The Saunterer

Why questionnaire responses about wilderness are phony

    People’s material values repress awareness of what Abraham Maslow called their B-values - for values of Being. This makes what they most care about hard for them to know.
    There should be a law that questionnaires about wilderness (and art) - B-values subjects - be given only to those on their deathbeds. With few days left, their material values wouldn’t cloud their hearts; they would tell us what really matters most. David Wootton describes the problem generally:

What makes life worth living? “Charity”, St Paul says, in the King James version - “love” in more modern translations. Happiness, most say. “Without love no happiness”, said Milton, turning the two answers into one. A friend of mine, close to death, made a long journey to see the Rothko exhibition at the Tate. He had no doubt there could be no better way to spend what might have been his last day. At such times our choices say a great deal about who we are; much of the rest of the time our answers are not to be trusted.

    (Quoted from “Desire without end,” by David Wootton, page 3 of The Times Literary Supplement, February 27, 2009.) For a brief biography of David Wootton, click here. For a brief biography of Abraham Maslow, click here. For an explanation of Maslow’s theory of a hierarchy of needs, click here.

Mark Twain on charges of cannibalism

    While Sauntering the other day in the stacks of the library, a book piqued our morbid sense. It is Prehistoric Cannibalism at Mancos 5MTUMR-2346, by Tim D. White (Princeton University Press, 1992). On page xix there is Mark Twain being Mark Twain, in the vein of his piece “Is Shakespeare Dead?” from his autobiography. He wrote:

Here is a pile of bones of primeval man and beast all mixed together, with no more damning evidence that the man ate the bears than that the bears ate the man - yet paleontology holds a coroner’s inquest in the fifth geologic period on an “unpleasantness” which transpired in the quaternary, and calmly lays it on the MAN, and then adds to it what purports to be evidence of CANNIBALISM. I ask the candid reader, Does not this look like taking advantage of a gentleman who has been dead two million years, and whose surviving friends and relatives - -. But the subject is too painful. . . . Here are the savage ways and atrocious appetites attributed to the dead and helpless Primeval Man - - have we any assurance that the same hand will not fling mud at the Primeval Man’s mother, next?

    For a brief biography of Mark Twain, click here. For images of and relating to Mark Twain, click here. To read “Is Shakespeare Dead?”, click here.

Francis Bacon on the greatest value of light

    It is natural to hold that light is valuable because it lets us see what it falls on, or because light can be made to carry messages. Francis Bacon placed light’s value more generally:

The beholding of the light is itself a more excellent and a fairer thing than all the uses of it.

    (Quoted from page 6 of The Architecture of Natural Light, by Henry Plummer. The Monacelli Press, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Francis Bacon, click here. For images of and relating to Francis Bacon, click here. For a bit about Henry Plummer, click here.