The Saunterer

John Cowper Powys’ unanswerable argument against vivisection

    Of all arguments against vivisection, John Cowper Powys’ argument ranks high in force:

The word “science” covers every kind of atrocity; and the issue is perfectly clear. My opposition to vivisection, particularly to the vivisection of dogs, is based upon an argument that is unanswerable. This wickedness contradicts and cancels the one single advantage that our race has got from what is called evolution, namely the development of our sense of right and wrong. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 322.)
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    For a brief biography of John Cowper Powys, click here.

David Attenborough on the individual characters of tiny creatures

    David Attenborough has seen the individual characters of tiny creatures. Of tiny bola spiders he writes in his book, Life in the Undergrowth:

When we were filming . . . we had in front of us a line of bottles, each of which supported a spray of leafy twigs in which crouched a small bola spider. These tiny creatures catch moths by whirling a filament of silk with a sticky blob at the end, whenever one came near them. Kevin Fleay, the cameraman, had been working with them for nearly a week and he introduced them to me individually. This one, he told me, was very shy. The slightest vibration made her draw up her legs and stay motionless no matter how near a moth came. That one reacted in the same way if the light was too bright. A third didn’t seem to mind how much light was shone on her but on the other hand she was unpredictable. Sometimes she would hunt and sometimes not. But the one at the end of the line, no matter how much she had eaten, or how much light shone on her, would whirl her bolas whenever a moth came anywhere near and usually caught her prey. These tiny creatures half the size of my fingernail each had individual characters.
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    For a brief biography of David Attenborough, click here.

John Lanchester on the best historical analogy for where Google is today

    As John Lanchester wrote in a piece in the London Review of Books, headlined “The global Id”:

The best historical analogy for where Google is today probably comes from the time when the railroads were being built. Everyone knew that trains and railways would change the world, but no one predicted the invention of the suburbs. Google and the increased flow of information on which it rides and from which it benefits, is the railway. I don’t think we’ve yet seen the first suburbs.
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    For a brief biography of John Lanchester, click here.

M. C. Escher on the similarities between poetical and commercial minds

    About the similarities between poetical and commercial minds, M. C. Escher wrote this:

It may seem paradoxical to say that there are similarities between a poetical and a commercial mind, but it is a fact that both a poet and a businessman are constantly dealing with problems that are directly related to people and for which sensitivity is of prime importance. The business-like mind is sometimes described as being cold, sober, calculating, hard, but perhaps these are simply qualities that are necessary for dealing with people if one wants to achieve anything. One is always concerned with the mysterious, incalculable, dark, hidden aspects for which there is no easy formula, but which form essentially the same human element as that which inspires the poet.  (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 258.)   

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    For a brief biography of M. C. Escher, click here.

Auguste Rodin on “What is art for?”

    One thing art does is it shows and refines the human soul and the meaning of life. Auguste Rodin had this in mind when he said:

Art indicates to men their reason for being. It reveals to them the meaning of life; it illuminates their destiny and consequently orients them in life. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 182.)
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    For a brief biography of Auguste Rodin, click here.

Edmund Gosse on the value of mental discipline

    Edmund Gosse’s early failures gave him the mental discipline he drew upon for later successes. He relates:

What is actually taught in early childhood is often that part of training which makes least impression on the character, and is of the least permanent importance. My labours failed to make me a zoölogist, and the multitude of my designs and my descriptions have left me helplessly ignorant of the anatomy of a sea-anemone. But I cannot look upon the mental discipline as useless. It taught me to concentrate my attention, to define the nature of distinctions, to see accurately, and to name what I saw. Moreover, it gave me the habit of going on with any piece of work I had in hand, not flagging because the interest or picturesqueness of the theme had declined, but pushing forth towards a definite goal, well-foreseen and limited beforehand. For almost any intellectual employment in later life, it seems to me that this discipline was valuable. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 261.)

    This is not scientific evidence; it is anecdotal evidence. Is it any less true for that? In our book, it is stronger.
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    For a brief biography of Edmund Gosse, click here.

    For an explanation of anecdotal evidence relative to scientific evidence, click here. 

Eugene Delacroix on laziness as the greatest enemy to the development of one’s faculties

    About laziness being the greatest enemy to the development of our faculties Eugene Delacroix wrote:

With the majority of men, the intelligence is a field that lies fallow for almost all their lives. Seeing the multitude of stupid or at least mediocre people who seem to live only to vegetate, one has the right to be astonished that God should have given reason to his creatures, the faculty of imagining, of comparing, of combining, etc., to produce such small fruit. Laziness, ignorance, a passing situation, or chance throws them out of their course, and changes almost all men into passive instruments of circumstance.
We never know what we can get out of ourselves. Laziness is undoubtedly the greatest enemy to the development of our faculties. And so, know thyself would be the fundamental axiom of every society in which each of its members would perform his role exactly and would fulfill it to its limit. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 293.)
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    For a brief biography of Eugene Delacroix, click here.

The disgusting roots of male chauvinism

    Our recent Saunterings through the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh brought us to a large oil-on-canvas painting showing a woman being transfused by a doctor, the blood being drawn out of a goat, heartlessly killed in the attempt. It angered our anti-vivisectionist and feminist sides, supporting the shame we carry of our sex. 

    By their constitution, as we were told by the explanation next to painting, white males at one time believed that women, children, and members of the nonwhite races were closer to animals than to white males. Painted by Jules Adler in 1890, Transfusion of a Goat’s Blood was explained as follows:

A French physician, Simon Bernheim, commissioned this painting of himself transfusing blood from a goat into a young woman. His attractive female “guinea pig” draws our attention to the unfolding medical drama, but scientific theory preferred women for such procedures. It was widely thought that males represented the height of human development, while women were biologically closer to animals. By this logic, the procedure would be more effective if carried out on a woman. Human-animal transfusions had been attempted since the 15th century, and ended only after blood types were discovered in 1901.
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    To see an image of the painting, and to listen to two short audios about it, click here. The audios are titled “The choice of a woman to receive the transfusion in Adler’s painting tells us a lot about Victorian science and values,” and “The painting is a barometer of the change in how humans view their relationship to the animal kingdom.”

William Carlos Williams’ cheering advice to college students

    It’s the advice that William Carlos Williams wrote to his son in college:

You, dear Bill, have a magnificent opportunity to enjoy life ahead of you. You have sensibility (even if it drives you nuts at times), which will be the source of keen pleasures later and the source of useful accomplishments too. You’ve got a brain, as you have been told ad nauseam. But these are the very things which are tormenting you, the very things which are your most valued possessions and which will be your joy tomorrow. . . . Wait it out. Don’t worry too much. You’ve got time. You’re all right. You’re reacting to life in the only way an intelligent, sensitive young man in a college can. In another year you’ll enter another sphere of existence, the practical one. The knowledge, abstract now, which seems unrelated to sense to you (at times) will get a different color.
Sooner or later we all of us knock our heads against the ceiling of the world. It’s like breaking a record: the last fifth of a second, which marks the difference between a good runner and a world beater is the hardest part of the whole proceeding. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 262.)
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    For a brief biography of William Carlos Williams, click here.

On allowing the hunting of Yellowstone’s grizzly bears

    Here are some remarks of grizzly bear expert, Professor Barrie Gilbert, Utah State University, published in The Herald Journal, Logan, Utah, January 25, 2006, concerning the recently proposed U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service management plan that would remove grizzly bears from the endangered species list:

. . . .There isn’t a very large number out there. Hunting is one of the reasons the bears became endangered in the first place. . . . The bears would be hunted for trophy and sport. . . . There is big money in bear hunting. . . . To me they are like intelligent dogs. And I don’t go around shooting intelligent dogs.

    Who is this U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that made the proposal? It is two or three federal employees with trophy-hunter leanings, sitting in a room, patching together a plan and stamping it with the seal of officialdom that implies it has been determined with certainty that allowing the killing of grizzly bears will please many, many people and harm the sensibilities of few, few people - a benefit-to-cost slam dunk.