Philip Sugg | Blog

I had a dozen or more books that I needed to return to the UChicago library, so I drove over there after putting my son to bed. Late at night, after all the retail in the neighborhood has closed, most people are at home getting ready for bed. That big library building is still lit up. The university is in session for summer classes but there are hardly any students left. Fifteen minutes before closing, I nearly have the place to myself.

This concept of the ’third place’ gets thrown around sometimes in American settings: a place outside of home (the first place) and work or school (second place) that has some significance for communal life, where people can gather and form a culture outside of family or professional functions. Libraries are one type of third place I’ve known for most of my life. In my case I don’t know if they’ve mostly been about community; certainly they have been that at times, but what might be even harder to find than a gathering spot in the US right now is a place that’s devoted to quiet reflection, with a sense of possibility. A place where exploration can be invisible (or not), and needn’t be tracked or justified to anyone. When has the country ever needed a site like that more?

I don’t know what the fate of libraries will be–even in the near future. I doubt they’re getting more funding this year than they had last year. Large-scale storage of paper volumes is getting harder to justify. Private research libraries like UChicago’s are now coasting off the investments made in a different era.

From a short walk last weekend in a mature hardwood forest, occasional light. A delight to see a slow-growing plant like wild ginger covering the whole hillside–like a form of living time laid out in space. The thin but consistent layer of leaf cover makes all the difference in what can grow and thrive on the forest floor.

wild ginger, a slow grower at about 6 inches per year, spreading a hundred or more feet downhill

Huge stands of Ladyfern (Athyrium filix-femina) wherever the tree cover was heavy. In any window where a tree fell and the canopy broke open, the ferns were burned away

Something in the Osmorhiza genus, likely aniseroot. My eye was captured by the segmented, almost fern-like lobes of leaves on this plant.

In the Driftless region of Wisconsin with my family this last weekend, I had a chance to think about the consequences of its geology. Drift-less refers to the relative lack of glacial presence in this region during the last Ice Age, which ended around 12,000 years ago. Glaciers are one of the great earth-moving machines. Some features, like the rock and sand and dirt that make up mountains, are scraped away. They bring new material to the ground they pass over. In Wisconsin this can be hundreds of feet of sand and topsoil¹. The old land is both buried and crushed. But the original lime and sandstone bedrock is still present in the Driftless–usually beneath the ground, sometimes on jagged slabs lifted above the trees.

Spared the resetting effects of the glaciers, the Driftless retained traces of the past billion-plus years of geological history. The present-day soil sits right on top of old rocks. These rocks are a book of changes over time, a geological palimpsest written by the movements of water. Water nibbles at the bedrock, creating craggy, spindly passageways for itself. _Dendritic drainage, like the roots of a tree. Smaller channels open up, then larger, like an organic network of underground pipes. Water spouts up from these depths, changing the course of streams each year and the contours of the land over decades, then disappears back into the earth, rejoining the subterranean rivers and lakes. The surface is changeable. What has endured is the foundation–rock–on which the land sits. Water is the messenger between surface and depths.

On Wildcat Mountain, in Wisconsin’s Driftless region. This high observation point–from where the photo was taken–is around 1200 feet elevation, no more than a few hundred feet above the height of the surrounding plateau. But I was high enough to gain an awareness of the overall shape of the terrain (e.g., the knob to the left of the photo), to see the pattern of the topography (woods interrupted by open fields) and to see over all impediments, to the straight line of the ultimate horizon. I’ve stood on many mountains higher than this, and here I had the sensation that I was on a peak thousands of feet higher than it was–at great height. What is the term for when one landscape evokes another? The imagination allows itself to be tricked, perhaps out of nostalgia for a more familiar scene or a homeland. Heimatgefühl, the Germans would say.

The trick here is the elongation of relatively modest slice of vertical distance. In a few hundred feet this “mountain” (apparently the locals called it a hill before it was turned into a state park) gives the viewer a sense of detachment from the flatlands. There is a productive loss of connection between the high ground one stands on and the plateau below–a little bit like you’re flying. When I saw this view in person it made me feel like I was seeing the jigsaw puzzle of my surroundings. One doesn’t usually get views this comprehensive from Wisconsin. Looking at the photo now, I am reminded of the title to Rebecca Solnit’s 2013 book The Faraway Nearby. At this paradoxical point in space, we get close to something far away, and become far away from something near. Height creates both sensations at the same time. This is one source of its sublimity. Isn’t this feeling a privilege of rest, of getting away from the everyday, of being in a position to contemplate? Let’s hope that it can happen from more places, from even more unassuming elevations.

Image credit Internaz

I was saddened to see that William Langewiesche, the writer and long-form journalist, has died at 70. His was one of those bylines that I’d learned to get excited about a few times a year over the last decades, especially on topics related to aviation. He began his career as a pilot, and used that credibility to establish himself as the unofficial interpreter of flight–and flight disasters–for educated, literary audiences in the English-speaking world.

Judging by his recent work, he was very much still in the game. But Langewiesche was far more than a writer about airplanes. And what was that more? Not a writer who stuck to a competency earned through first-hand experience, but a writer whose technical skills revealed a more general comfort with complexity. In stepping out of his lane, he performed a demystification of expertise. Langewiesche’s early life as a pilot required an instinctive comfort with detail. But what set him apart was not his command of the details but his drive to understand them, to integrate them into an ever-widening but credible synthesis. All of these traits made him the ideal writer for an increasingly technological moment.

Langewiesche was a nonfiction writer who showed surprising range, but he was not a generalist on the level of, say, John McPhee.¹ In a sense he wrote many versions of the same story. Complexity is one of the defining conditions of the modern age. What happens when it is ignored, denied or misunderstood? This problem has its mythic qualites. It is often a story about what happens when human actors–mortals–lose sight of their limits, when they are reminded of their capacity for error and the ever-present possibility of the rare event.

Text-generating AIs get a lot of attention for their (apparent) capacity to outperform a human subject at any number of useful analytical tasks. An equally demanding challenge might be to persuade an audience that AI-generated ‘artwork’ was produced by a human. All the image generators I have seen might be skilled in some realistic or technical sense. Still, by now the visual tip-offs that an AI was involved are increasingly well-known. The specifics differ somewhat by the model, but the overall AI ‘house style’ for visuals is–to my eye–quite recognizable and consistent at this moment. Harder to explain is this: how does one recognize a piece of art as the product of a human? The human is what is left when all known AI styles are subtracted from the world.

Astronomers and telescope operators have a term, “first light,” that is kind of what it sounds like: the first time that light passes through a new telescope and makes an image.¹ There ought to be something like this for horticulture and gardening. I was happy to see flowers emerging, for the first time, from seeds I started stratifying two seasons ago, in late fall of 2023.

These are Calico Beardtongue (Penstemon Calycosus)

Late this past weekend I took a look at HBO’s new film Mountainhead. It’s gotten a lot of mainstream attention in the last few weeks, including about the $65 million house where the movie is set.¹ Mostly, I found the movie to be a quite literal and unlikeable presentation of a few widely circulated criticisms of the tech industry. Like Succession, also written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, it seems to draw a lot of its appeal from the voyeuristic curiosity of its audience. Mountainhead watchers must wonder about what type of house you vacation at when you are young-ish and among the richest people in the world. What does entertainment, friendship, work-play look like at this level?

This is one of those films that only makes sense if it comes with a claim to show “how it really is.” And yet, given the exclusivity of the subject matter, how would the audience know if the movie had gotten it right? One answer is that the film brings an obscure, elite situation down to the level of gossip–to the eminently comprehensible. These men, who claim to rule by means of their extraordinary talents and intelligence, must be disarmed, so that their fate unspools itself only through their basic qualities (honesty, courage, loyalty, ruthlessnes etc.). We may not be able to judge if the opulent setting is credible, but we can judge a character that is confronted with a situation.

What is distinctive about the setting of this movie is that it strips these men of their power. To buy this place at the top of the mountain and associate with one another, they had to fight to the top of the metaphorical pinnacle, conquering or creating entire industries. But all of the planes and motorcades and massive corporate armies that they command are removed from the situation. It’s a “poker weekend,” time off the clock, a chance to revel in ordinary time. And the film shows us leaders whose discomfort with power is almost paradoxical. What they seem to want is supremacy over one another: to be richer, more successful than the next person in the treehouse.²

Withdrawal and the so-called “ivory tower:” this is the constant temptation of any thinking person–especially those intellectuals who want to produce something that is likely to last.

Reading Lionel Gossman’s Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas, he has a case study on the Swiss scholar Johann J. Bachofen. Born in 1815, Bachofen was the intellectually talented scion of a wealthy family, appointed at a young age to a professor’s chair at the University of Basel, with high expectations that he would ascend to political life and the city’s governing elite. But objections to his appointment led to a minor public scandal; the inexperienced, sensitive Bachofen was more than rich enough to withdraw from formal employment entirely, which he largely did for the remainder of his 71-year life. While he would make a name for himself in posterity with his intellectual work (Mother Right), which he pursued without institutional restraint, the upheavals and revolutions across 19th-century Europe that he witnessed with increasingly conservative horror led him to an attitude of withdrawal from the world. Gossman describes it:

In the face of the collapse of traditional societies and traditional values, the only reasonable policy was to withdraw, cultivate those things that would enrich one’s own inner being and that might be shared with a few other individuals similarly inclined, and thus wait out the coming crisis, as it were, in order that beyond it, when humanity had come to it senses again, the torch of true learning and wisdom might be handed on. For though Bachofen described himself as a “pessimist,” he did not believe–any more than Burckhardt did–that the present age was the last word on human history. “The old world of Europe lies on a sickbed from which it an expect no lasting recovery,” he wrote to Meyer-Ochsner, but this did not signify the end of history, only the destruction of that which had to be sacrificed so that the history of mankind could take on a new turn. Sickness and death were the prelude to regeneration. Whatever the fate of the established states, therefore, “at the individual level, much that is good can be salvaged, much that is worthwhile can be newly created.” So, too, at the local level: “The best seek a sphere of activity in the concerns of their municipality. From there they hope to win back later a part of the ground that has been lost. My past experience and my studies indicate that my province should be that of magistrate and judge.” All the effort and energy expended on politics and the state is now best directed toward the improvement of individual lives, for it is individuals who will transmit what can be salvaged of the old culture, not states. (132)

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