The Saunterer

Lucien Price on the purpose of life

    At the highest level, Lucien Price tells us, are two alternatives for the purpose of life:

At every turn we are confronted with a choice between these two standards of conduct. Is the purpose of life to enjoy or is it to create? Is life enriched according to the amount we acquire and own, or according to that which we produce and give?

    (Quoted from page 48 of Winged Sandals, by Lucien Price. Little, Brown, and Company, 1928.)
    For a brief biography of Lucien Price, click here.

Dan L. Duncan dies at 77

    Duncan L. Duncan was a Great White Hunter, for fifty years bringing grief to his animal victims and their kin. On March 31, 2010, The New York Times reported in his obituary: “Mr. Duncan’s passion was big-game hunting. He owned a hunting preserve in Texas, and he hunted animals like lions and polar bears on six continents.” It goes on to describe his breaking a law to shoot a moose and sheep from a helicopter.
    This made us remember a passage we read recently in Ape, by John Sorenson (Reaktion Books, 2009). The subject is Paul Belloni du Chaillu, a Great White Hunter and best-selling author during the middle 1800s. Of him, John Sorenson writes (page 65):

Like many nineteenth-century Europeans, he provides a lurid, exhausting account of slaughtering one animal after another. While he boasted of killing thousands of animals, murdering gorillas particularly stimulated him: he was ‘never more excited in my life’ than when shooting one, although hearing his victim’s ‘half human devilish cry’ he ‘almost felt like a murderer’. Although acknowledging that he ‘almost felt like a murderer’ when killing gorillas, this ‘sickening’ realization of similarity provided the essential thrill: ‘It is the lurking reminiscence of humanity indeed, what makes one of the chief ingredients of the hunter’s excitement in his attack of the gorilla.”

    And we call humans the greatest of the species?

Denise Levertov on divorcing

Divorcing

            One garland
   of flowers, leaves, thorns
was twined round our two necks.
  Drawn tight, it could choke us,
  yet we loved its scratchy grace,
        our fragrant yoke.

       We were Siamese twins.
          Our blood's not sure
            if it can circulate,
         now we are cut apart.
Something in each of us is waiting
        to see if we can survive,
                  severed.

    (From page 104 of Denise Levertov, Selected Poems. New Directions Publishing, 2002.)
    For a brief biography of Denise Levertov, click here. For images of and relating to Denise Levertov, click here.

Alexander Pope on the rightness of wild nature

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

    (Quoted from page 1 of The Nesting Season: Cuckoos, Cuckolds, and the Invention of Monogamy, by Bernd Heinrich. Harvard University Press, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Alexander Pope, click here. For images of and relating to Alexander Pope, click here. For an interview of Bernd Heinrich about the intelligence of ravens and crows, click here.

Harry Levinson on the basic question of every consultant

    My Saunterings during these recent weeks have strayed into the nature of psychological consulting in organizations, and so to Harry Levinson and his advice:

The anguish of the client is fundamental to all consultation: No pain, no problem; no problem, no need for a consultant. Despite what anyone may say, no organization undertakes consultation “to make things better” unless someone hurts. Therefore, the basic question for every consultant regardless of the reason for a consultation request is, “Where is the pain?”

    (From Organizational Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effective Consulting, by Harry Levinson. American Psychological Association, 2002.)
    For a career biography of Harry Levinson, click here. For images of and relating to Harry Levinson, click here.

Manfred Kets de Vries on the psychology of feeling entitled

    You probably know of athletes (especially football players) who grow up thinking they are beyond ethics and laws. They are part of a general bunch, which includes certain male corporate executives, about which Manfred Kets de Vries says this:

In a position of leadership, people suffering from this kind of disorder become fixated on power, status, prestige, and superiority. They overvalue their personal worth, arguing that, as exceptional people they deserve special privileges and prerogatives. They act in a grandiose, haughty way, expect special favors, flout conventional rules, and feel entitled; they’re unempathetic, inconsiderate to others, exploitative, and unconstrained by objective reality.

    (Quoted from page 42 of Destructive Leaders and Dysfunctional Organizations: A Therapeutic Approach, by Alan Goldman. Cambridge University Press, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Manfred Kets de Vries, click here. For images of and relating to Manfred Kets de Vries, click here. Alan Goldman is a professor of business at Arizona State University.

Aldo Leopold on the Thing behind the living thing

    From each valued living thing, Aldo Leopold reminds us, we may step back to the natural processes that create it. By this, we catch a greater value.

Our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history. His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.

    (Quoted from page 353 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg)

    For a brief biography of Aldo Leopold, click here. For images of and relating to Aldo Leopold, click here.

Douglas Adams on guns

    Guns, Douglas Adams tells us, are for making people and animals miserable:

The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. ‘Make it evil’ he’d been told. ‘Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sorts of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with.’

    (Quoted from page 172 of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams. Ballantine Books, 1995.)
    For a brief biography of Douglas Adams, click here. For images of and relating to Douglas Adams, click here.

Ted Hughes on the dragonfly

    Has anyone done better than this on the dragonfly?

Dragonfly
Now let’s have another try
To love the giant dragonfly.
Stand beside the peaceful water.
Next thing - a whispy, dry clatter
And he whizzes to a dead stop
In mid-air, and his eyes pop.
Snakey stripes, a snakey fright!
Does he sting? Does he bite?
Suddenly he’s gone. Suddenly back. A
Scarey jumping cracker -
Here! Right here!
An inch from your ear!
Sizzling in the air
And giving you a stare
Out of the huge cockpit of his eyes - !
Now say: ‘What a lovely surprise!’

    (Quoted from page xvii of Dragonflies, by Philip S. Corbet & Stephen J. Brooks. Collins, 2008)
    For a brief biography of Ted Hughes, click here. For images of and relating to Ted Hughes, click here. For work information about Philip S. Corbet, click here. For work information about Stephen J. Brooks, click here.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt on what the Federal Art Project achieved

    In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt began the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, spreading four billion dollars over five projects: The Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, The Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Writers’ Project, and the Historical Records Survey. Forty thousand artists and cultural workers were employed. In 1941 he said this about the Federal Art Project:

A few generations ago, the people of this country were taught by their writers and their critics and their teachers to believe that art was something foreign to America and to themselves - something imported from another continent and from an age that was not theirs - something they had no part in, save to go and see it in a guarded room on holidays and Sundays. But recently, within the last few years, they have discovered that they have a part. They have seen in their own towns, in their own villages, in schoolhouses, in post offices . . . pictures painted by their sons, their neighbors - people they have known and lived beside and talked to. They have seen . . . rooms full of paintings by Americans - some of it good, some of it not good, but all of it native, human, eager and alive - all of it painted by their own kind in their own country, and painted about things they know and look at often and have touched and loved.   

    (Quoted from page 160 of When Art Worked, text by Roger G. Kennedy. Rizzoli, 2009)
    For a brief biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, click here. For a work biography of Roger G. Kennedy, click here. For information about the Federal Art Project, click here.