The Saunterer

NEXT POST WILL BE MADE ON MAY 8, 2006

The Saunterer will be traveling until May 8, when posting will resume.

Glenn Gould on “What is art for?”

    Glenn Gould believed that through art we can construct a life of wonder and serenity:

I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 206.)

    A thought strikes this Saunterer: It might be said as truthfully that through wilderness we can construct a life of wonder and serenity.

    For a brief biography of Glenn Gould, click here.

Alan Seeger on the essence of success

    Just before he died in battle in World War I, Alan Seeger wrote:

I am not influenced by the foolish American ideas of “success” which regard only the superficial and accidental meanings of the word – advancement, recognition, power, etc. The essence of success is in rigorously obeying one’s best impulses and following those paths which conscience absolutely approves, and than which imagination can conceive none more desirable. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 169.)
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    For a brief biography of Alan Seeger, click here.

What kind of Coldwell Banker real estate agent would Henry David Thoreau have been?

    Near the beginning of his essay “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau tells us:

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog – a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me.

    To read Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” click here.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on the fallacy of the willingness-to-pay method

    Antoine de Saint-Exupéry pinpointed the fallacy of the willingness-to-pay method when he wrote:   

But I refuse to consider the fact that people are satisfied with what they have as a proof that they lack nothing. There is no absolute instinct that makes one demand something as yet unconceived. But if one makes people aware of an inner impulse that exalts them, then they will demand to know what the conditions for it are. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 355.)

    How can people be made aware of an inner impulse to preserve large areas of wilderness? Then they will be willing to pay for the preservation.

    Private colleges used to have (maybe still do) a way of making students aware of their latent inner impulses. The antithesis of the willingness-to-pay method, it is the inescapable shove into compulsory courses they have no interest in, and would willingly pay to avoid. I entered a small private college as a materialist. I left as an inspired transcendentalist. We engineering students had our faces rubbed in classical literature, poetry, and arts. There was no escape route. The one option was to quit and go home. Somewhere in the forced march along the path of most resistance, I discovered a far better way of living for me. The inescapable shove doesn’t exist at public universities. There, students can get out of almost everything, and everything includes the things they can’t conceive of that might be good for them.
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    For a brief biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, click here.

Mary Somerville on the need for kindness to animals

    Near the end of her long life, Mary Somerville wrote that killing or hurting animals is contrary to God’s mercy and justice:

The short time I have to live naturally occupies my thoughts. . . . As I do comprehend, in some degree at least, the exquisite loveliness of the visible world, I confess I shall be sorry to leave it. I shall regret the sky, the sea, with all the changes of their beautiful colouring; the earth, with its verdure and flowers: but far more shall I grieve to leave animals who have followed our steps affectionately for years, without knowing for certainty their ultimate fate. . . . If animals have no future, the existence of many is most wretched; multitudes are starved, cruelly beaten, and loaded during life; many die under a barbarous vivisection. I cannot believe that any creature was created for uncompensated misery; it would be contrary to the attributes of God’s mercy and justice. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p.275.)
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    For a short biography of Mary Somerville, click here.

Wayne H. Davis on the mistake of equating land to paper money

    For ideas on how conserving and preserving land can solve many of society’s ills, show us any better than those in the short essay The Land Must Live, by Wayne H. Davis, Professor Emeritus, School of Biological Sciences, University of Kentucky. Here is an extract

To the ecologist perhaps the most insane of all meanderings in the business world is that which equates land to paper money and makes the two freely interchangeable. Once sold, the land can be flooded behind a dam, blasted away to open a mine or road, or sent helter-skelter down into the streams via erosion. We consider no moral question to be involved in this. The only value judgment for society is made on the other side of the transaction: The money received for the land is viewed in a positive light as a stimulus to the local economy.

Perhaps the time is ripe for a new religion based upon a reverence for the land and all the life which springs therefrom. Is it not every bit as logical to worship the solid earth beneath your feet from which the mystery of life springs eternal with each vernal equinox as to have to imagine some unseen being in the sky?

    To read all of the essay, click here.

Richard Livingstone on the aim of commerce and how it leads to a life without standards

    Richard Livingstone, in his 1943 book, Education for a World Adrift, put it this way:

The life without standards exists in all epochs, but it is the peculiar danger of a rich society at whose feet every kind of facility, distraction and pleasure are poured in indiscriminate profusion. Commercialism helps the chaos. For the aim of commerce is not to sell what is best for people or even what they really need, but simply to sell; its final standard is successful sale.
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    For a brief biography of Richard Livingstone, click here.