The Saunterer

Rockwell Kent on the benefits of solitude in growing up

    Grow up in solitude, and an important value will be conferred in you. Hear Rockwell Kent:

Being alone in one’s youth is of the greatest importance in the development of one’s latent personality and of all the faculties of reflection and imagination - and of practical self-reliance. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 308.)
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    For more of Rockwell Kent and his ideas, click here.

Samuel Butler on genius and assembly line teaching

    Modern education is assembly line education, and genius is a nuisance to its smooth running. Hear Samuel Butler:

Schools and colleges are not intended to foster genius and to bring it out. Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way. They are as the artificial obstructions in a hurtle race - tests of skill and endurance, but in themselves useless. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 264.)
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    For a brief biography of Samuel Butler, click here.

Vladimir Horowitz on being original

    Produce original works, not imitative works, advised Vladimir Horowitz:

One suggestion I would offer is never to imitate. There is an old Chinese proverb which says, “Do not seek to follow in the master’s footsteps; seek what he sought.” Imitation is a caricature. Any imitation. Find out for yourself. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 300.)
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    For a brief biography of Vladimir Horowitz, click here.

Claude Debussy on the relation of music to nature

    Musicians, Claude Debussy wrote, should be students of nature:

Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are a part of Infinity. It is allied to the movement of the waters, to the play of curves described by the changing breezes. Nothing is more musical than a sunset! For anyone who can be moved by what they see can learn the greatest lessons in development here. That is to say, they can read them in Nature’s book - a book not well enough known among musicians, who tend to read nothing but their own books about what the Masters have said, respectfully stirring the dust on their works. All very well, but perhaps Art goes deeper than this. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 240.)
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    For a brief biography of Claude Debussy, click here.

Dmitri Shostakovich on how vileness ruins love

    Imagine that you live in a world without cruelty to animals and people. Imagine further that the half of your heart given to your family and friends is full up with love, and the other half is full up with empathy for animals and people. Now come out of the dream into the imperfect world, where you know that vile acts go on - animals and people put in pain or robbed of their lives. This wrings the half of your heart where you feel for them, and the sadness seeps across and suppresses the other half’s capacity to love family and friends. Dmitri Shostakovich is definite on the point:

I dedicated Lady Macbeth to my bride, my future wife, so naturally the opera is about love too, but not only love. It’s also about how love could have been if the world weren’t full of vile things. It’s the vileness that ruins love. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 274.)

    When will lawmakers, politicians, economists, and religious leaders realize that the wringing of what seems like the minor part of the heart wrings the major part? Eliminate cruelty to animals and people from the world, and that will be a great plus not only for them. It will enable fuller love of family and friends.

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    For a brief biography of Dmitri Shostakovich, click here.

Brooks’s Law and the war in Iraq

    Brooks’s Law applies to projects to develop computer software. In its unqualified form it states: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. It is the subject of Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.’s book, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley). Qualifying the Law, Brooks states: ". . . adding extra manpower early in the schedule is a much safer maneuver than adding it later, since the new people always have an immediate negative effect, which takes weeks to compensate."

    Brooks offers five reasons for software projects turning into disasters:

First, our techniques of estimating are poorly developed. More seriously, they reflect an unvoiced assumption which is quite untrue, i.e., that all will go well.

Second, our estimating techniques fallaciously confuse effort with progress, hiding the assumption that men and months are interchangeable.

Third, because we are uncertain of our estimates, software managers often lack . . . courteous stubbornness. . . .

Fourth, schedule progress is poorly monitored. Techniques proven and routine in other engineering disciplines are considered radical innovations in software engineering.

Fifth, when schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse. More fire requires more gasoline, and thus begins a regenerative cycle which ends in disaster.

    You know, it might be that now that the U. S. government has recognized the schedule slippage in the Iraq war, and has decided to add manpower, it could turn out like dousing a fire with gasoline, making matters worse, much worse.

    (Thanks to the reader of The Saunterer who suggested we might find Brooks’ book germane for what it suggests about projects, in general, failing.)

Edwin Hubble on not being afraid to die

     Edwin Hubble had no fear of death. So reported Edith Sitwell in a passage of letter to a private correspondent, 3 June 1955:

Did you, I wonder, know Dr Hubble, of the Expanding Universe - one of the greatest men I ever knew. One day, in California, he showed me slides of universes unseen by the naked eye, and millions of light-years away. I said to him ‘How terrifying!’ ‘Only when you are not used to them,’ he replied. ‘When you are used to them, they are comforting. For then you know that there is nothing to worry about - nothing at all!’

That was a few months before he died. And so I suppose now that he knows how truly he spoke. I was most deeply moved by that. I could never cease to be so. (Quoted from Edith Sitwell: Selected Letters, J. Lehmann and D. Parker, eds., Macmillan: London 1970.)
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    For a brief biography of Edwin Hubble, click here.   
    For a brief biography of Edith Sitwell, click here.

Elizabeth Catlett on what artists should work for

    What is the purpose of art? What should artists work for? Elizabeth Catlett has her answer:

Art can’t be the exclusive domain of the elect. It has to belong to everyone. Otherwise it will continue to divide the privileged from the underprivileged, Blacks from Chicanos, and both from rural, ghetto, and middle-class whites. Artists should work to the end that love, peace, justice, and equal opportunity prevail all over the world; to the end that all people take joy in full participation in the rich material, intellectual, and spiritual resources of this world’s lands, peoples, and goods. (Quoted from Elizabeth Catlett: In the Image of the People, p. 33.)
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    For a brief biography of Elizabeth Catlett, click here.

Frederick Crews on the source of our present woes

    Frederick Crews puts much of the blame for our present woes on religion:

Think of the shadows now falling across our planet: overpopulation, pollution, dwindling and maldistributed resources, climatic disruptions, new and resurgent plagues, ethnic and religious hatred, the ravaging of forests and jungles, and the consequent loss of thousands of species per year . . . the greatest mass extinction, it has been said, since the age of the dinosaurs. So long as we regard ourselves as creatures apart who need only repent of our personal sins to retain heaven’s blessing, we won’t take the full measure of our species-wide responsibility for these calamities.

An evolutionary perspective, by contrast, can trace our present woes to the dawn of agriculture ten thousand years ago, when, as Niles Eldredge observes, we became “the first species in the entire 3.8 billion-year history of life to stop living inside local ecosystems. (Quoted from Follies of the Wise, Frederick Crews, page 280.)
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    For a recorded interview with Frederick Crews, click here.
    For a brief biography of Niles Eldredge, click here. The above quotation is from Eldredge’s book, The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism.

Why John Muir naturalists are for keeping machines out of wilderness areas

    A naturalist is someone who, in sensing the parts of nature with a mind trained in biology and ecology, and a heart trained in beauty, senses beyond the parts to a transcendental kingdom, the spirit of nature. A John Muir naturalist, beside being a naturalist, has John Muir’s fight to see that wilderness areas are abundantly and perpetually preserved, sustenance for spiritual well-being, where nothing ever goes tiring or disappointing or betrays itself by a false note. Accordingly, here is a passage from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 155:

John Muir naturalists believe that nature should be put off limits to recreation that mars the mirror of God or the solitude needed to reflect in the mirror. However much some clamor to drive machines up and down dunes and hills, and about lakes and rivers - and businesses to sell the machines - what makes recreational sense and commercial sense fails to make spiritual sense.

The sound or sight of one machine crashing through sacrosanct wilderness, or marks left by one, closes the possibility of being seized with the sacred enlargement of the present and the place. Contradictory, isn’t it, to bar machines from the Washington National Cathedral while inviting them into nature’s Cathedral? The joyriders are hardly after quiet and being alone; crowds and noise amplify their excitement. Let them dodge their boredom at stadiums, shopping malls, and race tracks.
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    For a brief biography of John Muir, click here.