The Saunterer

Karen Dawn on why she supports rights of animals to be treated humanely

    Karen Dawn is the author of Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way We Treat Animals. In a published interview, she explains why she supports animal rights:

I am human, so all things being equal, I will put human life over that of other animals. But things are so grossly unequal. I don’t put pigs before people, but I am vegetarian because I put a pig’s right to live before my right to eat a bacon double cheeseburger. . . . When people learn about factory farming and animal testing, they are likely to feel that society’s current treatment of animals must change. So it is up to us, with good arguments and warmth, to make sure that animal issues are increasingly part of public dialogue. (Quoted in AllAnimals, Fall 2008, p. 29, published by The Humane Society of the United States.)

    For a brief biography of Karen Dawn, click here. For details about Thanking the Monkey, click here.

James Agee on the necessity of discipline in creative work

    From knowing Charlie Chaplin, James Agee concluded this:

I have particularly been seeing a great deal of Chaplin and his wife. Very interesting, (to put it mildly) to see what a man of real genius - which I am convinced he has - is really like. . . . The “genius” is a mixture of these things with tremendous self-discipline and technical mastery and hard work, with incandescent feeling and intuitiveness, when he is working. The roots are emotion and intuitiveness; the chief necessity is discipline. (Quoted from page 185 of Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. 1962. New York: G. Braziller.)

    For a brief biography of James Agee, click here.

Octavio Paz on the two-part life

    The two-part life, marked by a mid-life turning point, is so common it must be innate. We take the first part on one course, roughly to age fifty. Then we change to another course for the second part. It can happen that living the first part generates side effects which are not obstacles to the first part but which remain and become obstacles to living the second part. As the poet Octavio Paz said:

I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself. (From Eagle Or Sun by Octavio Paz. Translated by Eliot Weinberger. Lightning Source Inc, 1976.)

    For a brief biography of Octavio Paz, click here.

Henry Adams on sublime machinery as a moral force

    The sublime, by definition, suspends comparison within its class. The greatest sublime is wild Nature, the natural world including the heavens. It is the lone member its class, an inherited machine, here before we arrived. Of the greatest machines we invent, they are lesser sublimes: the greatest computer, the greatest ship, the greatest dam, . . .
    If the sublime of any class is a moral force, the greatest sublime, wild Nature, should be the greatest moral force. Yet the lesser sublime machines steal the spotlight. They are more approachable and so, to most people, more impressive and more inviting worship than wild Nature. Witness how we rip apart Nature for material to grow technology. It bothers the Saunterer seeing the masses today react as Henry Adam reacted in the hall of dynamos at the Great Exposition in Paris, 1900:

As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring - scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect for power - while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before a silent and infinite force. Among the thousands of symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive. (Quoted from page 380 of The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams, chapter XXV, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” printed for the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1918.)

    For a brief biography of Henry Adams, click here. For the full text of the "The Dynamo and the Virgin," click here.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on dedication to your work

    The dedication, noted Saint-Ex, builds you:

Man’s urgent need to free himself from slavery by securing for himself the fruits of his work has centered attention on labor as an exchange of value, on labor as a commodity. But we must not forget that one of the essential aspects of work is not the salary that it brings in but the spiritual enrichment that it procures. A surgeon, a physicist, a gardener is more human than a bridge player. One part of work feeds you, the other part builds you; it is the dedication to work that builds you. (Quoted from page 77 of Wartime Writings, 1939-1944, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. 1986. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.)

    For a brief biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, click here.

Paul Cézanne on how artists should study

    Paul Cézanne advised:

Keep good company, meaning: Go to the Louvre. But after seeing the great masters who rest there, one must hasten to leave and to revivify oneself through contact with nature, with the instincts and with the artistic sensations within us. . . . Studying well in Nature’s presence, that’s the best thing there is. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. p. 237.)

    For a brief biography of Paul Cézanne, click here. For images of Cézanne’s paintings, click here.

Noam Chomsky on seeing the world differently

    Think of global warming and other world problems as you read Noam Chomsky’s words:

We live entangled in webs of deceit, often self-deceit, but with a little honest effort, it is possible to extricate ourselves from them. If we do, we will see a world that is rather different from the one presented to us by a remarkably effective ideological system, a world that is much uglier, often horrifying. We will also learn that our own actions, or passive acquiescence, contribute quite substantially to misery and oppression, and perhaps eventual global destruction. (Quoted from page 1 of Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, by Noam Chomsky. 1985. South End Press.)

    For a brief biography of Noam Chomsky, click here.

Will Barack Obama start America to fulfill John Adam’s dream of art?

    Let’s hope so. Here is John Adam’s dream:

I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic achievement and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. (Quoted from page 71 of Patronizing the Arts, by Marjorie Garber. 2008. Princeton University Press.)

    For a brief biography of John Adams, click here.

How should the sexes aid one another?

    An answer given on page 3 of the article “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” by Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Ripley, from The Dial magazine, July, 1843:

The sexes should not only correspond to and appreciate one another, but prophesy to one another. In individual instances this happens. Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.

    For brief biographies of Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Ripley, click here, here, and here.

J. W. N. Sullivan on the infinite shades by which art and nature affect us

    As J. W. N. Sullivan reminds us, a specific work of art or experience of nature produces in each of us a specific response:

Man’s capacity of response, as it were, is almost infinite. It is perfectly possible that between certain reactions and stimuli there may be a one to one correspondence. A poem, in its effect on us, may have no equivalent. A dawn or a sunset, a melody or a cry in the night, may evoke in us a reaction which is unique. It is even possible that most of our reactions, both to nature and to art, are unique. Art is no substitute for nature, and the arts are not substitutes for one another. Our commonest experiences, when they recur, recur with a difference. We do not fall in love twice in the same way. Even boredom has its shades. (Quoted from page 24 of Beethoven: His spiritual development, by J. W. N. Sullivan. 1960. Random House reprint of 1927 original.)

    For a brief biography of J. W. N. Sullivan, click here.