The Saunterer

Maria Chabot on the outer and inner sizes of music and poetry

    Bigger outer size: It takes nine to sixteen minutes, depending on the conductor’s tempo, to listen to Bach’s organ piece, Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Smaller outer size: It takes about a minute to read Blake’s The Tyger. Yet the inner sizes of the two - their emotional effects - can be equally big. In a letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, dated November 25, 1948, Maria Chabot wrote how she ended her Thanksgiving day:

I listened to the Bach Passacaglia - a big thing - and read a Blake poem, a little thing, but equally big. (From Maria Chabot - Georgia O’Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941-1949. Barbara Buhler Lynes and Ann Paden, eds. University of New Mexico Press. 2003)

    For a brief biography of Maria Chabot, click here.

Lawrence S. Lerner on population reduction

    Conservation and sustainability will not prevent our sending Earth to its grave. Birth control (quick to it) - an average of one child per couple - is the only solution. Lawrence S. Lerner, Emeritus Professor, California State University, in a letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education, section B, January 9, 2009, says the obvious:

    With all his detailed attention to the complex political processes and the geographical and economic inequities involved in reducing ecological costs, Peter Dauvergne (“Conservation’s Uphill Battle,” The Chronicle Review, November 28) ignores the elephant in the room.
    Even assuming that the rising economies of China and India do not spur accelerating consumption, what good would it do if I and others like me were to achieve the improbable goal of reducing our waste streams by 50 percent, if the population doubles?
    All environmental projects, however clever and efficient they may be, are doomed to failure unless the world population stabilizes or, better, decreases. The fundamental ecological goal should be a reduction of world population to less than half what it is now, to about 3 billion. Even then, it will be about 50 percent larger than it was when I was a kid!   

    For more about Lawrence S. Lerner, click here.

On the difference between compassion and pity

    The habit of Sauntering has, we corroborate every day, a way of yielding unexpected insights, such as this:

Compassion is a far greater and nobler thing than pity. Pity has its roots in fear and carries a sense of arrogance and condescension, some times even smug feeling of “I’m glad it’s not me.” As Stephen Levine says, “When your fear touches someone’s pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone’s pain it becomes compassion.” To train in compassion is to know that all beings are the same and suffer in similar ways, to honor those who suffer, and to know that you are neither separate from nor superior to anyone. (Quoted from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, Patrick Gaffney, and Andrew Harvey. Published by HarperSanFrancisco. 1994.)

    For a brief biography of Sogyal Rinpoche, click here. For an interview with Stephen Levine, click here.

M. C. Escher on wanting to do a job well

    Unwavering desire to do a job well, believed M. C. Escher, matters more than having the talent to do it well:

God, I wish I could learn to draw a bit better! It takes so much effort and perseverance to do it well. Sometimes I am quite close to delirium with pure nerves. It is really only a question of battling on relentlessly with constant and, if possible, merciless self-criticism. I think that making prints the way I do it is almost only a matter of very much wanting to do it well. For the most part, things like talent are mere poppycock. Any schoolboy with a bit of aptitude might draw better than I; but what is usually lacking is the unwavering desire for expression, obstinacy gnashing its teeth and saying, “Even though I know I cannot do it, I still want to do it.” (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 258.)

    For a brief biography of M. C. Escher, click here. For images of M. C. Escher’s art, click here.

On Japanese work slogans

    The other day while sauntering through Kabuki’s Forgotten War: 1931 - 1945, by James R. Brandon, we came across two witty work slogans used in World War II to encourage Japanese workers. They’re good too, perhaps, for encouraging you and me to make war on our stubborn personal projects, getting them done at the cost of all else (e.g., to finish writing a book, or the six-year project of professors to achieve academic tenure).

The one:
    No Personal Desires until Victory.
The other:
    Monday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday.

César Daly on what public monuments and buildings are for

    Society has drifted from an important lesson of ancient Greece. César Daly brings it to attention again:

The public monument, the monument which addresses itself to everybody, which belongs to the nation . . . needs to satisfy the general, national sentiment of beauty. . . . Finally, beauty, as everyone conceives it, must shine on the face of our public buildings, like glory on our army, holiness on our religion, loyalty on all acts of national life. . . . The beauty of a public monument ought to be a dazzling and direct emanation of the living genius of society, a profession of aesthetic faith by the race. (From page 291 of The City As A Work Of Art, by Donald J. Olsen. Yale University Press. 1986.)

    For a brief biography of César Daly, click here.

Matthew Frederick on the difference between architects and space planners

    Here’s the Saunterer’s review of Matthew Frederick’s 4,000-word book, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School: The 101 things are 101 good design principles. That averages out to about 40 words per principle. Many of them hold for any kind of artistic design, such as the design of recreational campgrounds. Here is one:

Good design solutions are not merely physically interesting but are driven by underlying ideas. An idea is a specific mental structure by which we organize, understand, and give meaning to external experiences and information. Without underlying ideas informing their buildings, architects are merely space planners. Space planning with decoration applied to “dress it up” is not architecture; architecture resides in the DNA of a building, in an embedded sensibility that infuses its whole. (Quoted from page 14 of 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, The MIT Press. 2007.)

    For Matthew Frederick’s blog, click here.

Kenneth Clark on the heroic in life

    Sauntering in essays has a way of yielding unexpected treasures, as this remark of Kenneth Clark:

The heroic in life . . . is based on the consciousness that life is a struggle; and that in this struggle it is courage, strength of will, and determination which are decisive, not intelligence nor sensibility. The heroic involves a contempt for convenience and a sacrifice of all those pleasures which contribute to what we call civilized life. It is the enemy of happiness. (Quoted from “The Young Michelangelo," by Kenneth Clark, chapter 3, page 43, in The Horizon Book of the Renaissance, by Richard M. Ketchum and John Harold Plumb. American Heritage Pub. Co., 1961.)

    For a brief biography of Kenneth Clark, click here.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. on logic’s role in forming laws

    The Saunterer passes on to you this important truth that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote:

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. (Quoted from page 1 of The Common Law, by O. W. Holmes, Jr.. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1881)

    For a brief biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., click here.

Elaine Scarry on beauty as a force for justice

    From the Saunterer’s years of observation, an association is clear: artists care enormously for beauty and enormously for social justice. Elaine Scarry tangentially notes the same:

Beauty, far from contributing to social injustice . . . or even remaining neutral to injustice as an innocent bystander, actually assists us in the work of addressing injustice. (Quoted from On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry. Princeton University Press. 1999.)

    For a brief biography of Elaine Scarry, click here.