The Saunterer

Vera Brittain on planning her proper course through life

    Raised in a wealthy family, a young Vera Brittain planned her course through life, and wrote of it in her diary:

If I am to have any distinction, I want it to be that of intellect & talent - so far, far more worth having than the pomp & circumstance that comes from being the possessor of wealth or the product of generations of intermarriage. Expensive lunatics, that are kept in motors & sables by an industrious nation’s toil! (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 280.)
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    For a brief biography of Vera Brittain, click here.

Peter Watts on how all paths of creative work are alike

    Writing in a 1973 issue of the London Times, Peter Watts explained how all paths of creative work are alike:

My father was a classical scholar and a life-long teacher of the classics who could never knock a nail into a piece of wood without damaging his thumb and the wood. For more than 30 years I have been a sculptor in wood and stone, and I could never construct the simplest Latin sentence. . . . Yet both of us were sufficiently adroit in our own spheres to realize that our paths were exactly parallel, and that the semblance of perfection which he loved and pursued all his life was the same beacon as mine. The greatest happiness that life can afford is to be found in the pursuit of these paths, and their number is almost without count but the goal is one.
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    For a brief biography of Peter Watts, click here.