The Saunterer

Richard Jefferies on the beauty of the earth

    Sauntering in the writings of British naturalist Richard Jefferies brings such truths as this:

    The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendor of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live. All else is illusion, or mere endurance.

(Quoted from page 64 of The Life of the Fields, by Richard Jefferies. Chatto & Windus, 1889.)

    For a brief biography of Richard Jefferies, click here. For images of or relating to Richard Jefferies, click here.

Isaac Bashevis Singer on books

    Had Isaac Bashevis Singer (by the way, a great vegetarian and defender of animal rights) grown up with the far fewer bookstores we have today, would he have become the literary person he did? Books to him were heaven:

I remember the money in my pocket and decide to go to Tward Street to buy myself a storybook. . . . Each title pulls me like a magnet. Each booklet has its own mystery, cleverness, and bizarre intrigues. But I can’t buy them all. I have to choose. I spend my last kopeck and carry home a stack of books. The street and the boys on it no longer concern me at all. I have only one wish: that my joy not be interrupted, that I have the time to read everything from beginning to end.

    (Quoted from page 77 of Book Row: An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade, by Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004.)
    For a brief biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer, click here. For images of or relating to Isaac Bashevis Singer, click here.

Thomas Mann on leader-scoundrels refusing to admit they are wrong

    -- and thus they prolong their wrong ways, making us all victims:

It might be said that we are judging Germany by an unfair standard if we refuse to admire its current desperate struggle, its refusal to accept defeat, its resistance to the last man, the last bullet and the last drops of blood, or to recognize the heroism enshrined in this. History has always celebrated this kind of ultimate resistance as memorable and heroic –- and now all of a sudden, for Germany, it is held to be meaningless or criminal. This line of argument is false. The perpetuation of the war by Germany beyond defeat to annihilation has nothing to do with heroism, but is in fact a crime committed against the German people by its leaders. The people’s suicidal struggle is not voluntary but has been extorted through moral and physical terror –- by rulers who pretend that the Germans are bleeding for their honor and self-preservation, when the fact is that they are giving their utmost and more for the survival of the scoundrels who drove them into this war and who refuse to abdicate at any price, including that of Germany’s absolute ruination.

    (From Thomas Mann’s March 20, 1945, BBC broadcast to Germany, reported in the September 16, 2011, issue of the Times Literary Supplement, page 7.)
    For a brief biography of Thomas Mann, click here. For images of or relating to Thomas Mann, click here.

Laurence Durrell on the greatness of olives

    When you eat an olive, you partake of ancient history:

The entire Mediterranean seems to rise out of the sour, pungent taste of black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat and wine, a taste as old as cold water. Only the sea itself seems as ancient a part of the region as the olives and its oil, that like no other products of nature, have shaped civilisations from remotest antiquity to the present.

    (Quoted from page 12 of Olive: A Global History, by Fabrizia Lanza. Reaktion Books, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of Laurence Durrell, click here. For images of or relating to Laurence Durrell, click here.
    For some background of Fabrizia Lanza, click here. For images of or relating to Fabrizia Lanza, click here. For all sorts of images of olives, click here. 

Paul McCartney on why he is a vegetarian

    In the October 19, 2011, issue of The Wall Street Journal, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had a full page where Paul McCartney explained:

Many years ago, I was fishing, and as I was reeling in the poor fish, I realized, “I am killing him – all for the passing pleasure it brings me.” And something inside me clicked. I realized, as I watched him fight for breath, that his life was as important to him as mine is to me.

    For an image of the ad “I am Paul McCartney, and I am a Vegetarian,” click here.
    For a brief biography of Paul McCartney, click here. For images of or relating to Paul McCartney, click here.
    For Peta’s Annual Review of the work it does for animals, click here.

Guy Sircello on why we should love beauty

    Want to be happier? Then seek out great art, great music, great architecture, the great parts of wild nature -- the greatest of the world’s beauties. Hear Guy Sircello:

Beauty is the best and most delightful part of our world, and in loving the best of the beautiful, we are the happiest and best of creatures. Without the love of even the slightest kind of beauty, we are less happy and less good than we otherwise might be, and of nothing other than beauty can this be said. Loving beauty is therefore of the utmost importance.

    (Quoted from page 210 of Love and Beauty, by Guy Sircello. Princeton University Press, 1989.)
    For a brief biography of Guy J. Sircello, click here. For images of or relating to Guy J. Sircello, click here.

Logan Pearsall Smith on why we like looking into the starry night sky

    Impressions about a thing dramatically color our emotions about the thing:
    People stand absorbed before a van Gogh. If they then learn it is a fake, their hearts turn cold.
    People recall lovingly their memories of years of marriage. If they then learn their spouses have faked it, the memories turn worthless.
    And if people were to discover that the stars are light bulbs a mile above, poof would go the sublime, never wanting to look up again. Logan Pearsall Smith uses the example of the stars to explain the deeper principle of the impression giving the object its value:

The knowledge that the universe is a multitude of minute spheres circling, like specks of dust, in a dark and boundless void, might leave us cold and indifferent, if not bored and depressed, were it not that we identify this hypothetical scheme with the visible splendour, the poignant intensity, and the baffling number of stars. So far is the object from giving value to the impression, that it is here, as it must always ultimately be, the impression that gives value to the object. For all worth leads us back to actual feeling somewhere, or else evaporates into nothing –- into a word and a superstition.

    (Quoted from page 128 of Little Essays Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana, by Logan Pearsall Smith. Books For Libraries Press, 1967 reprint; first published 1920.)
    For a brief biography of Logan Pearsall Smith, click here. For images of or relating to Logan Pearsall Smith, click here.
    For a brief biography of George Santayana, click here. For images of or relating to George Santayana, click here.

Edward Degas on cultivating compassion

    Apply your heart, Edward Degas advised:

The heart is an instrument which goes rusty if it isn’t used. Is it possible to be a heartless artist?

    (Quoted from page 284 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001)
    For a brief biography of Edward Degas, click here. For images of or relating to Edward Degas, click here.

Heinrich Heine on religion as a guide

    For saving Earth’s wildlands and oceans and climates, religion is a foolish guide. Let me read out to you words from Heinrich Heine’s Gedanken und Einfälle:

In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides.

    (Quoted from page 43 of god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens. Twelve, 2007.)
    For a brief biography of Heinrich Heine, click here. For images of or relating to Heinrich Heine, click here. For a brief biography of Christopher Hitchens, click here. For images of or relating to Christopher Hitchens, click here.

Charles Edward Kenneth Mees on the “Steve Jobs type”

    Has Charles Edward Kenneth Mees (1882 - 1960) here explained an essential element in the success of Steve Jobs? --

The best person to decide what research shall be done is the man who is doing the research. The next best is the head of the department. After that you leave the field of best persons and meet increasingly worse groups. The first of these is the research director, who is probably wrong more than half the time. Then comes a committee which is wrong most of the time. Finally there is a committee of company vice-presidents, which is wrong all the time.

    (Quoted from page 513 of Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists, edited by John Daintith. CRC Press, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Charles Edward Kenneth Mees, click here. For images of or relating to Charles Edward Kenneth Mees, click here.
    For a brief biography of Steve Jobs, click here. For images of or relating to Steve Jobs, click here.