The Saunterer

Stanislaw Marcin Ulam on periodically changing one’s field of work to acquire new points of view

    Ulam writes:

I also believe that changing fields of work during one’s life is rejuvenating. If one stays too much with the same subfields or the same narrow class of problems a sort of self-poisoning prevents acquisition of new points of view and one may become stale. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 230.)
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    For a brief biography of S.M. Ulam, click here.

Edward Abbey on dragging a spirit and purpose out of one’s guts

    When Edward Abbey wrote the following he wasn’t an idler. He was putting food on the table. He was on track to being a good social worker or editor or such. But his intuition sensed a greater possibility. He would have to break from his comfortable habits and drag it out of his guts and make it real. In one of his journals is this entry:

I lie awake and think: Sitting in the Lobo Theater, Saturday afternoon, I was haunted by something like the conviction of sin. An original sin? The feeling of nothing, of nothingness. Nihil ex nihilo. A terrible dread. Why? The belief that I was, that I am, pissing my life away.
“Any way you turn
Any way you look
You have pissed away your life.”
I am now thirty-three, like Christ, and in the middle of the journey, like Dante. If there is any greatness in me, if I have a spirit and purpose here, then I must very soon drag it out of my guts. Tear truth from my entrails. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 210.)
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    For a brief biography of Edward Abbey, click here.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on the call of the wild

    Saint-Exupéry writes in Wind, Sand and Stars:

When the wild ducks or the wild geese migrate in their season, a strange tide rises in the territories over which they sweep. As if magnetized by the great triangular flight, the barnyard fowl leap a foot or two into the air and try to fly. The call of the wild strikes them with the force of a harpoon and a vestige of savagery quickens their blood. All the ducks on the farm are transformed for an instant into migrant birds, and into those hard little heads, till now filled with humble images of pools and worms and barnyards, there swims a sense of continental expanse, of the breadth of seas and the salt taste of the ocean wind. The duck totters to right and left in its wire enclosure, gripped by a sudden passion to perform the impossible and a sudden love whose object is a mystery. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 355.)
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    Mrs. Saunterer asked us, “What about the young of today who blank out the world with their Ipods and Xboxes? They’re in the barnyard. Are they beyond being struck by the call of the wild?”
    In our next post we will report on Edward Abbey’s escape from the barnyard.
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    For a brief biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, click here.