The Saunterer

Richard Lynch Garner on why we should be kind to animals

    In a book reporting his research on language communication among non-human primates, Richard Garner wrote:

A knowledge of their language cannot injure man, and may conduce to the good of others, because it would lessen man’s selfishness, widen his mercy, and restrain his cruelty. It would not place man more remote from his divinity, nor change the state of facts which now exist. Their speech is the only gateway to their minds, and through it we must pass if we would learn their secret thoughts and measure the distance from mind to mind. (Quoted from The Speech of Monkeys, by R. L. Garner. London: William Heinemann. 1892. p. 109.)

    I’m jotting down here the truth of this quotation and also a Saunterer’s protest - a protest against the idea that we have any divinity to speak of. A species with hundreds of thousands of years of cruel behavior to animals has no right to think of itself as Godlike.

    For information about the career of Richard Lynch Garner, click here.

Wassily Kandinsky on every artist’s inner need

    Wassily Kandinsky believed that the inner need of every artist has three elements:

The inner need is built up of three mystical elements: (1) Every artist, as a creator, has something in him which calls for expression. . . . (2) Every artist, as child of his age, is impelled to express the spirit of his age. . . . (3) Every artist, as a servant of art, has to help the cause of art. . . . (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 292.)

    For a brief biography of Wassily Kandinsky, click here.

Franz Kafka on the kind of books we should read

    Read to be slammed, advised Kafka:

I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake with a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all. . . . What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe. (Quoted from A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel. New York: Viking. 1996. p. 616.)

    For a brief biography of Franz Kafka, click here. For the same of Alberto Manguel, click here.

William O. Douglas on the two kinds of confidence

    The Saunterer is happy here to quote someone on his side, William O. Douglas:

A judiciary that discloses what it is doing and why it does it will breed understanding. And confidence based on understanding is more enduring than confidence based on awe. (Quoted from Stare Decisis, by William O. Douglas. New York: Association of the Bar of the City of New York. 1949. p. 31.)

    For a brief biography of William O. Douglas, click here.

Havelock Ellis on the significance of the little things of life

    Listen to Havelock Ellis:

I never grow weary of the significance of little things. What do the so-called great things of life count for in the end, the fashion of man’s showing-off for the benefit of his fellows? It is the little things that give its savour or its bitterness to life, the little things that direct the current of activity, the little things that alone really reveal the intimate depths of personality. (Quoted from Impressions and Comments, by Havelock Ellis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1914. p. 74.)

    For a brief biography of Havelock Ellis, click here.

Eugene V. Debs on why there is war

    As everyone knows, there would have been no Iraqi War if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had to fight in its trenches. Eugene V. Debs put the principle nicely:

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder . . . the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. . . . They are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their duty but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches. (Quoted from Who Benefits from Global Violence and War, by Marc Pilisuk with Jennifer Achord Rountree. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International. 2008. p.1.)

    For a brief biography of Eugene Victor Debs, click here.

August Bernhard Hasler on the infallibility of the Pope

    With Pope Benedict XVI arriving for the first US visit of his papacy, the Saunterer dipped into August Bernhard Hasler’s book, How the Pope Became Infallible, to discover infallibility’s upside and downside to the Church:

Infallibility’s upside (p. 277): The new dogma [declaring papal infallibilty] taught that the pope was infallible in matters of faith and morals - a uniquely ideological thesis. This claim extends not to one doctrinal statement but to all of them; it covers every single one. It shields the entire doctrinal structure of the Catholic Church from criticism. Papal infallibility – the formal principle, as it were, of Catholicism - becomes the crowning conclusion of the system. The insurance policy is flawless: There can be no appeal from the pope to any other authority. Infallibility in this context functions as a meta-ideology, the ideologizing of an ideology. The many ideological elements in the system are protected by a single, constitutive, all-encompassing ideology. The aim of all this is stabilization and integration. Presupposing the fundamental principle of infallibility, the Church’s entire operation can run smoothly.

Infallibility’s downside (p. 37): Infallibility always constitutes a limit to the power of an individual pope, who is bound by the infallible declarations of his predecessors.

    The Catholic Church’s infallibility stance eternally destines it to preach against birth control. Forever must the Church go up its blind brainless alley, contributing to overpopulation and the resulting disappearance of wilderness.

Sarah Kirby Trimmer on kindness to animals

    Predating by a century Albert Schweitzer’s call for reverence for all animal life, Sarah Kirby Trimmer wrote:

Happy would it be for the animal creation, if every human being . . . consulted the welfare of inferior creatures, and neither spoiled them by indulgence, nor injured them by tyranny! Happy would mankind be . . . by cultivating in their own minds and those of their own children, the divine principle of UNIVERSAL BENEVOLENCE. (Quoted from Fabulous Histories, Designed for the Instruction of Children, respecting Their Treatment of Animals, by Sarah Kirby Trimmer. London: J. G. & F. Riverton. 1838. p. 164)

    For a brief biography of SarahTrimmer, click here. For information about Albert Schweitzer’s philosophy of reverence for life, click here.

Charles Baudelaire on the trouble with youth

    Rarely does the Saunterer encounter natural emotion in university students, and never in the blaring words of their “music.” The times haven’t changed from when Charles Baudelaire wrote:

The gravest mistake of modern youth is that they force their emotions. (Quoted from Charles Baudelaire: Intimate Journals, translated by Christopher Isherwood. Hollywood: Marcel Rodd. 1947. p. 127.)

    For a brief biography of Charles Baudelaire, click here.

Everett Ruess on how to really live

    While Sauntering in the wilderness of southern Utah, Everett Ruess wrote in his diary:

A love for everyone and everything has welled up, finding no outlet except in my art. Music has been in my heart all the time, and poetry in my thoughts. Alone on the open desert, I have made up songs of wild, poignant rejoicing and transcendent melancholy. The world has seemed more beautiful to me than ever before. I have loved the red rocks, the twisted trees, the red sand blowing in the wind, the slow, sunny clouds crossing the sky, the shafts of moonlight on my bed at night. I have seemed to be at one with the world. I have rejoiced to set out, to be going somewhere, and I have felt a still sublimity, looking deep into the coals of my campfires, and seeing far beyond them. I have been happy in my work, and I have exulted in my play. I have really lived. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 318.)

    For a brief biography of Everett Ruess, click here.