The Saunterer

Mark Twain on where our lives are located

    If you make an analysis of it (as Mark Twain did), what you call your life is almost entirely the ideas you privately and almost constantly think about. The show’s in your head, ideas being born, being misplaced, being forgotten, all of which is unknowable to others, and inexpressible. What, then, is there for you to miss when you die? Mainly, the thing that is the biggest time consumer of your existence: your private show in your head.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. . . . His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world . . . and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! A mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden – it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. . . .

    (Quoted from “Riverboat Rambler,” by Garrison Keillor, a review of Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, University of California Press, 2010. In: The New York Times Book Review. Sunday, December 19, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Mark Twain, click here. For images of or relating to Mark Twain, click here. For a brief biography of Garrison Keillor, click here.

Jeremy Nathans on why we should applaud China’s one-child policy

    Mothers around the world are totally selfish when they have more than two children. For, today’s mothers are speeding the coming of the day when their personal multiple-child policy has caused future mothers to be restricted by law to having one child in total, or even none. Soon the whole world will be China-like, which Jeremy Nathans describes:

In 1960, China had a population of 646 million; in 1980, it was 981 million; by 2000, it had grown to 1.267 billion; and in 2010, it is projected to be 1.354 billion. In the past 50 years, China’s population has increased by an amount equal to or greater than the population of all of Central and North America (~500 million). Without defending or criticizing the one-child policy, we can at least recognize that it stands as a brave attempt by the inhabitants of an overcrowded planet to create a more livable future for our children and grandchildren.

    (Quoted from “China’s Plan Flawed But Courageous,” by Jeremy Nathans. Science, vol. 330, 17 December 2010, p. 1625.)
    For Jeremy Nathans’ home page, click here. For images of or relating to Jeremy Nathans, click here.

Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards on living on the edge

    There is a real chance that overpopulation is going to reduce us all to enduring on the edge, like animals and plants in the Arctic, as weeds do, a condition V. C. Wynne-Edwards described:

Except perhaps among carnivorous predators, competition between individuals for space and nourishment seems commonly to be reduced to a low level among members of the arctic flora and fauna; they live somewhat like weeds, the secret of whose success lies in their ability to exploit transient conditions while they last, in the absence of serious competition. In the Arctic the struggle for existence is overwhelmingly against the physical world, now sufficiently benign, now below the threshold for successful reproduction, and now so violent that life is swept away, after which recolonization alone can restore it.

    If our recolonization comes, don’t bet we’ll finally have learned our lesson.
    (From page 50 of Evolutionary Restraints: The Contentious History of Group Selection, by Mark E. Borrello. The University of Chicago Press, 2010)
    For a brief biography of Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards, click here. For images of or relating to Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards, click here. For a brief biography of Mark E. Borrello, click here. For images of or relating to Mark E. Borrello, click here.

The language of Inca stonework

    Inca stonework is wordless writing that tells of the Incas’ duty to excellence:

The Spanish brought writing. The Inkas did not know writing; they knew stonework.

    (Quote attributed to Don Luis, Sonqo, Peru, on page 65 of A Culture of Stone: Inka perspectives on rock, by Carolyn Dean. Duke University Press, 2010.)
    For images of Inca stonework, click here. Carolyn Dean is Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. For her home page, click here. For a description of her book, A Culture of Stone, click here.

Walter Benjamin on what we call progress

    Walter Benjamin referred to Paul Klee’s painting "Angelus Novus" as showing:

. . . An angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise: it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

    (Quoted from page 178 of Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, by Slavoj Zizek. Picador, 2008.)
    For a brief biography of Walter Benjamin, click here. For images of or relating to Walter Benjamin, click here. For an image of Paul Klee’s "Angelus Novus," click here. For a brief biography of Slavoj Zizek, click here.

Charles Lindbergh on finding the core of how to live one’s life

    A young Charles Lindbergh spent the night next to his plane on the Bonneville Salt Flats, planning how to make his soul:

The trend I decided to set that night on the Salt Lake desert involved more subtle problems than merely setting a trend to combat fear. I had no clear-cut objective. I was trying to combine two seemingly contrary objectives, to be part of the civilization of my time but not to be bound by its conventional superfluity. . . . I would cut down on all these activities. I would eliminate the superfluous, simplify my life, and let the trend develop. One thing seemed certain. The key to appreciation, to a balanced being, to joy and grace, lay in a basic simplicity beneath the elaborate garments of culture one chose or was forced to wear. I would reduce my obligations, give away some of my possessions, concentrate my business and social interests. I would take advantage of the civilization into which I had been born without losing the basic qualities of life from which all works of men must emanate.
    The important thing was the core. But what was it: how much of it was physical, how much mental, how much spiritual? How could one reach one’s core?

    (Quoted from page 179 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of Charles Lindbergh, click here. For images of or relating to Charles Lindbergh, click here.

Vladimir Horowitz on how to play the piano

    In the December 8 , 2010, The Wall Street Journal, pianist Byron Janis, who was Vladimir Horowitz’s student as a child, passed on pointers that Horowitz gave him. They apply to playing all instruments, and to all musicians, and generally to painting, dance, poetry – all the arts:

    You must make the piano sing more. And colors, colors – you paint well in watercolors but must paint more in oils.
    You can be a big Romantic pianist and at first, you will exaggerate. Don’t worry. It’s easier to subtract from something good than to add.
    And on the temptation to imitate:
    You want to be a first Janis, not a second Horowitz.
   
    For a brief biography of Vladimir Horowitz, click here. For images of or relating to Vladimir Horowitz, click here. For a brief biography of Byron Janis, click here. For images of or relating to Byron Janis, click here.

Ciaran Carson on how to know when people are telling lies

    Ciaran Carson’s test depends on the language the apparent liar uses:

You know how you know when someone’s telling lies? you said. They get their story right every time, down to the last word. Whereas when they tell the truth it’s never the same twice. They reformulate.

    (From page 213 of On Balance, by Adam Phillips. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Ciaran Carson, click here. For images of or relating to Ciaran Carson, click here. For a brief biography of Adam Phillips, click here. For a photo and an article on Adam Phillips, click here.

Ellen Sturgis Hooper on the role of dreams

    Ellen Sturgis Hooper’s poem, I Slept, and Dreamed that Life was Beauty, tells of dreams’ role:

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, sad heart, courageously,
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A noonday light and truth to thee.

    (Quoted from page 524 of Transcendentalism: A Reader, by Joel Myerson. Oxford University Press, 2000. The poem first appeared in The Dial, July 1840, p. 123.)
    For a brief biography of Ellen Sturgis Hooper, click here. For images of or relating to Ellen Sturgis Hooper, click here. For a brief biography of Joel Myerson, click here.

Pope Benedict XVI on using condoms

    A front page article in the November 24, 2010, The New York Times is headlined, "Halting Disease Can Outweigh Ban on Condoms, Pope Signals." Reading on distressed us, as we saw that Benedict is thinking of the wrong disease, AIDS. The disease he and his line of predecessors should have addressed but actively sought to encourage is exponentially increasing overpopulation, which has forever wiped out most of wild nature.
    The popes are suicidal dictators; Earth, a vast Jonestown. As John Fowles put it,

It is not Christ who is crucified now, it is the tree itself, and on the bitter gallows of human greed and stupidity. Only suicidal morons, in a world already choking with death, would destroy the best natural air conditioner creation affords. . . .

    For a brief biography of Pope Benedict XVI, click here. For a brief biography of John Fowles, click here.