The Saunterer

Heinz R. Pagels on drawing strength from one’s enemy to fight that enemy

    Pseudoscience should be the enemy of us all. So the more we rub shoulders with it, the better we are inspired to stamp it out. So tells Heinz R. Pagels in his book, The Dreams of Reason:

I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.

    Quoted from page 35 of The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate, by Adam Frank. University of California Press, 2009. For a brief biography of Heinz Pagels, click here. For Adam Frank’s website, click here.

Gustave Eiffel on the first principle of architectural aesthetics

    It can take a period for people to recognize and be comfortable with revolutionary beauty. So it was with the Eiffel Tower, as Gustave Eiffel explained in 1887 in the Paris newspaper Le Temps, defending the Tower:

Because we are engineers, do you think we are not concerned with beauty in our constructions and that when we strive for solidity and durability, we do not also strive for elegance? Do not actual conditions of strength always conform to the secret conditions of harmony? The first principle of architectural aesthetics is that the essential lines of a monument be determined by their perfect appropriateness to their intent. What conditions have I had, above all, to take into account for my tower? Wind resistance. Well, I claim that the curves in the four ridges in my building, as supplied by my calculations, will give an impression of beauty, for they will translate to the eyes the boldness of my conception.

    Quoted from page 129 of Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience, by Barry Allen, Cornell University Press, 2008. Barry Allen is a professor of philosophy at McMaster University. For images of the Eiffel Tower, click here. For a virtual tour of the Eiffel Tower, click here. For a brief biography of Gustave Eiffel, click here.

Osama bin Laden on the blame for global warming

    Osama bin Laden looks no further than capitalist greed:

In fact, the life of all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations, yet despite that, the representatives of these corporations in the White House insist on not observing the Kyoto Accord, with the knowledge that the statistics speak of the death and displacement of millions of human beings because of that, especially in Africa. This greatest of plagues and most dangerous of threats to the lives of humans is taking place in an accelerating fashion as the world is being dominated by the democratic system, which confirms its massive failure to protect humans and their interests from the greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives. (Quoted from page 210 of The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics, by Faisal Devji. Columbia University Press, 2008.)
    For a brief biography of Osama bin Laden, click here. For Faisal Devji’s home page, click here. For a short description of his book, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity, click here.

On the indomitable instinct for sex intercourse

    Sauntering in back issues of The American Biology Teacher, I paused at an interesting story (page 402, September, 1965), worth republishing as a reminder of the unyielding nature of the base impulses:

Workers at Humboldt County’s Prairie Creek fish hatchery in Eureka, California had a finny visitor recently and are not telling a fish story that tops all fish stories. The visitor, named “Indomitable,” is a two-year old, 14-inch silver salmon that overcame all obstacles and returned to the tank in which it was spawned. To do so, the fish had to swim some five miles from the Pacific ocean up Redwood Creek, into Prairie Creek, up a drainage ditch, through several other drains, straight up a four-inch drain pipe that had a 90-degree sharp turn in it, then knock off a wire screen cover over a 2 ½ inch stand pipe before finally clearing a nearly impassable wire net into the tank. “Indomitable” was none the worse for his journey except for a slightly bashed-in nose, apparently received when he knocked off the wire screen cover. Hatchery manager Kenneth Johnson terms the trip “the most amazing spawning journey known to the world fish history.”

Bernard DeVoto on how to write

    Here is Bernard DeVoto explaining how, and it’s true for any art:

Whatever his age in years, a writer is still young so long as he feels his work as an enhancement of himself. He is essentially frivolous about writing: it is a setting for or an adornment of his ego. A mature writer is one whom experience and reality have taught to subordinate himself to the job. His discipline is to determine the implicit requirements of the job and then to do it wholly in terms of those requirements, disregarding everything else, disregarding himself most of all. Let the chips fall where they may: what counts is the job. Not his satisfaction (though it may be great), not those who may praise or condemn it, not those whom it may infuriate or bore or delight, but the job as it may be of itself complete. He has no option, he is committed. He has sufficiently mastered his tools and he uses them toward a deliberately chosen end, the job that sets its own terms. Between him and that end nothing whatever can come except his limitations and the fallibility he shares with the rest of the race. Everything else is irrelevant; if anything isn’t, he has not grown up.

    (From Bernard DeVoto’s essay, “What Counts is the Job”; pages 52-57 in The Writer’s Handbook, by Udia G. Olsen et al., 1959.)
    For a brief biography of Bernard DeVoto, click here.

André Leroi-Gourhan on the nature of rhythm

    Rhythm plays a central role in Islam. How much so we learned in By Noon Prayer: The Rhythm of Islam, by Fadwa El Guindi. Berg: Oxford. 2008. Chapter 6 presents a theory of Arabo-Islamic Rhythm, that begins with André Leroi-Gourhan explaining the role of rhythm:

Rhythms are the creators of space and time . . . Space and time do not enter lived experience until they are materialised within a rhythmic frame. Rhythms are also the creators of forms.

    For a brief biography of André Leroi-Gourhan, click here. For Fadwa El Guindi’s website, click here.

Heinz R. Pagels on the why of mountain climbing

    He gives his reason in the conclusion of his book, The Cosmic Code (Simon & Schuster, 1982):

I used to climb mountains in snow and ice, hanging onto the sides of great rocks. I was describing one of my adventures to an older friend once, and when I had finished he asked me, "Why do you want to kill yourself?" I protested. I told him that the rewards I wanted were of sight, of pleasure, of the thrill of pitting my body and my skills against nature. My friend replied, "When you are as old as I am you will see that you are trying to kill yourself."
    I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock but it did not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.

    Heinz Pagels died climbing. For his obituary, click here.

Caspar David Friedrich on the value of the artist’s feeling

    Caspar David Friedrich put it:

The artist’s feeling is his law. Genuine feeling can never be contrary to nature, it is always in harmony with her.

    Quoted from page 246 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. For a brief biography of Caspar David Friedrich, click here. For images of his art, click here.

Sidney Axinn on the reason for having laws

    This is Sidney Axinn explaining:

The point of having a law is not that it will prevent the action that it calls illegal. Many cities have a law against parking in front of fire hydrants; yet the law does not stop the practice. Laws against murder do not seem to stop that activity. The fact that laws do not totally deter crime does not mean that we should repeal them. The point of having laws was expressed nicely by Professor Roger Fisher of Yale Law School:
    “The essential talent of the law lies not in producing perfect order but in coping with disorder in an orderly way. Contract law, negligence law and criminal law ‘work’ not in the sense of producing a society with no broken contracts, no negligence and no crimes, but by telling us how society should respond when things go wrong.” (Quoted from page 70 of A Moral Military, by Sidney Axinn. Temple University Press. 2009.)

    For a brief biography of Sidney Axinn, click here. For a brief biography of Roger Fisher, click here.

Valentine de Saint-Point on the essence of lust

    This is what she says:

Lust is to the body what the ideal is to the spirit - the magnificent Chimera, ceaselessly sought after, never captured, which the young and the avid, intoxicated with the vision, pursue without rest. LUST IS A FORCE.
    (Quoted from page 181 of Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, by Christine Poggi. Princeton University Press. 2009.)

    For a brief biography of Valentine de Saint-Point, click here.