The Saunterer

Gaston Bachelard on the roots of humans to the plant kingdom

    About our roots to the plant kingdom Gaston Bachelard says:

A botany of the imagination, stemming from an attraction for branches, wood, leaves, roots, bark, flowers and grass, has furnished us with a stock of images of astonishing regularity. We are controlled by vegetal values. We would all profit by taking a census of this private herbarium in the depths of our unconscious, where the slow, gentle forces of our life find models of continuity and perseverance. The life of root and bud lie at the heart of our being. We are really very ancient plants. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 337.)

    Bachelard made his remark years before a view related to his appeared, Edward O. Wilson's Biophilia Hypothesis, which posits that our evolution has endowed us with an instinctive love of nature, particularly strong for plants and savannas.
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    For a brief biography of Gaston Bachelard, click here.
    For information about Biophilia, as well as about the book The Biophilia Hypothesis, click here.

Raymond Chandler on how to not grow old

    Raymond Chandler’s idea for not growing old is to throw yourself into creative work:

Retiring is a kind of dying. The best way to revive is certainly what you have in mind. Work like hell at something just a little creative. No man grows old as long as he can create. You may die in the midst of it – so may I, who am older than you are – but you don’t die of lethargy. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 194.)
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    For a brief biography of Raymond Chandler, click here.

Van Wyck Brooks on the connection of the aesthetic and the humane

    Practically all artists of note are necessarily humane. Van Wyck Brooks explains why:

It is a violation of some deep instinct in us to separate the aesthetic from the humane. . . . When Abraham Lincoln in his youth . . . saved a fawn’s life by scaring it away from a rifle, he was acting in line with the discipline that requires writers to value life on pain of losing the power to recreate it. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 257.)
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    For a brief biography of Van Wyck Brooks, click here.