides over the recording in iMovie and turn it into a video to send around. This has turned into a wonderful tool for listening to changes in my voice over the years. Yet it’s also interesting now because I not only use this tool for recording the actual performance but also the rehearsals as well, and sometimes when I’m editing papers. I gave a lightning talk last week that was part of a webinar hosted by the Graduate Student Advisory Committee of the Renaissance Society of America about animal intelligence titled “Animals Adapting to Changes in Nature: Perceptions of Animal Intelligence in the Renaissance?” The paper itself was pretty quick and easy to write; it maybe took me an hour to make the first draft several months ago. Yet I began recording rehearsals and making edits after each one up to the minutes before I went live on Thursday morning. I was a bit nervous when I presented, so in the end the cool and practiced pace I’d planned with a mid-range voice ended up being a minute faster than expected and closer to my upper register. When I’ve thought about what to do if anyone asked to hear this talk after the fact, I’ve considered possibly sending out my last rehearsal recording from an hour before the performance, after all many speakers would in decades past make a separate recording of their lectures & speeches from the actual live reading. Yet to keep it authentic to the talk as it went ahead, I also feel inclined to send out the one that I gave on Thursday morning to the 16 other panelists and organizers on the call and the 35 attendees listening in from around the globe. This question gets to the heart of my talk because I made the case that André Thevet’s sloth showed signs of intelligence by refusing food it didn’t want to eat and not falling to the same bad practices as the Frenchmen who captured it or the native Tupinambá who were more familiar with it. Those practices, human faults one might say, include indecision.

Rather than flip a coin or pick another method of choosing, I’m instead going to play for you now the last rehearsal recording for one very simple reason. The main benefit of my recording of the actual talk is that it ought to have captured the organizer’s introduction and the questions that followed my presentation. Yet, my phone’s microphone couldn’t pick any of that up because my computer’s sound output was going into my headphones. So, without any more gilding the lily here are my thoughts on Renaissance sloths adapting to changes in nature, brought to you through a most electronic form of communication.

~

Animals Adapting to Changes in Nature:

Perceptions of Animal Intelligence in the Renaissance?

I want to begin by thanking the members of the RSA Graduate Student Advisory Committee for holding these lightning talks and accepting my proposal among the speakers today. When considering this question of animal intelligence, I’m drawn back to the Aristotelian notions of the animal sensitive soul in contrast to the human rational soul; Erica Fudge put it well, writing that animals can feel, perceive, and move, yet humans are the only natural beings to express intellect.[1] Animals were used as stand-ins for humans in allegory and vivisection, and an over-exertion of passion could drive a human into a state of animality, yet the human was understood to be fundamentally different because of our facilities of reason developed through experience over one’s lifetime.[2]

Newly encountered American animals played a disruptive role in this dynamic. Anatomically, many such animals defied European expectations for their size, or their chimerical character appearing as a composite of unrelated creatures known to exist in the wider Mediterranean World. Chief among these in my research is the three-toed sloth which was described by the French cosmographer André Thevet (1516–1590) in his 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique. There are many different aspects of Thevet’s sloth which allowed it to stand out as a singularity among singularities from its appearance as a bear-like ape to its vocalizations “sighing like a little child afflicted with sorrow” to its general disregard by the indigenous Tupinambá people who explained aspects of its manner to Thevet.[3] I’ve written and spoken extensively about this, I know several of you have heard me talk about Thevet’s sloth at a number of conferences in the last several years. Today though, I want to discuss something I haven’t addressed yet in all these presentations; namely the signs in Thevet’s text which point toward some sense of the sloth’s intelligence.

The sloth’s intelligence is seen in its abstention from eating the food Thevet provided it. Thevet wrote “I kept it well for a space of 26 days, where I knew that it never ate or drank, but was always in a similar state.”[4] This reaffirmed Thevet’s assertion that “this beast has never been seen to eat by a living human,” either by the Tupinambá or the French.[5] This abstention from eating could well be understood as a sign of the sloth’s lack of a rational soul which would know to eat; yet I think it is better to perceive the sloth’s abstinence as an active choice made by an animal who didn’t favor the food it was offered. Thevet wrote that “some believe that this beast lives solely on leaves of a tree named in [the Tupi language] Amahut,” which is one of the Cercopia species known to live along the Brazilian coast.[6] Yet a 2021 sloth behavioral study published in the journal Austral Ecology has proven that this claim is less grounded in the genus’s actual experience.[7]

Perhaps the sloth can be best contrasted with the dogs which killed it at the end of that 26-day captivity, or even with the accused descent from humanity by first the Tupinambá and later the French in accusations of cannibalism. Unlike the humans who occupy these stories from France Antarctique who so often fall so far from their rationality to eat each other, the sloth simply refused to eat at all. This small creature, taken from its forest home and left in the care of an unfamiliar human who didn’t know what to feed it, chose to preserve its nature and not eat what was foreign to it. The sloth adapted to changes in the nature around it and expressed an intelligence perhaps more elevated than the humans who captured it. I’m drawn to one of the most poignant lines in Montaigne’s essay “Des cannibales” in which the erstwhile political animal himself wrote “I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling.”[8] In all of the variations on his sloth account, Thevet published this same story twice first in the Singularitez of 1557 and later in the Cosmographie Universelle of 1575, the dominant sense I get from Thevet’s text is one of befuddlement at an animal that defied his expectations in so many ways. In the tradition of animal allegories from Aesop to Renyard the Fox the sloth fills the role of an exotic oddity, a stranger in the canon of European natural history which didn’t quite fit any mold available. Even after Thevet’s sloth was christened by Conrad Gessner an Arctopithecus in 1560 and by Carolus Clusius as an Ignavus in 1605, this fact that it refused to eat or drink what Thevet offered it for 26 days remained a constant in its story. I see in the sloth a sign of intelligence beyond expected human norms and rules which rendered it exceptional. Any assimilation of the sloth was an artifice laid over its character, a colonial imposition. Still, its abstinence fit the framework of the sensitive soul, reflecting a delicate sensitivity toward things it found unfamiliar.

~

How does a 450 year old sloth’s intelligence have any bearing on the electronic signals which carry our communications in this new century? I wouldn’t have been able to study Thevet’s sloth in the way I have without the internet and all our technology. So much of my work is with digitized primary sources, mostly printed books, that I do almost all of my research on the computer. It’s a rare occurrence that I get to go into an archive to look at a source in the flesh. Yet I think there’s another interpretation we can take here: like the sloth we choose how much we are in touch with each other, how much of our lives are spent with our phones in our hands. My weekly screen-time report tends to fall in the 3 hour range per day. Yet I’m not only checking my social media accounts or texting with people on my phone, but I’m also reading books and writing notes and ideas down on my phone or using the camera to try and capture an artful reflection of the lived world around me. Recently on Instagram I saw another person’s screen-time report say they spend 14 hours on their phone per day, which is essentially the entirety of my waking hours. To me that is unhealthy to an extreme. Yet that’s how that individual has chosen to live their life.

I know that no matter where I end up, I will remain connected to others through our technology. Somedays I do miss the slower pace of sending letters or calling family and friends on the phone as things were when I was a child. I’d rather talk with someone face-to-face or voice-to-voice than text. As I wrote in January, I feel that we’ve allowed texting to take the place that videocalls were supposed to hold in the 21st century. We’re not constantly talking to people over monitors beyond Zoom calls that are scheduled and with that pre-arrangement more formal than the quotidian string of text messages. Today, I do have a notepad on my desk, one that was given to me among the materials of a workshop I attended at the École des Hautes-Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris last summer. It’s gotten some use, yet one year later I’m still only halfway through the gridded pages. As with so much of life in general, I feel that I’m trying to find a balance between the digital and the manual, between life online and life in this place where I find myself in a given moment. All I know for certain is that over all else, I long for connection.

[1] Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England, (Cornell University Press, 2019), 13.

[2] Fudge, 17.

[3] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99r.

[4] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99v–98r.

[5] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99v.

[6] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 98r.

[7] Gastón Andrés Fernandez Giné, Gastón Andrés, Laila Santim Mureb, and Camila Righetto Cassano, “Feeding ecology of the maned sloth (Bradypus torquatus): Understanding diet composition and preferences, and prospects for future studies,” Austral Ecology 47 (2022): pp. 1124–1135, at p. 1132.

[8] Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, (Stanford University Press, 1965), 155.

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A frame from Abraham Ortellius's map of the Americas, 1587.

On Toponymy

On Toponymy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, the first in several scribblings about my research: how I connect historic places in my sources with their modern names.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, the first in several scribblings about my research: how I connect historic places in my sources with their modern names.

When I started working on my dissertation and began downloading copies of André Thevet’s 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, I was struck by a curious question regarding the identity of some of the places which Thevet described along the disparate shores of the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the sixteenth century. Some of these were readily accessible, the Portuguese fortress of Elmina for one remained an infamous outpost of the slave trade for centuries after Thevet’s 1555-1556 voyage. Likewise, Thevet made early references to regions like Florida, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil which are still known by those names today. I especially admire how he demonstrated the assimilative power of colonialization in the renaming of the Taíno island of Haiti into a newly christened European island literally called Little Spain, that is Hispaniola. Today, we know Haiti as the name of the western republic on the island of Hispaniola, and the Haitians as a people predominately of African descent, yet that term on its own originated with the indigenous inhabitants of that island and its neighbors.

André Thevet (1516-1590) from his Grande Insulaire.

This new world of names which Thevet hoisted upon the places he sought to describe in his Singularitez place that book in its historical context at the dawn of the European colonization of the broader Atlantic World and also in some cases provides a perspective on precolonial and early contact societies that have otherwise been diminished by the deluge of colonial toponyms which in many places replaced them. Thevet, like his fellow Frenchman Jacques Cartier, tended to use indigenous names for places, flora, and fauna. I’ve written in great detail about this concerning Thevet’s use of a French rendering of the Tupi name for the sloth, Haüt, and my dissertation includes similar analyses of the preservation of indigenous names for toucans, parrots, and macaws from Tupi for Thevet’s own French audience in his work. While his preference for indigenous names certainly added a lure of the exotic to his work, it is clear that he saw the utility of keeping these names and promulgating them to his readers.

When I am approaching a location in Thevet’s work I begin by seeing what the other editors and translators of Thevet down the last 468 years have done to familiarize what Thevet wrote for their audience. Thomas Hacket’s 1568 translation is beneficial to see how an Elizabethan reader might interpret distant Brazil and is useful for connecting Thevet’s Atlantic to Ralegh’s. Likewise, Giuseppe Horologgi’s 1562 translation is beneficial for understanding how Thevet was read by Italian humanists curious about the wider world; these readers were most likely thinking about Thevet’s stories in the context of the wider genre of travel literature typified in Italy by Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s (1485–1557) I Navigationi et Viaggi and for his natural history the collected works of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605). Moving from Thevet’s contemporaries, I then turn to a nineteenth century French reprint of the Singularites (as they were rendered in Modern French) edited by Paul Gaffarel. This edition was published in 1878 at a time when interest in Thevet and sixteenth-century French Brazil had a resurgence during the Third Republic which lasted into the early career of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Métraux, the two most prominent French anthropologists to consider the value of Thevet and his rival Jean de Léry as primary sources on early contact Tupinambá culture. Finally, I will turn to the two modern Brazilian translations of Thevet, Estêvão Pinto’s from 1944 and Eugenio Amado’s from 1978. Together these two sources are often my first choice when tracking down taxa of Brazilian flora and fauna and confirming Brazilian demonyms and toponyms. I figure these translators tended to have better access to Brazilian archives and scientific studies concerning their own country than their European counterparts considering the great distance between these continents. Lastly, several partial modern English translations of Thevet exist which provide their own regional analyses, most notable of these is Roger Schlesinger and Arthur Stabler’s 1986 translation of Thevet’s North American chapters which does particular justice to Thevet’s account of Canada. 

The best sort of contributions any of us can make to collective human knowledge is built upon the conclusions and efforts of our colleagues past and present. The academy is a collaborative effort that only survives as long as we believe in the value of our work and of each other. I was reminded of this when I was in Boston during the Renaissance Society of America’s annual conference in March and felt such a potent sense of jubilation at that experience of camaraderie, I felt spending those four days among friends and colleagues. I especially see this among my fellow grad students and early career scholars who are the future of higher education and who are engaged in their work to a degree that in the span of a doctorate we readily become experts in our own disparate fields yet find solace and support in that common experience.

Returning to the task at hand, once I have consulted each of these various editions and translations of Thevet’s Singularitez, I then turn to his Cosmographie Universelle, a two volume magnum opus which was published in 1575. Volume 1 contains his accounts of Asia and Africa, and Volume 2 collected knowledge about Europe and the Americas. Thankfully, the Cosmographie Universelle has a good set of indices crafted by Thevet himself, which make navigating this gargantuan work easier. At this point, six years into my study of the man my PDF files of this book have enough of my own highlights & notes that I’ve added my own layer of internal navigation atop the cosmographer’s original efforts. Often, the Cosmographie Universelle supplements the Singularitez and adds greater depth and detail to it. For one, I first recognized Thevet’s claim that the sloth was an animal which could “live only on air” in the Cosmographie Universelle, only later noting the same claim in Chapter 52 of his Singularitez. In the Cosmographie Universelle it’s actually pulled out as a section heading in the margins of the book.

If again, Thevet either uses the same name for the geographical feature in question without any further context or the feature all together isn’t mentioned I will then turn to his 1586 Grande Insulaire, an unpublished manuscript of his which was edited by the preeminent French Thevet scholar Frank Lestringant and released in book form in 2016 by the Genevan publisher Droz. Lestringant has a long career studying Thevet, and his footnotes on the cosmographer remain among the best around. Often, he’ll be able to identify the places I’m looking for, but again his specialty is the history of French Protestantism in the sixteenth century, so toponymy isn’t necessarily his focus in reading Thevet.

This then leaves the last resort: a quick internet search to see what comes up when I type in Thevet’s sixteenth-century name for a given location. Often, I have better luck searching French or Portuguese Google than English Google (google.fr or google.pt) or even the French or Portuguese editions of Wikipedia, though all results from both the search engine and online encyclopedia need to be taken with a grain of salt and tremendous care. Anything I find online needs to be double-checked with other sixteenth-century sources, often Spanish in origin, to determine where Thevet got his name for the place from.

With my method in place, I want to put it to use explaining how I identified one particularly confusing toponym which Thevet used to describe a city on the coast of Peru. First, let me say that Thevet had a very broad understanding of Peru which included the entire side of South America west of the Andes, Panama, most of Central America, and the Caribbean archipelago beyond. Knowing this, I began by ignoring the word Peru and focusing instead on the coordinates Thevet ascribed to this city. He wrote in Volume 2, Book 22, Chapter 8 of his Cosmographie Universelle that this city was located “22 degrees from the Equator.”[1] Thevet used a Ptolemaic system for determining degrees of latitude, writing in the Singularitez that the Earth was divided into “360 degrees, and each degree is divided into 70 miles, which equals 16.5 leagues (96.48 km).”[2] By this calculation, the Earth’s circumference should be 34,732.8 km, which is 5,342.217 km short of the actual circumference at the Equator. This is a fitting comparison to make because the region where this city of “Saint Iacques” was located because it was certainly Equatorial in latitude considering he placed it among the cities of Quito & Ingapirca, which are located in modern Ecuador and Cusco & Cajamarca, which are located in modern Peru. 

A frame from Abraham Ortellius's map of the Americas, 1587.
A frame from Abraham Ortellius’s map of the Americas, 1587, showing Thevet’s Sainct Iacques as S. Tiago.

Generally, I found that Thevet’s degrees of latitude tend to be about double their modern equivalents, though this is a rough and often incorrect assessment. In this instance, that theory led me to search maps of the Peruvian coast around 11ºS looking for towns called Santiago, the Spanish translation of the Middle French Sainct Jacques. After spending a day searching, I gave up on this particular effort for the first time. Weeks later though, I returned to it after a conversation with frequent Wednesday Blog reader and one of my best friends Carmelita Bahamonde, who pointed out to me that her Ecuadorean hometown’s official, long name is Santiago de Guayaquil. I looked into it, and found several pages later hidden amid the text that Thevet had clarified further about this particular city of Sainct Jacques, writing that it was “the old port formerly named Guayaquil.”[3] I put this oversight at not finding this information where it was in that same source to my own poor eyesight, yet I remain grateful to my friend for confirming her hometown’s presence in Thevet’s Atlantic cosmography. He went into further detail about Guayaquil’s Spanish founder, the conquistador Francisco de Orellana (1511–1546) who led the first successful European expedition down the Amazon from the Andes to the Atlantic, losing almost all of his men along the way to desertion, disease, and attacks by the locals who knew to not welcome the Spaniards. In fact, when I began hearing about the lost Amazonian civilization first on PBS’s NOVA and later in one of my magazines, I believe it was in Smithsonian, I nearly leapt from my chair shouting “Thevet wrote about them!”

An engraving from a 16th century book of indigenous Brazilians cutting down trees for their timber.
The Franco-Tupinambá trade partnership in action from Thevet’s Cosmographie Universelle, vol. 2, 21.16, f. 950v. BNF, Public Domain.

The value of André Thevet’s books lie in their character as sources for understanding the Americas just at the moment of these continents’ invention as the fourth part of a larger global world. The Singularitez and Cosmographie Universelle offer stories and perspectives of peoples and places that had not yet been subsumed into the colonial deluge that would submerge so much of the indigenous cultures of these continents in the coming centuries. This week, my colleague (and newly minted Ph.D.) Mary Katherine Newman at Oxford published a blog post with the History Workshop on restoring indigenous historical practices to equal prominence with the written European archive that we historians are trained to use. In many respects, Thevet did this, albeit through the perspective of a sense of civilizational hierarchy which was the accepted norm of his day. Métraux wrote that Thevet was the better of the sixteenth-century travelers to visit Brazil when it came to finding the precolonial and early contact Tupinambá in that same written archive. In my work, I’ve made a strong effort at acknowledging Tupinambá agency in their colonial encounters with the French, who were interested in trading with the locals rather than conquering, colonizing, or converting them. This allowed for a vibrant trading partnership  to develop between the French and the Tupinambá which lasted through the mid 1560s. French colonial efforts might have taken off in Brazil had the colony, named France Antarctique, survived its first decade. Through a mix of sectarian infighting and increasing Portuguese dominance along the Brazilian coast, the French were expelled from France Antarctique by 1567. Still, one French toponym survives; the island where the French built their fort, which they named Fort Coligny, is today still known in Portuguese as Ilha da Villegagnon, after France Antarctique’s governor, Admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon (1510–1571), the man who brought Thevet to Brazil to serve as the colony’s chaplain.

[1] Thevet, Cosmographie Universelle, vol. 2, 22.8, f. 970a.

[2] Thevet, Singularitez, f. 132v.

[3] Thevet, Cosmographie Universelle, vol. 2, 22.8, f. 972a.

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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.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

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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