The Saunterer

Edward Arthur Milne on our true measure

Edward Arthur Milne, writing to the physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, popularly known as Chandra, said this:

Posterity, in time, will give us all our true measure and assign to each of us our due and humble place. He really succeeds who perseveres according to his lights, unaffected by fortune, good or bad. And it is well to remember there is no correlation between the judgment of posterity and the judgment of contemporaries.

    (Quoted from “Chandra: A biographical portrait,” page 43 in Physics Today, December 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Edward Arthur Milne, click here. For images of or relating to Edward Arthur Milne, click here. For a brief biography of Chandra, click here. For images of or relating to Chandra, click here.

William Speirs Bruce on loneliness

William Speirs Bruce, member of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, 1902-04, realized what did and did not cause loneliness, later writing:

Isolation among the fastnesses of nature does not bring loneliness: that can perhaps be only felt in its full extreme among the busy haunts of men.

    (Quoted from page 138 of Fraser’s Penguins: A journey to the future in Antarctica, by Fen Montaigne. Henry Holt and Company, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of William Speirs Bruce, click here. For a brief biography of Fen Montaigne, click here. To see a five-minute clip of Fen Montaigne going toe-to-toe on global warming with Stephen Colbert, click here.

Romulus Linney on how creative work discovers its creator’s core

    In his obituary in The New York Times (1/17/2011), playwright Romulus Linney is quoted as saying a truth about every devoted creator:

When all this is over, my writing will add up to the sum total of me. The choices I make with my writing have a lot to do with myself as an unfolding personality, so that in the end your writing is really your destiny. It’s a question of finding that central thing that’s yours to say and yours alone.

    For a brief biography of Romulus Linney, click here. For images of or relating to Romulus Linney, click here.

Elizabeth Bishop on the discovery of self

    Think back. How old were you, and where were you, when you first became conscious of your own identity, aware that you were more than a selfless window on the world? Elizabeth Bishop tells of her experience:

After New Year’s, Aunt Jenny had to go to the dentist, and asked me to go with her. She left me in the waiting room, and gave me a copy of the National Geographic to look at. It was still getting dark early, and the room had grown very dark. There was a big yellow lamp in one corner, a table with magazines, and an overhead chandelier of sorts. There were others waiting, two men and a plump middle-aged lady, all bundled up. I looked at the magazine cover – I could read most of the words – shiny, glazed, yellow and white. The black letters said: FEBRUARY 1918. A feeling of absolute and utter desolation came over me. I felt . . . myself. In a few days it would be my seventh birthday. I felt I, I, I, and looked at the three strangers in panic. I was one of them too, inside my scabby body and wheezing lungs. “You’re in for it now,” something said. How had I got tricked into such a false position? I would be like that woman opposite who smiled at me so falsely every once in a while. The awful sensation passed, then it came back again. “You are you,” something said. “How strange you are, inside looking out. You are not Beppo, or the chestnut tree, or Emma, you are you and you are going to be you forever.” It was like coasting downhill, this thought, only much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree. Why was I a human being?

    (Quoted from page 32 of Elizabeth Bishop: The Collected Prose. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984)
    For a brief biography of Elizabeth Bishop, click here. For images of or relating to Elizabeth Bishop, click here.

John Cowper Powys on the spiritual

    A good definition of spirituality, in the worldly sense, is rooted in John Cowper Powys remark:

When, on that great flight of steps at Rome leading up from the Piazza del Spagna to the Pincian Hill, I suddenly got an ecstacy of mysterious exultation, in which I said to myself, “Let me pass and perish, as long as this magical stream of life, so noble in its heroic continuity, still goes on!” What I really did was to sink my own solitary personality in the innumerable personalities of all men and women who for generations had gone up and down those historic steps.

    (Quoted from page 322 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of John Cowper Powys, click here. For images of or relating to John Cowper Powys, click here. For images of the Piazza del Spagna, click here.

Loren Eiseley on why harming animals is wrong

    There are many reasons for not disturbing animals. The one you are about to read is little known. It is that humans and animals share similar and difficult evolutionary pasts, and hence we should be empathetic toward animals, as their struggle and discomfort to survive has been like ours. What Loren Eiseley says invites deep reflection:

Many years ago, as a solitary youth much given to wandering, I set forth on a sullen November day for a long walk that would end among the fallen stones of a forgotten pioneer cemetery on the High Plains. The weather was threatening, and only an unusual restlessness drove me into the endeavor. Snow was on the ground and deepening by the hour. There was a rising wind of blizzard proportions sweeping the land.
    Late in a snow-filled twilight, I reached the cemetery. The community that placed it there had long vanished. Frost and snow, season by season, had cracked and shattered the flat, illegible stones till none remained upright. It was as though I, the last living man, stood freezing among the dead. I leaned across a post and wiped the snow from my eyes.
    It was then I saw him - the only other living thing in that bleak countryside. We looked at each other. We had both come across a way so immense that neither my immediate journey nor his seemed of the slightest importance. We had each passed over some immeasurably greater distance, but whatever the word we had carried, it had been forgotten between us.
    He was nothing more than a western jack rabbit, and his ribs were gaunt with hunger beneath his skin. Only the storm contained us equally. That shrinking, long-eared animal, cowering beside a slab in an abandoned graveyard, helplessly expected the flash of momentary death, but it did not run. And I, with the rifle so frequently carried in that day and time, I also stood while the storm - a real blizzard now - raged over and between us, but I did not fire.
    We both had a fatal power to multiple, the thought flashed on me, and the planet was not large. Why was it so, and what was the message that somehow seemed spoken from a long way off beyond an ice field, out of all possible human hearing?
    The snow lifted and swirled between us once more. He was going to need that broken bit of shelter. The temperature was falling. For his frightened, trembling body in all the million years between us, there had been no sorcerer’s aid. He had survived alone in the blue nights and the howling dark. He was thin and crumpled and small.
    Step by step I drew back among the dead and their fallen stones. Somewhere, if I could follow the fence lines, there would be a fire for me. For a moment I could see his ears nervously recording my movements, but I was a wraith now, fading in the storm.
    “There are so few tracks in all this snow,” someone had once protested. It was true. I stood in the falling flakes and pondered it. Even my own tracks were filling. But out of such desolation had arisen man, the desolate. In essence, he is a belated phantom of the angry winter. He carried, and perhaps will always carry, its cruelty and its springtime in his heart.

    (Quoted from page 118 of The Unexpected Universe, by Loren Eiseley. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964.)
    For a brief biography of Loren Eiseley, click here. For images of or relating to Loren Eiseley, click here.

Primo Levi on congenial incompetents

    What Primo Levi points out applies to more than smooth politicians:

Sympathy is often a means of getting away with incompetence. Italy is full of attractive people who are very simpatico and don’t know their trade.

    (Quoted from page 216 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of Primo Levi, click here. For one of his obituaries, click here. For images of or relating to Primo Levi, click here.

Anne McClintock on cleanliness as a means of class distinction

    . . . or how the Victorians and Edwardians gave rise to the money-making soap industry, as Anne McClintock explains:

Soap did not flourish when imperial ebullience was at its peak. It emerged commercially during an era of impending crisis and social calamity, serving to preserve, through fetish ritual, the uncertain boundaries of class, gender and race identity in a social order felt to be threatened by the fetid effluvia of the slums, the belching smoke of industry, social agitation, economic upheaval, imperial competition, and anticolonial resistance. Soap offered the promise of spiritual salvation and regeneration through commodity consumption, a regime of domestic hygiene that could restore the threatened potency of the imperial body politic.

    (Quoted from page 211 of Imperial Leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest, by Anne McClintock. Routledge, 1995.)
    For a brief biography of Anne McClintock, click here. For images of or relating to Anne McClintock, click here.

Octavio Paz on men’s love of women

    Is there anything approaching a universal truth in Octavio Paz’s view? –

Everything is against it: morals, classes, laws, races, and the very lovers themselves. Woman has always been for man the “other,” his opposite and complement. If one part of our being longs to unite itself with her, another part - equally imperious - rejects and excludes her. Woman is an object sometimes precious, sometimes harmful, but always different. By converting her into an object and by subjecting her to deformations which serve his interests, his vanity, his anguish and his very love dictate, man changes her into an instrument, a means of achieving survival. Woman is an idol, a goddess, a mother, a witch or a muse, as Simone de Beauvoir has said, but she can never be her own self. Thus our erotic relationships are vitiated at the outset, are poisoned at the root.

    (Quoted from page 23 of A Poetics of Being-Two: Irigaray’s Ethics and Post-Symbolist Poetry, by M. F. Simone Roberts. Lexington Books, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of Octavio Paz, click here. For images of or relating to Octavio Paz, click here. For a brief biography of Luce Irigaray, click here.

Conrad Aiken on the question of arranging in art and literature

    Conrad Aiken wrote in a letter:

Is there any getting away from the fact that even the slightest step in literature, from the less to the more “poetic” is a step from the less to the more “arranged?” “Arranged” in the richest sense -- embracing selection, order, emphasis. To “arrange” at all is, if you like, artificial: but it is an essential of all art. . . . I quite agree with you that the “less arranged” has its own cool sort of charm, adapts itself admirably to certain moods more colloquial and less intense; but I think its range is, in comparison with that of the “more arranged,” infinitely small -- Theoretically, one should seek in a work of art the utmost complexity, or arrangement, consistent with brevity -- should one not?

    (Quoted from page 263 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of Conrad Aiken, click here. For images of or relating to Conrad Aiken, click here.