The Game
by Marie Howe

And on certain nights,
maybe once or twice a year,
I’d carry the baby down
and all the kids would come
all nine of us together,
and we’d build a town in the basement

from boxes and blankets and overturned chairs.
And some lived under the pool table
or in the bathroom or the boiler room
or in the toy cupboard under the stairs,
and you could be a man or a woman
a husband or a wife or a child, and we bustled around
like a day in the village until

one of us turned off the lights, switch
by switch, and slowly it became night
and the people slept.

Our parents were upstairs with company or
not fighting, and one of us—it was usually
a boy—became the Town Crier,
and he walked around our little sleeping
population and tolled the hours with his voice,
and this was the game.

Nine o’clock and all is well, he’d say,
Walking like a constable we must have seen
in a movie. And what we called an hour passed.
Ten o’clock and all is well.
And maybe somebody stirred in her sleep
or a grown up baby cried and was comforted…
Eleven o’clock and all is well.
Twelve o’clock. One o’clock. Two o’clock…

and it went on like that through the night we made up
until we could pretend it was morning.


"The Game" from What the Living Do by Marie Howe. © 1998 by Marie Howe. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. All rights reserved.  (buy now)

It's the birthday of writer and ecologist Aldo Leopold, (books by this author) born in Burlington, Iowa (1887). Aldo grew up in a big, prosperous family, lived on a 300-acre estate with a lot of his relatives. The whole family spoke German together and worked in the gardens and orchards, where he learned about plants and soil. He went hunting with his dad and bird-watching with his grandfather.

While he was studying at Yale, he practiced writing by composing long letters home. Theodore Roosevelt created the U.S. Forest Service in 1901, and a few years after that, Leopold finished his master's degree and joined the Forest Service. He worked on surveying and drawing maps.

When he was in his 20s, he was caught in a storm out in the wilderness and he ended up with kidney disease. For the rest of his life, he had bouts of poor health. And it was during these bouts that he began to write. He wrote Game and Fish Handbook (1915) and Game Management (1933), about wildlife conservation. After 19 years in the Forest Service, he became the Professor of Game Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and bought a piece of land on the Wisconsin River. And it was there, at his home in Wisconsin, that he wrote many of the essays for which he is now famous, published in A Sand County Almanac (1949). It became one of the most important texts of the conservation movement.

Aldo Leopold wrote, "Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left."

It's the birthday of William James, (books by this author) born in New York City As a young man, he studied art, then went on to Harvard University and earned a medical degree there. But he was never a practicing doctor — instead, he stayed on as a member of the Harvard faculty. He said: "I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave."

William James' most famous contribution to philosophy is an idea called pragmatism. Pragmatism was first conceived of by Charles Sanders Peirce, but it didn't catch on.  Unlike Peirce, William James was not a philosophical genius, and he didn't see anything wrong with taking a complex concept and oversimplifying it for the sake of making it more accessible. The term "pragmatism" was first used in a lecture James gave at the University of California Berkeley in 1898. But James was quick to give the credit for the term to Peirce, who he said had thought of it about 20 years earlier.

According to James, pragmatism valued the practical outcome of an idea above the idea itself. He saw a huge divide in philosophy between what he called "tough-minded" and "tender-minded" ways of looking at the world. He associated a "tough-minded" view with science, empirical evidence, atheism, pessimism, skepticism, and materialism. "Tender-minded," on the other hand, went along with idealism, optimism, religion, dogma, and free will. James thought that pragmatism was a way of getting beyond this divide, and plenty of other dualities that caused conflict.

James also said that pragmatism was a philosophy of truth. He said, "The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons." In James' pragmatism, "truth" was a large concept — something could be true because it was actually experienced in a direct way, or it could be true because it contributed to overall happiness. So he allowed for a lot of religious and spiritual beliefs to coexist with empirical thinking, because religion was true in the sense that it added meaning to life.

James' pragmatism was based in empiricism, in the sense that experience should be the ultimate context for everything. But unlike some of the more rigid empirical philosophers like David Hume, who thought experience was only what was experienced by the senses, James said that experience could also include metaphysical ideas, religion, or anything at all that was part of our experience as human beings.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, it made sense that Americans embraced pragmatism — a new approach, a practical approach, and an attempt to reconcile seemingly opposing sides. Pragmatism was popularized by James, Peirce, and John Dewey, one of Peirce's students. Dewey lived until 1952, and he had a long and prolific career. By the time he died at the age of 92, he had published 40 books and hundreds of articles. Dewey called his philosophy "instrumentalism" rather than "pragmatism," but he is generally considered the third major pragmatist. He helped make the philosophy seem even more relevant to Americans, writing about education, art, civic life, and government.

Even though it is such a complex philosophy, today we use the word pragmatism in an offhand way, to mean "practicality."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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