The Saunterer

John Fowles on the essential difference between good science and good art

    Has anyone put it better than John Fowles? --

For what good science tries to eliminate, good art seeks to provoke – mystery, which is lethal to the one, and vital to the other.

    (Quoted from page 6 of How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, by Robert A. Day. Cambridge University Press, 2008)
    For a brief biography of John Fowles, click here. For images of or relating to John Fowles, click here.

Frederick Douglass on doing evil in the name of religion

    In many parts of the world today, religion is used to justify evil acts. It was the same 170 years ago in the American South, as Frederick Douglass tells:

Another advantage I gained in my new master was, he made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion; and this, in my opinion, was truly a great advantage. I assent most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, – a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, – a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, – and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to the enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.

    (Quoted on page 10 of Frederick Douglass: Oratory from Slavery, by David B. Chesebrough. Greenwood Press, 1998)
    For a brief biography of Frederick Douglass, click here. For images of or relating to Frederick Douglass, click here. For a brief biography of David B. Chesebrough, click here.

The Small Box, by Vasko Popa

    Poems fail to touch us when we try to understand them literally. Their affect may come only by turning off our attention. If you try to find meaning in The Small Box, you may finally decide it is about the human heart or love or any number of things, but you will miss its  reason for being -- its loveliness.

The Small Box

The small box gets its first teeth
And its small length
Its small width and small emptiness
And all that it has got

The small box is growing bigger
And now the cupboard is in it
That it was in before

And it grows bigger and bigger and bigger
And now has in it the room
And the house and the town and the land
And the world it was in before

The small box remembers its childhood
And by overgreat longing
It becomes a small box again

Now in the small box
Is the whole world quite tiny
You can easily put it in a pocket
Easily steal it easily lose it

Take care of the small box

    (Quoted from page ix of Poetry Is, by Ted Hughes. Doubleday, 1967.)
    For a brief biography of Vasko Popa, click here. For images of or relating to Vasko Popa, click here.

Tabitha Kenlon on E-readers as a help against deteriorating eyesight

    In a letter to The New York Times Book Review, Sunday, October 17, 2010, Tabitha Kenlon describes the help:

. . . As my retinas deteriorate, reading print, especially in direct sunlight is nearly impossible. E-readers, unlike print books, allow me to reverse contrast (to white lettering against a black background) and enlarge the text, so that I can read again. Far from killing books, my iPad has restored something I was on the verge of losing.

    For information about Tabitha Kenlon, click here.

Walter M. Cabot on the damages a habitually distracted life brings

    In 1911, Walter M. Cabot wrote: “Distraction unhappily, when overdone, distracts the whole man.” (He’d have been sad to know that practically all of life today consists of distractions.) He went on:

The unwelcome invasion of Europe by three American institutions - the “quick lunch,” the “American bar,” and, more recently, the “Coney Island,” or “Luna Park,” form of amusement -- supplies only too good evidence that there exists this unwholesome tendency in American life. The “quick lunch” is expressly for the people who are too hurried to take proper time for their food; the “bar,” for those who want sensation and nerve stimulation unadulterated; and the outdoor variety-show, for those who find that the quiet but more or less complex interests of scenery, literature, music, and painting put too much strain upon the attention and too little thrill into the tired nerves.
    This tendency -- I speak here, of course, of tendencies merely -- to neglect in our hurry the latent suggestions, the deeper meaning, the spiritual significance, the refreshment and beauty, that may be won from even the simplest and most practical aspects of existence, betrays itself in our treatment of both our play and our work.

    (Quoted from “The Place of Beauty in American Life,” by Walter M. Cabot, pg. 517 in the November 1911 issue of The Forum.)
    Walter Mason Cabot was a Harvard University professor. Now, Elaine Scarry is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Harvard University. To read about Elaine Scarry’s ideas on using art to encourage empathy, click here.

Virginia Woolf on the human soul

    The soul? Listen:

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each, a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown.

    (Quoted from page 24 of What Good Are the Arts?, by John Carey. Oxford University Press, 2006)
    For a brief biography of Virginia Woolf, click here. For images of or relating to Virginia Woolf, click here. For John Carey's homepage, click here.

Vassili Rozanov on the limited value of Christianity

    Christianity deals only with making the world better within the domain of the Ten Commandments. As Vassili Rozanov brought attention to 1909, most of what it takes to lead a satisfactory life lies outside of Christianity’s domain:

Alas, “love thy neighbor” offers no response to questions about the composition of light, the nature of chemical reactions or the law of the conservation of energy. Christianity, . . . increasingly reduced to moral truisms . . . which cannot help mankind resolve the great problems of hunger, poverty, toil or the economic system, . . . occupies only a tiny corner in contemporary civilization.

    (Quoted from page 99 of Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path, by Laura Engelstein, Cornell University Press, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Vassili Rozanov, click here. For information about Laura Engelstein, click here.

Eleanor Roosevelt on drawing power from a physical disability

    Beginning in 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt conducted a monthly department in the Ladies’ Home Journal, in which she answered readers’ questions. One was this:

    Do you feel that your husband would have been as truly great a man had he not been stricken, as he was, with infantile paralysis? Being physically handicapped myself, I am interested in learning whether you think an illness or infirmity can be instrumental in awakening powers that might otherwise have remained undeveloped.

    Her answer:

    I think it depends largely upon the individual’s strength of character and ability to use to good advantage whatever happens to him in life. In the case of my husband, he accepted infantile paralysis as a challenge. I never but once heard him complain, and never did he take the attitude that he was going to be a useless member of society. With that as a beginning, I think that the years of discipline and suffering which he went through made him the great individual that he became. He understood human suffering and he knew it could be overcome. He also knew that one must have physical and spiritual courage; and, if one had that, there was no situation that could not be met.

    (Quoted from page 48 of If You Ask Me, by Eleanor Roosevelt. Curtis Publishing Company, 1946)
    For a brief biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, click here. For images of or relating to Eleanor Roosevelt, click here.

Walt Whitman on how to connect to Nature

    Simply undress when out hiking where no one is around. Walt Whitman describes the therapeutic result:

A light south-west wind was blowing through the tree-tops. It was just the place and time for my Adamic air-bath and flesh-brushing from head to foot. So hanging clothes on a rail near by, keeping old broadbrim straw on head and easy shoes on feet, havn’t I had a good time the last two hours! First with the stiff-elastic bristles rasping arms, breast, sides, till they turn’d scarlet – then partially bathing in the clear waters of the running brook . . . stepping about barefooted every few minutes now and then in some neighbouring black ooze, for unctuous mud-bath to my feet . . .
    As I walk’d slowly over the grass, the sun shone out enough to show the shadow moving with me. Somehow I seem’d to get identity with each and every thing around me, in its condition. Nature was naked, and I was also.

    (Quoted from page 807 of Whitman: Poetry and Prose, by Walt Whitman. Library of America, 1982.)
    For a brief biography of Walt Whitman, click here. For images of or relating to Walt Whitman, click here.

Alexander Hewatt on the deadly combination of short-sightedness and greed

    The combination plagues all areas of life, and around 1780 Alexander Hewatt described its consequences in farming:

Like farmers often moving from place to place, the principal study with the planters is the art of making the largest profit for the present time, and if this end is obtained, it gives them little concern how much the land may be exhausted. . . . The richness of the soil, and the vast quantity of lands, have deceived many. . . . This will not be the case much longer, for lands will become scarce, and time and experience, by unfolding the nature of the soil . . . will teach them . . . to alter [their] careless manner of cultivation.

    A Sauntering side thought: marriages, lest they grow depleted, need careful continual cultivation.
    (The above is quoted from page 122 of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, by David R. Montgomery. University of California Press, 2007.)
    For a brief biography of Alexander Hewatt, click here. For a brief biography of David R. Montgomery, click here.
    Garrett Hardin made a career of telling people about the combination of short-sightedness and greed. For a brief biography of Garrett Hardin, or to read his famous essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," click here.