Great-Granddaddy wrote and wrote and wrote! I am truly grateful! Here are some more bits and bobs that I particularly enjoyed. (Titles are his.)
Circle of Life
Life begins in a point and extends itself in what appears to be a straight line. It is middle age before we sense a curvature. This is the point at which George Meredith says the individual first experiences the "sensation of mortality." Not much further travel is necessary to reveal that it is no spiral movement but that, like Einstein's space, life is curving back upon itself: he knows now that he is traversing an arc the terminus of which will close the gap. The end from which merges with the end to which; and "Lo! the phantom caravan has reached the nothing it set out from." (reference)
Diet
My father used to say, "You're not hungry until you can eat dry bread with relish." Practice this and another of his aphorisms "always quit eating while you are still hungry" -- generally practiced in any fairly healthy population and nine-tenths of the doctors would have to turn to other employments to make a living.
And maybe a half of the hospitals could be used for housing.
Untitled
Can there be a justification for life torturing life? Insects torture us -- why not we them? Tit-for-tat philosophy -- the east refuses to accept this -- the west has accepted it and extended it to creatures which do not inflict any torment upon us.
Disney Film "The Secret of Life"
Saw it twice...
Thesis -- struggle of life "against" nature forces a misstatement it is not against, for Life is a "natural" part of Nature. Physical forces, materials, all, everything is subject to life --- there can not be a struggle one against the other -- Life picks up, uses, throws away, uses again
-- endlessly Life is the active principle, material the passive.
Religion
So far as I am concerned the visible and sensible universe (ie the universe as it may be made
known to me by my five senses aided by appliances techni___ use -- microscope, telescopes, radar, etc.) is my church. Poets, philosophers and naturalists, scientists, artists, insofar as they can discover new beauties, ie harmonies or thought-provoking mysteries which [sic] intensifying my interest -- these are my priests. My absorption in these is my devotional.
July 28, 1949
Every religion except one's own is false; no such general indictment of science can be sustained.
Glass
(After describing breaking a glass and trying to dispose of it without neighborhood dogs accidentally swallowing a piece from rummaging in the garbage...)
Glass is by all odds the hatefullest material that the ingenuity of modern man has devised, but it is the material by which this age will be remembered in the long result of time, for glass is indestructible. Cement crumbles, steel rusts away, but glass remains. And in what huge quantities is it being manufactured and to what intimate uses it is being put. The damnable dump-heaps of our civilization will be mainly glass for the future archeologists, a million years from today. And I am not sure that it will not be a fitting memorial. As our civilization is a brittle one.
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The following is part of a transcript from the oral history. It describes more fully the bike ride and a particularly harrowing experience. I previously understood that he rode to El Paso and took a bus the final leg to Deming, but this account says he rode the whole way to Deming. --KDD
I got on a bicycle and I rode to Deming, New Mexico.
Nine hundred and eighty-three [miles] or something like that with the roads like they were. Well, I done it. Yeah, I got tired of staying around home there (in Eddy) and didn't want to teach any more [sic]. I was searching for land. I wanted land...I wanted me a homestead -- a place that I could be kind of a squire like person. So I went out there.
I got on the bicycle in Eddy, Texas, and I got off it at Deming, New Mexico and I sold it to the barber who shaved me for twenty-three dollars and I'd given Montgomery-Ward twenty-three dollars for it. So I got free transportation, and I had my camping outfit. I didn't sleep in a house but once during the whole trip.
And when I got to the crossing of the Pecos River I led my bicycle across that highest bridge in the world at that time -- and a long bridge at that, and I didn't
know anything about the train schedules and a train came while I was on the bridge but I happened to be right near one of those big sills that, you know so I just stepped off and lifted my nice little bicycle right down there on that sill by while a great long train -- fifty cars -- went by just lickety-split and then I got back on.
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More Photos from the Files
I just wanted to tell you how much I've enjoyed these posts, especially this one. I discovered Roy Bedichek decades ago, and his letters and essays have stayed with me. I've told so many people about him, that I wrote a summary for those who want to know more. I thought it might interest you: https://www.hebertaylor.com/roy-bedichek
But I really just wanted to say thanks.
Heber
nice to uncover new facts.
However, I happen to disagree with this:
"Every religion except one's own is false; no such general indictment of science can be sustained."
There has always been disagreements about science, even among scientists ("preponderance of evidence") but it is worse now, esp. when money and ideology are threatened.
and this:
"Glass is by all odds the hatefullest material that the ingenuity of modern man has devised..."
I guess plastic had not been invented yet?
I also had understood he sold his bike in EP, but now we know the real story from the horse's mouth.