The Saunterer

George MacDonald on the nature of death

    George MacDonald believed that death is nothing to fear:

As to death itself that is not in any sense an evil, for it is not the thing it looks to the eye that looks on.  I can well imagine the freed one exclaiming “Is this what they call death!” (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 279.)

    Is death final? No awareness, no values, no fundamental urges? Blackness to blackness, nothing to nothing? What’s the best life to make between the two nothings? Ours is to do all we can to save the world’s species and free the animals of human tormentors. Abundant wild nature, complete reverence for animals.
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    George MacDonald wrote children’s tales of fantasy. Once every few years we drift off to sleep listening to the audio version of MacDonald’s “Princess and Curdie.” It’s excellent escapism. For a brief biography of George MacDonald, click here.

Anne Bancroft on teaching people’s hearts

    How to teach the heart? Don’t lecture it. Give it drama. Hear Anne Bancroft:

I think my job as an actress - the job of my talent or what I want to do with my talent - is to give to the people what I believe are certain realities of life, certain truths. Because I know one of the hardest things in life is to not only see a truth but to accept it. It’s a very hard thing, reality - to see and accept and to realize it as a reality and a truth. I could get up and I could lecture and just lecture and lecture and lecture that this is a reality, that anything that puts the spirit in a dungeon is a sin, and that the greatest joy in the world is liberating that. And so I could get up and make a speech, but I don’t think an audience would be quite so willing to accept it as they would be when it is embellished within an entertainment form, you see. If you put it in an entertaining form and then say what you want to say to the world - and you put it within the theatrical form - I think it gets to them easier, more easily. They don’t feel that it’s being thrust on them. They’re not only getting a truth, but they’re getting it done in this way, in this charming way or in this theatrical way or in this dynamic way - and it’s easier, I think. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 222.)

    Besides actors, her idea is germane to activists.
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    For a brief biography of Anne Bancroft, click here.

Frederick Crews on our crimes against Earth

    Frederick Crews gets full marks for pointing out this:

Today, when we have burst from six million to six billion exploiters of a biosphere whose resilience can no longer be assumed, the time has run out for telling ourselves that we are the darlings of a deity who placed nature here for our convenience. We are the most resourceful, but also the most dangerous and disruptive, animals in this corner of the universe. A Darwinian understanding of how we got that way could be the first step toward ethics commensurate with our real transgressions, not against God but against Earth itself and its myriad forms of life. (From Follies of the Wise, Frederick Crews, page 280.)
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    For a recorded interview with Frederick Crews, click here.