The Saunterer

The Saunterer is away finding comfort in art museums

    I’ll return to posting on April 13. Until then - for a list of more than eight hundred past posts, click here.
    And try entering into Google the two terms Romesburg and Saunterer, and add a third that interests you, such as art, education, science, confidence, animals, spirit, nature, wilderness, music, poetry. . . .

H. E. Bates on the spirit of a wood

    The Oxford English Dictionary has for wood -- “a collection of trees growing more or less thickly together (esp. naturally, as distinguished from a plantation), of considerable extent, usually larger than a grove or copse (but including these), and smaller than a forest; a piece of ground covered with trees, with or without undergrowth.”
    A plantation is without spirit. We can plant the trees, but we can’t plant the spirit, for the spirit comes from planting as we can’t plant, as only wild Nature can. Listen to H. E. Bates:

[The wood] is a contrast of power and delicacy, space and littleness. Yet all the time, throughout the year, it has its own special atmosphere. You have only to walk a yard under the trees in order to become under its spell, to sense the change, the sometimes startling, sometimes soothing difference in the spirit of the air. There is some precious quality brought about by the close gathering together of trees into a wood that defies analysis. The mere planting together of trees will not create it. An avenue will not do it, nor a park, nor an orchard. There must, it seems, be a closeness, an untidiness, a wildness. There must be all kinds of trees, all kinds of flowers and creatures, a conflicting and yet harmonious pooling of life. A wood planted, as fox-coverts often are, with one kind of tree, has no life at all. It stands dead as a wood of hop-poles. It is the wood of little and great trees, of flowers and water, of squirrel and fox, bird and badger, of light and shadowiness, that has the everlasting vibration of life in it, that special rare atmosphere, at once soothing and refreshing and somehow elevating, that only the best of woods can give.

    (Quoted from page 353 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of H. E. Bates, click here. For images of or relating to H. E. Bates, click here.

Bertrand Russell on the main thing in marriage

    This is Bertrand Russell writing to a Judge Lindsey:

My own view is that the state and the law should take no notice of sexual relations apart from children, and that no marriage ceremony should be valid unless accompanied by a medical certificate of the woman’s pregnancy. But when once there are children, I think that divorce should be avoided except for very grave cause. I should not regard physical infidelity as a very grave cause and should teach people that it is to be expected and tolerated, but should not involve the begetting of illegitimate children - not because illegitimacy is bad in itself, but because a home with two parents is best for children. I do not feel that the main thing in marriage is the feeling of the parents for each other; the main thing is cooperation in bearing children.

    (Quoted from page 298 of A Preface to Morals, by Walter Lippman. The Macmillan Company, 1929.)
    For a brief biography of Bertrand Russell, click here. For images of or relating to Bertrand Russell, click here.
    For a brief biography of Walter Lippmann, click here. For images of or relating to Walter Lippmann, click here.

John Muir on commercial developers

    John Muir naturalists are those with John Muir’s beliefs, as extracted from his collected writings and applied to today. I have spoken for them on pages 156-57 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001:

The John Muir naturalist differs with possibly all commercial developers, and with plenty of economists, businesspeople, politicians, administrators, and planners who line up in the developer’s camp. Where the developer thinks, “How stupid to exclude bulldozers, cement mixers, oil wells, and open pit mines from millions of square miles,” the John Muir naturalist thinks, “How blasphemous of humanity’s spiritual needs to skin the land for commerce, beyond a modest degree, and not keep the full range of species and wildernesses, in rich abundance.”
    To developers, the spiritual loss is nothing. Nature is grist for their money mill. They see wilderness as a nuisance squatting on land they eye for expansion. Woodlands are for clearing and building or farming on. Tigers are to shoot, whales to harpoon, with the toucan’s jungle home ideally put into coffee plantations. And the starry sky takes distant second place to the outdoor lighting that dims it from view.
    The developer claims that the time when development stops making amends for the nature it obliterates lies nowhere near -- that it is needless to worry while woods and under-story life are sheared off for streets, houses, roads, and arable land, and as air, water, and land receive waste chemicals of factories, power stations, and mines, feedlots and farms, exhaust pipes and ruptured oil tankers.
    The developer backs the claim with a number, the benefit-to-cost ratio. Economic analysts estimate the dollars that foreseeable industrial and residential developments may bring to the world. Against this, they estimate and quantify the impacts to health -- so many wheezes, so many hacking coughs, so many lymphatic cancers resulting in lost wages and doctor bills. The net result, the benefit-to-cost ratio, shines a green light. Development, society is told, can be safely extended.
    The John Muir naturalist sighs. The analysts widely understate the costs. They leave out that development denatures the earth, blighting the spirit before the body is endangered. The benefit-to-cost ratio actually tips the other way. The light really shines red.
    John Muir naturalists, lest they be wrongly pictured, are not categorically against development. They welcome it, provided it and further development it may open the way for do not intrude on the health of the spirit. And where development already exists, they favor redevelopment, not destroying more of nature.

    For a brief biography of John Muir, click here. For images of or relating to John Muir, click here.

Thomas Mann on analysis

    Here in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is Settembrini instructing his protégé:

Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good, in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority. . . . But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death, with which it may well belong – allied to the grave and its unsavory anatomy.

    (Quoted from page 63 of Resisting History: Religious Transcendence and the Invention of the Unconscious, by Rhodri Hayward. Manchester University Press, 2007.)
    For a brief biography of Thomas Mann, click here. For images of or relating to Thomas Mann, click here. For a brief biography of Rhodri Hayward, click here.

Cicero on the value of long-term memory

    Without memory, there is no sensing human spirit, and so, says Cicero, memory matters:

For what is the life of man, if memory of the past be not inwoven in the life of later times?

    (From the front matter of Value of the Classics, Princeton University Press, 1917.)
    For a brief biography of Cicero, click here. For images of or relating to Cicero, click here.

Carlos Montoya on playing flamenco guitar

    Carlos Montoya was asked, “Do you know any players other than Spanish who play good flamenco? Could any other but a gypsy play in true flamenco spirit?” He answered:

They are able to play with the technique of the Flamenco, but lack the true style; they do not give the ‘crema del Flamenco,’ nor do they have the ‘aire Flamenco’ (style). Often, even good Flamenco guitarists have bad nights, and sometimes one has to go night after night to hear Flamenco in order to strike one of those tremendously thrilling and satisfying moments. This may be due to the necessity of the guitarist’s feeling in the right mood or a sympathetic atmosphere.

    (Quoted from “Interview with Carlos Montoya,” by Gregory d’Alessio, pages 24-25, The Guitar Review, No. 19, 1956. The articles in this issue are devoted to Flamenco.)
    For a short video of Carlos Montoya playing Flamenco, click here. For a brief biography of Carlos Montoya, click here. For images of or relating to Carlos Montoya, click here.

The Club of Rome on democracy’s limit

    The world can’t have both democracy and overpopulation. Overpopulation produces “underdemocracy.” One has to go – and religion, doing its best to promote overpopulation, will in the end murder democracy. In the words of the Club of Rome:

Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though it may sound, democracy is not longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.

    (Quoted from page 71 of The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome. Orient Longman Limited, 1993.)
    For images of or relating to overpopulation, click here. For the Club of Rome’s website, click here.

Actress Jane Russell’s philosophy of life

    Her philosophy was a good one for whipping thoughts of suiciding. Something beyond her, she wrote, was always there,

telling me that if I could just hold tough a little longer, I’d find myself around one more dark corner, see one more spot of light and have one more drop of pure joy in this journey called life.

    (Quoted from “Jane Russell, Sultry Star of 1940s and ‘50s, Dies at 89,” The New York Times, March 1, 2011.)

    For a brief biography of Jane Russell, click here. For images of or relating to Jane Russell, click here.

William O. Douglas on mountaineering

    If you’ve wondered why people climb mountains, William O. Douglas has an answer:

The struggle of man against man produces jealousy, deceit, frustration, bitterness, hate. The struggle of man against the mountains is different. Man then bows before Something that is bigger then he. When he does that, he finds serenity and humility, and dignity too.

    (Quoted from page 18 of Of Men and Mountains, by William O. Douglas. Globe Pequot, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of William O. Douglas, click here. For images of or relating to William O. Douglas, click here.