Footnotes to a Conversation, July 10, 2023

“Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.” – José Rizal

I’ve been trying my hand at fermentation over the last few months with first yogurt and now water kefir. Both have been highly successful – and much simpler to make than many of the articles and recipes imply. As with many aspects of life, it’s okay to improvise!

Gut Feelings

Interoception is the ability to feel what’s happening inside our bodies. “When we talk about ‘listening to our bodies’ or ‘going with our guts,’ we are often talking about this type of interoception. Close your eyes at any given moment, and you can gauge your over-all mood—good, bad, excited, tired, a bit down, or generally pleased. This mood combines what’s going on in your mind with how your organs, muscles, and nerves are embodying the moment.” Some of us are more internally aware than others. It may help you when gambling, but it can also harm you as you may not read the signals correctly. People with anxiety or depression may attend too much to their bodies, for example. Subconscious awareness of our body is more effective than consciously listening to our bodies. [The New Yorker]

Sound of Silence

“The human sense of hearing is a handicapped sense, since it is totally defenseless. We can close our eyes when we don’t want to see, we can decide not to eat when something doesn’t taste nice, we can decide not to touch when something scalds. However, it’s no use stopping one’s ears, and even sealing them up with wax, if we don’t want to hear. The sound still reaches our ears through the skull. Our sense of hearing is vulnerable and, in that sense, we are the slaves of the world that surrounds us. It may seem odd that I repeat things that everybody knows. Yet the majority of people today act as though these quite obvious facts have not entered their consciousness. A motorcyclist does not care at all that, while driving through the empty streets at 3 a.m., he wakes up hundreds of people. The owner of a radio set, when he forces all his neighbors to listen to a radio program, sometimes for hours on end, cares even less about other people. I could give endless examples of our contemporary world which compel us to accept the sad fact that people are being deprived of one of their elementary rights – the right to have silence. This right is not protected by the law; it is not even respected by people in their everyday behavior.” [Witold Lutosławski, 20^th century Polish composer]

It’s a Woman’s Job

The first telephone operators were boys. But as customer service became increasingly important, they were replaced by women. “By 1900, Bell Telephone demanded that their operators—all women—be ‘physically fit in order to tackle the exacting work at the switchboard.’ Applicants had to be sufficiently tall that they could reach top wires, prove they had good hearing and eyesight, and ‘could not wear eyeglasses or have a consumptive cough.’” The Hello Girls were bilingual American women interacting with Allied units in France during WWI, but it took until 1972 for them to be recognized as veterans. [JStor Daily]

Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I also post occasional articles on other dates, including frequent book reviews and travel tales.

If you share my love of nature, check out EcoFriendly West, an online publication encouraging environmental initiatives in Western Canada, and Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces.