International Fascination of Plants Day for 2024

 

As today is International Fascination of Plants Day, it’s appropriate to show some portraits of plants I made in Driftwood on April 8th while waiting for the full solar eclipse. The first is fragrant mimosa, Mimosa borealis, and the second is a Missouri foxtail cactus, Escobaria missouriensis.

 

 

The third photograph reveals the intricacy of a developing
standing cypress plant, Ipomopsis rubra, viewed from above.

 

 

The last portrait shows a scarlet hedgehog cactus, Echinocereus coccineus.
with one of those “redder than red” flowers nature sometimes offers up.

 

 

 

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Last week I watched an interview in which a well-known author repeated an aphorism that he attributed to Voltaire: “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Curious, I did a little searching and turned up an investigation into the quotation that Walter Olson carried out in 2020. The aphorism appears to be an unknown someone’s pithy summary of what Voltaire wrote in his 1765 essay “Questions sur les miracles” (“Questions About Miracles”). Here’s the relevant French passage, followed by an English rendering:

 

Il y a eu des gens qui ont dit autrefois : Vous croyez des choses incompréhensibles, contradictoires, impossibles, parce que nous vous l’avons ordonné ; faites donc des choses injustes parce que nous vous l’ordonnons. Ces gens-là raisonnaient à merveille. Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste. Si vous n’opposez point aux ordres de croire l’impossible l’intelligence que Dieu a mise dans votre esprit, vous ne devez point opposer aux ordres de malfaire la justice que Dieu a mise dans votre cœur.

 

In times gone by there were people who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, contradictory, impossible, because we’ve ordered you to; therefore do unjust things because we order you to. Those people reasoned wonderfully well. Certainly anyone who’s entitled to get you to be absurd is entitled to get you to be unjust. If you don’t take the intelligence that God has put into your mind and use it to resist orders to believe the impossible, then you won’t take the sense of justice that God has put into your heart and use it to stand up against orders to do wrong.

 

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman