by Liam Heneghan Dedicated to the students who travel with Randall Honold and me to Wicklow, West Kerry, and Connemara, this summer, following in the footsteps of Synge. At that time in my life before I realized that such things are rare, I was paid, modestly it’s true, by Glenveagh National Park to travel on…

By Liam Heneghan “One should wander solitary as a rhinoceros horn.” – Rhinoceros Horn Sutta “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,/Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” – T.S. Eliot Sixty-three days after his solitary stay on Desolation Peak, Jack Kerouac came down the mountain leaving behind him a “column…

By Liam Heneghan What kind of happiness does technology procure then? And why do people remain both enthralled and unsatisfied by it? (Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life) To be a friend to many people in the complete kind of friendship is not possible (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII) There is a…

By Liam Heneghan Before Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sanymount Green Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower. Ulysses, James Joyce. Only thoughts reached by walking have value.Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche In 1987 I saw him for the first…

By Liam Heneghan “There are tories in science who regard imagination as a faculty to be avoided rather than employed. They observe its actions in weak vessels and are unduly impressed by its disasters” —John Tyndall, 1870 In his 1881 essay on Mental Imagery, Francis Galton noted that few Fellows of the Royal Society or…

By Liam Heneghan [Spoiler alert: I discuss in some detail the plot outcome of The Great Gatsby and, for that matter, of Django Unchained] I do not mean to suggest here that Quentin Tarantino set out in Django Unchained to revive in any sort of deliberate way the characters and themes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s…

By Liam Heneghan Every time I extricate a tick from near my groin I recall with fondness a trip I took with a small group of youthful botanists to the west coast of Ireland in 1984. I tagged along with third year undergraduates on the annual University College Dublin Botany Department’s field trip to the…

by Liam Heneghan In Memoriam Patricia Monaghan, poet: your words are flame. On August 19th 1833 Colonel Colbee Chamberlain Benton (1805-1880) left Chicago with Louis Ouilmette, a young man of French and Potawatomi heritage, to inform local Indian tribes that their federal annuities would be paid in September of that year. Benton’s trip, recorded in…

by Liam Heneghan From my book in progress Fields of Love: Themes of Romance and Agricultural Reform in the Work of Leo Tolstoy (this volume is not yet under contract). Leo Tolstoy started Anna Karenina, arguably his finest novel, with a hypothesis. “Happy families”, he conjectured, “are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in…

by Liam Heneghan Theories of war provoke snarling debate because we are never at peace. Similarly, calls for sustainability nettle us when accompanied by declarations of civilization’s imminent collapse. Certainly there are several lines of investigation indicating that the collective needs of humanity cannot be met in perpetuity and that current demands are already imposing…

by Liam Heneghan What we might remember most about the London 2012 Olympics are the medal ceremonies. The proud, the tearful, the exhausted, the awestruck, the lip-syncing, and occasionally the unimpressed. We might also call to mind the relative equanimity with which silver and bronze medalists tolerated the national anthems of the winning nation. Nobel…

By Liam Heneghan A unicorn is described as having the legs of a deer, the tail of a lion, the head and body of a horse. It possesses a single horn which is white at the base, black in the middle and red at the tip. Its body is white, its head red, and its…

by Liam Heneghan Quum fructus maturus semina dispergat. Linnæus, Philosophia Botanica, 1751 1. In The Beginning Was the Verb In the beginning was the Verb, and the Verb was with God, and the Verb set all things in motion. More than just any Word (Latin verbum, word) the God who is, was, and shall be…

by Liam Heneghan Urban ecology, the environmental sciences youngest and most rambunctious cousin, is in a position to influence the design of the cities of the future. Its clout comes from its willingness to think big, to think about the ecology of entire cities as if they were just any other ecosystem. Urban ecologists call…

by Liam Heneghan To James White, botanist and teacher. Though you might forgivably mistake a man for a tree at the level of gross morphology, nevertheless, a tree undeniably dwells in place whereas a person’s home is born in motion. Agnes Arber, the Cambridge plant anatomist and philosopher, remarked in her 1950 classic The Natural…

by Liam Heneghan “He was violent?” She exhaled. “I don’t know. What’s ‘violent’ anymore? He was a teenage guy. Then, a guy in his twenties.” —Richard Powers, The Echo Maker Once upon a time, there was an editor of a short-lived academic journal called Evolutiona Pathologica who was fired in disgrace. In an interview published…

by Liam Heneghan A short note in which I conjecture on a potentially vast local extinction event of Midwestern soil organisms especially of those inhabiting the leaf litter of woodlands. In our evolutionary progression humans scrambled from the leafy treetops about half way down the length of the trunk. We now live perched between treetop…

by Liam Heneghan The recently dead rot much like money accumulates in banks (until recently, at least), only, of course, in reverse. A sage great-great-ancestor who had, for instance, set aside a few shillings for a distant descendant would, through the plausible alchemy of compound interest, have made that great-great-offspring a wealthy person indeed. In…