The Saunterer

Peter Medawar on hard thinking and soft thinking

    Hard thinking is an excellence, soft thinking is hot air. Nobel winner Peter Medawar explains why:

Hard thinking is thinking about particulars or thinking in terms of language that can convey a clear and precise meaning to other people; putting forward ideas which can be tested, which can be the subject of critical examination; statements that make an intellectual appeal as opposed to a visceral appeal – if you admit the distinction. Soft thinking is thinking that makes an appeal to or through the emotions; which gives one a nice cosy feeling inside; which attempts to persuade one of what ought to be intellectual truths by non-intellectual methods.

    (Quoted from page 4 of The Threat and the Glory: Reflections on Science and Scientists, by Peter Medawar. HarperCollins, 1990.)
    For a brief biography of Peter Medawar, click here. For images of or relating to Peter Medawar, click here.

William of Auvergne on a way of making a beautiful thing ugly

    A beautiful thing in one place will be ugly in an incompatible place. William of Auvergne illustrated this with faces, but it is as true of patches of wilderness misplaced among freeways:

Redness is in itself pleasant-looking and is beauty; if, however, it were in that part of the eye which should be white, it would disfigure the eye. . . . The eye is in itself shapely and beautiful . . . but only when it is in its proper and rightful place. If, however, it were where the ear is, or in the middle of the face, that is, in an inappropriate place, then it would make the same face ugly.

    (Quoted from page 17 of Plain Ugly: The unattractive body in early modern culture, by Naomi Baker. Manchester University Press, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of William of Auvergne, click here. For some personal details of Naomi Baker, click here.

Antonia Fraser on the “Bambi moment”of losing a loved one

    Harold Pinter was her loved one, and her sad moment this:

About twenty past seven I was sitting reading Tolstoy’s Resurrection by Harold’s bedside. He was breathing but with a strong rattling sound. The nurses were outside. The children and grandchildren had dispersed for Christmas. I was alone in the room. I was happy like that. Suddenly the rattling stopped. Harold opened his black eyes very wide, almost staring, although he didn’t respond when I spoke to him as before: ‘It’s me, Antonia, who loves you.’ Then he went quite tense, his whole body. Finally he went still and silent.
    I leant forward and found no breath. He looked white and dead. I sat for a while. Then I kissed him. His dear body was already quite cool. Must you go? Yes, it was time. Before I left the room, after another, last kiss, I said: ‘Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing you to your rest.’

    Equal feelings enter us when the beloved is a pet.
    (Quoted from page 328 of Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter, by Antonia Fraser. Doubleday, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Antonia Fraser, click here. For images of or relating to Antonia Fraser, click here. For a brief biography of Harold Pinter, click here. For images of or relating to Harold Pinter, click here.

Stephen Crane on all that matters is someone to love

Should the Wide World Roll Away, by Stephen Crane:

Should the wide world roll away,
Leaving black terror,
Limitless night,
Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand
Would be to me essential,
If thou and thy white arms were there,
And the fall to doom a long way.

    (Poem from page 31 of A Stephen Crane Encyclopedia, by Stanley Wertheim. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997.)
    For a brief biography of Stephen Crane, click here. For images of or relating to Stephen Crane, click here.

Blaise Pascal on thought as a means of comfort

    The next time you are alone below a starry sky, try Blaise Pascal’s line of thought:

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see –- engulfed in an infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
   
    He goes on of how his ability to think saves him:

It is not in space that I should look to find my dignity, but rather in the ordering of my thought. I would gain nothing by owning territories: in point of space the universe embraces me and swallows me up like a mere point; in thought, I embrace the universe.

    (Quoted from page 131 of Foundations of Biology, by William D. McElroy and Carl P. Swanson, Prentice-Hall, 1964.)
    For biographic words about Blaise Pascal, click here. For images of or relating to Blaise Pascal, click here.)

Isak Dinesen on living life over

    Would you want to live your life again from its beginning? Some would say yes, for the chance to change it. But the fortunate, I believe, are those who would say yes because they would not want to change it, for it has been perfect enough, worth a second exact playing, revisiting moments they mentally rushed over the first time. Something Isak Dinesen wrote may help you decide:

An old lady sat in a party and talked of her life. She declared that she would like to live it all over again, and held this fact to prove that she had lived wisely. I thought: Yes her life has been the sort of life that should really be taken twice before you can say that you have had it. An arietta you can take da capo, but not a whole piece of music, – not a symphony and not a five-act tragedy either. If it is taken over again it is because it has not gone as it ought to have gone.
    My life, I will not let you go except you bless me, but then I will let you go.

    (Quoted from “I Will Not Let Thee Go Except Thou Bless Me,” from page 285 of Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen, Modern Library Edition, 1992.)
    For a brief biography of Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), click here. For images of or relating to Isak Dinesen, click here.

Gustave Flaubert on the highest achievement of art

    What is art for? Gustave Flaubert answered with this:

What seems to me the highest and most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, nor to arouse our lust or rage, but to do what nature does -- that is, to set us dreaming. The most beautiful works have this quality. They are serene in aspect, inscrutable. The means by which they act on us are various: they are as motionless as cliffs, stormy as the ocean, leafy, green and murmurous as forests, forlorn as the desert, blue as the sky.

    (Quoted from page 286 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of Gustave Flaubert, click here. For images of or relating to Gustave Flaubert, click here.

Martin Amis on religious belief

    The Saunterer has long been puzzled why anyone would admit to belonging to a religion. It’s admitting one is a member of a club that works to ruin Planet Earth by constantly pushing overbreeding. Apparently Martin Amis thinks the same:

Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

    (Quoted from page “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd," by Martin Amis. The Guardian, Saturday, 1 June 2002.)

    For a brief biography of Martin Amis, click here. For images of or relating to Martin Amis, click here.

Robert Frost on prophets and poets

    The one, Robert Frost believed, is the agent of “beware”; the other, the agent of “be aware:

The PROPHET and the poet seem to me to go together, somewhat. The prophet is the great bewarer. Bewareness is his life, telling the king what to beware.
    And the poet, his great thing is awareness – awareness, luxuriating in what God gives us; luxuriating in it all, the spiritual, the mental, the physical.

    (Quoted from page 115 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.

Walter Lippmann on news reporting

    Even when a reporter writes with a straight tongue, the words are necessarily forked. Walter Lippmann reminds us why:

For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another tomorrow. There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out the same idea in the reader’s mind as it did in the reporter’s.

    (Quoted from page 66 of Public Opinion, by Walter Lippmann. Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1922.)
    For a brief biography of Walter Lippmann, click here. For images of or relating to Walter Lippmann, click here.