The Saunterer

Edwin Arlington Robinson’s advice to artists

    Refuse to measure anything by the moment. That is the crux of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s advice to artists caught between the needs of their personal lives and the needs of their art:

If you make up your mind to do it, you will soon find a kind of joy in the sheer intensity of the immediate sacrifice and another in the consciousness that you have not only a moral but an artistic ideal to live for. You must remember, even when it seems almost like selfishness to do so, that your art is to be the concrete expression of your life. If you are loyal to that, you cannot be disloyal to yourself; for all of your largest ideas have come from this new life, which you think just now to contain nothing but unhappiness. Refuse for once and all to measure anything by the moment and you will realize before long that the picture will take on new colors - and brighter ones. This, again, is easy enough to say. (Quoted from Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, by Scott Donaldson. New York: Columbia University Press. 2006. pp.182-83.)

    For a brief biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson, click here.

Charles Darwin’s “thinking walks”

    Every day near his house at Downe, in nature and with his dog, away from people, Charles Darwin took “thinking walks,” bringing him ideas. For photographs of where he walked, click here.

Adam Smith on the roles of time and measure in instrumental music

    Adam Smith’s interests ran beyond social philosophy and political economy. Give him a listen:

[In instrumental music] each foregoing sound seems to introduce, and as it were prepare the mind for the following: by its rythmus, by its time and measure, it disposes that succession of sounds into a certain arrangement, which renders the whole more easy to be comprehended and remembered. Time and measure are to instrumental Music what order and method are to discourse; they break it into proper parts and divisions, by which we are enabled both to remember better what is gone before, and frequently to foresee somewhat of what is to come after. . . . (Quoted from “Of the Affinity between Music, Dancing, and Poetry,” in Adam Smith, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence Vol. 3 Essays on Philosophical Subjects, by Adam Smith. London, 1869, p 434-438.)

    For a brief biography of Adam Smith, click here.