The Saunterer

John Aubrey on how geology and soil types can affect human character

    In the seventeenth century, John Aubrey wrote of differences between people living on chalk soils and those living on clay lands:

In North Wiltshire, and like the vale of Gloucestershire (a dirty clayey country) the Indigenae, or Aborigines, speake drawling; they are phlegmatique, skins pale and livid, slow and dull, heavy of spirit; hereabout is but little tillage or hard labour, they only milke the cowes and make cheese; they feed chiefly on milke meates, which cools their brains too much, and hurts their inventions. These circumstances make them melancholy, contemplative, and malicious; by consequence whereof come more law suites out of North Wilts, at least double to the Southern parts. And by the same reason they are generally more apt to be fanatiques: their persons are generally plump and feggy: gallipot eies, and some black: but they are generally handsome enough. . . . On the downes, sc. the south part where ‘tis all upon tillage, and where the shepherds labour hard, their flesh is hard, their bodies strong: being weary after hard labour, they have not leisure to read and contemplate of religion, but goe to bed to their rest, to rise betime the next morning to their labour.

    (Quoted from page 45 of English Houses 1300 -- 1800: Vernacular Architecture, Social Life, by Matthew Johnson. Longman, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of John Aubrey, click here. For a brief biography of Matthew Johnson, click here.

Shel Silverstein on teaching children philosophy

    One way to teach children philosophy is with poetry. And liberal use of the language helps, as Shel Silverstein proves in:

“Yesees and Noees”

The Yesees said yes to anything
That anyone suggested.
The Noees said no to everything
Unless it was proven and tested.
So the Yesees all died of much too much
And the Noees all died of fright,
But somehow I think the Thinkforyourselfees
All came out all right.

    (Quoted from August 21, 2011, issue of The New York Times Book Review review of Every Thing On It: Poems and Drawings by Shel Silverstein. HarperCollins, 2011)

    For a brief biography of Shel Silverstein, click here. For images of or relating to Shel Silverstein, click here. To see the Amazon.com page for Every Thing On It, click here.

Peter Atkins on energy and work

    Nature is a weak inventor of machines for efficiently turning energy into work. When a volcano erupts, practically all of its released energy dissipates. What work there is is mainly in pushing magma around.
    The rise of industrialized civilization parallels the rise of engineers and the machines they invent to channel energy into doing work. This is how Peter Atkins describes it:

Fire preceded the harnessing of fuels to achieve work. The heat of fire – the tumbling out of energy as the chaotic motion of atoms – is easy to contrive for the tumbling is unconstrained. Work is energy tamed, and requires greater sophistication to contrive. Thus, humanity stumbled easily on to fire but needed millennia to arrive at the sophistication of the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, and the jet engine.

    A Sauntering thought: Perhaps love is base, disorderly urges tamed. Insert “base disorderly urges” in place of “energy” above, and “love” in place of “work.” Base disorderly urges are easy; love requires great sophistication to make. Are churches civilization’s equivalent of the steam engine?
    (Peter Atkins is quoted from page 34 of his book, Four Laws that Drive the Universe. Oxford University Press, 2007.)
    For a brief biography of Peter Atkins, click here. For images of or relating to Peter Atkins, click here.

Henry David Thoreau on the effects of music

    William Congreve’s play “The Mourning Bride” (1697) opens with,

Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
 
    William Congreve wrote this before rock music was invented to move Philistine souls; property damage, stolen cars, and murder marked the Altamont Free Concert.
    Classical music has charms to move cultivated souls. Has ever there been a murder at a symphony concert?
    Rock or classical – which would have drawn Henry David Thoreau? All we have to go on are his words:

    When I hear music, I fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest.

    (We quote Henry David Thoreau from page 57 of The Power of Music, by Elena Mannes. Walker & Company, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of Henry David Thoreau, click here. For images of or relating to Henry David Thoreau, click here.
    For a brief biography of William Congreve, click here. For images of or relating to William Congreve, click here.
    For a brief biography of Elena Mannes, click here. For images of or relating to Elena Mannes, click here.
    For a bit about the Altamont Free Concert, click here.

Henry Fielding on global warming

    In his 1742 comic novel Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding offers a ready-made reason for why many politicians (mostly Republican) assail the possibility of global warming. He couches the explanation in the parson Abraham Adams’ thoughts at hearing a woman’s scream in the night from an attack by a man:

He did not, therefore, want the entreaties of the poor wretch to assist her; but lifting up his crabstick, he immediately leveled a blow at that part of the ravisher’s head where, according to the opinion of the ancients, the brains of some persons are deposited, and which he had undoubtedly let forth, had not Nature (who, as wise men have observed, equips all creatures with what is most expedient for them) taken a provident care (as she always doth with those she intends for encounters) to make this part of the head three times as thick as those of ordinary men, who are designed to exercise talents which are vulgarly called rational, and for whom, as brains are necessary, she is obliged to leave some room for them in the skull; whereas, those ingredients being entirely useless to persons of the heroic calling, she hath an opportunity of thickening the bone, so as to make it less subject to any impression, or liable to be cracked or broken; and, indeed, in some who are predestined to the command of armies and empires, she is supposed sometimes to make that part perfectly solid.

    (Quoted from the Easy Read Large Edition of Joseph Andrews, Volume 1, by Henry Fielding. Objective System, 2006.)
    For a brief biography of Henry Fielding, click here. For images of or relating to Henry Fielding, click here.

G. K. Chesterton on the accumulating minuses of science

    Gradually piling up barely noticeable side effects, science blights civilization, which G. K. Chesterton puts this way:

    Our scientific civilisation is not a civilisation: it is a smoke nuisance.

    (Quoted from page 137 of A Miscellany of Men, Volume 4, by Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912.)
    Let us add the specially harmful minus that science makes possible overpopulation, which carries all sorts of nuisances besides smoke and pollution.
    For a brief biography of G. K. Chesterton, click here. For images of or relating to G. K. Chesterton, click here.

Arthur Miller on glamour worship

    One dictionary defines glamour as “the attractive or exciting quality that makes certain people or things seem appealing or special.”
    Glamour worship, to the Saunterer, is as life-enhancing as garbage worship. Glamour worship is a factor in making us a third-rate race (animals, plants, us). Arthur Miller thought so too:

Glamour is a youth’s form of blindness that lets in light, incoherent color, but nothing defined. Like the rainbow, it is a once uplifting vision that moves away the closer you come to it.
    My father, on the other hand, got more glamour-struck the older he became. He loved to stand in front of a theatre where a play of mine was on and every once in a while stroll in to chat with the box office men about business. “How do you know they’re giving you the right count?” he would ask me. Indeed, how did I know?
    In 1962, after our divorce, Marilyn took him as her escort to John Kennedy’s birthday party in Madison Square Garden and introduced him to the president. My father would treasure a news photographer’s picture of the occasion: Marilyn stands laughing with her head thrown back while Kennedy shakes hands with him, laughing with spontaneous, innocent enjoyment at what I am sure must have been one of my father’s surprising remarks. I was not aware that for the rest of his life, which lasted some four more years, he spent considerable time on the lookout for his name in the gossip columns and entertainment news, until one day he gravely asked me – he was about eighty then – “Do you look like me or do I look like you?”
    This was serious. “I guess I look like you,” I said. He seemed to like that answer.

    (Quoted from Timebends: A life, by Arthur Miller. Grove Press, 1987.)
    For a brief biography of Arthur Miller, click here. For images of or relating to Arthur Miller, click here.

Desmond Tutu on first being allowed to vote

    Most of us who have always had the right to vote have no special feelings about it. Not Archbishop Desmond Tutu, when in 1994 he and millions of black South Africans gained suffrage:

The moment for which I had waited so long came and I folded my ballot paper and cast my vote. Wow! I shouted, “Yippee!” It was giddy stuff. It was like falling in love. The sky looked blue and more beautiful. I saw people in a new light. They were beautiful, they were transfigured. I too was transfigured. It was dreamlike. You were scared someone would rouse you and you would awake to the nightmare that was apartheid’s harsh reality.

    (Quoted from page 6 of Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science, by Sissela Bok. Yale University Press, 2010)
    For a brief biography of Desmond Tutu, click here. For images of or relating to Desmond Tutu, click here.
    For a brief biography of Sissela Bok, click here. For images of or relating to Sissela Bok, click here.

Roger Fouts on helping chimpanzees

    The chimpanzees that performed in Planet of the Apes were later discarded to a roadside zoo. But as the world turns, compassion for animals multiples. The recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes used no chimpanzees. Andy Serkis plays the main one, and he and director Rupert Wyatt encourage kindness to animals. The movie is pro-animal rights, and gives perfect sense to Roger Fouts’ commitment:

By the time I turned fifty, I knew I wanted to be judged not by what I wrote in scientific journals about chimpanzees but by what I did for them.

    (Quoted on page 51 of The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, by Andrew Westoll. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of Andrew Westoll, click here. For a shameful example of what too often happens to chimpanzees that act in movies, click here.
    For a brief biography of Roger Fouts, click here. For images of or relating to Roger Fouts, click here.
    For a brief biography of Andy Serkis, click here. For images of or relating to Andy Serkis, click here.
    For a brief biography of Rupert Wyatt, click here. For the transcript of an interview of Rupert Wyatt about Rise of the Planet of the Apes, click here.

John H. Glenn Jr.’s philosophy of life

    Our Sauntering habit last week uncovered a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, one of which was from The Patriot, Harrisburg, Pa., Saturday, March 3, 1962, reporting on John H. Glenn Jr.’s statement on his religious faith, told to the Senate Space Committee:

    I can’t say that while in orbit you sit there and pray, or anything like that. It is a very busy time, and I know I have tried –- there have been people in the past who tried to put words in my mouth that, at a certain time, I suddenly lapsed into a prayerful state, or something like that, and this just isn’t the case.
    I feel we should live all of our lives every day as though that were going to be the last day. Now, I fall so far short of this every day that it is pitiful, but we come back and keep trying the next day, anyhow.
    But I feel that, to me at least, my religion is not a “fire engine” type of religion and not something that I call on in an emergency and then put God back in the woodwork in His place at the end of a particularly stressful period. We try to live every day as best we can, and I think that this is the way.
    I would say the same thing happened on the mission. My peace has been made with my Maker for a number of years, and so I have no particular worries about the future along that line.
    I think to try to limit God to one particular section of space or something is a very foolish thing to do. I don’t know the nature of God any more than anyone else, nor would I claim to because I happened to have made a space ride that got us a little bit above the atmosphere. God is certainly bigger than that, and I think he will be wherever we go.

    For a brief biography of John H. Glenn Jr., click here. For images of or relating to John H. Glenn Jr., click here.