The Saunterer

Charles Swain Thomas on benefits of visiting one’s old home town

    Not long ago I asked a friend why he doesn’t want to return to the town he and I grew up in. His reply, “Too many ghosts.” He was letting the painful costs prevail. Charles Swain Thomas let the pleasant benefits prevail. They show in his March 1939 column, “The Saunterer” for the Harvard Educational Review, of which I will quote a bit:

   Recently I spent a day in my old home town - far away from the noisy grinding of the cars that are dodging each other on the various streets that converge menacingly in Harvard Square. The experience of going back to one’s early haunts allows us to thrum freely the keyboard of our memory. Our undirected hands finger repeatedly the long ranges from the deepest bass on, on up to the highest sounding treble. There are grace notes here and there that unconsciously trill their wayward echoes and seem to attract more attention than the ruling theme would ordinarily allow. Even now as I write they keep ringing out their little silent insinuations to the accompaniment of my cursive pen as it Saunters over these late March pages.
    I somehow keep dwelling on the many, many persons who have passed completely out of that boyhood circle that was once so crowded with intimate jostling personalities. . . . Doubtless they have all met the alternating comedies and tragedies of daily life and forgotten, it may be, many of those former childhood happenings, those youthful school experiences, those pleasant interchanges of friendly talks and intimate visits that helped to personalize those early developing years.
    Even our former enemies - not really our enemies, of course - have all gone into some bewildering no-man’s land, where all lines of communication were long ago unceremoniously severed. We should like to meet those youngsters - now grown old - chat with them about the early years, and discover if there be any logical reason why we so violently hated them in the past. . . .
    If we are successful - or even partially successful, the old, old winds will blow gently over the land, the old, old thoughts will generously re-warm our hearts. And there together, like William Morris in his Earthly Paradise, we shall freely indulge our memories of the past -
Memories vague of half-forgotten things,
Not true nor false, but sweet to think upon.

M. C. Escher on how working gives us existence

    The layabout human has no being according to M. C. Escher:

Lazing about leads to unhappiness. I believe that the most important difference between man and other living creatures lies not so much in having or not having a “soul” or a “spirit,” but in the astonishing fact that man must “work” as a condition of existence, while a bird does not need to. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 259.)

    For a brief biography of M. C. Escher, click here.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on how to become immortal

    Immortality can be achieved, believed Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, through creating excellence for the world:

What fascinates me in life is being able to collaborate in a task, a reality, more durable than myself: it’s in that spirit and with that in mind that I try to perfect myself and acquire a little more mastery over things. If death attacks me, it leaves untouched these causes, and ideas and realities, more solid and precious than myself. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 173.)

    For a brief biography of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, click here.

Dorothea Dix on working to improve the world

    Dorothea Dix got her marching orders from the world she saw:    

In a world where there is so much to be done, I felt strongly impressed that there must be something for me to do. (Quoted from Letters from New York (Second Series), by L. Maria Child. 1845. New York: C. S. Francis & Co. p. 284.)

    For a brief biography of Dorothea Dix, click here. For a brief biography of Lydia Maria Child, click here.

Lord Byron on the value of dogs

    Like Elizabeth von Arnim (of the Saunterer’s previous post), Lord Byron knew the same unsurpassed value of dogs. The inscription he composed for the burial monument of his dog Boatswain reads:

Near this spot
Are deposited the Remains of one
Who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.
This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
If inscribed over human ashes,
Is but a just tribute to the Memory of
BOATSWAIN, a DOG
Who was born at Newfoundland, May, 1803,
And died at Newstead, Nov 18th, 1808.

    For a brief biography of Lord Byron, click here.   

Elizabeth von Arnim on the value of dogs

    Those of us who know the unsurpassed value of dogs cannot say it better than Elizabeth von Arnim said it:

I would like, to begin with, to say that though parents, husbands, children, lovers and friends are all very well, they are not dogs. In my day and turn having been each of the above, - except that instead of husbands I was wives, - I know what I am talking about, and am well acquainted with the ups and downs, the daily ups and downs, the sometimes almost hourly ones in the thin-skinned, which seem inevitably to accompany human loves.
    Dogs are free from these fluctuations. Once they love, they love steadily, unchangingly, till their last breath.
    That is how I like to be loved.
    Therefore I will write of dogs.

    Thus begins Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1936 book, All the Dogs of My Life. Hers is one of two literary dog books the Saunterer has read. The other is J. R. Ackerly’s 1956 book, My Dog Tulip. Both stories last in the heart. For a brief biography of Elizabeth von Arnim, click here. For something about My Dog Tulip, click here.

Lester R. Brown on the need to slow population growth

    Lester R. Brown has it (almost) right:

Countries everywhere have little choice but to strive for an average of two children per couple. There is no feasible alternative. Any population that increases or decreases continually over the long term is not sustainable. (Quoted from Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by Lester R. Brown. 2008. W. W. Norton & Co. p. 133.)

    The fertility rate in Ethiopia is 5.4. Where the Saunterer lives (he calls it “Little Ethiopia”) the fertility rate is not much lower. One old man was written up in the local newspaper last year as if he had done the human race a great turn for having spawned more than 240 people. So far as what is good for the world, Ethiopians and Little Ethiopians are unequal causes in the destruction of Earth’s wild nature: its forests, its whales, its great apes and its tigers, and beyond. The Little Ethiopians, by their greater income, constitute the really powerful cause of destruction. Lester R. Brown would have it exactly right had he said that countries ought to strive for an average of fewer than two children per couple, reducing population.

   For a brief biography of Lester R. Brown, click here.

John Stuart Mill on love of the world

    In these words of John Stuart Mill we detect the promise of a great wave of coming environmentalism:

When we consider how ardent a sentiment, in favourable circumstances, of education, the love of country has become, we cannot judge it impossible that the love of that larger country, the world, may be nursed into similar strength, both as a source of elevated emotion and as a principle of duty. (Quoted from Three Essays on Religion, by John Stuart Mill. Henry Holt and Co. 1874. p. 107)
    For a brief biography of John Stuart Mill, click here.

Miguel de Unamuno on making good works

    The best kind of good works to make are those that react on you, making you, the maker, a better person. Miguel de Unamuno jotted this in his diary:

To do good is not the same thing as to be good. It is not enough to do good, one must be good. It is not enough to do more good works today than yesterday; it is necessary to be better today than yesterday. In fact, what kind of good works are those that have not made you better as you have gone on accumulating them and piling them up? Good works which don’t make you a better person as you treasure them up for yourself are vain, merely apparent, the good works of vanity. (Quoted from The Private World: Selections from the Diario Íntimo and Selected Letters 1890-1936, Series LXXXV 2, by Miguel de Unamuno. Bollingen, Princeton University Press. 1984. p. 43.)

    For a brief biography of Miguel de Unamuno, click here.

Khaled Abou El Fadl on Muslimism

    Westerners have difficulty making sense of the Muslim faith. Khaled Abou El Fadl offers one reason why:

A seditious figure stood at the podium. “Why do I need thirty thousand books in my library? Is it because every single book says exactly the same thing?” wondered Khaled Abou El Fadl, the UCLA professor who adopted stray dogs to defy mean-spirited Muslims. “The way we Muslims treat our intellectual heritage is very much as if book after book should affirm the ‘simple truth’ that is Islam and we need not go beyond.” Today’s Muslim scholars “must be the most dull, the most boring products that humanity has known. Because each one of them can say, ‘What I’m going to do with my life is I’m going to write exactly the same things that were said for the past six hundred years.” (Quoted from The Trouble with Islam, by Irshad Manji. St. Martin’s Press. 2003. p. 187.)

    For a brief biography of Khaled Abou El Fadl, click here.