Intellectuals, Ponds & Permaculture, St Patrick's Day ☘️
How to spot an intellectual; my new pond; achievements and celebration
March 16th, 2024: Greetings from Ireland. Spring has arrived and all the little critters which I have come to adore are beginning to crawl from their hiding spaces, transforming from their precursor states and populating every green nook and cranny in delightful fashion. My own attentions have been otherwise a little diverted as work has been very busy and, just as there are seasons in the year, there are seasons in life, too, and I’m putting this one down as a season of work, of chopping wood and carrying water, while still hopefully smelling some of the roses along the way.
Nonetheless, I have written the usual missive. Below you will find musings on intellectuals, ponds, and St Patrick’s Day. Enjoy!
Intellectuals
Gentle Reader,
The word ‘intellectual’ sometimes reverberates through a room with a certain authority, eliciting a frisson of excitement amongst the listeners. It carries a certain power, as if the person in question occupied a higher plane of existence, and issued forth with unchallengeable authority.
But what is an intellectual? It might be worth asking in your nearest public house – the regulars there might have an opinion. In the meantime, I myself am dwelling on a recent newspaper article in which somebody was labelled as a ‘public intellectual.’
Such a description could come dripping with satire, but on this occasion it seemed to be in earnest. I wondered what made him a public intellectual, or even an intellectual at all. Granted, he is known to write serious articles in the newspaper of record, and his opinion is sought after, in regard various Important Subjects.
There are many ways to be smart. A colleague of mine has a particular talent of saying exactly what I have said, but in a longer and more roundabout way, which has the effect of making it seem more palatable, and everybody likes it. His words heal wounds and glue people together, and he is thereby successful. I can’t do it. Is he an intellectual? I don’t think so. He doesn’t really have the classic hallmarks…he is not bespectacled nor does he employ an arcane vocabulary. He appears to take no interest in minutiae. In fact, his eyes glaze over when any fine detail is alighted upon.
Another guy I know can ‘spin out’ a company in a weekend. He gets everything going, devises processes, makes phone calls, involves influential people. Then, when the sales start coming in, he jumps ship, hires a manager, and starts the next project. He is not an intellectual. But he sure has know-how.
So, what then is an intellectual? It seems to be somebody whose smarts are of the dryest kind, the kind which is associated with the intellect itself, which is ‘the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively, especially with regard to abstract matters.’
It is highly divorced then, from day-to-day practical matters, which perhaps proves why having a high IQ doesn’t predict success in business, in relationships, and so on. Maybe it isn’t a truly useful kind of intelligence? All the same, the public intellectual, or even the local public-house garden-variety intellectual, is often a respected member of society, and is reverted to at dinner parties in order to tell us what was the cause of the First Kashmir War. The problem is, that by the time he has started explaining, the conversation has moved on.
But we love him all the same. My preferred definition for an intellectual, however, has nothing to do with dinner parties. I once read that:
The intellectual is a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
It is sort of amusing, isn’t it? Yet it rings true. If I ever see somebody reading a book with a pen in their hand, I immediately admire them, especially if he is wearing a trench coat in a Viennese coffee shop on a blustery day, at an hour when respectable persons are usually working.
I probably once wanted to feel like an intellectual, a real smartass. But, over the last couple of years, I have really come to see how the softer skills in life are, if not just more useful, then at least more important for happiness. There is an abundance of dried out professors who, as smart as they are, don’t know that you should tell your wife she looks good when she dresses up for dinner or, that small talk serves a purpose, that character is sometimes more important than pedigree.
The intellect, I guess, does not always serve us. But I’m glad of my aunt’s husband, who is always on hand to explain the history of the Silk Road, or to point out informative tidbits, such as the location where poor old Erskine Childers was executed, as we drove past, and why.
Ponds and Permaculture
I have written a little previously about my newish green-thumbed ways. After quite a long time talking about it, I eventually dug a wildlife pond. This happened at Christmas.
Why did I do it? Apparently, as the name suggests, they are helpful for wildlife. Frogs and dragonflies can inhabit them, and birds can take a bath there. They also look very nice and, there is something beautiful about interfacing with nature in this way, about creating a space to co-habit or to invite little critters
Now, the pond is starting to take shape a little, since spring is emerging, and it looks a lot more embedded in its environment. The margins have softened a little, the birds have dragged some twigs around to it, and a teeny tiny ecosystem is starting to emerge.
It suffers, however, from a fatal flaw: it has no liner. This means that when the weather dries up, so does the pond. I knew this to be the case beforehand, but since the liners are expensive, and since it’s at my parents place, I just wanted to run a little experiment. Like a lot of things in life, it’s good to get started, instead of using perfectionism as an excuse to delay.
In any case, it is very rainy here, so I don’t need to worry too much about drying out, and if it does, it turns out that a seasonal pond is still great for wildlife. So, I’m pretty happy, and my eye is turning now to other permacultural activities…
But let’s see how the experiment goes. It’s early days yet, and I’m still too shy to send a photo, partly because I’m envious of the many much larger and fancier photos which I’ve seen online. I would, however, encourage any and all of you, to dig a pond or make a little barrel pond, and at the bottom of this article I’ve written a little ‘call to action’, so check it out if you’re interested.
St Patrick’s Day
I used to think that you couldn’t be proud of something you didn’t achieve. For example, if you are Irish, you should not celebrate Irish culture, because the fact of your birth was simply a geographic accident. Nowadays, I see my old views of a symptom of being immersed in an achievement culture of sorts, and I think you can and should celebrate whatever you feel like celebrating.
Well, tomorrow is St Patrick’s Day, which commemorates the main who supposedly drove the snakes out of Ireland. The present writer therefore did not see a snake until he went to Flinders Island, where a baby copperhead nipped at my heels. Despite his anti-permacultural ways, I wish you all a happy St Patrick’s Day, or Lá Fhéile Pádraig, tomorrow! ☘️
Thanks for reading. This week, I have a cunning little environmentally friendly call to action. Since I want more ponds in the world, any reader who digs a little wildlife pond, or sets up a little barrel pond, should message or email me with a photo, and I will send them 3 months free membership of this Substack. I don’t have many paywalled posts, but hey, they might be worth a look.
For the rest of you, if you haven’t subscribed yet, click the nice green button to get more of the same.
I was brought up to aspire to be an intellectual, as my parents thought that rational intelligence was the best they could instill in me. I've pondered many times how other types of intelligence could be just as important. What is it that makes us admire an intellectual so much?!
PS: I always read books with a pencil in hand. 😊🤓
PS2: what a great idea to build a little pond!