The Saunterer

Charles Lindbergh’s plan for his life

    After soloing the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh decided to aim the rest of his life toward simplicity not complications, and appreciation not possessions:

My civilized life did not encourage receptivity. There were too many details pressing for attention, too many problems, large and small, to occupy my mind. My time was a chattel of my obligations. My senses had less freedom than a slave’s. But the juxtaposition that forms man also contains the capacity to change. In the future, I decided, I would devote more attention to the core without renouncing civilization. I would set a trend toward balancing the diverse elements of being, toward simplicity rather than more complications, toward appreciation rather than possessions, toward an objective I felt was before me but could not as yet define.

To select an objective and set a trend - how simple and routine that seems written in a sentence! And what momentous consequences can result in actual life! When I look back through my life, I realize that such selections and trends have had an extraordinary effect on its shaping. Usually I was conscious of their importance at the time. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 179.)

    For a brief biography of Charles Lindbergh, click here.

William Faulkner on how failure benefits creators

    As William Faulkner tells it, failure drives creators toward perfecting their work:

By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommercial ones of the human spirit; who has tried to carve, no matter how crudely, on the wall of that final oblivion, in the tongue of the human spirit, “Kilroy was here.”

That is primarily, and I think in its essence, all that we ever really tried to do. And I believe we will all agree that we failed. That what we made never quite matched and never will match the shape, the dream of perfection which we inherited and which drove us and will continue to drive us, even after each failure, until anguish frees us and the hand falls still at last.

Maybe it’s just as well that we are doomed to fail, since, as long as we do fail and the hand continues to hold blood, we will try again; where, if we ever did attain the dream, match the shape, scale that ultimate peak of perfection, nothing would remain but to jump off the other side of it into suicide. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 187.)
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    For a brief biography of William Faulkner, click here.

Robert Schrank on doing no more work than is absolutely necessary

    Factory workers tend to no more work than absolutely necessary, which speaks about the impossibility of having a labor of love on the factory floor. Robert Schrank explains:

I was beginning to learn the second work lesson that would be taught me many times over in a variety of different jobs: Don’t do more work than is absolutely necessary. Years later I would read about how people in the Hawthorne works of Western Electric would “bank work” and use it when they fell behind or just wanted to take it easy. I have seen a lot of work banking, especially in machine shops. In some way I have felt that banking work was the workers’ response to the stopwatches of industrial engineers. It is an interesting sort of game of hide the work now, take it out later. In another plant, would you believe we banked propellor shafts for Liberty ships! (Quoted from Ten Thousand Working Days, 1978, by Robert Schrank.)

    Anybody know if office workers bank work?

Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker on the intolerable sin of cruelty to animals

    In 1805, writing in crude English, Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker showed a refined heart:

Little W. Drinker inform'd of a sad sight he yesterday saw in the street as he was going to his Aunt Nancys, a pig, he said with her tail cut of close to her body, her ears cut off close to her head, she lifted her feet very high as she walked, and was smelling about after her 2 little pigs that were at a distance from her - when he came near her he discover'd that both her eyes were out. it was not a recent abuse by the Childs account her eyes were nearly shut, but lumps of red flesh growing out of them. - Whoever was the Perpetrator of this cruel act, was guilty, in my opinion of a henious or hateful sin, and, I think, will be likely to suffer for it, in this world or the next. - I have often seen, as I walk'd in the streets, marks of cruelty that have been exercised on the poor animals, horses, Hogs, Dogs &c. those things in what is called a civelized land, is intolerable. (Quoted from the Diary of Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker.)
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    Today, cruelty to animals is hundreds of times worse in numbers and pain. Part of it goes by the name of vivisection. Another part, by the name of factory farming. That is why we are a staunch supporter of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
    For a brief biography of Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker, click here. To learn about PETA, click here.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on the importance of wilderness

    Of what importance is wilderness? For one thing, it is there that we return to reason and faith, so often smothered in city living. For another, egotism leaves us when we enter wilderness. As Emerson tells it:

In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel nothing can befall me in life - no disgrace, no calamity . . . which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground - my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space - all mean egotism vanishes. (Quoted from Emerson’s essay, Nature.)
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    For a brief biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, click here.

Kurt Wolff on what runaway inflation is

    Publisher Kurt Wolff tells what it was like to live in Germany in 1923 with runaway inflation:

I wish I could give people today an inkling of what five Swiss francs meant in the Germany of 1923, when a street car ride or postage stamp cost 200 million marks, and when employees were paid their salary daily, so they could spend it the same day for purchases that would be unaffordable the day after. Those were the times in which the value of the dollar climbed from 550,000 marks to 600 million marks, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. . . . (Quoted from Kurt Wolff: A portrait in essays and letters, The University of Chicago Press, 1965.)
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    For a bit about Kurt Wolff’s life, click here.

Walter Goodnow Everett on the moral rights of children

    As Walter Goodnow Everett explains, it is the responsibility of parenthood to  provide children with their moral rights:

The undue emphasis upon numbers as the criterion of value has led inevitably to the popular disregard of the responsibilities of parenthood. This is an evil which poisons life at its very source; it is an evil, too, which multiplies, affecting countless generations. It thwarts the production of a nobler race, stronger in body, clearer in intellect, and more generous in soul. All species of living beings are well-bred but man, and man for the most part very ill. The evil of irresponsible parenthood, not only in its economic but also in its other aspects, is one before which the evil of divorce shrinks into insignificance. Until those who are responsible for the education of the people deal with it seriously and vigorously, charity will be, as at present, helpless to touch a tithe of the actual needs of the poor, while the ever rising tide of population from the unfit, of whatever class, will continue to keep at a low point the average physical vigor and intellectual perfection of the race. Surely every child brought into the world has a moral right to decent food, clothing, and shelter, to proper recreation and physical development, and to an education that will fit it for some useful career, however humble. Where there is no reasonable prospect of such provision parenthood is irresponsible, and so far immoral; the child may have a right not to be born. (Quoted from Moral Values, by Walter Goodnow Everett, p. 245; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1918.)
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    For a brief biography of Walter G. Everett, click here.

Landon Cabell Garland on the complementary roles of the teacher and the pupil

    The teacher and the pupil, Landon Cabell Garland makes clear, are individually responsible for their complementary roles:

All true education is from within - the energizing of the mind itself. Your teachers cannot study for you. We may remove some obstacles from the way; we may save you from wandering into harmful bypaths, but you will have to do the hard and steady and systematic work. . . .  (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 212.)
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    For a brief biography of Landon Cabell Garland, click here.

E. M. Forster on how art is the best guide to solving interpersonal difficulties

    Science, particularly as in the research psychology journals, offers no help for solving interpersonal difficulties. It is art, and especially literature, where help is to be found. E. M. Forster speaks from experience:

I am a little doubtful perhaps about your application of ‘psychology’ to your difficulties, though your psychology is of course better than other people’s. Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong - I refrain from adding in booming tones, ‘and always will be’, but it is certainly always just wrong at present. . . . Art is a better guide than Science. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 272.)
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    For a brief biography of E. M. Forster, click here.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/forster.htm

William Beebe on one of many reasons it’s wrong to kill any animal

    Any truly Christ-like person will have no trouble agreeing with William Beebe’s words:

And the next time you raise your gun to needlessly take a feathered life, think of the marvelous little engine which your lead will stifle forever; lower your weapon and look into the clear bright eyes of the bird whose body equals yours in physical perfection, and whose tiny brain can generate a sympathy, a love for its mate, which in sincerity and unselfishness suffers little when compared with human affection. (Quoted from William Beebe’s 1906 book The Bird: Its Form and Function.)
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    For a brief biography of William Beebe, click here.