The Saunterer

Henry David Thoreau on how climate reacts on us

    How would Henry David Thoreau have responded to the trend of global warming? He did believe that the climate of his day positively reacted on people:

For I believe that climate does thus react on man - as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky - our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains - our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests - and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. (Quoted from Thoreau’s essay, “Walking.”)

Adolf Weissmann on why the romance of the world is being destroyed

    Adolf Weissmann, a German writer on music (1873-1929), put the de-romanticizing of the world down to the rise of the machine:

The de-romanticizing of the world, which we now face, was set in motion already before the war, but it was completed by it. . . . The machine, which conquers distances in shorter and ever shorter times, is self-evidently opposed to the romantic. The romantic thrives on distances, and even creates them artificially. With the discovery of the railroad, the romantic certainly was not killed, but the commerce and worldwide traffic that the railroad set in motion gave it its first and painful wound. A glorious isolation of the artist became a rarity. . . . By necessity, a leveling process will spread throughout the world. To the extent the machine shines in all corners of the world, then the romantic must die. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 333.)