The Saunterer

Frances Power Cobbe on what true love is

    English writer Frances Power Cobbe revealed the nature of true love when she wrote:

The time comes to every dog when it ceases to care for people merely for biscuits or bones, or even for caresses, and walks out of doors. When a dog really loves, it prefers the person who gives it nothing, and perhaps is too ill ever to take it out for exercise, to all the liberal cooks and active dog-boys in the world. (Quoted from The Confessions of a Lost Dog, London: Griffith and Farran, 1867.)
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    For a brief biography of Frances Power Cobbe, click here.

Raising the quality of living by reducing population

    Look at Rust Belt cities in the United States, where industries have closed, forcing people to move away, raising the quality of living for those who remain. Buffalo had 580,000 people in 1950; today it has 290,000. The benefit for those who remain is an increased quality of living - less traffic, less noise, and less of every bad thing else that comes with crowding.

    The story is in “You Can Go Home Again: Buffalo Tries To Reclaim Its Native Sons and Daughters,” in the August 17, 2006, issue of The Wall Street Journal. The article notes that the same pleasant effect of unpeopling is happening in Iowa, where the governor says that the state has no rush hour but rather a rush minute, “between 5:00 and 5:01 p.m.”

    Business and political leaders aren’t celebrating this. With their grow, grow, grow mentality, they care mostly about vacant land that isn’t being developed to every square foot with roads and buildings. Their aim is to use the good quality of living to attract back to Buffalo and Iowa those who left, no matter that this will lower the quality of living.

    In the same issue is a related article, “Cash Incentives Aren’t Enough to Lift Fertility.” The governments of some low-fertility countries, yet densely populated, are offering money and time off from work to people who agree to beget more people. Then there are the high-fertility countries, like Uganda, which please their governments because, the Journal reports, Uganda is “on track to triple to 150 million by 2050.”

    On the ride back from the Tetons, Mrs. Saunterer asked: Is Bill Gates misguided in the social causes he’s spending his fortune on?

    Having seen this life, the only kind of next life we would welcome is one where progress amounts to such things as tearing out two lanes of all four lane highways, because of too few people to use them.

    We have a copy of an essay written nearly a century ago that opens with this sentence: “Ultimately, most questions – political, social, economic – reduce themselves to the fundamental problem of population.” There’s really only one problem to solve in the world, and solving it will make all other problems mostly disappear.

John Charles Daly on the three evils of water pollution

    A decade before Earth Day, John Charles Daly wrote of the three evils of water pollution:

There are three things essentially evil about water pollution. First, it menaces life, birds, land animals, fish, and human life as well. And second it threatens our water supplies, for when we put dirt into water we waste it and make it less fit for further use. We cannot afford to do this, for we do not have enough water in most parts of the United States to throw away. And . . . we are disgracing our environment, damaging the habitat of our wildlife, and robbing ourselves and our children of beauty and recreation and that heritage of nature which should be theirs.

The menace of water pollution to life exists everywhere in our county.

In our struggle to gain public support for clean water, we must make the public realize that any substance used anywhere in our civilization is likely in the end to reach our waterways. (From the pamphlet “Quotable Quotes on Water Pollution,” U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, 1962.)

    Since John Charles Daly wrote this, there’s been progress in curbing water pollution. Yet today, what portion of the public realizes that any substance used anywhere is likely in the end to reach our waterways? What portion cares?
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    For a brief biography of John Charles Daly, click here.

How Ansel Adams discovered his destiny

    Ansel Adams recounts:

How different my life would have been if it were not for these early hikes in the Sierra - if I had not experienced that memorable first trip to Yosemite - if I had not been raised by the ocean - if, if, if! Everything I have done or felt is in some way influenced by the impact of the Natural Scene. It is easy to recount that I camped many times at Merced Lake, but it is difficult to explain the magic: to lie in a small recess of the granite matrix of the Sierra and watch the progress of dusk to night, the incredible brilliance of the stars, the waning of the glittering sky into dawn, and the following sunrise on the peaks and domes around me. And always that cool dawn wind that I believe to be the prime benediction of the Sierra. These qualities to which I still deeply respond were distilled into my pictures over the decades. I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 339.)
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    For a brief biography of Ansel Adams, click here.

Clarence Day on the most remarkable creation of man

    Hear Clarence Day:

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish, civilizations grow old and die out and after an era of darkness new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.

    For a brief biography of Clarence Day, click here.

Hamilton Wright Mabie on the deeper uses and ends of skill

    Hamilton Wright Mabie, in his book Essays on Work and Culture (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898), writes of two uses and ends of skill, one the shallower, one the deeper:

The external prosperity which is called success is one value because it evidences, as a rule, thoroughness and ability in the man who secures it, and because it supplies the ease of body and of mind which is essential to the fullest and most effective putting forth of one’s power; and the sane man, even while he subordinates it to higher things, never entirely ignores or neglects success. The possession of skill is to-day the inexorable condition of securing this outward prosperity; and, as a rule, the greater a man’s skill the more enduring his success. But skill has other and deeper uses and ends. Thoroughness and adequacy in the doing of one’s work are the evidences of the presence of a moral conception in the worker’s mind; they are the witnesses to the pressure of his conscience on his work. Slovenly, careless, and indifferent work is dishonest and untruthful; the man who is content to do less than the best he is capable of doing for any kind of compensation - money, reputation, influence - is an immoral man. He violates a fundamental law of life by accepting that which he has not earned.

Skill in one’s art, profession, or trade is conscience applied; it is honesty, veracity, and fidelity using the eye, the voice, and the hand to reveal what lies in the worker’s purpose and spirit. To become an artist in dealing with tools and materials is not a matter of choice or privilege; it is a moral necessity; for a man’s heart must be in his skill, and a man’s soul in his craftsmanship.
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    For a sketch of Hamilton Wright Mabie’s career and his works, click here.

Margaret Fuller on the public’s limited mental vision

    Margaret Fuller, quoted in the New York Tribune in 1846, put it this way:

The public must learn how to cherish the nobler and rarer plants, and to plant the aloe, able to wait a hundred years for its bloom, or its garden will contain, presently, nothing but potatoes and pot-herbs.

When will the public ever see?
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    For a brief biography of Margaret Fuller, click here.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh on how nature can teach us how to live

    In Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book, Gift from the Sea, she tells:

For the natural selectivity of the island I will have to substitute a conscious selectivity based on another sense of values - a sense of values I have become more aware of here. Island-precepts, I might call them if I could define them, signposts toward another way of living. Simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life. Balance of physical, intellectual, and spiritual life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing. Closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittency of life: life of the spirit, creative life, and the life of human relationships.
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    For a brief biography of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, click here.

Charles Swain Thomas’ definition of Sauntering

During parts of the 1930s and 40s, Charles Swain Thomas wrote a column called The Saunterer for the Harvard Educational Review. In the Volume 12, 1942 issue, he tells readers his definition of Sauntering:

Sauntering, as I have more than once asserted, need not imply the leisurely paced movements of the physical body. Perhaps even more frequently it may connote the leisurely pace of the ceaselessly roving mind. It suits particularly the mood of easy reminiscence, the silent pause upon something in the past that has won our momentary attention and has within itself enough inherent substance and vitality to allow an occasional, or even a perennial, revival.
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In the world of today, which tries to cram unnecessary events and obligations into living, Sauntering is on our endangered activities list. For the sake of preserving our sanity, we regularly resist the world, practicing “the leisurely pace of the ceaselessly roving mind.”

Bruno Walter on the power of nature on his life

    To Bruno Walter and Henry David Thoreau, the power of nature in their lives was the same. Bruno Walter tells:

Next to music, nature . . . has always been the strongest power in my life. And it surely did not penetrate into my soul merely through my vision, no matter how fervently I enjoyed the sight of beautiful mountains, valleys, lakes, sunny days, and moonlit nights. I was vouchsafed also a more immediate access: I felt akin and attached to the thicket and the ocean, to the rocky solitude and the thunderstorm, to the humming of insects, and to the noonday quiet. Saturated with nature, and feeling part of it, I was able early to enter into the sense of Faust’s verses:
This glorious Nature thou didst for my kingdom give,
And power to feel it, to enjoy it.
‘Twas not the stranger’s short permitted privilege
Of momentary wonder that Thou gavest;
No, Thou hast given me into her deep breast
As into a friend’s secret heart to look;
Thus teaching me to recognize and love my brothers
In still grove, or air, or stream.

(Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 315.)
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    For a brief biography of Bruno Walter, click here.