The Saunterer

C. S. Lewis on the value of probability

    Is C. S. Lewis’ remark a sweeping truth?

We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread. (Quoted from Christian Reflections, by C. S. Lewis, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; Reprint edition. 1994. p.111.)

    Yes there are many true instances of this. Yet we can think of instances where no loaf is better than a whole loaf.
    At one time we had a large cancer surgically removed. The surgeon said “No traces of it in your lymph nodes. You won’t need chemotherapy. ” He put the probability near 1.0 that we were cancer-free. Yet we assumed the worst, that the probability was 0.0. On the possibility that a few rogue cancer cells were in secret hiding, we went through six months of chemotherapy.
    There’s an object lesson in this for governments considering plans to deal with global warming. Better to neglect the probabilities. Assume that humans are definitely the cause. Plan accordingly.
    God isn’t going to save the world from global warming. God didn’t save me from cancer. Some combination of the surgeon and chemo did. I never said one prayer for myself, nor did anyone on my behalf. If we are to be saved from global warming, forget about praying to be saved. That won’t work. Action will.
    For a brief biography of C. S. Lewis, click here.

Roger Tory Peterson on the meaning of life

    What do you make of Roger Tory Peterson’s meaning of life?

Even though I was brought up as a God-fearing Lutheran I was never satisfied with most people’s definition of the word ‘God.’ They cannot really define it or if they do, they seem to envision a humanistic being rather like us out there in the stratosphere somewhere. My own view is a holistic one in which life goes on but not in precisely the identical forms they were before they died. I prefer the term, ‘life force,’ because after we die there will be other people, other grasshoppers, other birds, other flowers, but all mixed up in a zillion ways and not in the same form as when we left this earth. The food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink are all composites of our ancestry. (Quoted from Roger Tory Peterson: A biography, by Douglas Carlson, University of Texas Press, 2007, 246.)

    For a brief biography of Roger Tory Peterson, click here.

Robert Schuman on looking for the ideal mate

    Robert Schuman’s advice boils down to “don’t be overly choosy”:

When I was a young man I vowed never to marry until I found the ideal woman. Well, I found her - but, alas, she was waiting for the ideal man.

    For a brief biography of Robert Schuman, click here.

War is a racket

    Governments and businesses are war’s chief promoters. War offers incentives of money and power, the lifeblood of male-run institutions. Half the world knows this. For the others, Eric Gill tells it:   

There are “money-changers” in all civilized countries, and modern war, in spite of the patriotism of millions of conscripts and their officers, is mainly about money. (Quoted from Eric Gill: The sculpture, by Judith Collins, Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press, 1998. p. 134.)

    For a brief biography of Eric Gill, click here.

Alexander Jamieson on what to aim for in writing personal letters

    After nearly two centuries, Alexander Jamieson’s advice still rings true: 

1. [Epistolary writing’s] first and fundamental requisite is, to be natural and simple; for a stiff and laboured manner is as bad in a letter, as it is in conversation. This does not banish sprightliness and wit. These are graceful in letters, just as they are in conversation; when they flow easily, and without being studied; when employed so as to season, not to cloy. One who, either in conversation or in letters, affects to shine and to sparkle always, will not please for long.
    2. The style of letters should not be too highly polished. It ought to be neat and correct, but no more. All nicety about words, betrays study; and hence musical periods, and appearances of number and harmony in arrangement, should be carefully avoided in letters.
    3. The best letters are commonly such as the authors have written with most facility. What the heart or the imagination dictates, always flows readily; but where there is no subject to warm or interest these, constraint appears; and hence, those letters of mere compliment, congratulation, or affected condolence, which have cost the authors most labour in composing, and which, for that reason, they perhaps consider as their master-pieces, never fail of being the most disagreeable and insipid to the readers. (Quoted from A Grammar of Rhetoric, and Polite Literature, by Alexander Jamieson. New Haven: A. H. Maltby and Co. 1826. p. 265.)

George MacDonald on the beauties of the sea and the sky

    Of the beauties of the sea and the sky, George MacDonald once wrote:

Write to me about the sea & the sky, and all those never-ceasing beauties, ever changing yet still the same great truths.  The sense of which makes a man feel great too.  These truths ever the same yet ever presenting new aspects of beauty, different to the same mind at different times - yet ever in essence one and the same. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 279.)

    For a brief biography of George Macdonald, click here.

Barbara Ehrenreich on the obsolescence of family values

    For some of us it’s easy to grow sick of continually hearing the praises of family values. In place of families and the great maintenance time they consume, the race needs to forge a stronger human family. Barbara Ehrenreich tells it well:

The family is all we need, America’s ostensibly Christian evangelists tell us. . . . But if anything  represents a kind of evolutionary regression, it is this. Insofar as we compress our sociality into the limits of the family, we do not so much resemble our Paleolithic human ancestors as we do those far earlier prehuman primates who had not yet discovered the danced ritual as a “biotechnology” for the formation of larger groups. Humans had the wit and generosity to reach out to unrelated others; hominids huddled with their kin. (Quoted from Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropolitan Books. 2007)

    For a brief biography of Barbara Ehrenreich, click here.

W. Somerset Maugham on how to seemingly walk on air

    W. Somerset Maugham’s prescription is to create:

I am never so happy as when a new thought occurs to me and a new horizon gradually discovers itself before my eyes. A fresh idea dawns upon me and I feel myself uplifted from the workaday world to the blue empyrean of the spirit. Detached for a moment from all earthly cares I seem to walk on air. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 219)

    For a brief biography of W. Somerset Maugham, click here.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres on the necessity of nobility of soul to artists

    As Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres advised:

Have a religious feeling for your art. Do not suppose that anything good, or even fairly good, can be produced without nobility of soul. To become accustomed to beauty, fix your eyes on the sublime. . . . Go forward with your head raised towards the skies. . . . (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 247.)

    For a brief biography of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, click here.

Andy Warhol on the real world and the fantasy world

    If the Saunterer mistaketh not, these words of Andy Warhol need to be understood:

Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see. When I was little, I never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I thought were happening in the Midwest, or down South, or in Texas, that I felt I was missing out on. But you can only live life in one place at a time. And your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory. So the fantasy corners of America seem so atmospheric because you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one. (Quoted from America, by Andy Warhol. New York: Harper & Row. 1985.)

    Failure to grasp this raises the danger of basing our decisions on the captivating fantasy world rather than on the warts-and-all real world. Technology moves on, putting us in an increasing flux of media impressions. That may be growing our fantasy world at the cost of shrinking our sense of the real world. (A test of this idea would be to see whether or not the population-adjusted disillusionment rate is rising.) For a brief biography of Andy Warhol, click here.