Results of the practice

Although the overwhelming majority of Westerners who entered the monastic life at Wat Pah Pong were male, there were also a small number of Western women who came to train as maechees. Chief amongst these, was an American known by her adopted name Khamfah, who arrived with her husband Paul, after fleeing their home in Laos ahead of the Communist takeover in late 1975. The couple decided to try to stay for five years, with the proviso that, if at any time, both of them wanted to leave, then they would do so; however, in the case that one wanted to go and the other wanted to stay, then they would both carry on and endure through their difficulties. It was challenging for both of them, but they survived the five years.

At the end of every year, Luang Por would allow Maechee Khamfah to go to Wat Pah Nanachat for a few days where she would have the chance to speak to Paul (by then known as Ven. Thitabho). But mostly, their relationship was confined to the odd clandestine note, secreted at an agreed spot in the forest on the maechees’ route to the kitchen. In many ways, it was harder for Maechee Khamfah: as a nun, she had much less access to Luang Por, and, in the Maechee Section, her inspiration could easily waver. But Ven. Thitabho did not find monastic life easy either, and sometimes he would probably have preferred the distance from Luang Por that his wife resented.

By the late 1970s Luang Por had become a more grandfatherly figure. But the old fire and ability to give corrosive admonishments would occasionally resurface. He could also accomplish the effect of a scolding without speaking a word, as he demonstrated one day when he caught Ven. Thitabho breaking a key monastic regulation.

Private supplies of tea, coffee, sugar and so on were forbidden at Wat Pah Pong. Everybody was expected to be content with whatever communal drinks were provided. However, a number of the Western monks – Ven. Thitabho included – persuaded themselves that they were a special case in this respect, and if they were discreet enough about it, boiling a pot of water in the forest and having a cup of tea together was a minor, harmless indulgence. Every now and again, they would meet at Ven. Thitabho’s kuti, where an ancient black kettle was secreted.

One day, Ven. Thitabho received a parcel of fine teas from his sister in England. In the late afternoon, he made a small fire in the forest behind his kuti, at a spot where the smoke would not be visible from the path, to enjoy a first cup of the new batch. But when an involuntary shiver passed through his body, he quickly turned around to see a motionless and stonefaced Luang Por watching him. It was the proverbial nightmare come true. Luang Por walked over to the illicit supplies, lifted up his walking stick and knocked over a few jars of tea with a crash, spat on the ground and walked off in silence.

Luang Por spent most of the second half of 1979 overseeing the renovation of the monastery in Bahn Kor where he had spent his first years in the robes. Towards the end of the year, Ven. Thitabho was assigned as his attendant. One day, a group of Thai visitors began to praise the Western monks for their renunciation and dedication. Luang Por agreed, yes, his Western disciples were accomplished, many of them could chant the Pāṭimokkha. ‘They’re all very intelligent,’ he paused dramatically, ‘except for this one’, he pointed to Thitabho, ‘He’s really stupid.’ Afterwards, Luang Por asked Thitabho slyly if he got angry when he treated him like that. Thitabho said, ‘How can you get angry with a mountain?’ Luang Por was delighted. Laughing, he turned to one of the novices by his side, ‘Write that down. Write that down!’

Eventually, the five years were up. In the last few months, Khamfah’s growing sense of isolation in the Maechee Section had been exploited by a fundamentalist Christian missionary. This had culminated, somewhat bizarrely, in her conversion (‘Maybe, she’s right’, said a deadpan Luang Por, startling Ajahn Sumedho who brought the news). After their departure, ex-Thitabho adopted his wife’s faith. The couple sent letters to Western monks lamenting what they called the aridity of Buddhist spirituality, and exulting in what they believed to be a shared sense of Christ’s presence. One of their main complaints was that after five years in the wat, they could see no tangible results from their practice. No matter how much they had tried, life had always seemed to remain pretty much the same. These comments were passed on to Luang Por. Then one day, a photo of the couple with their first child arrived in the post. It was shown to Luang Por. He looked at it for a moment and then said, ‘At last, they’ve seen the results of their practice.’

Stillness Flowing The Life and Teaching of Ajhan Chah 

Black Widows & Angels of Death

 Black Widows

Early on, people noticed the similarities between the black widow spider and the behavior of some murderesses. The term “Black Widow” was originally used to describe a murderess that killed her romantic interests. The idea was to liken the behavior of certain multiple murderesses to that of the infamous black widow spider. As most people are aware the black widow spider, after being impregnated by her male counterpart, kills her impregnator. Black Widow murderesses behave similarly, killing their suitor after they have passed some arbitrary point that seemed appropriate to the killer. To some degree, this categorization does fit a small group of serial murderesses. Below I have listed the stories of some of the well documented cases of Black Widows. All women sought out prospective mates. All women killed their mates once they had outlived their usefulness to the women to whom they were married, or romantically interested in. The two lovable sisters, in Arsenic and Old Lace, were a7 worthy of such monikers. Black Widows, however, in their truest form work alone.

In many ways the label is deceiving, suggesting that Black Widows only kill their romantic interests. In many more cases, however, the “widow” may also kill other family members such as children. Mary Ann Cotton, one of the most notorious English murderers killed men she was interested in, or who were romantically interested in her. She also killed her own children, her step-children, and her own mother. Belle Gunness, although principally targeting men with financial means, occasionally would also dispatch one of her children and/or burn down a house for some extra cash. Vera Renczi is the only real “black widow” murderess in the truest sense of the term, killing two husbands and thirty-two lovers. She killed her son only out of necessity in that he was starting to become suspicious of her activities. The deaths of these close relatives often provided a financial reward, by way of insurance monies, that continued to sustain the murderess until she could find another source of income, or another victim. Such is the case with many of the case studies documented below.

Mary Ann Cotton (1832 - 1873)

According to Seagrave (1992), Mary Ann Cotton holds the title of one of Britain's greatest mass murderers of all time, regardless of gender consideration. Born Mary Ann Robson, in 1832 (Alleged Wholesale Poisoning, 1872), she was brought up a strict Methodist in the village of Low Moorsley, England. Her parents, Michael and Mary, were still in their teens. When Mary Ann was fourteen her father, a coal miner, died in an accident. Although the sources conflict on the age of her first marriage, it is known that between the ages of sixteen and twenty, she married William Mowbray. They moved to Devon and had five children, three of whom died. The second to die, a daughter named Mary Ann, was four years old. She was diagnosed as having “gastric fever”. They returned to the North East of England where Mary Ann had three more children. She insured all three, and her husband, with the British and Prudential Insurance Co. They soon died.

In 1865, Mary Ann married a second time to George Ward, of Sunderland. She met him at the Sunderland Infirmary, where Mr. Ward was a patient. George also succumbed to “gastric fever” on October 21, 1866 at the age of 33 (Alleged Wholesale Poisoning, 1872). After his death, she began work as a housekeeper for John Robinson, a widower with five children. They were soon married. In 1867 Mr.
Robinson's son, John, died. Within twelve days of young John's death, Mr. Robinson lost his two other children. Shortly after the deaths of the Robinson children, Mary Ann went to visit her mother. Once there, she expressed concern over her mother’s health. This was confusing as many believed her to be a healthy fifty-four year old woman. Her mother died almost immediately after Mary Ann expressed her concerns.

According to Newton (1993), she was then introduced to Frederick Cotton by his sister, and friend, Margaret Cotton. Margaret Cotton died suddenly, under Mary Ann’s care, shortly after they had met. In 1870 the pregnant Mary Ann married Frederick even though she was still married to John Robinson. She bore a son. Soon after, farmer’s pigs started dying at an alarming rate, forcing the newlyweds to move to West Auckland, County Durham. It was here she met the recently widowed Joe Natrass. At age 39, on September, 19, 1871, Frederick died of “gastric fever”. Her newly born son, Robert, died a short time after. Joseph Natrass moved in to her home within three months of Fred Cotton’s death. She told the community he was a “lodger.” In March and April of 1872 Natrass and Cotton’s ten-year-old son died. This was followed by the death of Cotton’s other son Charles, age seven, in July. Before the death of this last child she was reported to have said “I’ll not be troubled long. He’ll go like the rest of the Cotton family.” (Haines, 1989, p. 234)

It was this string of deaths that aroused suspicion. The doctor, having seen too many deaths in one family, refused to sign a death certificate for the death of Cotton’s second son. The authorities were brought in and the child was examined. Arsenic was  found in his stomach. Another child's body, and the body of Nattrass, was exhumed. Arsenic was found in both.

While awaiting trial, Mary Ann gave birth to yet another child in January, 1873. This one was adopted out to another family. The defense tried to argue that Mr. Cotton’s seven-year-old boy may have licked the arsenic off the wallpaper in her home. The prosecution brought forth evidence that Mary Ann had purchased arsenic and soft soap, supposedly for killing bedbugs shortly before the child’s death.

She was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. She was hanged on March 24, 1873. The execution was botched and it took her three minutes to die. It is known that she killed fifteen people, although it is estimated that she may have killed as may as twenty-one.

Belle Gunness (1859 - 1908?)

According to Seagrave (1992) Belle was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset on November 11, 1859 in Selbu, Norway. By age 14, she was already working as a dairy maid. At the age of twenty-three Belle Paulson immigrated from Selbu, Norway in 1883 to the United States; her passage was paid for by her sister. When she arrived she anglicized her name in effort to settle herself more quickly. She moved in with her older sister, Olina (Nellie) Larson, and brother-in-law in Chicago. There she did sewing and laundry work until she married Mads Sorrenson in 1884. After several years of marriage without children, they adopted Jenny Olson in 1890. Six years later, in 1896, Belle had her first child, Caroline, who died five months after her birth. A second child, Myrtle was born in 1897. Her first son Axel, her third child, soon followed in 1898, but he too died in infancy. A fourth child, Lucy, was born the following year. Both Caroline and Axel were insured. Both children died of inflammation of the lower intestine which could have resulted from acute colitis or poisoning.

For the next ten years the family lived simply. They lived primarily off the insurance money. It also appeared that the family was struck with bad luck. In 1896, a year after Belle and Mads bought a confectionary, the building burned to the ground. They moved to the suburb of Austin where, two years later, their house also burned to the ground. Both buildings were insured. On July 30, 1900 Mads Sorrenson died, rather suddenly. Before he died he went into strong convulsions. Apparently, Belle had given her husband a “powder” for a cold. The death certificate cited cause of death as an enlarged heart. Both of these symptoms are characteristic of strychnine poisoning. Another interesting coincidence about Belle's husband's sudden death was that it fell on the only day that two life insurance policies, filled out in her husband's name, overlapped.

Belle invested the eight thousand, five hundred dollar insurance claims in a farm, fifty miles away, near La Porte, Indiana. In 1902 Belle married a recently widowed, younger man, Peter Gunness. Nine months later he died, in a rather bizarre manner. According to Jones (1980, p.138) Belle testified under oath:

“Peter, sitting next to the stove, had bent down to pick up his shoe and jarred the stove in such a way that a large stone crock of hot water overturned, scalding him, and a sausage grinder that had been drying on the top on the top shelf of the stove fell down and struck him right between the eyes.”

Jenny Olson, her adopted daughter, confirmed this story. Belle collected a $2,500 insurance policy, gave birth to a posthumous child named Phillip and hired a man to help her around the house. He would be the first of many. Three of the hired men ended their relationship with Belle rather abruptly, and were reported to have left suddenly, one without finishing the plowing. Only one hired man, Ray Lamphere, stayed around the farm even after he was fired. She gave up looking for men to hire and took out an advertisement in a Norwegian paper:

“WANTED - A WOMAN WHO OWNS A BEAUtifully located and valuable farm in first class condition, wants a good and reliable man as partner in the same. Some little cash is required for which will be furnished first-class security” (Jones, 1980, p.139) 4]

And another:

“A rich and good-looking woman, the owner of a pig farm, desires to correspond with a gentleman of wealth and refinement. Object matrimony, Scandinavian preferred.” (4 more, 1908, p. 2)

Men began coming to La Porte to marry the rich widow.
Each would also disappear suddenly, usually after making a substantial withdrawal from the bank.

On April 27, 1908, Belle’s house burned to the ground. The bodies of three children, Myrtle, Lucy and Phillip were found in the basement. Apparently they had been poisoned before the fire. They also found the charred, headless body of a woman lying in Belle’s bed. Ray Lamphere was charged with the murder of all four.

Ten days later, while still looking for the head of Belle Gunness they dug up a rubbish pit in the chicken yard. On May 5 they found the body of Andrew Helgelein who was known to have responded to Belle’s advertisement. He had been drugged, strangled, cut up and packaged in old grain sacks. A few feet away they found the body of Jenny Olson, her foster child, who had supposedly gone off to school in California rather suddenly. Another man was found underneath her skeleton. The next day, while searching an old privy vault, they found the body of what could have been a woman. In another garbage pit they found the remains of three more men.

The bodies had been treated with quicklime, and sectioned, which made positive identification difficult. It is estimated that she killed between thirteen and twenty-three, people. Eventually the head of the woman in the bed was found.
However it was missing a jawbone, which held the lower denture. This jawbone was crucial for identification purposes. Ray Lamphere, after twenty-six hours of deliberation, was found not guilty of murder but guilty of arson. He died in jail in 1909. He, as well as many others, believed Belle Gunness to be alive and not living far from La Porte. At the trial, it was thought that the body found in the burnt house was too small to be Belle Gunness, who was a rather large woman.

In fact, there were several sightings of Belle, one which may have helped her get away. A woman was spotted on a train in Syracuse, a few days after the first body was found. This woman, who turned out to be the sister-in-law of Mrs.
Charles Rockefeller, was detained for several hours in the middle of the night until she could prove that she was not Belle Gunness. She sued the Syracuse police and the railroad for false arrest. After that, there were several sightings of Mrs. Gunness but the woman was rarely arrested. If Belle Gunness was alive at this point, she was free to travel wherever she wanted.

As to motive, it is assumed that she killed all of these people for their money through insurance payouts or directly taking the dowry money men brought with them. Her own sister, living in Chicago, remarked:

“My sister was crazy for money.... That was her greatest weakness. As a young woman, she never seemed to care for a man for his own self, only for the money or luxury he was able to give her.... When living with her first husband in Austin she used to say ‘I would never remain with this man if it was not for the nice home he has.’” (4 more, 1908, p. 2)

A Dr. Jones in Austin, who treated Mads Sorensen before he died noted that Mrs. Gunness, then Mrs. Sorensen, was a “religious fanatic.” He also suggested that when her first husband died, leaving her a veritable fortune in insurance monies, she became tempted by the prospect of making more money (4 more, 1908).

Anna Marie Hahn (1906-1938)

According to Newton (1993) Anna immigrated to Cincinnati at age two. She was married in 1929 to a telephone operator Philip Hahn and managed a bakery. She twice tried to ensure her husband for $25,000 but was resisted each time. He became suddenly ill and was rushed to the hospital by his mother. Anna resisted the hospital trip. He lived, but the marriage failed. Anna began to offer her services as a live in nurse, despite lack of training. Her first client Emmst Koch was a man of seventy plus years. He died May 6, 1932, leaving Anna the house in his will.

The house had a doctor’s office on the ground floor and she would frequently steal blank prescription sheets for medicines for her nursing business. Another retiree, Albert Parker was next to die under her care. She borrowed his money before killing him, and then disposing of the I.0.U. after he died. Following the death of Parker, Jacob Wagner died, willing $17,000 to his “niece” Anna. Next, George Gsellman willed her $15,000 before he died under her care. Newton (1993) states that a man named George Heiss survived one of her attacks after he stopped drinking his beer when he noticed flies who tasted his mug of beer immediately died. He did not report the incident.

George Obendoerfer died last in 1937. He was lured to Denver Colorado to see her ranch. He died in a hotel room and she withdrew $5000 from his account. She refused to pay for his funeral. It was then that authorities noted the bank withdrawals. They performed an autopsy and found arsenic in his body. She returned to Cincinnati, where she was arrested and bodies exhumed. All had been poisoned with something different. There was enough poison in her house “‘to kill half of Cincinnati.” (Newton, 19935 p792):

The New York Times reported that chemists stated at her trial that there was enough poison in the remnants of a supper found in Gsellman’s room to kill seventeen people. After being denied several attempts at a new trial, she went into history as the first woman to be executed in Ohio’s electric chair. She died on December 7, 1938. After inviting the press and swooning before being placed in the electric chair, she pleaded for her life to the warden and the spectators in the viewing room. She proclaimed “Isn’t there anyone who will help me? Is nobody going to help me?” (Anna Hahn dies in electric chair, 1938, p. 3).

The New York Times also reported that a priest was saying the Lord’s Prayer with her when the current was applied. She was noted to have warned the priest to step back from the chair as “Be careful Father! You’ll be killed” (p. 3).

Vera Renczi (Twentieth Century)

Vera Renczi was born into a wealthy family in Bucharest, Rumania. However, sources cannot confirm when she was born or the actual dates that these events took place. It is known that at the age of ten, her mother died. Her family then moved to Berkerekul, Yugoslavia. Even at this age she was reported to be showing signs of “nymphomania” and intense possessiveness toward men. She also had a violent temper. At the age of fifteen, she was discovered in a boy’s dormitory, at midnight. She had many lovers with whom she would run away. She would, however, return when she was bored or when her father discovered her and dragged her back home. She eventually fell in love with a wealthy businessman, several years her senior. They were married. They spent their honeymoon in Germany. Soon, Vera was pregnant. Fifteen months after her marriage, she gave birth to a son, Karl. Shortly after his birth, Vera announced that her husband had abandoned her.

After a year of living quietly, she began to frequent local cafes. She finally announced that she had heard that her husband had been killed in a car accident, and then proceeded to marry again. Her new husband, Josef Renczi, was younger and apparently very handsome. Early in the marriage, her husband was unfaithful. Shortly after Vera noticed what her husband was doing, he disappeared. She claimed that he had gone on a long voyage. She later announced to people that she had received a letter from him telling her that he had left her forever.

After her two unsuccessful marriages, she began to entertain a series of lovers. All of whom would disappear. All disappearances were explained by Vera or not noticed. Her thirty second lover, however, was missed by his wife. Vera attempted to explain the disappearance:

“Yes he was my lover. I had no idea he was married, but as he lay in my arms one night he told me he was married to a girl he hated. I threw him out and I haven't seen him since.” (Haines, 1991, A4)

Through his wife’s insistence Vera’s house was searched. Thirty-five zinc boxes, containing the bodies of her two husbands, thirty-two lovers and her only son, were found in the basement. Her son had been killed because he began to get suspicious and threatened to expose her. They were all arranged in a semi-circle with her two husbands situated in the centre. On each, Vera had inscribed the name of the victim.

She admitted poisoning them with arsenic; sometimes over a “last supper”. The reason she gave for killing her husband was that she was bored. She also admitted becoming bored with the other lovers and, rather than seeing them with another woman, she murdered them. She further confessed that she used to sit in an armchair, during the evenings, in the midst of the coffins. During this time she said she would remember their lovemaking and their suffering before they died. She was sentenced to life, in prison, where she died only two years after being sentenced.

Angels of Death

Like Black Widows, Angels of Death have a similar history. In this case, the group moniker comes from a play on words. Caregivers, and in particular nurses, were often called “Angels of Mercy” because of their kind and caring service over the course of healing, or they brought mercy and relief in times of suffering. Angels of mercy are those who are exceptional at their caring ability.

They are tireless and selfless to help those who are sick, disabled, or in need of comfort. An Angel of Death, alternatively, is one who brings the opposite: pain and suffering to the healthy. These women inflict pain, often through long and enduring poisonings, often pretending to nurse their victims back to health. As with the Black Widow moniker, the Angel of Death label is also misleading. Not all are nurses, some are merely caregivers. Some stated that they were nurses but, in fact, were not. I have summarized a few of the most well known cases of this type of killer below.
Lucy de Berk killed infants in her care. Beverley Allitt and Genene Jones killed their very young patients. Jane Toppan never graduated from nursing school, but killed her “private nursing” clients. Catherine Wilson never became a nurse, but opted instead for household work where she cared for her employers. She would kill clients after befriending them and encouraging them to list her as sole heir to their small fortunes. Other times she would kill those who had large sums of money on their person which she would steal, or she would kill those she owed money to. All have in common that they were administering care in some fashion.

Beverly Allitt (1968 — present)

According to Kelleher and Kelleher (1998) Beverly Allitt operated out of the United Kingdom. She killed children who attended the Grantham and Kesteven Hospital. Allitt had pronounced personality problems identified as early as age thirteen. By her late teens she had a history of medical appearances for injuries that where either self inflicted, or appeared to be invented. Doctors commented that many of her illnesses appeared to be psychosomatic (Doctor suspected illness syndrome, 1993). It was eventually concluded that she suffered from Munchausen’s Syndrome. Patients with this disorder present at hospitals faking symptoms of serious illnesses in order to get much desired attention. She eventually decided to get her nursing certificate after she finished high school. She missed 130 days of nurses training, and had difficulty finding placement after she was certified because of her persistent personality problems. She eventually settled in Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, a remote facility that was terribly short staffed.

Many children became sick under her watch. Four eventually died under her care. She was employed at the hospital for only 58 days. Her first victim, seven-week-old Liam Taylor, died while receiving treatment for a common cold. The second victim, 11-year-old Tim Hardwick came in suffering from severe bouts of epileptic shock, and passed away under Beverly’s care. It was assumed a prolonged attack was the cause. Three-month-old Becky Philips suddenly stopped breathing while being treated at the hospital and died. Becky was a twin, and therefore her sister was brought in for testing. She was found to be perfectly healthy and normal, but then suddenly experienced bouts of not being able to breathe while Beverley was watching her. The last bout arrested her heart and, although doctors were able to bring her back to life, she suffered irreparable brain damage.

Beverly’s last victim was fifteen-month-old Clare Peck, an asthmatic (Jenkins, 1993a). She stopped breathing April 22, 1991, two hours after being placed under Allitt’s care but her death was blamed on Asthma. Her blood analysis revealed high levels of potassium. All deaths had in common Allitt’s presence on the ward. It was found that the children who had been attacked, 26 in all, had been injected with either insulin or potasstum.

According to the Jenkins (1993a) Allitt went to live with Tracey Jobson, of Peterborough while awaiting trial. Although they were considered to be friends, Tracy’s son Jonathan began suffering dizzy spells shortly after her arrival. These spells were accompanied with cravings for chocolate. Beverly offered this teenager a drink, and at the bottom of the glass Jonathan found a chalky substance. He later collapsed, stating that he was unable to see, had stomach pains, and head pains. Ms. Jobson recalls that Allitt did nothing to help. He survived the attack. It was discovered later that Jonathan’s blood sugar was very low, and he had received diabetic tablets intended for his grandmother.

Before her trial, when questioned about her nursing skills she stated “My nursing means more to me than living.” (Jenkins, 1993b, p. A2) When reporters further asked about her competence given the accusations she replied “I am not competent, far from it. I know I am not competent. I am one of the bloody crappiest nurses out. I am the lowest of the low.” She then stayed quiet for the remainder of the trial process.

It was established that she committed these assaults to receive attention and appreciation from staff. In essence, she had graduated from faking her symptoms, to injuring others and then attempting to save her victims. She could also get attention while offering comfort to bereaved family members. Although similar, this syndrome is called Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy, as the offender desists in mocking symptoms of severe illness in their own bodies, and begins to create symptoms in another to gain personal attention.

She was charged with four counts of murder, eight counts of assault and ten counts of grievous bodily harm with intent to kill. By October, 1993, while beginning to serve 13 life sentences, Beverly admitted to committing nine of the murders (Jenkins, 1993c). She also admitted to smothering some infants when the injection did not produce desired results. Ironically, her trial was repeatedly delayed because of a series of illnesses, including severe anorexia (Trial delayed, 1993).

Lucy De Berk (circa 1962 — present)

Sage (2003) noted that Lucy worked as a nurse in the Dutch health system. It was later uncovered that she had falsified documents and lied about her past in order to become a.nurse. De Berk had stolen a great many items from around the country, including a book on serial murderers. She had also spent time in Canada working as a prostitute. Lucy also had a history of depression and suicide attempts.

In 2003, Lucy, age 41, was found guilty of murdering three infants, and an elderly woman, and attempting to murder three others in her care. All of her child victims were born with serious physical abnormalities and originally were thought to have died from natural causes. Suspicions became aroused when a five-month old baby died within an hour of a diagnosis by doctors that the child’s health was improving. Autopsy revealed the child had been poisoned, leading to the exhumation of some of her other patients who had died suddenly on her shift. Also of interest is the fact that she is responsible for the death of Judge Haopei Li, who sat on the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Li was treated in hospital shortly before he was scheduled to retire from the bench.

Sage states that prosecutors suggested that she killed out of compulsion, quoting directly from a partially burned diary. “I gave in to my compulsions... I don’t even know why I am doing it... I will take this secret with me to the grave... Still I hope I am helping people by this” (p. A18). She also had written a number of undecipherable notes on the day that her victims died. De Berk stated in her defense that she used to give secret Tarot readings to her patients.

Genene Jones (1950 - present)

According to Elkind (1983) Genene Jones, one of four adopted children of Dick and Gladys Jones, grew up on a rather large San Antonio estate. She was born July 13, 1950. From the very beginning of her life she had felt unwanted and unloved. Although this was not a wealthy family, they were certainly comfortable. Genene's first encounter with death was at the age of sixteen. Travis, Genene's younger learning disabled brother, was alone in his father's sign shop when it exploded. Although Genene cried at the funeral her appearance at her school the next day confused many of her peers. She appeared to be "milking sympathy" from everyone who had heard the news of her brother's death.

All through high school people recall her telling wild stories about events that had occurred in her life. Eventually many people found these tales to be false and eventually steered away from Genene. By the beginning of her senior year at high school Dick Jones, her father, had died of cancer. Although only seventeen, she had lost the two most precious people in her life. Very shortly after this death she decided that it was time that she got married.

She married Jimmy DeLany, a high school drop out, only six weeks after she buried her father. It is here that she embarked on various careers, eventually deciding to be a nurse’s aid. Although she was fired from the first few of her nursing jobs, because of a harsh attitude, she eventually ended up at Baxar County Hospital, a hospital for San Antonio's poor. It is here, on the pediatric intensive care unit that an alarming number of children began to die under Genene's care.

The children in the pediatrics ICU were going into unexpected cardiac arrests on Genene's shift. Although the evidence kept mounting, many people who had the ability to stop Genene Jones, such as the hospital administrators, head nurses and doctors, had chosen to discount the evidence. Finally, it could no longer be ignored. But even when the abnormal deaths were acknowledged as a serious problem, it still took months for people to act. Meanwhile small children were dying from, what would later be found to be, overdoses of heparin. This drug is an anti-coagulant which effectively caused these children to bleed to death.

Eventually the pressure from the hospital became too strong and Genene was asked to leave. Dr. Kathy Holland, an intern in the Baxar County Hospital, who believed in Genene's innocence, hired Genene as her assistant in her private practice after completing her residency. Together they went to Kerrville, a small town outside of San Antonio, to set up a practice. On the second day after this practice opened, Dr. Holland's office had its first serious trauma case, something that was considered rare in a private practice. A small fourteen month old child, Chelsea McClelland, had mysteriously stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated and taken to emergency at a hospital a few miles away. Fortunately this child lived. But others, who also mysteriously stopped breathing, did not.

Although Kathy Holland originally dismissed the first few incidents, she too began to see a deadly pattern. Eventually she found empty bottles of succinylcholine, a strong drug used by anesthesiologists. The drug is used to temporarily paralyze the entire musculatory system and once injected breathing is not possible independently but must be aided by a respirator. Ironically, Chelsea McClelland's parents continued to trust the doctor and her nurse and brought their daughter for a second check-up. She did not live. Her mother remembers Genene boi Jones injecting a clear liquid into her daughters arm and watching her go limp. She tried to stop her but by then it was too late.

Genene was eventually charged with the death of Chelsea McClelland and Rolando Santos. She received a 99-year and a 60-year prison sentence to be served concurrently (Nurse gets 60, 1984). However, she was suspected of killing at least fifteen children in the pediatric ICU at Baxar County Hospital. Genene was found guilty of little Chelsea's murder. She was never charged with the killings at the hospital, even after the Chelsea McClelland trial “...because no useful purpose would be served by prosecuting additional charges against her.” (Elkind, 1989. p. 370).

Jane Toppan (1854 - 1938)

According to Seagrave (1992) Jane Toppan was born Honora A. Kelly in 1854, to a poor Irish couple, probably in Massachusetts. Her mother died when Jane was still an infant. Her father, who attempted to raise Jane and her three sisters, went mad shortly after. All four children were then taken care of by their grandmother. When the grandmother found it financially impossible to raise the children, they were sent to the Boston Female Asylum for Destitute Girls. Jane was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Abner Toppan in 1859 and moved to Lowell, Massachusetts. Now renamed Jane, she was given a strict but fair upbringing where her Irish heritage was a source of embarrassment. Her new parents told people she was Italian, and that her parents died in a boat coming to America. It is interesting to note that the terms of her adoption stated that she could be sent back to the Asylum any time before age 18, and that when her adoptive mother died, she left her entire estate to her two older daughters. Jane was left penniless.

In her twenties, Jane became engaged. Her new fiancé gave her a ring with a bird on it, as a symbol of his love for her. He then went off to the nearby town of Holyoke to find a job. A few weeks later Jane received a letter from this man apologizing for not returning. He also mentioned that he had found a job, as well as a wife. It was the landlady's daughter in Holyoke. She smashed the ring to pieces. From that day on, she never looked at birds and she never talked about them. Jane became very reclusive. She refused to see friends and stayed at home. She bought a book on dreams and convinced herself that she could tell the future by paying attention to her dreams. It has also been reported that she attempted suicide twice during this time.

At age twenty-six, she suddenly announced she was going to be a nurse. She went to school and soon became one of the most popular nurses at the hospital. Other nurses began to notice that Jane had a preoccupation with autopsies and operations. She became fascinated with the anatomical experiments. Eventually a male patient died under her watch. This was unusual as he was recuperating rather quickly. A second patient soon followed. She was called to the chief surgeon's office. Although there is no formal record of their dialogue, she was dismissed from the hospital and was not allowed to graduate. She later admitted to committing “practice killings” during this time. It was also believed that she had taken money from the hospital while in training.

From there she applied for a job as a head nurse and was hired. She was soon fired as it was discovered that she had forged papers stating that she was a graduate nurse. By that time she had decided to attend to the needs of the elderly and the sick as a private nurse. It is assumed that she committed murder earlier in her career. Circa 1899, however, her murderous activity increased which aroused suspicion within her community. She killed using a deadly cocktail of morphine and atropine. While morphine dilates the pupils of the eyes and may have aroused suspicion, atropine constricts the pupils. She perfected the cocktail to make the eyes appear normal upon post mortem examination.

Shortly before her arrest in 1901, she was visited by an old friend, Mattie Davis. Mattie soon grew ill and died July 4, 1901. Jane brought the body home to Cataumet. Captain Alden Davis, head of the Davis household, insisted that Jane stay on and attend to his two married daughters who were sick. She eventually a agreed. Despite constant attention from Jane, Mrs. Annie Gorden, one of Captain Davis’s daughters, died July 29, 1901. She had a high fever and was writhing in her bed before she died. She had already expired by the time the doctor had arrived, but Jane said to the doctor, “I am afraid she is sinking.” Captain Davis, once again, insisted that she stay on. The two deaths had drained Captain Davis. He lost his appetite and his ability to sleep. Jane Toppan came to him with some medicine. It was a colorless, odorless liquid. She insisted he take it and said that he would be fine in the morning. The next morning he was found dead. He was survived by Mrs. Mary Gibbs, his only living daughter.

Mrs. Mary Gibbs became very distraught and depressed over the sudden deaths of the family. She asked her cousin Beulah to come and stay with her. She would stare out the window toward Cemetery Hill. Jane Toppan came to her with a liquid in a glass and said that the doctor had prescribed it. A few hours later she was feeling awful. She was put to bed and soon she too began to writhe. She was dead by the following morning.

When Captain Gibbs, Mary’s husband, arrived home he was surprised to find out that his family had died in the space of forty-five days. Beulah took him aside and mentioned to him how scared Mary had been around nurse Toppan. She also mentioned to him that she had overheard a conversation, between Mary and Jane, in the sewing room. Apparently Jane had owed five hundred dollars to the estate. She had asked Mary, since Captain Davis had died, if the debt could be cancelled. Mary refused. Beulah also related how Jane had stopped Dr. Walters from performing an autopsy, stating that it was against the religious beliefs of the Davis family. She then left for Lowell.

Captain Gibbs went directly to the authorities. He then had his wife exhumed. It was found that she had been overdosed with morphine. Although Dr. Walters had agreed that he saw the signs of the morphine overdose the eyes of the victim were dilated and not constricted. He, therefore, had dismissed the idea. A detective was sent to Lowell. However, Jane Toppan had already poisoned her foster sister, Edna Bannister. She had left the household and had taken up employment with Mr. George Nichols in Amherst. It was there she was arrested.

She denied any wrongdoing. She was put in jail. Her defense was heavily supported by friends and family. Police began to exhume the bodies, of former patients, all over New England. All were found to have died from an overdose of morphine and atropine. Police linked the morphine to a druggist named Benjamin Walters in Wareham. He said that he had a prescription for every one. Indeed he had. All had been forged by Toppan. During her imprisonment, a psychiatrist by the name of Stedman began to visit her in her cell. In one of their conversation he took a chance and asked,

“Did you kill them Jane?” Her response was given with a smile: “Yes I killed them! I might have killed George Nichols and his sister that night if the detective hadn’t taken me away! ... I fooled them all - I fooled the stupid doctors and the ignorant relatives. I've been fooling them for years and years.” (Nash, 1981, p. 366)

After recounting the names of her victims, thirty-one in all, it was estimated that there were as many as seventy by her own speculation, but she couldn't remember them all. She recounted how she used to inject morphine into her patients and wait for the pupils to constrict:

“Then came the wait. I would have to watch and watch and watch as the pupils contracted, and, at the right moment inject them with atropine and watch and watch until the pupils were again wide and vacant. It was hard, precise work, all of it. I had to dose the patients slowly, a little at a time. It took days, and sometimes even weeks to kill them.” (Nash, 1981, p. 367)

She also recounted how, sometimes, she would bring patients to the brink of death and then work feverishly to bring them back to health, only to kill them later.

There have been many motives suggested as to why this woman killed so many. Some think that it was her desire to be married, as she entertained ideas of marrying relatives of some victims. Others thought that it was her love of children that may have prompted her to murder as she murdered some mothers whose children she expressed interest in adopting. Still others think that it was a dreadful feeling of rejection she experienced. She eventually stated (Sifakis, 1982, p. 716):

“It wasn’t my fault. I had to do it. They hadn’t done anything to me and I gained nothing from their deaths except the excitement of watching them die. I couldn’t resist doing it...
Everybody trusted me. It was too easy. I felt strange when I watched them die. I was all excited and my blood seemed to sweep madly through my veins. It was the only pleasure I had.”

However Seagrave (1992, p. 288) states that she did offer this possible explanation to Dr. Stedman:

“Do you know what I want to be? ... I want to go on and on... I want to be known as the greatest criminal that ever lived. That is my ambition.”

On June 25, 1902, she went to trial. Dr. Stedman, the psychiatrist, stated for tne record that, “Jane Toppan was suffering from a form of insanity that could not be cured” (Nash, 1981, p. 367).

Jane strongly contested this statement in court, calling Dr. Stedman a liar. “I am not crazy!” she shouted. “And all of you know it! I know that I have done wrong! I understand right from wrong! That proves that I am not crazy!” (Nash, 1981, p. 367)

Regardless of her statement, she was placed in the Taunton State Asylum for the Criminally Insane. She eventually passed the time writing love stories. Although she came near death once, she lived out her life there. She died at the age of eighty-four, August 17, 1938.

Catherine Wilson (1822 - 1862)

This woman initially worked for people as household help, but later befriended her potential victims. She poisoned them for cash or insurance holdings. According to Seagrave (1992) Catherine started killing at about 32 years of age, in 1854 in Boston, England. She made friends with a man, stating that she, herself, was a widow. She also began caring for his gout. He eventually named her as sole heir to his estate in his will. A short time later, after experiencing diarrhea and vomiting for ten days, Mawer died. Mawer’s nurse commented that Mawer’s health would decline every time she would come over and serve him tea. Despite these observances, the doctor did not note that Mawer had been poisoned.

She moved into a rooming house, in London, operated by Maria Soames. She was accompanied by a man named James Dixon who, Wilson claimed, was her brother. He was noted as a heavy drinker. She eventually poisoned him with colchicum, an old remedy for treating gout, which she took after inheriting the Mawer estate. Although she stated that his death was due to Consumption, the doctor insisted on an autopsy. No evidence of consumption was found, but his death was ruled the result of natural causes. In October, 1956, she poisoned her landlady, Maria Soames, after she had received a number of loans from her. Maria was 50 years of age. Ironically, she told a number of people that Maria had committed suicide by taking poison because she had been jilted by an unknown man. The doctors ruled that she had died from peritonitis and heart disease. She billed the estate ten pounds before returning to Boston.

In early 1859 Wilson began to accept loans from a Mrs. Jackson. Mrs. Jackson died 4 days after withdrawing 120 pounds from her bank. The money was never recovered, and Wilson was not suspected of foul play. Later that year she moved back to London and met and befriended a women named Ann Atkinson; an aunt of James Dixon. It is reported that Ann Atkinson made a trip to London to see Catherine and to do some shopping, bringing with her 51 pounds. This money went missing suddenly and Ann had to return home early. The next year, Ann visited Catherine again, only this time with 120 pounds. Ann was reported ill to her husband four days after her arrival, but was dead by the time he reached London. Catherine was found in bed, overcome with grief. She explained the missing money to Ann’s husband by stating that Ann had been robbed on the train to London, but was too ashamed to mention the event as she was embarrassed. After his departure with his wife’s body, Catherine was seen wearing a diamond ring supposedly given to her from Ann as a “token of gratitude” (Newton, 1993, p. 181)

In 1862 Catherine met and befriended a Mrs. Carnell. Sarah Carnell had recently left her husband and Catherine volunteered to be a liaison between the couple who were seeking reconciliation. Catherine began nursing Sarah’s health. Wilson eventually served Sarah a tea which burned Sarah’s lips. Sarah dropped the concoction on the bed. Within minutes it was clear that the tea was eating through the sheets. Catherine fled, escaping apprehension for six weeks. She was eventually caught and brought to trial on the attempted murder of Sarah Carnell. The defense successfully argued that the chemist had mixed up the prescription and Catherine was acquitted of all charges. She was arrested a few days later for the death of Maria Soames with evidence gathered from Soames’ exhumation. Further exhumations of her late clients were ordered after she had initially fled London. She was hanged in Horsemonger’s Goal, in London, on October 20, 1962.

Summary

This chapter has examined some specific case studies of two of the most popular forms of female serial murderesses: The Black Widow and the Angel of Death. These particular forms of serial murder have demonstrated a steady presence in the media, being documented because of the unusualness of the case.

Women as criminals, much less serial murderers, have become the source of great interest when their acts are discovered. Although the stories of their acts have been published and retold over the centuries, their acts have only recently been identified as “serial” in nature. Even though we recognized that these were dangerous women, who were capable of much harm, we could not see them in the light of serial murderess until the early part of the 1990’s. Since that time, these women have come to be included in many of the encyclonedic collections now available, and have begun to emerge more and more as a subject of interest in written and electronic media. As we shall learn in the next chapter, these are not the only forms of serial murderess that have been identified.

The Female Serial Murderer
A Sociological Study of Homicide and the “Gentler Sex”

 Hannah Scott

Strange creatures

 Introduction

Extreme Nature is about some of the most intriguing, supernatural, out of the ordinary and extreme plants and animals on the planet. A fish that can change sex, a frog that gives birth through its mouth and a flower that smells so bad it makes people faint are in the motley collection of weird and wonderful creatures included in the book.

If proof were ever needed that fact really is stranger than fiction, then look no further than the natural world. Did you know, for example, that a bombardier beetle can blast a chemical spray that’s as hot as boiling water?

Are you aware that a castor bean produces a toxin 6,000 times more deadly than cyanide? And have you ever wondered about the three-toed sloth, which has just two modes of being: asleep and not quite asleep?

It would have been hard for a science fiction writer to dream up some of the most bizarre creatures and wacky behaviour described in this book. Imagine an animal that squirts up to a quarter of its own blood at its predators – that’s the Texas horned lizard. There is a frog that can withstand being frozen to –270°C (–454°F) and a moth with a 35cm (14in) tongue. A fish that can inflate itself to become a spine-covered sphere three times its original size may sound like a character from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but it really does exist, in tropical seas around the world, in the form of the pufferfish.

One of the richest environments for such peculiar and eccentric wildlife is the sea. This is where scientists first discovered the coelacanth, for example – a strange-looking fish that was thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago, but is now known to be alive and well and living in the western Indian Ocean. The sea is where we first set eyes on a remarkable octopus that lives a life of deception, by disguising itself as anything from a flounder or a jellyfish to a sea snake. And in the cold, dark ocean depths scientists have found shrimp-like creatures thriving 11 km (6.8 miles) below sea level. But the sea is also the most unexplored region of the world and studying its wildlife can be about as difficult and challenging as exploring outer space. Even now, there are probably huge animals lurking beneath the ocean waves as yet unseen by human eyes – and untold numbers of smaller ones. But with the help of space-age research techniques and equipment, such as deep-sea submersibles and remote-access vehicles, we are just beginning to understand the true extent of alien-like life on our own planet.

There are more outlandish creatures to discover on land, too, though many of them are likely to be the natural world’s tiddlers and relatively hard to find. But the fact that we’ve already unearthed plants that eat animals, insects capable of walking on water and frogs with baggy skin just makes scientists determined to search for new species of plants and animals and ever-more extravagant forms of behaviour. It’s hard not to wonder what secrets have yet to be unravelled in the treetops, deep underground, in hidden corners of remote tropical rainforests, or under the glare of a microscope.

Extreme Nature was written with the invaluable help of over 150 such scientists working in all corners of the globe. With their generous assistance, in just a few sentences it’s been possible to summarise some of the highlights of many years, sometimes decades, of research. Thanks to them, if you’ve ever wondered which animal has the best colour vision, if a millipede really does have a thousand legs, how fast a falcon can swoop, or which is the world’s most dangerous snake, this is the place to look.

Any study of extreme nature is inevitably full of surprises, and when it comes to superlatives, there is always another record-breaker just around the corner. But while there’s little doubt that few of the records we’ve included are absolutes, in one way or another all animals and plants have something exceptional about them that deserves our attention. It’s certainly been enormous fun corresponding with so many experts in so many different fields and, with their guidance, making the final selection.

Ultimately, the aim of the book is simply to revel in these other-worldly creatures and their outlandish behaviour. We hope you enjoy being wowed by some of their exploits.

***
Most explosive defence
NAME bombardier beetles Carabidae family
LOCATION on every continent except Antarctica
ABILITY mixing chemicals to create an explosion

In the world of insects, ants can overcome almost anything. But they don’t always have it their own way. Bombardier beetles deliver an anti-ant surprise that is positively explosive. An ant, a spider or any other predator that, say, clamps on to a beetle’s leg with hostile intent instantly finds itself blasted with a chemical spray that’s as hot as boiling water.

So how does a small, cold-blooded creature manage to do this? Pure chemistry: in the rear of its abdomen are two identical glands lying side by side and opening at the abdominal tip. Each has an inner chamber containing hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinones and an outer one with catalase and peroxidase. When chemicals in the inner chamber are forced through the outer one, the chemicals react together, and the beetle has effectively created a bomb.
The resulting vapour, now containing the irritants known as p-benzoquinones, explodes from the end of the abdomen with a bang that’s audible to a human and a temperature that’s scalding to the would-be predator. What’s more, the beetle can rotate its abdomen through 270 degrees in any direction, so that it can aim with absolute precision, and if 270 degrees isn’t enough, it can shoot over its back, hitting a pair of reflectors that will ricochet the spray at the extra angle needed. Scientists find bombardiers fascinating because they’re the only animals known to mix chemicals to create an explosion.

Most poisonous animal
NAME golden poison-dart frog Phyllobates terribilis LOCATION Pacific rainforests of Colombia, South America ABILITY producing the most deadly poison of any animal

This tiny frog uses toxic chemicals as a defence in its body and is therefore technically poisonous (venomous animals inject toxins via a weapon – a tail, fang, spine, spur or tooth). The toxin is effective only when the frog is attacked, and since the frog doesn’t want to be harmed, it sports a brilliant yellow or orange colour to warn predators of extreme danger.
In fact, this most poisonous of frogs is possibly the most poisonous animal in the world. The toxin is in its skin – you can die even by touching it – and there is enough in the skin of one animal to kill up to 100 people. Though the frog has been known to science only since 1978, inhabiting just one area in Colombia, the Chocó indians have known about it for generations, using its skin-gland secretions to poison their blowgun darts and kill animals in seconds.

The golden poison-dart frog gets most of its batrachotoxin (meaning frog poison) from other animals, probably small beetles, which in turn get it from plant sources. Captive-bred frogs, by comparison, never become toxic, presumably because they aren’t fed toxic insects. The frog is active in the day, having few predators except a snake, that has become immune to the toxin. Surprisingly, birds have been discovered in New Guinea with the same batrachotoxin in their skin and feathers. The likely link has been tracked down to a small beetle, similar to the New World beetles, which also contains batrachotoxins.

(...)
Biggest blood-sucker
NAME Amazon leech Haementeria ghilianii
LOCATION Amazon basin
ABILITY drinking up to four times its weight in blood

No, the biggest blood-sucker isn’t a vampire bat. Vampires, which are native to the tropical Americas, don’t actually suck blood – they lap it up.

They find large mammals – most noticeably cows, pigs or horses – make a cut in their skin and then drink the blood. Not being very big (average body length is 6.5–9cm/2.5–3.5in), a single bat only actually consumes a few tablespoons of blood a night, though because of the anticoagulant in its saliva, the prey keeps bleeding for some time after the bat has flown away.

The world’s largest leech, measuring up to 46cm (18ins) does suck blood, however, and a very hungry one can take in four times its body weight before it becomes satiated. Since a large Amazon leech weighs about 50g (1.8oz) – the record is 80g (2.8oz) – that’s a lot more than a few teaspoons of blood. Like the vampire, the Amazon leech feeds on large mammals, which it attacks when they enter water, and it also uses an anticoagulant to keep the animal’s blood flowing. But the leech injects an anaesthetic, too, so that the temporary host is unaware of what’s happening to it.
All leeches are segmented worms – their nearest relatives are earthworms – and all, regardless of size, have precisely 32 segments. A few segments at each end of the Amazon leech are modified into suckers for attaching to prey, and every segment has its own independent nerve centre – hence a leech has 32 brains.
(...)
Most inquisitive bird
NAME kea Nestor notabilis
LOCATION New Zealand
ABILITY curiosity

Parrots are highly inquisitive, but even among parrots, keas are exceptional. They’re native to New Zealand’s South Island, a cold, snowy, unparrotlike place where keas have to use all their wits to find a meal. While parrots elsewhere are flying from one conspicuous fruit to another, keas are searching under rocks and bark and in bushes, cones and shells for food such as roots, shoots, berries or insect larvae. This and a mountainous habitat virtually free of predators has, over 2.5 million years of evolution, made them insatiably curious. And they’re especially drawn to things they’ve never seen before. So when humans arrived in New Zealand, the keas were delivered a bonanza of new objects to investigate for food.

Nowadays great sources of fascination are camping grounds and ski-resorts. These parrots are large and have powerful beaks, and they can rip right through a canvas tent for the sheer joy of investigation. A particular favourite is the rubber on cars – windscreen wipers mainly. One gang of keas is said to have ripped out the rubber lining around the windscreen of a tourists’ hire car, causing the glass to fall inwards and opening up the interior. When the tourists returned, they found clothes, food and car parts scattered in the snow, while the keas appeared to be playing a game of football with an empty Coke can. The birds then retreated and watched – with great curiosity, it seemed – to see what the tourists would do about it.
(...)
Most dangerous snake
NAME saw-scaled viper
Echis carinatus
LOCATION West Africa through the Middle East to India ABILITY injecting a venom that can kill more people than that of any other snake

This all depends on how you measure danger. Whatever is best at killing you is most dangerous. Luckily for humans, no snakes desire to eat us, but some can kill when defending themselves. The one that kills the most often is the saw-scaled viper. The one with the most toxic venom, however, is the sea snake Hydrophis belcheri. Like all sea snakes, its venom has evolved to incapacitate fish and suchlike, and it’s non-aggressive, lacks the striking fangs of vipers, and bites people only when accidentally handled in fishing nets. More dangerous in terms of fatalities is the beaked sea snake, which inhabits coastal waters and so comes into contact with people more often.

Many sea snakes are found in Australian waters, and Australia is also the country with the greatest number of venomous snakes. Eleven of the top 12 most venomous are found here, the world record-holder being the inland taipan, or fierce snake.

But Australia doesn’t hold the record for the most dangerous of all land snakes. Taking into account venom toxicity, venom yield, fang length, temperament and frequency of bite, the record goes to the saw-scaled viper.

It is widespread, small (therefore easily overlooked) and aggressive when threatened, and it probably bites and kills more people than any other snake.

Its name comes from the fact that, when frightened, it rubs its scales together, making a sawing noise – a reminder that most snakes would rather frighten people away than bite them. And, of course, far, far more snakes are killed by people than vice versa.
(...)
Deepest diver
NAME sperm whale Physeter macrocephalus
LOCATION oceans worldwide
ABILITY diving deeper than any other mammal

Sperm whales behave more like submarines than air-breathing mammals. They disappear into the cold, dark ocean depths to catch deepwater squid or sharks and other large fish.

In 1991, scientists recorded an incredible, record-breaking dive of 2,000m (6,560ft) near the island of Dominica, in the Caribbean. But there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that sperm whales may be able to dive even deeper. On 25 August 1969, for example, a male sperm whale was killed by whalers 160km (100 miles) south of Durban, South Africa. Inside its stomach were two small sharks, which are known to live only on the seafloor. Since the water in that area exceeds a depth of 3,193m (10,475ft) for a radius of some 48–64km (30–40 miles), it is logical to assume that the sperm whale had been to a similar depth when hunting its prey.

The same whale also made one of the longest recorded dives for any mammal. By the time it surfaced to breathe, having caught the two small sharks, it had been underwater for an estimated 1 hour 52 minutes.
(...)
Sleepiest animal
NAME brown-throated three-toed sloth Bradypus variegatus LOCATION Central America and tropical South America ABILITY doing as little as possible

A three-toed sloth has two modes of being: not quite asleep and asleep. It can sleep for up to 20 hours a day: the longest lifespan recorded for a sloth is 30 years, which means that that animal spent 25 years asleep. A sloth sleeps hanging upside-down from a tree branch, which is also what it does when it’s awake. The difference is that, when it’s awake, it pulls leaves off the tree incredibly slowly and eats them incredibly slowly. Then it moves along the branch at a speed that’s been worked out at 0.5kph (0.3mph) or less than 14m (45ft) a minute.

On a really eventful day, it descends to the ground and very slowly and awkwardly – since this is the only time it’s ever upright – makes its way to the next tree. Sometimes the next tree is on the other side of a river or marsh, in which case the sloth swims to it, using a kind of dog-paddle that’s strong and rather graceful compared to its walking but is, of course, very slow.

A sloth’s metabolism is much lower than that of other mammals, and in the morning it gets up to speed by sunning itself. It also digests slowly and only defecates once a week: for this event it comes slowly down from its tree, slowly digs a hole and deposits a third of its body weight (including urine) into it. Even the faeces, which are hard and dry, decompose at about a tenth the rate of other animals’ faeces.
(...)

Fastest-growing plant
NAME tortoiseshell bamboo, or moso,
Phyllostachys edulis
LOCATION China and in cultivation worldwide
ABILITY growing literally centimetres (even inches) an hour

Bamboos are strange plants. For a start, they are giant, woody grasses. Most of the 1,250 or so species do all their growing in early life. Once mature, a bamboo doesn’t grow any taller, no matter how long it lives (and some survive for more than 100 years), preferring instead to send up more shoots. This means a stand of clumping bamboo, while getting no taller, can become impenetrably thick.

Flowering is eccentric, too. Many species flower only once in their lives when aged between seven and 120, and then die. And that means that every single plant of a particular species may set seed at exactly the same time and die at the same time. (This is a special problem for giant pandas, which eat virtually nothing but bamboo and face general famine every 30–80 years, when the local bamboo species flowers.) Bamboo is also hugely important to us (there are more than 1,500 documented uses for it), and up to 40 per cent of the world’s population depends on it. As for tortoiseshell bamboo, it invests a huge amount of energy in seed production but may survive flowering and is widely grown as a crop. It’s one of the tallest giant bamboos and probably the fastest growing. One shoot is recorded as putting on a metre of growth in a single day – that’s 4cm (1.6in) an hour – and another grew 20m (65ft 6in) in eight weeks. It really is grass that you could watch grow.
(...)
Deadliest love life
NAME agile antechinus Antechinus agilis
LOCATION Australia
EVENT every male dies after mating, from stress

This little insect-eating, marsupial mouse has a short but promiscuous life.

Like all antechinus species, agile antechinus have a brief, two-week mating season when life becomes supercharged. Being secretive, nocturnal tree-climbers, their mating behaviour in the wild isn’t well known, but they are being studied in captivity by biologists keen to understand the effects of reproductive stress.

In July or August, males become flooded with testosterone and other hormones, and that’s when the mating frenzy starts. But it’s the smaller females who make the running. The males gather together in tree nests, where the females go to look for mates. The females seem to prefer dominant and therefore larger males, but they can’t be too fussy, since they mate with several different individuals. A male, too, mates several times.

Yet ejaculation goes on for at least three hours, and he stays locked to his mate for up to 12 hours, to make sure his sperm gets to her storage site first.

Alas, the surge of hormones and all the effort is just too much for his immune system. If gastric ulcers and kidney failure from stress don’t kill him, infections or parasites do, and he dies within days of his copulation – along with all other males in all the populations. Some females, though, live to mate a second year. They also have the upper hand when it comes to the gender of the next generation, as the sex ratio of their babies (which are kept in a true marsupial pouch) is often skewed towards females.

Extreme Nature
Mark Cawardine With Rosamund Kidman Cox

Palatinis Diary - extracts

 In five years of university study, students never once cast their eyes on a text by Plato. One student who was caught in the hostel reading Kant was expelled from the faculty.

(Liiceanu)
*
"I have no biography. I just have books. Graduation at twenty-three, then a year of mathematics and two years as a university librarian. I have lived in deliberate reclusion. I have refused any kind of fulfillment in social life, and I have done so without hypocrisy, with pleasure. At twenty-five I refused assistance from Negulescu; I withdrew to Sinaia and translated eight detective novels for the Herz Press. Of course it was a kind of rebellion. After that I lived on the margins for thirty years; it was a way of life which at the beginning I chose, and then, after 1948, when it was imposed on me, I accepted it as a joy—and I felt the last years in prison equally as a joy. My ten years at the Center for Logic, starting in 1964, were my entry into social life, and were just as much as I needed. Any other fulfillment outside books—a professor's chair, a successful marriage, travel—might have been my perdition. My books are the witness to my sanity, and anything else I might have done, any other fulfillment I might have had would have made me regret not living my life as I have lived it."
*
On page 222 of De l'inconvénient d'être né, Cioran presents a portrait of Noica: "D. is incapable of assimilating Evil. He recognizes its existence, but cannot incorporate it into his thinking. Even if he went to Hell and back, no one would know it, so high does he remain, in all he says, above anything that can harm him.

"You would seek in vain in his ideas for the slightest trace of the trials he has been through. Sometimes he has the reflexes, but they are only reflexes, of a wounded man. Opaque in the face of the negative, he does not realize that all that we possess is nothing but a capital of non-being. And yet a good many of his gestures reveal a demonic spirit. Demonic without knowing it. He is a destroyer dulled and sterilized by Good."

But seen from closer up, his demonism takes on the form of a cultural fanaticism. Noica believes in culture without leftovers. In other words, he cannot accept that ultimately we are only creating a diversion designed to conceal from us the pathetic situation of finding ourselves alone before the absence of God. Suffering from an excess of health, he ends up being mutilated in reverse. By his very nature, Noica is incapable of thinking of the mind in the tension involved in its insertion into the finite, and of thus bringing it down to the worldly proportions of finite conscious beings. He behaves like one who, in his enthusiasm to keep moving, fails to see that the ground on which he was able to tread has come to an end. Closed to the reality of the precipice, he would not even be surprised by the fall, or, faced by its imminent occurrence, he would somehow be able to produce the sophism necessary to transform falling into an exotic form of walking.

Cioran's refusal of thought and the way in which he contests our right to be conscious of the relative and illusory dimension of culture go hand in hand. Noica's authority is real when he sets his culturalism in opposition to the various varieties of the unpolished mind, making culture the supreme form of mental hygiene. But it becomes demonic, tyrannical and negative when it replaces careful lucidity with the calm serenity, troubled by nothing, of a mind which rejoices without having any ultimate motive for doing so.
*
"That Verführerin business reminds me of what a very nice lady said to me after my Hegel book, Stories about Man, came out. I was busy explaining to her that in relation to Hegel I am just a sort of Apostle Paul, going about with a staff in my hand spreading someone else's idea. 'So you're a fancy cocotte,' she whispered in my ear, 'alluring passers-by into Hegel's brothel.' What do you make of that?
*
I remembered that in the train he had told me about his friendship with Cioran, such as it was. They had been together at the Faculty of Philosophy, but had not got to know each other there, because Cioran had a complex about being provincial, and was reclusive. Attendance at lectures was not compulsory, and their occasions for meeting or for working together at seminars were infrequent. It was only after graduating that they had been brought together, when they received a two-month scholarship to Geneva, donated by Radulescu-Pogoneanu, whose father had been a pupil of Maiorescu. They had shared a room there, and Noica, who at that time had only had a good knowledge of Kant, said that in Cioran he had come face to face with a more comprehensive world of culture. "In Geneva I realized that he knew Calvin, and looked at the city differently, with a cultural eye which was not available to me. He approached philosophy differently from me, dealing with boring 19th century German commentators and with the philosophy of culture. This was the start of his disgust with classical philosophy." Then he told me how Cioran had lived all his life on the edge of society—"He wasn't employed for more than a year or two"—living at first on scholarships, which were extended up to the German occupation, and then on small sums given him by a few Romanians in paid employment (Eliade, for example, in Lisbon) and from other such sources. During the war, it amused him to take the "Siegfrieds" to French cabarets; he found a special pleasure in arranging such a marriage of two contrary worlds.
*
First of all there was the theme of the great cultural boulevards, the way in which he had chosen to live his cultural life, digesting the essential, in contrast to Cioran and Mircea Vulcânescu who had given him complexes all through his youth with their broad reading of secondary authors. "I would be reading Chateaubriand, and Cioran would go on for hours about the work of Chateaubriand's brother-in-law. Once in a French restaurant I sat and listened to them talking all evening about Léon Bloy, of whom I hadn't read a line. I tried to keep up with them, but I couldn't do it. Nowadays I am starting to think that I didn't go wrong in choosing the main boulevards of culture. Cioran ended up writing aphorisms, and Vulcânescu, had he lived, would most likely have done encyclopedic, not speculative work. There is a way of losing yourself in culture without any sense of the hierarchical place of things: it just means that someone else has to put on their diving suit later to rescue you and bring you back to the surface. All the same I have retained some essential things from the great secondary thinkers, and the saying that I would have liked to put above the door of my school, 'You can never know who is the giver and who is the receiver,' comes from Un Mendiant Ingrat by Léon Bloy.
*
He gives me a letter from Cioran to read, the one about the "Paraguayan sentiment of being," full of irritation and bitter irony. He gathers that Noica stays in Pâltiniç, 4000 feet above "them," and imagines that breathing the Pâltiniç air for a whole season has induced some sort of delirium in him. The Romanian Sentiment of Being is fine enough, says Cioran, but his advice is that Noica should stick to logic, where he has room to be as delirious as he likes.
*
"I have that ultimate attention of which Goethe spoke, and the flexibility which is necessary in front of l'autre. A healthy detachment is never the same as distance and contempt."— "How far should submission before the being of another be taken?"—"Not to the point of your own effacement. I remember how Cioran, who was very irritable, once ended a discussion with a friend, Stefan Teodorescu ('Uncle' we all called him), by slapping him across the face. How do you think Uncle reacted? He said, 'You're objective.'"
*
He has finished Jaspers's Autobiography, and talks about those incurably flat minds like Jaspers, who can write without the slight-est shame: "Italy is so beautiful!" "A flat mind will always remain flat, even if you send him to Paradise and let him converse with the Good Lord Himself. Even after a trip to Heaven, he will still be coming out with platitudes. Jaspers is surprised that Heidegger sometimes wouldn't answer his questions, but they were the type of questions that no one could be expected to answer: 'What do you think about God?' and things like that."
*
"I addressed a group of ten to fifteen psychiatrists, and tried to use the example of Jaspers to tell them that you cannot arrive at philosophy by a continual progression—psychiatry, psychology, and the next step, philosophy. Philosophy, in its strange madness, requires an overturning, aperiagoge, it requires a Damascus road experience. It is not sufficient to master a certain level of generality, to have general ideas, in order to do philosophy. Philosophy cannot be done around the edges of a science, as the mere extension of the latter into a higher level of thinking. You cannot do philosophy with psychology: you do it with philosophy, which means as a pre-condition blindness, the Damascus experience which presupposes conversion, a break with the past, the passage into another language, which Hegel defined as the language of reason, as opposed to that of intellect. When you enter the world of philosophy you must change your name: you are no longer called Saul or Cephas, but Paul or Peter. It is not easy indeed to explain what it means to have an organ of philosophy. All you can do is to say that Plato, Hegel and Heidegger certainly have it, and that equally certainly someone like Descartes or Leibniz does not. All my life, I have never ceased to wonder whether or not Aristotle had this organ, and I am inclined to believe that he did not, although I recognize that he raises problems which cannot be passed over.
*
Yesterday and today I have been caught up in Eliade's conversations. Having got past the beginning, I am amazed to realize what force his ideas acquire when they are presented in this form, in-stead of being dispersed and buried in the erudition of his books.

All his massive scholarly work, it now becomes evident, is fed by a few ideas of extraordinary scope and depth. I remain with the following: 1) the demonstration of a palaeolithic unity of humanity, on the basis of the religions of the agricultural age; 2) the spiritual mutation which ensues from the passage from hunting to agriculture: the confrontation with plant (as opposed to animal) life gives rise to the integration of humanity in the rhythm of the cosmos, and to the appearance of a consciousness of the unity of life and death, the existential attitude which lies at the roots of the great religions, and which started with the analogy of the birth, growth, death and resurrection of the plant; 3) the contribution of all people (all cultures) to the history of the mind; 4) that the capacity for signifying and symbolizing, specific to human behavior, has its true (initial) root in the religious existential attitude; 5) that the sacred is camouflaged in the profane, just as for Marx and Freud the profane was camouflaged in the sacred: the task is to "decipher the camouflage of the sacred in the desacralized world"; and finally, 6) that culture is in fact a specific condition of man—the political significance of culture lying in its capacity to respond on a different level to a difficult historical moment; the sacred and soteriological value of the book today, when oral teaching and folklore have disappeared; the possibility of surviving through the intermediary of culture (though Noica has experienced all this within himself).

In the evening, Noica makes a final visit to my room. I tell him how caught up I am in my reading of Eliade. He is very pleased, and proposes that I should indicate in a letter to Eliade the ideas which have struck me, telling him it is a pity they should remain dispersed or buried in works of erudition. In other words, I am to propose that he write the great postscript to his work. If I do not write the letter in the next two days, I shall probably never write it.

I tell him that I have had the sensation, reading the conversations, that I am facing a monster of culture. "Both Eliade and Cioran had their ideas in place before they were thirty. They got off to a better start than I did. I felt that my real beginning was after the age of forty. In any case, I hope I have been able to make you see who the man is, and how great he is. Don't make comparisons between us: our destinies have been different. Think what he would have done, with his projects, if he had stayed here. What could he have done without libraries? I have been content with my classics."
*
The words of Heraclitus come into my mind about how "there are gods here too," and I am convinced that the gods who have grown up around the door of Noica's room are more beautiful and more true than those gods who were with Eliade as he sipped from the all-too-human cup of vanity.
*
I have finished reading the latest volume of Eliade's short stories, In the Court of Dionysus, which appeared last year in Caietele Inorogului. This brings our discussion at morning coffee back to Eliade. "What amazes me about Eliade is his ability to take the commonplaces of religions so seriously. You see this when you read his literary work. You know how much I like his idea that there is a concentration of the sacred behind any profane reality. Like Hegel's Idea, this gives you a way of looking on all things with compassion, of ennobling and redeeming them. But there is also the disadvantage that, if you see a revelation of the sacred in every trivial detail, you risk disintegrating the sacred itself. You'll see for example how he ends the second volume of his History of Religious Beliefs and Ideas with the story of 'L'autobus qui s'arrête à Éleusis.' A bus on the Athens to Corinth route pulls in at the bus-stop in Eleusis, and an old woman gets on. She has no money for her ticket, so the driver puts her off the bus. The engine won't start. The other passengers decide to pay for her ticket. The old woman gets on again; the engine starts; there is general consternation; the old dear gives them a ticking off, and disappears. The business of the engine that wouldn't start, and so on, is authentic enough: it caused a bit of a stir in 1940, and got into the Athens newspapers. The trouble is that you get the feeling that Eliade picks up that sort of thing and believes in it. Well, it isn't helpful to see a revelation of the sacred in stories like that: you just dilute the sacred. He does the same with dreams. For the ten years that he and Jung were friends they used to keep telling each other their dreams.
*
"You and Andrei should not pass judgement on Eliade. He has an open-ended egotism: he knows that we all benefit, indirectly, from his self-fulfillment. In fact it is not really an egotism at all, so much as a naive way of rejoicing in his own successes. You will see this in the Entretiens which I will borrow for you this evening from Relu. He is really very childlike: in his youth he enjoyed being high-brow, and he liked telling people so. You can win him over very easily by praising him, so he often fails to distinguish between people of quality and the rest."
*
And now comes Eliade's reply, which is quite extraordinary, a philosophical reply which has the virtue of taking the problem out of the minor, psychologizing terms in which Jung puts it:

"It is possible that it is all a question of language. Perhaps what you term 'injustice' and 'cruelty' in Yahweh are only approximate, imperfect ways of expressing the absolute transcendence of God. Yahweh is 'He who is,' and so above
Good and Evil. It is impossible to include, to understand or to formulate him, so it follows that he is at one and the same time 'merciful' and 'unjust': it is a way of saying that no defi-nition can circumscribe him, and no attribute can sum him up."

But Jung's continuing insistence on the matter is lamentable, and unphilosophical, because it drags the problem down again to the lower level from which Eliade had lifted it:

"I am speaking as a psychologist," the professor continued, "and would emphasize that I am referring to the anthropo-morphism of Yahweh, and not his theological reality. As a psychologist, I observe that Yahweh is contradictory, and I also believe that this contradiction can be interpreted psy-chologically..."

"I wanted to demonstrate to you, from this starting point, that unphilosophical thought is unable to make two distinctions: that between soul and mind, and that between intellect and reason; and that in the end it does not have access to the transcendental. Psychology has always dwelt with the misery of the 'soul' and has never had access to the world of the mind. Although Goethe has a philosophical background, he remained at the level of the intellect, and in contrast, Brancusi, without philosophical instruction, had access to reason. A good part of the history of philosophy stops at the intellect, and is thus unphilosophical. I have always thought this of Aristotle: his philosophy is a philosophy of the intellect and does not have access to reason. Kant, who, historically speaking, is the one who makes the distinction, is criticized by Hegel for remaining, with all his philosophy, at the intellect. (...)
*
I thought what a sorry state some people can finish up in at the end of a life of thought. If your name is Heidegger or Cioran, you have no business lapsing into groans and laments with the terror of some Sicilian peasant. How can you exclaim, like Cioran, 'A quoi bon avoir quitté Coasta Boacii? Or how can you be afraid when you see people on the moon? I imagine it was the same when fire was first discovered. Some pessimistic old fellow or other must have risen from his slumber to say, Can't you see the trouble that is lying in wait for us? If that stuff gets into the hand of a child the whole forest could go up in flames, and what'll we do then, eh?' All these catastrophic visions annoy me. To be quite sincere I don't believe at all in the Great Catastrophe, and I have my arguments. Humanity, this great animal, this great collective individual ought to sense if it's standing at the threshold of the end, or indeed experiencing it already.
When you drown you have a moment of supreme recollection of your life, an illumination which comes to you in the last moment. If we were really drowning, as so many believe, if it were true that 'only a god can save us now' as Heidegger declared, it is impossible that we should not feel something, that we should not experience the convulsion before the end, that we should not recollect our history. But I can look at it another way too. Let us say that, with the year 2000, we are approaching the threshold of the end. If so, we should still be happy. It's quite something to be the last generation of humanity, isn't it?"
*
I amused myself this morning, on the way to the canteen, with alternative versions of Hobbes's saying about homo homini lupus. In the course of a discussion with Herder, who was presenting him with a project for an ideal society, Goethe replied: 'It might be so, but that will mean that each of us is the nurse of the other.' So we have homo homini curator. We have not got there yet, but if you allow me license I can say that we are in the stage of homo homini 'corruptor, ' of man who lives the foolish infinite of consumption. Everything corrupts us nowadays, goods and ideas alike. Even you are corrupting me with the books you brought here. But in contrast, I have no doubt that the 22nd century will be a good one for humanity, after the 21st has been one of purgatory, of recovery through cleansing from fear."
*
I think a closer approach to the Vedas and Upanishads would have been good for Heidegger. He has something of the good side of the oriental sage in him, as well as the element of laying waste: a sort of 'come sit by me' (which is what the word Upanishad' means), 'come sit by me and be silent — I like to think of it as upanishading.' But Heidegger maintained that we need to get to the East via the Greeks, because the Greeks are the door by which the East penetrated into Europe. Well, I'm afraid there is some truth in Beaufret's observation that we have been studying the Greeks for three hundred years and still the East continues to be closed to us."
*
So to return to where we started, the philosopher is not a doctor, as Nietzsche would have it, or as Buddhism teaches when it tells us that the Law is therapeutic. As far as you are concerned, I consider myself a mere tamer. I am trying to moderate your animality, your spoilt nature, your discontent, and to make you pass from the individual self to the enlarged self. I am edifying you to the extent that I am teaching you that living in the mind means entering into the enlarged self, which means integrating others, even the other, the adver-sary. The mind is the place where differences of the mere ego are extinguished. You cannot live in culture and remain with the pettiness of the ego. We have to forget ourselves to a certain extent, to discreetly let ourselves go, to dance, as Nietzsche says, and not tread with heavy steps. But I am not giving you a pre-scription or a dogma. Edification points towards dogma, and gets blocked in giving an answer. But the truth of the spirit, in the rays of which speculation moves, is that every answer points to a question, to a question which is awakened by the answer. Vom Wesen des Grundes every foundation points to another, and finally to Schelling's Un-Grund.
*
'Neti,' it replies, 'not I.' And everything you ask answers, 'Neti.' It is from this void of being that I start, which is quite different from Hegel's grandiose das Nichts, the pure nothingness into which being without determinations is converted. You can start naturally from this humble void of being which is in everything."

**
Then I went over the theory of the three categories of horse with them. 'Horses are of three sorts,' I said. There are draft horses, circus horses, and racehorses. Ninety-nine percent of people remain draft horses. Of the rest, some become circus horses, like Nadia Comaneci or Brigitte Bardot. But as far as I am concerned, I am only interested in racehorses. If you want to be ordained as priests, that is a spiritual matter in which I can have no part to play. But if you want to become racehorses you can come to me again further along your way. However, don't tell me that your failure is the fault of the world you live in. The squalor, if it exists, exists first of all in you, in your inner limits. People have read books by lantern light before now.'"
**
Romania today has twenty-two million inhabitants, and let us say that probably one young person in a million has genius. But for those twenty-two geniuses we need trainers. I have brought a couple of pages to read to you, which I have entitled 'The Twenty-Two: or On Performance Culture.' If you think they work and you let me publish them, I shall send them to Marin Sorescu at Ramuri:

A young French poet sent Valéry a manuscript of verses.
Valéry read it and replied: "Sir, you have no talent. You may have genius, but I have no competence in such matters." But it is precisely in such matters that at least a few people, at the heart of a national culture, should have competence. For if we have performance sport, which delights us as a spectacle and no more, so all the more must we have performance culture, which, whether it delights us or not, shifts the boulders in its path, and us with them. And to the extent that the performances of culture—whether in the realm of great inventions, of great ideas, forms of organization and social manifestation, or great artistic creations—are decisive for the affirmation and survival of peoples, it is well to reflect on the way in which they are produced.

Some performances of culture are obtained without knowing. The Romanian language, along with a few others, is in itself a cultural performance. Certain forms of organization and manifestation of village life represented, in the past, a cultural performance. Folklore is sometimes a cultural performance at the ultimate level of creation. If we are to believe that performances of culture are associated with a quality of inventive and creative genius, then these must be cases of a diffuse genius in action.

But when the performances are no longer anonymous, as in our historical time, then the quality of genius is concentrated in individual people. How are we to discover it and take full advantage of it? In particular, how are we to prepare young brains and make them bear fruit, just as we make oil, gas, reeds and even rubbish profitable?

It is probable that among the twenty-two million Romani-ans currently living there are twenty-two young people, one in a million, who are gifted in an absolutely exceptional way.
We do not need any more than that, in a country in which there is no lack of the intelligence and eagerness necessary to meet all the material and spiritual needs of the present day. But the question is not only how we find those twenty-two, but even more how we turn their virtuality into actuality. It would be simple enough to try the military approach: "All those who think they are exceptional—one step for-ward!" But we would find ourselves with too many candidates, and everything would have to start from the beginning again. And if Paul Valéry is right, and no one is competent in matters of genius, then we have no way of choosing from the many or from the few.

Fortunately, however, Valéry's words are not conclusive— perhaps he himself had only talent and not genius—and other great cultural performers have said more encouraging things about detecting and taking full advantage of exceptional young people. Edison, if I am not mistaken, said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspira-tion. This changes everything. In this case outside interven-tion is not only possible; it even becomes obligatory—enter the coach. For it may be that everything in performance cul-ture happens, as in performance sport, under the guidance of a coach.

The coach indeed knows how to make someone perspire.
Someone once complained to the manager of a great hotel in Switzerland about the person in the next room, who was playing the piano too much, and not even playing properly but just doing scales all the time. "That's Rubinstein," the manager explained. At over seventy, Rubinstein was still playing scales, still making himself perspire.

You feel pity for some young girl or boy athlete who has to spend a good part of their "most beautiful years" (but are they really so beautiful if, as is so often the case, they do not provide a modeling for the rest of life?) as if they were under the rigors of some medieval order. And perhaps we would be filled with pity at the sight of a gifted youth condemned for life to the rigors of culture, especially as there is no certainty of the result, and you have to coach not just twenty-two but several hundred. But this is precisely the difference between the words of Valéry and Edison: the one would like to know at a glance who has genius, while the other says that it is only later, once the person has perspired for a long time,
that the miracle which contributes to the sending ahead of peoples and of history may show itself.

And for this we need coaches. Teachers work with the rule, not the exception, and in any case they cannot devote themselves to a single disciple. And who else, even the incomparable institution of the family, has the competence and daring necessary? "Don't attempt too much," says the family to the young person. "Stay close to the shore if you want to be all right." But the coach is made of different stuff. Fond like a parent, as he is, of the young person, he says, "Throw yourself out into the stream; you won't drown." So where are our coaches? They are here already, aid they are certainly more numerous, in the field of culture, than those to be trained. It is the Romanian's vocation to be a coach. He has stayed on the edge for long enough through-out history and has seen how others have drowned. It is always easier to know how something should be done than to do it yourself. And anyway, good coaches might actually be those who have themselves achieved a performance. Professor Palade, the doctor who won the Nobel Prize, seems to have coached the team of the newly founded Institute of Biology in such a way as to give us the illusion that we might win another Nobel Prize some fine day. And Mircea Eliade could bring great orientalists into the world at any time, if we could convince ourselves that it was the duty of our country—the only one in Europe which is open culturally as much to the East as to the West—to give the world of tomorrow an exceptional team of interpreters; for spiritual interpretation demands a bit of genius too.

But I am not thinking so much of exceptional coaches for exceptional young people, as of those great humble coaches, who are willing to attend to the growth of a stalk of wheat day by day. I once referred to them as the autumn rain which knows nothing of the harvest. If only we could find the good seed: just twenty-two grains!

I listen to this text, in the ideas of which I have been growing for the last fifteen years, assimilating them and transforming them into a way of life, and I know not what spirit urges me to insubordination, like Alcibiades in his desire to escape from under the spell of the eiron of Socrates. A voice which I do not recognize rises in me and I hear myself saying, "Is it for us to withdraw the right to being from those who do not live culturally? You are affirming that the rest of humanity simply is not." "It is not I who withdraw that right: they deny it to themselves. They are content to live in statistics and sub-humanity. And I am not interested in statistics," replies Noica.
"But you cannot reduce 'to be' to 'to live culturally'! That means suppressing the variety of humanity in the name of one ontological model and its ideal saturation. There is a to be' which is given by ethics, a heroism of honesty, not just a heroism of culture, which can end monstrously in the neglect of our obligation to open ourselves to others and to assume analogically the entire sphere of the human. In a moment in which the salvation of humanity as humanity is at issue, you cannot leave things just in the sphere of culture. After the Treatise you ought to write an Ethics, not a Logic.

What we need is to create a new moral state of humanity, and not to save the mind in the niggardly form of those 0.1 percent who live culturally." "You are proposing, as I understand it, a doctrine of Seele and not of Geist." "I cannot see why Geist is unable to incorporate Seele. And why does die schône Seele have to be decreed to be a mere 'little soul' and sent off to the zone of non-being?" "You are speaking to me as Pierre Emmanuel used to do. When I said something similar to him he asked indignantly, 'Mais qu'est-ce que nous faisons avec l'épicier?' Well, allow me to reply that we are not going to do anything with l'épicier, because the grocer is not, and he is not because he did not want to be, because he has done nothing in order to be. Are you going to end up by raising the problem in the ridiculous manner of that theology which at a certain time felt obliged to think about the salvation of mankind be-fore the time of Christ? In the name of the false goodness which assigns the right to be in a universal way, humanity will die suffocated in its own rhythm of growth. What goodness is it that pre-cipitates the world towards its own end?" (...)
**
Then I went over the theory of the three categories of horse with them. 'Horses are of three sorts,' I said. There are draft horses, circus horses, and racehorses. Ninety-nine percent of people remain draft horses. Of the rest, some become circus horses, like Nadia Comaneci or Brigitte Bardot. But as far as I am concerned, I am only interested in racehorses. If you want to be ordained as priests, that is a spiritual matter in which I can have no part to play. But if you want to become racehorses you can come to me again further along your way. However, don't tell me that your failure is the fault of the world you live in. The squalor, if it exists, exists first of all in you, in your inner limits. People have read books by lantern light before now.'"

THE PÄLTINIS DIARY
A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture
GABRIEL LIICEANU '