The Saunterer

Henry James on the perfect day

    What is your perfect day? How does it compare with Henry James’?

To spend one’s morning in still, productive analysis of the clustered shadows on the Basilica, one’s afternoons anywhere in church or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one’s evenings in the starlight gossip at Florian’s, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly between the two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low black domes of the church - this, I consider, is to be as happy as is consistent with the preservation of reason.

    (Quoted from page vii of The Trouble with Medical Journals, by Richard Smith. The Royal Society of Medicine Press, 2006.)
    For a brief biography of Henry James, click here. For images of and relating to Henry James, click here. For a brief biography of Richard Smith, click here.

C. Wright Mills on how we understand the human condition

    No wonder we are messed up. To paraphrase C. Wright Mills, we understand ourselves and the human condition by a vast web of hearsay - and so not reliably:

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced; and their own experience is always indirect. The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others. Everyone lives in a world of such meanings. No man stands alone directly confronting a world of solid fact. No such world is available. . . .
    In their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by ready-made interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and shall never meet. Yet for ever man these images - provided by strangers and dead men - are the basis of his life as a human being.

    (Quoted from page 405 of Power, Politics and People:The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, Ballantine Books,1959.)
    For a short biography of C. Wright Mills, click here. For (not what you’d guess) images of C. Wright Mills, click here.

Andre Agassi and Philip Larkin on the pressure of parental expectations

    The New York Review of Books (24 June 2010) carries Michael Kimmelman’s review of Open: An Autobiography, Andre Agassi’s account of dealing with growing up under his father’s expectations for him to be a star tennis player. Kimmelman writes:

“From punk to paragon” is how Bud Collins, the tennis commentator, described Agassi’s public transformation – the pigeon-toed teen brat in stone-washed denims, gambler’s shades, and a Mohawk who becomes a philanthropist, philosopher, and statesman. “To my thinking,” Agassi writes, “Bud sacrificed the truth on the altar of alliteration. I was never a punk, any more than I’m now a paragon. . . . Transformation is change from one thing to another, but I started as nothing. . . . I was like most kids: I didn’t know who I was, and I rebelled at being told by older people. . . . What people see now, for better or worse, is my first formation, my first incarnation. I didn’t alter my image, I discovered it.”

    Kimmelman goes on to say of Agassi,

While he “never questioned” his father’s love, he wished it had been “softer, with more listening and less rage. In fact, I sometimes wish my father loved me less.”

    And of Agassi,

It is yet another step that brings him to the revelation that now “I play and keep playing because I choose to play. Even if it’s not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.

    And of Steffi Graf, whose father forced her into tennis when she hated it, Kimmelman says that she convinced Agassi that she was his soul mate:

They shared, along with preternatural physical gifts and competitiveness, an understanding of the downside of a tennis career and a determination not to repeat with their own children what had been inflicted on them.

    Reading Kimmelman, we thought of Philip Larkin’s poem, "This Be The Verse," of how a one-size social image scarcely fits all, producing millions of messed up lives. The poem:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
   They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
   And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
   By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
   And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
   It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
   And don’t have any kids yourself.

    (Quoted from page 180 of Philip Larkin: Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite. The Noonday Press, 1988.)
    For a brief biography of Andre Agassi, click here. For a brief biography of Steffi Graf,  click here. For a brief biography of Philip Larkin, click. here. For a brief biography of Michael Kimmelman, click here. For information about the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education, click here.
    As would be expected, there are counterviews to the above, which we leave to you to work out.

Sinclair Lewis on readers socialized to an ideal image

    The really popular novels, it used to be, were those that strengthened the socialization of readers to an ideal image they held. How much, do you think, that is still so, though the ideal may have changed? Listen to Sinclair Lewis in his 12 December 1930 speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature:

To be not only a best seller in America but to be really beloved, a novelist must assert that all American men are tall, handsome, rich, honest, and powerful at golf; that all country towns are filled with neighbors who do nothing from day to day save go about being kind to one another; that although American girls may be wild, they change always into perfect wives and mothers; and that, geographically, America is composed solely of New York, which is inhabited entirely by millionaires; of the West, which keeps unchanged all the boisterous heroism of 1870; and of the South, where everyone lives on a plantation perpetually glossy with moonlight and scented with magnolias.

    For a brief biography of Sinclair Lewis, click here. For images of and relating to Sinclair Lewis, click here. For his Nobel Prize speech, click here.

Carl Sagan’s warning of the consequences of mass ignorance

    One consequence, we had to learn, is the Gulf Oil Disaster. Carl Sagan’s warning is more urgent today than when he spoke it:

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

    (Quoted from the Editorial of the 7 May 2010 issue of Science, page 667.)
    For a brief biography of Carl Sagan, click here. For images of and relating to Carl Sagan, click here.

Emily Dickinson on when fear ends

    Some years ago the doctor said my cancer test was positive. At that moment, I lived Emily Dickinson’s words:

While I was fearing it, it came,
But came with less of a fear,
Because that fearing it so long
Had almost made it dear.

    (Quoted from page 558 of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Little, Brown. 1960.)
    For a brief biography of Emily Dickinson, click here. For images of and relating to Emily Dickinson, click here.

Cass R. Sunstein on how society might avoid plunders and injustice

    Break the curse of conformity he says:

The problem with conformity is that it deprives society of information that it needs. I have emphasized the same problem with social cascades, in which people follow others and fail to disclose what they actually know. As a result of cascades, both individuals and groups can blunder badly. When grave injustice exists, it often persists only because most people have a false impression of what other people think. They silence themselves, thinking that others must be right or simply wanting to avoid social disapproval. The tragedy is that plunders and injustice could be avoided if only people would speak out.

    (Quoted from page 210 of Why Societies Need Dissent, by Cass R. Sunstein. First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2005.)
    For Cass R. Sunstein’s home page, click here. For images of and relating to Cass R. Sunstein, click here.

E. B. White on common assumptions we need to question

    This is E. B. White writing about common assumptions of our culture:   

Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, and the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world as remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions.

    (Quoted from page 48 of Essays of E. B. White, by E. B. White. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.)
    For a brief biography of E. B. White, click here. For images of and relating to E. B. White, click here.

Hendrik van Loon on “What is tolerance?”

    Hendrik van Loon, after considering various definitions of tolerance, said this:

    Language is one of the most deceptive inventions of the human race and all definitions are bound to be arbitrary. It therefore behooves an humble student to go to that authority which is accepted as final by the largest number of those who speak the language in which this book is written.
    I refer to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
    There on page 1052 of volume XXVI stands written: “Tolerance (from Latin tolerare - to endure):-- The allowance of freedom of action or judgment to other people, the patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from one’s own or the generally received course or view.”

    (Quoted from page 21 of Tolerance, by Hendrik van Loon. Garden City Publishing Co., 1927.)
    For a brief biography of Hendrik van Loon, click here. For images of and relating to Hendrik van Loon, click here.

Robert Frost on doing good

    Grandchildren do good when they make their grandfathers find new answers, and Robert Frost experienced this example of it:

    Some girl said to me - granddaughter of mine, graduating from Smith, a year or two ago - she said to me, “Don’t you think that it’s everybody’s duty to do good in the world?” And I said, “I’d rather do well than good.”
    But she thought - (Wait till you hear.) - she thought a minute or two - (Sweet thing that she is.) - and she said, “But wouldn’t it be possible to do good well?”
    It’s a long time - (We see each other now and then.) - and there’s something to settle there. I let her have the field that day. She won, saying it would be possible “to do good well.” But there’s more to all that, isn’t there?
    For instance, all the ways of doing good are human. They’re determined by the race, way back through the years. One way to do good is to be a doctor. Another way to do good is to be a preacher. Another way to do good is to be a teacher. Another good way is to be a plumber. You see, and go on.
    I needn’t go on. There are all sorts of ways. And those have all been found by the race.
    And one of the ways is to do charity. That’s what she’s talking about. But to make that the only one of the ways to do good, you see, that’s what I have to settle with her, still.

    (Quoted from page 103 of Robert Frost: Speaking on Campus: Excerpts from His Talks, 1949-1962, Edward Connery Lathem, ed. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.)    For a brief biography of Robert Frost, click here. For images of and relating to Robert Frost, click here. For a brief biography of Edward Connery Lathem, click here.