Life seems a funny thing when reading Winnie the Pooh makes you want to pick up James C. Scott’s latest…
Milne:
BY THE TIME it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.
Scott:
Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they teem (usually) with life.… Each river, though subject to the same hydraulic laws, has its own unique personality and history. It makes abundant sense, then, to speak of the life history of a particular river, of its eco-biography. The biography of any river—the Orinoco, the Zambesi, the Mississippi, the Yellow, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Danube, the Ayeyarwady—would be every bit as distinctive as the personal biographies of the various shamans, sages, fishers, philosophers, tyrants, rebels, and saints who lived along their banks.
[…]
The term meander comes to us from an actual river in west central Turkey, the Büyük Menderes, which follows a winding course over a flat plain before entering the Aegean. The Menderes appears in Homer’s Iliad. As a verb in English, the word has come to mean aimless wandering in walking, speaking, or writing. As a technical geological and hydrological term, however, it denotes a distinct nonrandom and rather systematic pattern of movement.