The Saunterer

John Muir naturalists on overpopulation

    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 in The Life of the Creative Spirit (H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001), and the following from pages 154-55 is an extract. Note that although in it I am speaking of a secular pantheistic God, and don’t as many of the religious do believe that an infinite supply of souls exists, all anxiously waiting to be brought down to Earth, and it's a crime for us not to breed them their ticket for the trip (baby bodies to hold them), what I write holds equally for those who believe in religion and its God (many of whom are the root cause of far-overpopulated Earth):

    John Muir naturalists believe that the rampant increase in our numbers should be reined in. The issue is not of physical wasting but of spiritual wasting. It has been estimated, perhaps accurately, that the lands and seas could feed ten times the present population. Multiply the earth’s area by the number of people a square mile can keep alive, and the figure is about eighty billion.
    Developers, taking glee in this target, are without sorrow that eighty billion on earth will so raze nature that the spirit of God will be starved to oblivion. Fifty billion will do the same. Twenty billion, the same. As the upper limit, there should be no more of us than can be spiritually nourished. Incidental with this, there will be ample food to go around.
    What of the possibility of a tradeoff between numbers of people and their per capita material consumption? Twenty billion existing frugally may have the impact on nature of six billion existing affluently. All the same, the possibility is irrelevant. Privacy is limiting. We need room to be in nature with none of our kind around.
    Eat an ice cream sundae in company and it tastes the same, but intruding human sounds and sights are unnatural blemishes on wilderness, spoiling the beholder’s spiritual taste. What is more, merely knowing that vast pristine spaces exist, as that the panda has widespread wild habitats and is thriving in its element on its innate terms, despite our never setting foot in China, is fundamental to keeping the spirit of God alive.
    What is the rush to release a deluge of babies? In timeless eternity, souls bear no hardship in waiting to come onto earth. By having the flow of births moderate, everybody will eventually come here, and the here will not be a paved-over, nature-scarred, solitude-scarce, God-denying place.

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

Richard Livingstone on why most leadership fails

    Although it’s been a good many years since Richard Livingstone wrote his plea for educating to give a sense of direction, it is as pressing now as then:

Indeed the history of mankind might be described by a cynic as a series of splendid expeditions towards the wrong goal or towards no goal at all, led by men who have all the gifts of leadership except a sense of direction, and every endowment for achieving their ends except the knowledge of ends worth achieving. We must not forget in our education this element, a sense of direction. We do forget it, if we are content that our schools should merely impart knowledge, develop and discipline the intelligence, train character in the narrow sense. They must also be places where the mind is enriched by the right visions and where the ends of life are learned.

    (Quoted from page 42 of Education for a World Adrift, one of two books comprising On Education, by Sir Richard Livingstone. Cambridge University Press, 1945.)
    For a brief biography of Richard Livingstone, click here.

Walter Benjamin on the nature of allegories

    Walter Benjamin, knowing that a good analogy, like a good allegory, is sharp edged, put it:

Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.

    (Quoted from page 180 of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, by Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings, and Brigid Doherty. Harvard University Press, 2008.)

    For a brief biography of Walter Benjamin, click here. For images of or relating to Walter Benjamin, click here. For images that remind us of what ruins are, click here.

Oscar Wilde on how art beats nature

    Pablo Picasso said that art is a lie that makes us see the truth. Oscar Wilde said, in effect, a painting of nature is more beautiful than nature itself:

CYRIL. Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes her effects from him?

VIVIAN. Certainly. Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of Art.
    You smile. Consider the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.
    Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold. And so, let us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere. She has done so already, indeed. That white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces it quite admirably. Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pisaros.
    Indeed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutely modern. Of course she is not always to be relied upon. The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position. Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.
    Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasised.
    Of course, I am quite ready to admit that Life very often commits the same error. She produces her false Renés and her sham Vautrins, just as Nature gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, and on another a more than questionable Rousseau. Still, Nature irritates one more when she does things of that kind. It seems so stupid, so obvious, so unnecessary. A false Vautrin might be delightful. A doubtful Cuyp is unbearable. However, I don't want to be too hard on Nature. I wish the Channel, especially at Hastings, did not look quite so often like a Henry Moore, grey pearl with yellow lights, but then, when Art is more varied, Nature will, no doubt, be more varied also. That she imitates Art, I don't think even her worst enemy would deny now. It is the one thing that keeps her in touch with civilised man.

    (Extracted from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying,” from Volume 7 of The Complete Writings of Oscar Wilde. The Nottingham Society, 1909. It comes to the Saunterer at secondhand through The Victorian Web.)
    To test Oscar Wilde’s claim that a pastoral scene produced by nature is unbearable compared to a real Cuyp, click here to see some real Cuyps.
    For a brief biography of Oscar Wilde, click here. For images of or relating to Oscar Wilde, click here. For the whole of "The Decay of Lying," click here.

Henry Miller on the lack of thinkers

    Henry Miller, by holding Picasso’s wit high, is right about the lack of thinkers – and though he doesn’t conclude more, that is a sad thing in everyday affairs, and a dangerous thing in political and economic life:

I sometimes feel sorry for Picasso although I know he is one of the great, great men in this world of ours. But I feel sorry that he is the slave or victim of his creation, that he’s a compulsive artist. They say he’s not happy unless he’s working. He can’t enjoy not working, as it were. But I must say one thing about him. To me everything he says has high wisdom, and it’s said beautifully and with wit. You can ask him about anything, even things he doesn’t know about, and you get a wonderful answer. Because that mind of his is turning over all the time, and it isn’t a mind that says, “I’ve been trained, I know, I’ve studied.” No, it’s a quick spontaneous sort of thinking. You see, I think that there are very few real thinkers in the world, that we are all sleepwalkers; we are not thinking, we are reacting all the time. We are telling what we heard, what we have borrowed from others. We have no thoughts of our own. But Picasso says things with originality and, even if they’re crazy, lopsided, topsy-turvy, it makes high sense to me.

    (Quoted from page 121 of My Life and Times, by Henry Miller. Playboy Press, 1971.)
    For a brief biography of Henry Miller, click here. For images of or relating to Henry Miller, click here. To see and hear a minute of Henry Miller describing his discovery and love of Big Sur, click here.

Longing for the simpler times

    Sauntering the other day in the Utah State University library brought us a book on the history of ballooning, in which is a report from The Edinburgh Advertiser, September 24, 1784, of an early manned balloon flight. As we read, we were longing for the simpler times:

The outcries of the peasants invited us to return; I maneuvered in consequence, and we accosted them at about the height of one hundred feet. Some were clapping their hands together, others kneeling, and the greater part of them running away terrified. The most courageous contemplated us, and exclaimed, “Are you men or gods? - What are you? - Make yourselves known!” We replied, we are men like you, and here is a proof of it. We took off our coats, and threw them down; they seized upon them eagerly, and began to divide them in pieces.

    (Quoted from Ballooning: A History, 1782 - 1900, by S. L. Kotar and J. E. Gessler. Mcfarland & Co., 2011.)
    For S. L. Kotar on Linkedin, click here.

Shakespeare on natural settings

    Settings are everything. A great thing in its natural setting is a poor thing in an unnatural setting. Hang a Monet and a Cézanne on a wire fence at a NASCAR race. . . . See a lion penned in a zoo. . . . Hike in wilderness with gunfire cruelty in the distance. . . . -- Experience wonderful things out of their natural settings, and no longer are they wonderful. Portia tells Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice:

The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark
When neither is attended, and I think
The nightingale if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season seasoned are
To their right praise and true perfection!

    (Quoted from page 227 of Flyaway: How a Wild Bird Rehabber Sought Adventure and Found Her Wings, by Suzie Gilbert. Harper Perennial, 2010.)

    For a brief biography of Suzie Gilbert, click here.

Sigmund Freud on why who we feel we are does not change

    Ever wonder why you feel you are the same person today that you were years ago, even when a child? Freud answers by comparing the mind and Rome:

Let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past -- an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.

    (Quoted from page 45 of Freud the Man: an intellectual biography, by Lydia Flem. Other Press, 2003.)
    For a brief biography of Sigmund Freud, click here. For some images of or relating to Sigmund Freud, click here.
    For a brief biography of Lydia Flem, click here. For some images of or relating to Lydia Flem, click here.

Bob Berman on what causes smell

    In the Saunterer’s mail the other day was the July, 2011, issue of Astronomy. Half of the reason we subscribe is for Bob Berman’s column. This month’s was on “The Smell of Space.” Here’s an extract:

To have any smell at all, atoms must cling to our nasal membranes. This is why large molecules like tetracycline or DNA have no odor – they’re too big to stick to our noses. But truly large molecules are rare beyond Earth, so most celestial objects would indeed have some sort of scent. Unfortunately, the universe does not smell like roses. Parts of the solar system generate foul substances. Io’s volcanoes spew out putrid sulfur dioxide. Jupiter’s environment is worse than a college dorm. Uranus and Neptune are rife with ammonia. No, you don’t want to go around sniffing the solar system.
    Even the Moon may stink. When Michael Collins received Apollo 11's samples, the containers had lots of lunar dust on them, which wafted into the command module. Collins said it smelled awful.

    For a brief biography of Bob Berman, click here. For some images of or relating to Bob Berman, click here.

Amy Lowell on lilacs and New England

    Louis Untermeyer said that of all of Amy Lowell’s poems she liked “Lilacs” best. I can feel why -- near its end are these lines:
               
Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England,
Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England,
Lilac in me because I am New England,
Because my roots are in it,
Because my leaves are of it,
Because my flowers are for it,
Because it is my country
And I speak to it of itself.

    (Louis Untermeyer is quoted from page xxvii of The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1955.)
    For a brief biography of Amy Lowell, click here. For some images of or relating to Amy Lowell, click here. For a bit about lilacs, and some pictures, click here. For a brief biography of Louis Untermeyer, click here.