The Saunterer

A. E. Housman on not delaying living

    Looking for a good New Year’s resolution? A. E. Housman’s second poem from A Shropshire Lad offers one:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now   
Is hung with bloom along the bough,   
And stands about the woodland ride   
Wearing white for Eastertide.   
 
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,   
And take from seventy springs a score,   
It only leaves me fifty more.   
 
And since to look at things in bloom   
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go   
To see the cherry hung with snow.


    (Quoted from page 39 of Radclyffe Hall: A Life in Writing, by Richard Dellamora. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of A. E. Housman, click here. For images of or relating to A. E. Housman, click here.
        For a brief biography of Radclyffe Hall, click here. For images of or relating to Radclyffe Hall, click here.
    For a brief biography of Richard Dellamora, click here. For images of or relating to Richard Dellamora, click here.

Abraham Joshua Heschel on music

    What is music for? Abraham Joshua Heschel knew:

The only language that seems to be compatible with the wonder and mystery of being is the language of music. Music is more than just expressiveness. It is rather a reaching out toward a realm that lies beyond the reach of verbal propositions. Verbal expression is in danger of being taken literally and of serving as a substitute for insight. Words become slogans, slogans become idols. But music is a refutation of human finality. Music is an antidote to higher idolatry.

    (Quoted from page 245 of The Insecurity of Freedom, by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Noonday Press, 1967)
    For a brief biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel, click here. For images of or relating to Abraham Joshua Heschel, click here.
    For three minutes of video interview clips of Abraham Joshua Heschel (including his advice to young people on how to live), click here.

Jules Renard on libraries

    Parents raise their children to the parents’ standard. Jules Renard was raised to a greater standard:

    I was brought up by a library.

    (Quoted from page 290 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001)
    For a brief biography of Jules Renard, click here. For images of or relating to Jules Renard, click here.

Henry David Thoreau on life

    If ever you’ve wanted to stand in front of the entrance at Walmart and shout at the people going in and out, but were unsure what to say, try Henry David Thoreau’s observation:

    And the cost of a thing it will be remembered is the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.

    (Quoted from page 181 of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Journal, Volume 2: 1842 -- 1848. Princeton University Press, 1984.)
    For a brief biography of Henry David Thoreau, click here. For images of or relating to Henry David Thoreau, click here.

Dwight Macdonald on writing style

    Once on the subject of writing, Dwight Macdonald wrote a letter to the editors of Dissent, dated January 5, 1960, distinguishing between clear and confused styles. Here is an excerpt:

The Sermon on the Mount is notably clear and simple, at least as rendered in the King James Version, to which I have paid public homage on several occasions. But there is this much point to it, which some of your contributors might ponder: that were the Sermon woolly and pretentious in style, that would indeed be my reaction, and I should be right, since in that case the Sermon would not be the great moral message it is but a botch, and not only in style. Great ideas can only be expressed in a great style. There is no such thing as a clear message delivered in a confused style; the message is the style and the style is the message. Selah!

    (Quoted from page 390 of Discriminations: Essays & Afterthoughts, by Dwight Macdonald. A Da Capo Paperback, 1974.)
    For a brief biography of Dwight Macdonald, click here. For images of or relating to Dwight Macdonald, click here.

Václav Havel on responsibility

    Václav Havel died today. He made the definition of human responsibility be almost the definition of human Being:

Human responsibility is precisely the agent by which one first defines oneself as a person vis-a-vis the universe, that is, as the miracle of Being that one is. On the one hand, it is only thus that one defines and so infuses meaning into one’s dependency on the world; on the other hand, it is only thus that one definitively separates oneself from the world as a sovereign and independent being; it is only thus that one, as it were, stands on one’s own two feet. I would say that responsibility for oneself is a knife we use to carve out our own inimitable features in the panorama of Being; it is the pen with which we write into the history of Being that story of the fresh creation of the world that each new human existence always is.

    (Quoted from page 214 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Václav Havel, click here. For images of or relating to Václav Havel, click here.

Tony Walter on keeping silent about bad memories

    Using the case of ex-servicemen who hid their experiences in the First World War from their families, Tony Walker explains this coping mechanism and some of its consequences:

This set up a pattern in families in which stress by women as well as by men, is coped with by not talking about it. . . . Children in the inter-war period typically had parents who chose to remain silent about wartime experience and who bore the depression of the 1930s with quiet stoicism; these children were then required to fight in the Second World War, confirming the necessity of courageous silence. They brought up their own children, my generation, with little reference to the past and with few stories of deceased family members, least of all stories of those who died traumatically.

    (Quoted from page 40 of On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief, by Tony Walter. Open University Press, 1999.)
    For a brief biography of Tony Walter, click here. For images of or relating to Tony Walter, click here.

Joe Bageant on philistines

    Joe Bageant, from his book Deer Hunting with Jesus:

The reality is that our economy now consists of driving 250 million vehicles around the suburbs and malls and eating fried chicken.

    Global warming? Loss of the world’s species? Blame philistinism.
    Philistines count as most of the developed world’s population. Philistines are what a late friend of ours used to sum up as “food to crap converters.” If you believe in religion, philistines are God’s mistake of his giving our species phenomenally potential-ed brains.
    Philistines center much of their being on their alimentary canals, putting food in one end, feces coming out the other. Philistines are the nearest of our species to a Shit Machine, a mechanical-chemical canal whose operation you can see by clicking here. Joe Bageant was right – philistines drive the economy.
   
    (Joe Bageant is quoted from page 110 of Deer Hunting with Jesus. Crown Publishers, 2007.)
    For a brief biography of Joe Bageant, click here. For images of or relating to Joe Bageant, click here.

Robert Motherwell on abstract art

    The reason for abstract art, said Robert Motherwell, is that it vivifies life:

One might truthfully say that abstract art is stripped bare of other things in order to intensify it, its rhythms, spatial intervals, and color structure. Abstraction is a process of emphasis, and emphasis vivifies life, as A. N. Whitehead said.

    (Quoted from pages 45 of Robert Motherwell; with selections from the artist’s writings, by Frank O’Hara. Museum of Modern Art, 1965.)
    For a brief biography of Robert Motherwell, click here. For images of or relating to Robert Motherwell, click here.
    For a brief biography of Frank O’Hara, click here. For images of or relating to Frank O’Hara, click here.

Owen Jones on returning to a more healthy condition

    To do that, said Owen Jones, stop ornamenting for ornament’s sake:

The ornament of a savage tribe, being the result of a natural instinct, is necessarily always true to its purpose; whilst in much of the ornament of civilized nations . . . the ornament is oftentimes misapplied, and instead of first seeking the most convenient form and adding beauty, all beauty is destroyed . . . by superadding ornament to ill contrived form. If we could return to a more healthy condition, we must even be as little children or as savages; we must get rid of the acquired and artificial, and return to and develop natural instincts.   

    (From page 16 of The Grammar of Ornament, by Owen Jones. Day and Son, 1865.)

    For a brief biography of Owen Jones, click here. For images of or relating to Owen Jones, click here.