The Saunterer

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on every citizen’s duty

    At the dedication of Rockefeller Center, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., spoke these lines:

We believe it to be the duty of every citizen to do all within his power to improve the conditions under which men work and live. We believe that that man renders the greatest social service who so cooperates in the organization of industry as to afford the largest number of men the greatest opportunity for self-development, and the enjoyment by every man of benefits commensurate with those which his own work adds to the wealth of civilization.   

    (Quoted from page 38 of The Last Rivet: The story of Rockefeller Center, a city within a city, as told at the ceremony in which John D. Rockefeller, Jr., drove the last rivet of the last building, November 1, 1939. Columbia University Press, 1940.)

    For a brief biography of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., click here. For images of or relating to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., click here.

Sylvia Plath on the act of writing

    This is how Sylvia Plath saw the act of writing:

Writing is a religious act: it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they might be. A shaping which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. The writing lasts: it goes about on its own in the world. People read it: react to it as a person, a philosophy, a religion, a flower: they like it, or do not. It helps them, or it does not. It feels to intensify living: you give more, probe, ask, look, learn, and shape this: you get more: monsters, answers, color and form, knowledge. You do it for itself first. If it brings in money, how nice. You do not do it first for money. Money isn’t why you sit down at the typewriter.

    (Quoted from page 289 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001)
    For a brief biography of Sylvia Plath, click here. For images of or relating to Sylvia Plath, click here.

Giuseppe Verdi on one’s most precious place

    We each have a most precious place. Where is yours? Giuseppe Verdi had no doubt about how to measure his:

    You may have the universe if I may have Italy.

    (Quoted from page 223 of What Makes It Great? -- Short Masterpieces, Great Composers, by Rob Kapilow. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of Giuseppe Verdi, click here. For images of or relating to Giuseppe Verdi, click here.
    For a brief biography of Rob Kapilow, click here. For images of or relating to Rob Kapilow, click here.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on not eating meat

    Especially germane in the United States (and we hope will help people change) is Emerson’s message this day before Thanksgiving:

    You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

    (Quoted from page103 of The Animal Manifesto: Six Reasons for Expanding Our Compassion Footprint, by Marc Bekoff. New World Library, 2010.)

    For a brief biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, click here. For images of or relating to Ralph Waldo Emerson, click here. For a brief biography of Marc Bekoff, click here. For images of or relating to Marc Bekoff, click here.

Robert Louis Stevenson on the Occupy Wall Street movement

    A good while ago, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote:

Generous lads, irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cock-sparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God’s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.

    (Quoted from page 28 of Crabbed Age and Youth, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Thomas B. Mosher, 1907.)
    For a brief biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, click here. For images of or relating to Robert Louis Stevenson, click here.

Malcolm Gladwell on how human character is conditional on context

    If you find yourself in a strange environment, you may be surprised at seeing your character has strangely changed. Context, Malcolm Gladwell tells, is crucial to your character:

Character isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits. . . . Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstances and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.

    (Quoted from page 41 of Man with a Blue Scarf: On sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud, by Martin Gayford. Thames & Hudson, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Malcolm Gladwell, click here. For images of or relating to Malcolm Gladwell, click here.
    For a brief biography of Martin Gayford, click here. For images of or relating to Martin Gayford, click here.

Ruth Harrison on cruelty to animals

    "Oh Lonesome Me" was a 1958 popular song. “Oh Loathsome Me” is truer to our species for all the suffering we cold-heartedly cause animals. Hear Ruth Harrison:

How far have we the right to take our domination of the animal world? Have we the right to rob them of all pleasure in life simply to make more money more quickly out of their carcasses? Have we the right to treat living creatures solely as food converting machines?

    (Quoted from page 17 of Animal Machines: The new factory farming industry, by Ruth Harrison. Ballantine Books, 1966.)

    For a brief biography of Ruth Harrison, click here. For images of or relating to Ruth Harrison, click here.

Neil Postman and Sigmund Freud on the damages concealed in technological advances

    An autotoxin is a poison that acts on the organism that generates it. (For example, marriages often prove to be autotoxic.) And technology, when you come to think of it, can be too. Neil Postman, quoting Sigmund Freud, speaks to the point:

“One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man?”

Freud knew full well that technical and scientific advances are not to be taken lightly, which is why he begins this passage by acknowledging them. But he ends it by reminding us of what they have undone:

“If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage. . . . And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?”   

    (From page 5-6 of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, by Neil Postman. Vintage Books, 1993. Postman is quoting Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.)
    For a brief biography of Neil Postman, click here. For images of or relating to Neil Postman, click here. For a brief biography of Sigmund Freud, click here. For images of or relating to Sigmund Freud, click here.

Fernando Botero on not changing one’s style

    Unlike Picasso who regularly changed his style of painting, Fernando Botero kept his for a reason:

Changing style is like changing convictions . . . and in order to change, the way of thinking has to change. One cannot relinquish what one believes, what has been done as a consequence of exploration.

    (Quoted from page 11 of Botero in LA, by Peter Selz. Tasende Gallery, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Fernando Botero, click here. For images of or relating to Fernando Botero, click here.
    For a brief biography of Peter Selz, click here. For images of or relating to Peter Selz, click here.

Albert Camus on the benefits of travel

    As Albert Camus saw it,

What gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat –- hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant. . . . Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn’t know the fare of the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves.

    (Quoted from page 156 of Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, by Paul Fussell. Summit Books, 1988.)
    For a brief biography of Albert Camus, click here. For images of or relating to Albert Camus, click here.
    For a brief biography of Paul Fussell, click here. For images of or relating to Paul Fussell, click here.