The Saunterer

Henry David Thoreau’s primary nourishment

    What mattered most to Henry David Thoreau was his spirit of nature. Nourishment for it came before nourishment for his body:

I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. . . . Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me! (Quoted from Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Walking.”)

    To read “Walking,” click here. For a brief biography of Henry David Thoreau, click here.

Liane de Pougy on walking alone in nature

    Walking alone in nature is a pacifier. This can be judged by a single incident from among a thousand: Liane de Pougy’s:

This morning I went for a walk by myself in the grey, in the mist, in the warm wind which foretells a storm. I felt so good, alone in the universe, dreaming, cut loose. I no longer knew where I came from, I had no idea where I was going. Yesterday my chapter from the Imitation was about solitude and silence. I have just been granted an experience of it. I felt the sweetness of it. A great peace, a great calm and serenity flowed into me with the air I breathed. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 297.)

    For a brief biography of Liane de Pougy, click here.

Elspeth Huxley on Michael Vick’s inverted values

    Cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, and horses are beasts. On the normal scale of value, beasts are far above inhumane people. But Michael Vick lives by the abnormal inverted scale of value. He revealed so when he said "I am not the bad person or the beast I've been made out to be" in a letter to a judge asking for leniency.

    Writing in the 14 December 1984 issue of The Times, Mrs. Elspeth Huxley asked:

   Could we have a moratorium on the use of the phrase ‘they behaved like animals’ to describe any especially nasty form of human brutality? Carnivores certainly kill when they need their dinners but do so as quickly as they can. Herbivores just eat vegetation and do not interfere with others.
    Do we hear of dolphins torturing other dolphins, gorillas cutting, or biting, bits off other gorillas, elephants inflicting prolonged periods of terror on other elephants, or indeed on any other animal?
    Rather should dolphins left to die in nets, gorillas killed in order that their dried heads should be sold to tourists, elephants dying in agony from poisons for the sake of their tusks, exclaim, in condemnation of acts of savagery (should these ever occur) committed by members of their own species: ‘They behaved like humans’.

    For a brief biography of Elspeth Huxley, click here.

Charles Darwin on mindless collections of data

    Before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Henry Fawcett once defended Charles Darwin against a critic who said Darwin's On the Origin of Species was too theoretical and that he should have just "put his facts before us and let them rest." With this view Darwin disagreed, and he explained why in a letter to Fawcett:

About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service! (Quoted in “Colorful Pebbles and Darwin's Dictum: Science is an exquisite blend of data and theory," by Michael Shermer, Scientific American, May, 2001.)

    For a brief biography of Charles Darwin, click here. For a brief biography of Henry Fawcett, click here.

Dorothy L. Sayers’ definition of a labor of love

    Dorothy L. Sayers had an operational definition of a labor of love:

To feel sacrifice consciously as self-sacrifice argues a failure in love. When a job is undertaken from necessity, or from a grim sense of disagreeable duty, the worker is self-consciously aware of the toils and pains he undergoes, and will say: “I have made such and such sacrifices for this.” But when the job is a labor of love, the sacrifices will present themselves to the worker - strange as it may seem - in the guise of enjoyment. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 171.)

    For a brief biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, click here.

Levina Buoncuore Urbino on the wilful torture of vivisection

      What Levina Buoncuore Urbino wrote in her diary on January 17,1868, stands as a reminder that vivisection, which continues to go on today, is the tragedy of the human race:

We called upon Professor S., so much famed for his knowledge of the nervous system. He has a pleasant, intelligent face, but he tortures animals by his practice of vivisection. There was a poor dog in the study that made my heart bleed. I dared not look in his face, feeling guilty for the cruelty of man towards him. His limbs were distorted and swollen; his body a wreck of skin and bones; and the plaintive noise he made rang through my ears for days after. A large cat was in a cage, probably waiting her turn to be experimented upon. (Quoted from Diary of Levina Buoncuore Urbino, January, 1868, in An American Woman in Europe: The Journal of Two Years and a Half Sojourn in Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy. Boston, MA: Lee & Shepard Publishers, 1869, p. 206-07.)

Wassily Kandinsky on what art is for

    Hear Wassily Kandinsky:

Painting is an art, and art in general is not a mere purposeless creating of things that dissipate themselves in a void, but a power that has a purpose and must serve the development and refinement of the human soul. . . . (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 291.)

    For a brief biography of Wassily Kandinsky, click here. (His name is sometimes spelled "Vasily.")

Abraham Pais on why environmentalism must conquer material greed

    The world’s people must take these words of Abraham Pais to heart and act on them, or else bear the terrible consequence:

It is evident that if humanity is to have a future, then the untrammeled capitalism we have known, and which is at the root of the environment’s decline, can have none. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 330.)

    For a brief biography of Abraham Pais, click here.

Planting trees is not a cure for global warming

    It takes a tree one hundred years to offset the carbon emitted by a jet plane flying a few hours, notes Jonathan Silvertown. He goes on:

The forest ecologist Oliver Rackham has described carbon offsetting with trees as like trying to prevent sea-level rise by encouraging people to drink more water. Globally, we consume a million years’ accumulation of fossil fuels each year. Only a drastic reduction in fossil fuel consumption can significantly limit carbon dioxide emissions. We must not only spare living trees the chainsaw, but fossil trees the furnace. ("Green poles," by Jonathan Silvertown, Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 23, 2007, p. 29.)

    The cure for global warming is stopping human over-breeding, which is why donations are better made to Planned Parenthood than to Johnny Appleseed organizations.

    For information about Jonathan Silvertown, click here. For information about Oliver Rackham, click here. To see the frightening trend of out-of-control breeding, click here.

William Michael Rossetti on the effectiveness of Emerson’s essay on self-reliance

    William Michael Rossetti recounts:

I read [Emerson] eagerly and with great admiration: and I think I can say that nothing ever exercised a more determining effect on my character than the essay “Self-Reliance.” I was then very young - say barely 18 - and in that state of feeling when I was liable to be biased either . . . towards self-reliance or towards deference to the authority of my betters. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 271.)

    To read Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance,” click here.
    For a brief biography of William Michael Rossetti, click here.