In this essay, he's hanging out with Jim Loyd, an animal behaviorist known as "Firefly Doc" who studies fireflies as a professor at the University of Florida. There are many great moments, but I loved this quote about science:
"Science is not voodoo," he told me. "Amateurs should be able to do it. But a lot of students today think science requires lots of expensive technology and a laboratory." The accessibility of science was his favorite theme. He once wrote an essay about the subject, inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New England transcendentalist who encouraged naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau:
"Foregoing generations of students beheld nature face to face; ours, through their eyes, poorly," Doc wrote, capturing the flavor of Emerson's nineteenth-century prose. "Why should not our students also enjoy an original relation with their universe? Why should not our learners have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a science by revelation to them, and not merely through the history of others? Surrounded in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through them, and will invite them by the invigoration they supply to actions that reach to achieve new heights of insight, why should our students grope among the dry bones of the past, or the molecules or electrons of some wanting future, and live themselves as role-playing facades they know from TV?"
"The sun shines today too. There are things to be explored and found again, fresh."
Fireflies, of course.
Right on. This part serves nicely to shore up Klinkenberg's argument in the book that those who don't see the seasons in Florida need to connect with the part of it that isn't climate-controlled and interior-designed. To me it's more than that, though - science and philosophy and poetry aren't just subjects to be studied, they're disciplines to be practiced. They're not nouns, they're verbs.
Y'all ought to read the book. Thanks to mom for loaning it to me!
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