The Saunterer

Ernest Becker on awareness of death

    A cost of being a self-conscious animal is knowing that dying is unavoidable. On a one-to-ten scale of painting this grimly, Ernest Becker takes the prize:

    What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that One is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, and excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression-–and with all this yet to die.

    (Quoted from page 87 of The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker. Simon and Schuster, 1997.)
    For a brief biography of Ernest Becker, click here. For images of or relating to Ernest Becker, click here.

Eli Maor on the Pythagoreans

    Our summer Sauntering brought again the thought of how religions are dead set against the only thing that will save life on Earth: shrinking the human population. The thought recurred from reading this:

    The Pythagorean fixation with numbers had several consequences, some beneficial to the advancement of science, others detrimental. On the one hand, it spurred them to study the mathematical properties of numbers (here meaning positive integers); and by so doing they planted the seeds that would grow into modern number theory. But like any obsession when pursued fanatically, it lead to aberrations. Their uncompromising belief in the supremacy of numbers–-whether in musical harmony or in the physical universe-–blinded the Pythagoreans to other ideas that might have better explained the workings of nature. By subjugating the laws of nature to the Greek ideals of beauty, symmetry, and harmony, the Pythagoreans hindered the progress of the physical sciences for a good two thousand years.

    (Quoted from page 20 of The Pythagorean Theorem: A 4,000-Year History, by Eli Maor. Princeton University Press, 2007.)
    For a biographical sketch of Eli Maor, click here and scroll down. For images of or relating to Eli Maor, click here.

William Carlos Williams and Ansel Adams on how to stay creative in old age

    About this, the Saunterer will quote himself:

    Build a supply of pre-envisioned projects. The poet William Carlos Williams once explained to a correspondent how he intended to keep his creative vitality into old age:
    “I have gradually made enough notes, here and there, to keep me busy clearing them up and developing them for a long time after I retire--if ever. I should dread an old age divorced from the thoughts and actions of my more vigorous years. Age should be a commentator, and what better than to comment upon one’s own existence? Thus I have many projects in mind. And if I never catch up with them--wouldn’t that be a misfortune. But I intend to try to do so.”
    Similarly, young Ansel Adams anticipated old Ansel Adams’s difficulties of traveling around the American West, of finding the right places to photograph nature, and of waiting patiently for the right moments of light. Young Ansel Adams did this work for the coming Ansel Adams, providing thousands of photographic negatives which old Ansel Adams, up until his last look on earth, took into his darkroom and teased out their spiritual substance.

    (Quoted from page 136 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001)
    For a brief biography of William Carlos Williams, click here. For images of or relating to William Carlos Williams, click here.
    For a brief biography of Ansel Adams, click here. For images of or relating to Ansel Adams, click here.

Wendell Berry on investing

    Of all investment advisors, Wendell Berry is wisest-–as confirmed by his lines:

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

    (Lines from Wendell Berry’s poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” page 110 in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, Counterpoint Press, 1998.)
    For a biographical sketch of Wendell Berry, click here. For images of or relating to Wendell Berry, click here.

Abraham Flexner on how discrimination harms all

    Abraham Flexner posed to humanity a choice:

    In the face of the history of the human race what can be more silly or ridiculous than likes and dislikes founded upon race or religion? Does humanity want symphonies and paintings and profound scientific truth, or does it want Christian symphonies, Christian paintings, Christian science, or Jewish symphonies, Jewish paintings, Jewish science, or Mohammedan or Egyptian or Japanese or Chinese or American or German or Russian or Communist or Conservative contributions to and expressions of the infinite richness of the human soul?

    (Quoted from “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, by Abraham Flexner; page 550 in Harpers, June/November 1939.)
    For a biographical sketch of Abraham Flexner, click here. For images of or relating to Abraham Flexner, click here.

Guy Dammann on e-books

    A message needs a medium to be communicated, and each kind of medium affects the message. Guy Damman explains:

    Socrates’ suspicions of writing were two-fold. He thought the permanence of written discourse would prevent people from committing the substance of an argument to memory. He has more than amply been proved right, not least by the fact that I hastily downloaded a free copy of the Phaedrus simply to check this point. His second suspicion interests me more, however. This was that the physical separation between speaker and listener, entailed by the art of writing, would relieve the former of the responsibility to answer the latter’s questions. Writing presents itself as finished–-as perfected–-rather than as part of a dialogue with an outcome yet to be agreed. The simple fact of its permanence brings with it an illusion of truth.
    A central feature of our appreciation of the literary as well as all other arts is our sense of everything’s being in just the right place, of each word and phrase having been weighed and balanced and favoured over every possible alternative. When it comes to books, this is amplified by beautiful production, which feeds into the quality of being wholly and completely intended. But all this can also get in the way of the simple process of understanding and reflecting upon what someone else has written. The grand perfection of the book elevates its author to a position of unassailable power, often unwarranted, which in turn induces a sense of powerlessness and humility in the reader.
    In the case of electronic books, while the texts are identical to their printed equivalents, this imbalance of power is perceptibly weakened. There is something about the informality of the e-book, with its arbitrary pagination and punctuation mishaps, and the way the “print” literally erases itself to make way for the next page, which allows the reader to consider alternatives, and to approach the text less as something set in stone than as a conversation in progress. Reading becomes less aesthetic, more utilitarian.

    (Quoted from page 16 of the May 11, 2012, issue of The Times Literary Supplement.)
    For a biographical sketch of Guy Dammann, click here. For images of or relating to Guy Dammann, click here.

John Knauss on killing nature

    As Pogo put it, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” As John Knauss, put it:

    Nobody knows, for sure, why the dinosaurs became extinct, but it is known, for sure, that the dinosaurs are not to blame.

    (Quoted from page 165 of Sea Change: A message of the oceans, by Sylvia Alice Earle. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995.)
    For a brief biography of John Knauss, click here. For images of or relating to John Knauss, click here.
    For a brief biography of Sylvia Alice Earle, click here. For images of or relating to Sylvia Alice Earle, click here.

Robinson Jeffers on the universe

    Of all you love, which would you fight longest and hardest to preserve? With Robinson Jeffers it was the universe:

    I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. . . . The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that here is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one’s affections outward toward this one God, rather than inward on one’s self. . . .

    (Quoted from page 254 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001)
    For a brief biography of Robinson Jeffers, click here--and for more, here. For images of or relating to Robinson Jeffers, click here.

Mary Oliver on the world calling us

    Lines to dwell in from Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese:   

    The world offers itself to your imagination,
    Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
    Over and over announcing your place
    In the family of things.

    (Quoted from page 19 of Feathers of Hope, by Barbara Chepaitis. Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Mary Oliver, click here. For images of or relating to Mary Oliver, click here.
    For the complete Mary Oliver poem, Wild Geese, click here.
    For information about Barbara Chepaitis, click here. For images of or relating to Barbara Chepaitis, click here.

Sam Keen on forests

    From Sam Keen comes this:

    Forests are enchanted enough without elves or hobbits. (Did you ever see a ruby-throated hummingbird?)

    (Quoted from page 15 of Voices and Visions, by Sam Keen. Harper & Row, 1976.)
    For a brief biography of Sam Keen, click here. For images of or relating to Sam Keen, click here.
    A great find of Sauntering in art museums is to come upon anything by Martin Johnson Heade. You can test this by his painting of a ruby-throated hummingbird--click here.