Tea at Trianon: Nature Is Always Listening

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, October 1, 2023

Nature Is Always Listening

From The Marginalian:

Fungi are the evolutionary cardinals of the Earth — the first to conquer it and the last to inherit it, composing the living substratum beneath every forest and every field and every backyard ecosystem. Each cubic inch of mycelium compresses eight miles of fine filaments folded unto themselves — the original superstrings of this terrestrial universe. Wildly unlike us, they are inseparable from our creaturely inheritance. Since the dawn of our adolescent species, they have been touching our cuisine and our consciousness in ever-evolving ways, the underlying mystery of which we are only just beginning to unravel.
In the early 2000s, a series of groundbreaking studies began revealing yet another facet of that mystery — the way mushrooms respond to sound, despite having no auditory organs. One [PDF] found that high-frequency sounds inhibit spore generation and mycelial growth. Another [PDF] affirmed the correlation from the other side, finding that low-frequency sound waves stimulate mycelial growth. The aptitudes and abilities of every organism — ours included — are puppeteered by evolutionary adaptation. This means the curious relationship between sound vibration and mycelial growth must confer some substantive evolutionary advantage upon mushrooms, honed over the eons. Master-mycologist Paul Stamets, author of the millennial bible Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (public library), set out to solve the enigma. (Read more.)