TO BE A EUROPEAN CHRISTIAN (the rest of the world might be forgiven for thinking) was to build ships and sail them to any and all coasts not already a-bristle with cannons, make landfall at river’s mouth, kiss the dirt, plant a cross or a flag, scare the hell out of any indigenes with a musketry demo’, and—having come so far, and suffered and risked so much—unpack a shallow basin and scoop up some muck from the river-bottom. Whirled about, the basin became a vortex, shrouded in murk for a few moments as the silt rose into the current like dust from a cyclone. But as that was blown away by the river’s current, the shape of the vortex was revealed. In its middle was an eye of dirt that slowly disintegrated from the outside in as lighter granules were shouldered to the outside and cast off. Left in the middle was a huddle of nodes, heavier than all the rest. Blue eyes from far away attended to these, for sometimes they were shiny and yellow.

Now, ‘twere easy to call such men stupid (not even broaching the subjects of greedy, violent, arrogant, et cetera), for there was something wilfully idiotic in going to an unknown country, ignoring its people, their languages, art, its beasts and butterflies, flowers, herbs, trees, ruins, et cetera, and reducing it all to a few lumps of heavy matter in the center of a dish. Yet as Daniel, in the tavern, tries to rake together his early memories of Trinity and of Cambridge, he’s chagrined to find that a like process has been going on within his skull for half a century.

QUICKSILVER. Copyright © 2003 by Neal Stephenson.

It is probably around 1980. The location is what was then called the "New Biology" building on the second floor and the class was Avian Biology. I cannot for the life of me remember the Professor's name and I have no intention whatsoever of going to try and look it up. This is the flash that came to me when I had a text chat with the Brother and Son.

The nugget that suddenly came out of the swirl was a class discussion in that long-ago. One of the other students (a very attractive young woman named Susan who had the good sense and excellent taste to keep me at arms length) mused that the birds were singing because they were happy. The professor gently told her that when she heard birds singing, it was probably only for two reasons, they were either looking for a fight or a mate. At the time, being of the mistaken notion that saying something in a discussion labelled you as intelligent and perhaps a prospect for mating I added perhaps the birds were singing to announce their success.

The professor pointed out that my statement was just a description the fight/fuck duality that he had stated. My stock with Susan went down considerably.

Where this all is leading is a conversation via text with my brother in law and Son the other day about birdsong. There is a super spiffy program called "MERLIN" that you can download on your phone that listens for birdsong and identifies what it hears. I started the conversation with the family with a gush about the number of birds I heard (and a few that I saw). Then Carl (an excellent source of realism) sent this.

That led to me recounting the class interaction in a text conversation with the son and brother in law. The bro stated that, upon hearing the professor's description concerning the meaning of bird behaviors made him think that the name Twitter was quite appropriate for that particular platform.

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