The Saunterer

T. M. Luhrmann on Go

 Evangelicals she visited opined:
   They said again and again that God’s power and love were infinite, but they often felt helpless and unlovable; they often said that they forgot to pray for help when they should have prayed; and they often struggled with apparently unanswered prayers. They talked about the mysteries of faith, and how little they understood of why God allowed such pain in their lives.

from the great Indian epic the Mahabharata

 Every day countless people die, and  yet those who remain live as if they were immortals.

Elizabeth Hamilton on beauty

    She asks,

    Which is more beautiful, feline movement or feline stillness?

(Quoted from page 152 of Making Rounds with Oscar, by David Dosa. Hyperion, 2010.)

For information about Elizabeth Hamilton, click here.

 

Why did evolution give humans pubic hair?

    The Saunterer would be surprised if Darwin knew the answer, which we take off the internet:

    The skin in the area around the genitals is very sensitive. Pubic hair can naturally reduce friction associated with the movements during sexual intercourse and other activities wherein chafing may occur.

    Pubic hair can also help stop bacteria and other microorganisms from entering the body. Specifically, it can help trap dirt and pathogens that may enter the body through the vagina or penis.

The Saunterer's method of organizing books

(The method was published by H. Charles Romesburg in The New York Times Book Review this weekend, February, 2021):

Most people featured in By the Book haphazardly organize their books. I do the same, with over 1,000 books. I’d like to share my method of cataloging and retrieving them.

I hired a student of mine to use a cellphone camera to photograph the bookshelves (spines outward), organize the photos by room and shelf location and store the photos on my computer (iPad works as well).

Looking through them tells me where a book I want is and refreshes my memory of books that I’ve forgotten I have. My infirm body can’t retrieve; I give a friend the location and soon the book is in my lap. When I’m finished reading it, the friend puts it back where it was found.

H. Charles Romesburg

 

Robert Frost on revolutionizing the world

    Yes, revolutionize but don’t go whole hog was his advice:

I advocate a semi-revolution.
The trouble with a total revolution
(Ask any reputable Rosicrucian)
Is that it brings the same class up on top.
Executives of skillful execution
Will therefore plan to go halfway and stop.
Yes, revolutions are the only salves,
But they're the one thing that should be done by halves.

(Quoted from Frost’s poem A Semi-Revolution, page 407 of Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.)

Avi Loeb on preserving the world

    Avi Loeb does full justice to safeguarding our planet from extraterrestrials:
    But the moment we know that we are not alone, that we are almost certainly not the most advanced civilization ever to have existed in the cosmos, we will realize that we’ve spent more funds developing the means to destroy all life on the planet than it would have cost to preserve it.

    Quoted from Extraterrestrial, by Avi Loeb.
   Abraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University.

Sir Michael Edwards on how a foreign language affects your feelings

    Sir Michael Edwards speaks both English and French, with these consequences:

    I feel English when I’m looking at the detail of things, a ruffled pigeon padding under a gold-painted statue, for instance, and I feel French when I’m simply looking at the landscape and noticing the lines that border or construct it.

    (Quoted from page 48 of TLS, June 12, 2020)
    For a brief biography of Sir Michael Edwards, click here.

    To see and read a sample part of the Saunterer's new book, The Arts & You, click on this link. It contains more than a thousand quotations on what the arts can do for you.

David Attenborough on the human race’s greatest folly

    David Attenborough tells us:
   By and large we are eating up the natural world for our own purposes. Well that’s self-destruction actually. If you damage the natural world in the end you damage yourself and the human race will regret it.
    (Quoted from page 11 of the July 28, 2018, issue of The Scientist)
    For a brief biography of David Attenborough, click here.

Brad Taylor, author of fourteen best selling thrillers, on what makes a good one

Brad Taylor says in the January 24, 2021, NY Times Book Review:
Without a doubt, characters. Characters, characters, characters. One could write a scene where a car bomb is placed in an empty parking lot, set to go off in two minutes. The buildup is intense, with a “Day of the Jackal” feel of finding components and creating the device, but at the end of the day, do readers care about the empty parking lot? No. They only care if that bomb is going to harm someone they’ve invested emotional energy in — and that is the character of the story. Setting, pace and trajectory are important, but they’re irrelevant without the reader’s emotional investment, and that is driven by characters.