The Saunterer

Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo on the creative personality

    Abraham Maslow comes to our Sauntering mind when we think of prolific creators that delight in inventing theories but have little interest and ability for the actual work of applying them. His was the type of personality that Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo recognized in artists:

Those who have invention are usually not able to have the patience to work as do others. This happens for no other reason than that they are constantly assaulted by inventions and caprices; as soon as they have drawn a body and formed a gesture, infinite others are born in the fantasia, so that they are unable, because of the extreme delight they take in invention, to have the patience to finish any work begun. (Quoted on page 10 of Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture, by Cammy Brothers. 2008. Yale University Press.)

    For a brief biography of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, click here. For the same for Abraham Maslow, click here.

W. Somerset Maugham on writing excellent fiction

    Somerset Maugham tells what most of us know, but it is refreshing to hear him say it:

One fusses about style. One tries to write better. One takes pains to be simple, clear and succinct. One aims at rhythm and balance. One reads a sentence aloud to see that it sounds well. One sweats one’s guts out. The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently. It proves that if you can tell stories, create character, devise incidents, and if you have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. All the same it’s better to write well than ill. (From page 321 of A Writer’s Notebook, by W. Somerset Maugham. 1977. Arno Press.)

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

Steven Weinberg on how science is making laughable our species’ absurd vanity

    The more science is telling us about the history of the universe and human biology, the more moronic is our holding on to the religious view of our importance. Hear Steven Weinberg:

We have had to accept that our home, the earth, is just another planet circling the sun; our sun is just one of a hundred billion stars in a galaxy that is just one of billions of visible galaxies; and it may be that the whole expanding cloud of galaxies is just a small part of a much larger multiverse, most of whose parts are utterly inhospitable to life. As Richard Feynman has said, “The theory that it’s all arranged as a stage of God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.” (Quoted from “Without God,” by Steven Weinberg, The New York Review of Books, September 25, 2008, p. 73.)

    For brief biographies of Seven Weinberg and Richard Feynman, click here and here.

Edward R. Murrow on why we should be truthful

    Edward R. Murrow gave the reason while testifying to the U.S. Congressional Appropriations Committee, May 1963:

American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that. (Quoted from page 466 of Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow, by Alexander Kendrick. 1969. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.)

    For a brief biography of Edward R. Murrow, click here.

Louis Armstrong on creative excellence

    In terms of his mentor Joe “King” Oliver, Louis Armstrong defined creative excellence:

Joe Oliver has always been my inspiration and my idol. No trumpet player ever had the fire that Oliver had. Man, he really could punch a number. Some might have had a better tone, but I’ve never seen nothing have the fire, and no one created as much as Joe.
    The way I see it, the greatest musical creations came from his horn - and I’ve heard a lot of them play. I think he was better than Bolden, better than Bunk Johnson. Buddy blew too hard - he actually did blow his brains out. Even Bunk didn’t offer nothing but tone. He didn’t have the get-up-and-go that Oliver did; he didn’t create a phrase that stays with you. But Joe Oliver created  things. . . . (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 267.)

    For a brief biography of Joe Oliver, click here. For the same of Louis Armstrong, click here.

Albert Einstein on compassion for all living creatures and all of nature

    Albert Einstein was one with Ingrid Newkirk and John Muir, saying:

[The human being] experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affections for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in it beauty. (Quoted from page 140 of Myths of the Free Market, by Kenneth S. Friedman. 2003. Algora Publishing.)

    For a brief biography of Albert Einstein, click here. For the same of Ingrid Newkirk (click) and John Muir (click).

John Muir on the value of wilderness

    Time spent in wilderness keeps on giving in memories. Draw on them to dispel your everyday troubles, as John Muir tells:

    Next to the light of the dawn on high mountain tops, the alpenglow is the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God.
    Now comes the gloaming. The alpenglow is fading into earthy, murky gloom, but do not let your town habits draw you away to the hotel. Stay on this good fire-mountain and spend the night among the stars. Watch their glorious bloom until the dawn, and get one more baptism of light. Then, with fresh heart, go down to your work, and whatever your fate, under whatever ignorance or knowledge you may afterward chance to suffer, you will remember these fine, wild views, and look back with joy to your wanderings in the blessed old Yellowstone Wonderland. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. C. Romesburg, p. 341.)

    For a brief biography of John Muir, click here.

On decision making to solve crises

    Deciding on the best of a set of good alternatives isn’t psychologically the same as deciding on the best of a set of bad alternatives. Think of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Henry M. Paulson, Jr. His decisions for solving the world’s banking crisis are like soldiers’ decisions in the Bataan Death March, summed up in this passage:

One thing Ray Hunt learned in war is that life is not a series of clear-cut decisions between good and evil: it is sometimes a succession of choices among alternatives that are disagreeable. (Quoted from page 98 of From Bataan to Safety: The Rescue of 104 American Soldiers in the Philippines, by Malcolm Decker. 2008. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company.)

    For the history of the Bataan Death March, click here.

D. H. Lawrence’s personal philosophy

    Devote your living to producing the real You, and you will have lived according to D. H. Lawrence’s philosophy:

The final aim of every living thing, creature, or being, is the full achievement of itself. This accomplished, it will produce what it will produce, it will bear the fruit of its nature. Not the fruit, however, but the flower is the culmination and climax, the degree to be striven for. Not the work I shall produce, but the real Me I shall achieve, that is the consideration; of the complete Me will come the complete fruit of me, the work, the children. (Quoted from page 195 of The Poet as Botanist, by M. M. Mahood. 2008. Cambridge University Press.)

    For a brief biography of D. H. Lawrence, click here.

Albert Schweitzer on reverence for all forms of life

    Albert Schweitzer put it right in his 1952 Nobel Prize acceptance speech that perfect human-to-human ethics can only exist by having perfect human-to-animal ethics:

It is convinced that compassion, in which ethics takes root, does not assume its true proportions until it embraces not only man but every living being. To the old ethics, which lacked this depth and force of conviction, has been added the ethics of reverence for life, and its validity is steadily gaining in recognition.

    For a brief biography of Albert Schweitzer, click here.