The Saunterer

C. S. Lewis on why good is primary and evil is secondary

    If evil were primary and good secondary, there couldn’t exist the sound theory of value that does exist, noted C. S. Lewis:

A sound theory of value demands . . . that good should be original and evil a mere perversion; that good should be the tree and evil the ivy; that good should be able to see all around evil (as when sane men understand lunacy) while evil cannot retaliate in kind; that good should be able to exist on its own while evil requires the good on which it is parasitic in order to continue its parasitic existence. (From chapter 1, “Evil and God,” of God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, by C. S. Lewis, Walter Hooper (Editor).)
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    For a brief biography of C. S. Lewis, click here.

Pierre Auguste Renoir on the price of not enjoying one’s work

    Pierre Auguste Renoir drew no distinction between factory workers and galley slaves. Here he relates what a furniture worker said to him:

Monsieur, for thirty years I’ve made the legs of chairs, another makes the backs, another assembles them, but I’m incapable of making a whole chair. There’s the whole secret. A man who can no longer enjoy his work loses all trace of taste. He becomes like the machine which drives him. He slaves away without imagination and without brains. He earns his living but without joy, and that’s what they call progress. Slavery has been abolished but the factory has been created. The slave doesn’t exist any more, but there’s the galley slave who sweats away in front of a machine which brutalizes and slowly kills him. I remember from my youth the lumbermen who sang while cutting their planks. Go and visit a mechanized sawmill and see if you hear laughter and singing. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 251.)
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    For a brief biography of Pierre Auguste Renoir, click here.

Germaine de Staël on scientific progress demanding moral progress

    The idea is commonplace today, but it’s remarkable that Germaine de Staël wrote of it 200 years ago:

Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man’s power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.

    What is moral progress? We progress easily in knowing what we ought to do. We regress in our willingness to do it.
    Solving global warming demands moral progress. We know what we ought to do but are loath to start.
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    For a brief biography of Germaine de Staël, click here.

Fred Hoyle on “the godlike bit in all of us”

    Fred Hoyle gave the meaning of “the godlike bit in all of us”as follows:
In the Lake District, there was a spotted flycatcher that came back from central Africa each year to make its nest no more than five yards from our front door. The ability to navigate four thousand miles to this degree of precision would seem to me impossible without employing concepts similar to those we use in mathematics. The accuracy of the flycatcher and the accuracy of our calculations in quantum electrodynamics seem to me to spring from the same source, a source behind and independent of words, a source that . . . [is] the godlike bit in all of us. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 326.)
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    For a brief biography of Fred Hoyle, click here.

Eleanor Roosevelt on how to become a more caring person

    Eleanor Roosevelt is right on the mark in saying:

One curious thing is that I have always seen life personally; that is, my interest or sympathy or indignation is not aroused by an abstract cause but by the plight of a single person whom I have seen with my own eyes. It was the sight of a child dying of hunger that made the tragedy of hunger become of such overriding importance to me. Out of my response to an individual develops an awareness of a problem to the community, then to the country, and finally to the world. In each case my feeling of obligation to do something has stemmed from one individual and then widened and become applied to a broader area. . . . Actually I suppose the caring comes from being able to put yourself in the position of the other person. If you cannot imagine, “This might happen to me,” you are able to say to yourself with indifference, “Who cares?” (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 270.)
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    For a brief biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, click here.

May Sarton on the role inspiration plays in creative work

    May Sarton’s observation on the role inspiration plays in creating poems holds true for all creative work: 

In poetry I know that I can’t write in form unless the intensity is very great. In other words, I have to be inspired to use form. But when I am, then I can put a poem through sixty drafts to get that final crystalline thing that I want. I think of it when I’m teaching. The poem works like an aeroplane - it flies because of all the tension, the mechanical tensions within it. Every screw has to be screwed in exactly right, every single thing has to be balanced exactly right. And a poem is only as strong as its weakest word. It will not fly, doesn’t soar in the mind unless it has form. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 260.)
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    For a brief biography of May Sarton, click here.

Brenda Melford takes a look at two-faced environmentalists

    Brenda Melford, in her essay “We Must Preserve The Earth's Dwindling Resources For My Five Children,” takes a look at the too-many two-faced environmentalists. To whet your interest to read it all:

As we move into the 21st century, it is our responsibility to think of the future of the earth - not for ourselves, but for those who will inherit what my husband and I leave behind when we're gone. If we do not join together and do what's best for this, our only planet, there may not be an environment left in which my five children, and their 25 children's 125 children, can grow up and raise large upper-middle-class families of their own. . . .  If we don't develop new fuels now, there will be none left for those who issue from my loins to burn and continue to burn for all time. I don't want my 625-odd great-grandchildren to have to wait 20 or 30 precious seconds for their toilets to flush. I don't want their 3,125 children to live in a hellish society where they cannot own their own snowmobiles. And I shudder to think that my 15,625 great-great-great-grandchildren may not be able to have TVs in every room that they can leave on all day and all night. Is it our right to deny my progeny of their gargantuan RVs and motorboats, as well?

     “We Must Preserve The Earth's Dwindling Resources For My Five Children” appeared June 28, 2006 in The Onion. Read the full essay here.

Artur Schnabel and Viola Spolin on the limits of what a teacher can do

   Hear Artur Schnabel:

Talent is the premise. It may be released, but cannot be supplied by a teacher. Neither can he guarantee world fame to his students. He is no magician; the student is more important than he. What can a teacher do? At the best open a door; but the student has to pass through it. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 349.)

   Viola Spolin believed that a teacher can take the student further:

First teach a person to develop to the point of his limitations and then - pfft! - break the limitation. (Quoted in The New Quotable Woman, p. 364.)

   Perhaps their views are specific to their professions? Artur Schnabel was a classical pianist; Viola Spolin, an actress. "Pfft! - break the limitation" seems less likely a possibility in teaching students classical piano, higher mathematics, chemistry and physics, than it is in teaching students acting, religion, and business.

   Perhaps, too, their views are specific to the lower and higher levels within each profession. In learning lower mathematics a teacher can break a student’s limitations; in learning higher mathematics a teacher can’t.

For a brief biography of Artur Schnabel, click here.

For a brief biography of Viola Spolin, click here.

J. B. S. Haldane on why animals have rights

   The historian Ramachandra Guha tells why J. B. S. Haldane believed that animals have rights:

Haldane had long been conscious of the unnecessary suffering imposed in the course of modern scientific research. Like his father, he had never done an experiment on an animal that he could not do on himself. In a lecture of 1928, "Science and Ethics", he argued that a belief in the theory of evolution implied a belief in the rights of animals. As biologists, he said then, "our clear duty to animals is to spare them obvious physical suffering. As we learn about their psychology we shall know better. It is quite possibly as cruel to keep a pet rat in a light and airy cage as to lock a dog in the cellar all day." (Quoted from The Times Literary Supplement, June 16, 2006)

   For a brief biography of J. B. S. Haldane, click here.

Joan Miró on the most powerful objective of an artist’s life

    Hear Joan Miró:

I am working as much as I can. People who have managed to do something have followed different paths, but they have never deviated from hard work. That has to be the most powerful objective of an artist’s life. When a person is really an artist this is an inexorable fact, the way night follows day. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 170.)
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    For a brief biography of Joan Miró, click here.