The Saunterer

William Zinsser on the reason to travel

    Traveling, William Zinsser believes, connects oneself to immense historical, social, and cultural currents:

In Shanghai I was connected to the ancient power of music to bridge the widest kind of cultural gulf: West and East, African and Asian, oral and written. In Venice I was connected to chants that had been played and sung in the liturgy of St. Mark’s since it opened in 1067. . . . Watching a camel caravan materialize out of the desert carrying salt to Timbuktu, I was connected to all the caravans that ever crossed the Sahara. Watching the French explorer Eric de Bisschop sail away from Tahiti on a small bamboo raft bound for Chile, I was connected to all sailors since the earliest Polynesians who have set out across the Pacific. Climbing to Robert Louis Stevenson’s grave on a mountaintop in Samoa, watching an old Balinese drummer teach a temple dance to a five-year-old girl by placing her feet on his feet, meeting a Vietnamese poet in Hanoi who showed me a poem of healing reconciliation that he had written and left at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, I was moved by mystical bonds and continuities that I could only have felt by leaving home and putting myself in their path. Such moments have caught me by surprise with their beauty and their grace and have stayed with me ever since. (Quoted from “The Road to Timbuktu: Why I Travel,” by William Zinsser. The American Scholar, Winter, 1997. p. 119.)

    For a brief biography of William Zinsser, click here.

The wonder of animal communication

    See the wonder of animal communication in the following eight-minute video of an event at South Africa’s Kruger Park. The Cape Buffalo in the herd don’t immediately try to save one of their calves from lions. After conferring, they do try. This means they have a language and a way of reaching group decisions. (Relax, the calf escapes.)
    For the video, click here. For information on animal communication, click here.

On what poetry does that scientific data cannot do

    List every physical and behavioral fact about eagles, say, and the list misses the soul of eagles. Poetry shows us the soul and our feeling for it. The poet is Alfred Lord Tennyson:

                   The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

    Imagine a world in which only facts are permitted to be expressed, and you have imagined a world without music, dance, painting, and poetry.

    For a brief biography of Alfred Lord Tennyson, click here.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on controlling one’s bad passions

    Of the passions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed:

All passions are good when one remains their master; all are bad when one lets oneself be subjected to them. . . . It is not within our control to have or not to have passions. But it is within our control to reign over them. All the sentiments we dominate are legitimate; all those which dominate us are criminal. A man is not guilty for loving another’s wife if he keeps this unhappy passion enslaved to the law of duty. (Quoted from Emile: On education, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated by Allen Bloom. Basic Books. 1979. p. 455.)

    For a brief biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, click here.

Thomas Cole on the benefit of wilderness

    Wilderness has a social benefit, believed landscape painter Thomas Cole:

[The person who gazes on wilderness] feels a calm religious tone steal through his mind, and when he has turned to mingle with his fellow men, the chords which have been struck in that sweet communion cease not to vibrate. (Quoted from “Essay on American Scenery,” by Thomas Cole. 1835. p. 3.)

    For a brief biography of Thomas Cole, click here.

Federico Fellini on what art is for

    By art, Federico Fellini meant painting and film when he said:

Art is the most beautiful way for man to learn that he has religious feelings. (Quoted from Art as Far as the Eye Can See, by Paul Virilo. Oxford: Berg Publishers. 2007 p. 69)

    The word “religion” derives from the Latin religio, meaning “bond to,” “reverence for.”

    For a brief biography of Federico Fellini, click here.

Virginia Woolf on pressing to one’s center

    Do businesspeople press to their center as artists and writers do? We have trouble imagining a businessperson writing anything like the following from Virginia Woolf:

I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream. Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading; and pencil them into some sense. Still I am not satisfied. I think there is something lacking. I sacrifice nothing to seemliness. I press to my centre. I don’t care if it all is scratched out. And there is something there. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 313.)

    For a brief biography of Virginia Woolf, click here.

Jacques Cousteau on the harm technology can bring

    Jacques Cousteau co-invented the Aqualung, a technological breakthrough. He later came to regret it:

Today I see what profiteering SCUBA divers do with the Aqualung - using it to enable themselves to shatter coral reefs and sell the fragments as souvenirs; to scour underwater grottos of every last fish, snatching all creatures out of the hiding places in which they had escaped fishermen’s nets. Now that I understand, I am not sure that the good the apparatus can do outweighs the bad. Could I turn back time, I do not know whether I would participate in the invention of the Aqualung again. (Quoted from The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, by Jacques Cousteau and Susan Schiefelbein, New York: Bloomsbury USA. 2007. p. 204.)

    Economics has a sly disproportionate arithmetic. Each new invention is an overall plus on an individual cost-benefit basis. But a thousand new inventions are, on a group cost-benefit basis, a regrettable minus.

    A century of inventions, all cost-benefit desirable, has brought us global warming.

    For a brief biography of Jacques Cousteau, click here. For a brief biography of Susan Schiefelbein, click here. For an explanation of cost-benefit analysis, click here. 

George Bernard Shaw on killing animals

    George Bernard Shaw believed that killing animals is an atrocity. As to why there is so much of it, he had this to say:

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom. (From George Bernard Shaw’s preface to the essay, “Killing for Sport,”in Bernard Shaw: Selected Prose. 1952. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co. p. 934)

    For a brief biography of George Bernard Shaw, click here.

Henry David Thoreau on how to solve important problems

    Henry David Thoreau said the obvious when he said:

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots. (Quoted from Walden, by Henry D. Thoreau. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 1910. p. 98)

    This generalizes to: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of an important problem to one who is striking at the roots.”

    Global warming is an important problem. Its branches are human activities that emit greenhouse gases.  Its roots are overpopulation, unchecked breeding, five billion excess people. Global warming won’t be solved with band-aid solutions on its branches.

    For a brief biography of Henry David Thoreau, click here.