The Marginalian
The Marginalian

What It’s Like to Be a Panda

What It’s Like to Be a Panda

“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Stephen Hawking wondered, recognizing the quixotic nature of his quest for a theory of everything — a complete and final explanation of the universe, a universe only rendered real in the mind.

Around the same time, on another landmass, watching finches cling to the swaying branches in the wind, a scientist as original and unrelenting in his own quest was wondering about the “internal fires that fuel these wisps of feather and bone,” recognizing that each mind is itself a universe, that inside every skull, even the smallest, is a place black and fathomless as pure spacetime, housing an umwelt of which an outside observer can only ever have an incomplete theory.

Considered by many the most effective conservationist of the past century, George Schaller — the first researcher to walk among wild gorillas unarmed and be rewarded with unprecedented insight into their universe, the first to take a photograph of the elusive snow leopard, rigorous and sensitive biographer of the lives of species as varied as the African lion and the Tibetan antelope, and now himself the subject of Miriam Horn’s rigorous and sensitive biography Homesick for a World Unknown (public library) — has spent the better portion of his days in wild places where “one settles at times for mere survival,” bitten and blistered and burnt, often haunted by his sense of “terrible loneliness” and “utter insignificance,” yet determined to prevail over parasites and bureaucrats and armed rebels to bring us a little bit closer to the abiding mystery of that unreachable otherness dwelling inside every consciousness, every sensorium, every animal body nerved with the history of its habitat and its habits.
Out of his life arises the unnerving, redemptive intimation that all the whys of our theology and philosophy are dwarfed by a single how honed to the point of revelation on the whetstone of observation and interpretation we call science; that the most interesting question about life is not why it exists but how it coheres, how it sings, what it is like to be alive — a question only ever answerable through what Horn calls “sustained intimacy” with the other via our own animal bodies, only answered with a “willingness to confess bafflement.”

Of all the baffling creatures whose universes Schaller entered with his torch of thought and tenderness, none was a greater mystery than the giant panda — doubly so for having be so rampantly Disneyfied and Instagrammed into a stuffed toy for the modern mind, shorn of its creaturely reality, all the more unknown for being so voyeuristically objectified.

Chinese watercolor from George Schaller’s 1993 book The Last Panda.

Born uncommonly vulnerable — a pink handful of hairless flesh one nine-hundredth of the weight they would grow to, entirely dependent on the mom that must carry the infant in her mouth or paw continuously until it has grown to what Schaller described as a “panda-colored beanbag with legs” — pandas, even in their full-grown gigantism, remain one of our planet’s most vulnerable creatures, dealt a cruel hand by evolution, displaced and enslaved in our own hands. Schaller saw that what was needed was not merely better science but a restitution of these creatures’ dignity by meeting them, with curiosity and empathy, on their own terms — not as a symbol, not as a plaything, but as a living mystery with a sensorium and umwelt all its own.

Contextualizing the alien world he entered when he began his work with the giant panda, Horn writes:

A wild panda… doesn’t announce its presence like gorillas with big, noisy families, nor does it roam like a tiger. Instead, it stays mostly alone and mostly still, inside a world that seems designed to hide it: of bamboo screens all around made still more opaque by near-constant mists and rains. There it sits, just quietly eating, day and night. It must, because in one of the clumsier turns of evolution, it has become wholly dependent on a food it can barely digest. Though the purest of herbivores, eating only bamboo, a panda still has its carnivorous ancestors’ gut. Lacking the internal fermentation vat and symbiotic microbes that enable cows, giraffes, and other grass and leaf eaters to access the nutrients in cellulose and lignin, a panda can assimilate just 17 percent of the bamboo it eats. It can’t build enough fat to hibernate or even to sleep all night, but can survive only (like the orbiting humans in WALL-E) by combining gluttony with sloth.

Horn observes that the qualities we find most endearing in pandas — those traits most emblematic of their commodified cuteness — are an evolutionary consequence of this metabolic dictum:

Their sweet, broad head provides a strong anchor for jaws powerful enough to snap, strip, crush, and grind woody stalks. Their roly-poly body serves as a big, bamboo-holding barrel: George calculated that his favorite panda ate on average eighty-five pounds a day, half her body weight. Their famous pseudothumb, an elongated wrist bone, allows them to grab and hold even the slenderest stem, and to eat with exceptional efficiency. As George counted, one big male bit into 3,481 stems, rhythmically feeding each into the side of his mouth like a pencil into a sharpener, levering it Bugs Bunny–style into pieces, and reaching for the next before the last was swallowed. Most passes right through: Schaller weighed a single scat pile at seventeen pounds.

Taking in such meager energy, pandas must spend just as little. Most barely budge in a day, traveling no farther than a few hundred meters. Like Roman emperors, they eat slouched or reclined; George watched one lie on his back and use his hindpaws to bend stems toward his mouth, saving both forepaws for shoveling in the leaves. They don’t build beds, their plush bodies serving as both mattress and comforter. More than once, George saw a sated panda abruptly flop over onto its side or belly like a wound-down toy, fall promptly to sleep, then wake like Winnie-the-Pooh: raising arms overhead to yawn, rubbing their back end against a tree, even (when fed) licking a porridgy paw clean. Yet for all that adorableness, they were the most truly solitary animal George had ever known.

Chinese watercolor from George Schaller’s 1993 book The Last Panda.

But despite how closely and patiently he observed the pandas, Schaller felt the cold edge of their otherness. “Her being eludes me,” he wrote after countless hours observing a particular female he saw as “complete in herself… final and preordained,” finding himself “hopelessly separated by an immense space.” An epoch after Kepler invented science fiction with his imaginative parable about life on other worlds, Schaller turned to that most ancient of storytelling forms to imagine life in other worlds — the inner world of a panda — in a parable serving a moving reminder of just how alien this planet’s life-forms ultimately are to one another. Reaching across the immense space, he channeled the voice of the panda warning about her own unknowability:

You cannot divide me into… fragments of existence… I am, like any other being, infinite in complexity, indivisible. [Even] time is not the same for all living things. This fir lives more slowly than you, and I more quickly… Some of you… hold that language is necessary before one can think, and that makes me and all others — except you — unthinking creatures. What frivolous nonsense!… I think mainly with smells… Forget science now and then.”

Recognizing that we can only ever perceive other creatures the way we perceive one another — in fragmentary glimpses of a remote reality stitched together into a coherent picture by tenuous threads of theory and speculation — Schaller added in the urgent voice of his parable-panda:

Look at each other. Your ways of thinking are vastly different, yet you belong to the same species.

Exposing the weft of science’s warp, he wrote:

What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

In a sentiment part Emily Dickinson, part Wittgenstein, part Zen kaon, he captured the central mystery of aliveness:

The panda is the answer. But what is the question?

Chinese watercolor from George Schaller’s 1993 book The Last Panda.

Complement this fragment of the wholly magnificent Homesick for a World Unknown with a taste, delicious and incomplete, of what it’s like to be an orca, what it’s like to be an owl, and what it’s like to be a falcon.

BP

Chance, Choice, and the Avocado: The Strange Evolutionary and Creative History of Earth’s Most Nutritious Fruit

In the last week of April in 1685, in the middle of a raging naval war, the English explorer and naturalist William Dampier arrived on a small island in the Bay of Panama carpeted with claylike yellow soil. Dampier — the first person to circumnavigate the globe thrice, inspiring others as different as Cook and Darwin — made careful note of local tree species everywhere he traveled, but none fascinated him more than what he encountered for the first time on this tiny island.

Dampier described the black bark and smooth oval leaves of the tall “Avogato Pear-tree,” then paused at its unusual fruit — “as big as a large Lemon,” green until ripe and then “a little yellowish,” with green flesh “as soft as Butter” and no distinct flavor of its own, enveloping “a stone as big as a Horse-Plumb.” He described how the fruit are eaten — two or three days after picking, with the rind peeled — and their most common local preparation: with a pinch of salt and a roasted plantain, so that “a Man that’s hungry, may make a good meal of it”; there was also uncommonly delectable sweet variation: “mixt with Sugar and Lime-juice, and beaten together in a Plate.” And then he added:

It is reported that this Fruit provokes to Lust, and therefore is said to be much esteemed by the Spaniards.

Avocado by Étienne Denisse from the stunningly illustrated 19th-century French encyclopedia Flore d’Amérique. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)

But far more fascinating than the cultural lore of the avocado are its own amorous propensities, uncovered in the centuries since by sciences that would have then seemed like magic, or heresy.

The most nutritious known fruit, the avocado — a mostly evergreen member of the laurel family — is a ghost of evolution that should have grown extinct when the animals that fed on it and disseminated its enormous seeds did. Mercifully, it did not. Ample in Europe and North American during the Ice Age, it somehow managed to survive in Mexico and spread from there. But even more impressively, it managed to survive its own self-defeating sexual relations — the botanical equivalent of the human wire-crossing Eric Berne described in his revelatory 1964 classic Games People Play.

Bald of petals though the tree’s small greenish blossoms may be, they are an example of “perfect flowers” — the botanical term for bisexual blooming plants, which can typically self-pollinate. The avocado, however, is far from reproductively self-sufficient due to an astonishing internal clock, which comes in two mirror-image varieties.

In some cultivars — like the Hass, Pinkerton, and Reed avocados — the blossoms open up into reproductive receptivity in their female guise each morning, then close by that afternoon; the following afternoon, they open in their male guise. Other cultivars — the Fuerte, Zutano, and Bacon avocado among them — bloom on the opposite schedule: female in the afternoon, male by morning.

Thisbe by John William Waterhouse, 1909. (Available as a print.)

This presents a Pyramus and Thisbe problem across the wall of time — while both partners inhabit the space of a single tree, they can’t reach each other across the day-parts and need to be pollinated by trees on the opposite schedule. Their reproduction is further derailed by the fact that some varieties, like the Hass, only fertilize to fruition every other year.

Ever since humans have cultivated Earth’s most nutritious fruit, they have tried to help the helpless romancer with various intervention strategies — grafting, planting trees with opposite blooming schedules near each other, even manually pollinating blossoms of the same tree.

The world’s most beloved avocado — the Hass — is the consequence of human interference consecrated by happenstance in the hands of a California mailman in the 1920s.

Avocado by Royal Charles Steadman, 1919. (Available as a print and more.)

The year he turned thirty, Rudolph Hass (June 5, 1892–October 24, 1952) was leafing through a magazine when an illustration stopped him up short: a tree growing dollar bills instead of fruit. He was making 25 cents an hour delivering mail while raising a growing family. The tree, he learned, was an avocado and its fruit were promised to be the next great horticultural boon.

Rudolph took all the money he had, borrowed some from his sister Ida, and bought a small grove of the leading commercial avocado variety — the Fuerte — with a few other cultivars sprinkled in. Needing the greatest possible gain from his grove, he wanted only Fuertes but couldn’t afford to buy any new trees. Instead, he decided to cut down some of the old ones and graft them to become more fertile young Fuertes. He took counsel from a professional grafter, who said the best technique was to graft with his own seedlings. He had none. But it happened that a man on his mail route had a mighty green thumb and was experimenting with growing avocados from seeds, which he got from restaurant refuse.

Rudolph bought three of the lustrous dark orbs and planted them in his grove. They sprouted. When they grew strong enough, he grafted onto one of them a cutting from one of the mature Fuerte trees. The graft didn’t take. He tried again on another of the seedlings. This too failed.

Resigned, Rudolph abandoned the experiment and let his surviving seedling grow as it pleased. In a neglected corner of the grove, it quietly went on doing what trees, those masters of improvisation, do — press on with their blind optimism. When it reached maturity, it began bearing fruit that looked nothing like any other avocado — dark and luscious, the Braille of its skin glimmering with violet.

When Rudolph cut one open for his five young children, they declared those were the most delicious avocados they had ever tasted.

Soon, the world would agree.

This being America and that being the wake of the Great Depression, the Hass family had patented the avocado within a decade.

Rudolph and Elizabeth Hass in front of the mother tree

After describing his “new and improved variety of avocado which has certain characteristics that are highly desirable” and listing all the ways in which “the present invention” differed from existing avocados — higher oil content, superior flavor, doesn’t drop from the tree or rot inside before ripening, resists cold blasts, and, oh, it is almost purple — Rudolph ended his patent application with a summation of his creation that hums with a kind of humble pride:

I claim as my invention: The variety of avocado tree… characterized by its summer ripening, medium-sized fruits, of purple color having a leathery skin… and borne on long stemps [sic], with a small tight seed and with creamy flesh of excellent color and nutty flavor, smooth with no fibre and butter-like consistency.

Rudolph Hass’s avocado patent, 1935.

In the near-century since Rudolph’s hopeful and hapless experiment, the Hass avocado has begun bringing in more than a billion dollars a year for growers, accounting for four fifths of the American avocado industry. But Rudolph Hass continued working as a mailman until he was felled by a heart attack months after his sixtieth birthday, months before Rachel Carson indicted her country with the reminder that “the real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife.”

Today, every single Hass avocado in every neighborhood market that ever was and ever will be can be traced to a single mother tree grown by a destitute California mailman in 1926 — tender evidence that every tree is in some sense immortal, and a living testament to how chance and choice converge to shape our lives.

BP

Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

We are each born with a wilderness of possibility within us. Who we become depends on how we tend to our inner garden — what qualities of character and spirit we cultivate to come abloom, what follies we weed out, how much courage we grow to turn away from the root-rot of cynicism and toward the sunshine of life in all its forms: wonder, kindness, openhearted vulnerability.

Answering a young person’s plea for guidance in finding direction and meaning amid a “bizarre and temporary world” that seems so often at odds with the highest human values, the sage and sensitive Nick Cave offers his lens on the two most important qualities of spirit to cultivate in order to have a meaningful life.

Nick Cave

A generation after James Baldwin observed in his superb essay on Shakespeare how “it is said that his time was easier than ours, but… no time can be easy if one is living through it,” Nick prefaces his advice with a calibration:

The world… is indeed a strange and deeply mysterious place, forever changing and remaking itself anew. But this is not a novel condition, our world hasn’t only recently become bizarre and temporary, it has been so ever since its inception, and it will continue to be such until its end — mystifying and forever in a state of flux.

He then offers his two pillars of a fulfilling life — orientations of the soul that “have a softening effect on our sometimes inflexible and isolating value systems”:

The first is humility. Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things. If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others’ shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.

The other quality is curiosity. If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I’ve grown older I’ve learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world. Having a conversation with someone I may disagree with is, I have come to find, a great, life embracing pleasure.

Couple with Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell on what makes a fulfilling life and revisit Nick Cave’s humble wisdom on the importance of trusting yourself, the art of growing older, and the antidote to our existential helplessness, then savor his lush On Being conversation with Krista Tippett about loss, yearning, transcendence, and “the audacity of the world to continue to be beautiful and continue to be good in times of deep suffering.”

BP

Middle Age and the Art of Self-Renewal: An Extraordinary Letter from Pioneering Education Reformer Elizabeth Peabody

Middle Age and the Art of Self-Renewal: An Extraordinary Letter from Pioneering Education Reformer Elizabeth Peabody

“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,” Virginia Woolf wrote in one of her characteristic asides of immense insight as she considered the dying art of letter writing. This may be the most elemental paradox of existence: We yearn for permanence and stability despite a universe of constant change as a way of hedging against the inescapable fact of our mortality, our own individual impermanence. And yet this faulty coping mechanism results not in immortality but in complacency, stagnation, a living death. Emerson captured this paradox with sundering precision as he weighed the key to personal growth: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

That is what Emerson’s contemporary and collaborator, the great education reformer Elizabeth Peabody (May 16, 1804–January 3, 1894), explores in an 1838 letter to her friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister, included in Figuring. (Peabody’s own sister, Sophia, would eventually marry Hawthorne, living through his conflicted romantic attachment to Herman Melville.)

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

As a child, Peabody had taught herself Latin and Greek in order to access the world’s wisdom and cut off her curls in revolt against her culture’s preoccupation with young women’s appearance rather than their minds. She learned astronomy and geography in an era when higher education was not available to women and become the first woman allowed into Boston’s only lending library. (The exception only lasted a month, during which she borrowed twenty-one books.) In her ninety years, Peabody founded the first English-language kindergarten in America, translated the first American edition of Buddhist scripture, launched the country’s first foreign-language bookstore and circulating library, coined the term Transcendentalism to define the philosophical current sweeping New England, and introduced the king and queen of Transcendentalism. The epitome of intellectual restlessness and creative self-reinvention, she never married — she lived a life her younger sister described as one of “high thinking and plain living.”

Quoting advice a friend had once given her, Peabody writes:

The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth. The holy sensibilities of genius — for all the sensibilities of genius are holy — keep their possessor essentially unhurt as long as animal spirits and the idea of being young last; but the perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth; when the world comes to them, not with the song of the siren, against which all books warn us, but as a wise old man counselling acquiescence in what is below them.

Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

Peabody ends with the admonition that the path to complacency is paved with complacent companions:

No being of a social nature can be entirely beyond the tendency to fall to the level of his associates.

The antidote to stagnation, therefore, lies in surrounding oneself with people of creative vitality. The pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell — a contemporary of Peabody’s and a key figure in Figuring — would articulate this beautifully two decades later in contemplating how we co-create one another and recreate ourselves through friendship: “Whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware.”

Complement with the pioneering social scientist John Gardner on the art of self-renewal and legendary cellist Pablo Casals, at age 93, on creative vitality and how working with love prolongs your life.

BP

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