The Saunterer

Alain de Botton on architecture

    The Saunterer believes that the Art Deco school buildings he was educated in through high school gave atmosphere that made him more creative, more spiritual of civilization, more wanting to go forward in life-–than had the buildings been purely utilitarian, smooth boxes, dashed off like Walmarts. It is good to see Alain de Botton’s back this observation with the general comment:

    Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places.

    (Quoted from page 117 of The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design, by Lance Hosey. Island Press, 2012.)
    For images of or relating to deco high schools, click here.
    For a brief biography of Alain de Botton, click here. For images of or relating to Alain de Botton, click here.
    For a brief biography of Lance Hosey, click here. For images of or relating to Lance Hosey, click here.

Francis Thompson on what poetry is

    Francis Thompson’s description of poetry (applies also to painting) gets us further forward:

    O world invisible, we view thee,
    O world intangible, we touch thee.
    O world unknowable, we know thee,
    Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

    (Quoted from page 135 of The Forms of Things Unknown, by Herbert Read. Horizon Press, 1960.)
    For a brief biography of Francis Thompson, click here. For images of or relating to Francis Thompson, click here.
    For a brief biography of Herbert Read, click here. For images of or relating to Herbert Read, click here.

Margaret Atwood on the sense of touch

    A Sauntering this spring among the Field Museum’s meteorite collections, housed in display cases, brought home the problem of being restricted to hearing, sight, smell and taste. How can you know a meteorite when you aren’t allowed to touch it?–-to feel the flow of heat from you to it, to rub its surface irregularities, to compare it to things familiar to touch-–baseballs, cats, books. We have to agree with Margaret Atwood:

    Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

    To this we add:
    (1) As to touch revealing the flow of heat, if you are at a higher temperature than what you touch, that is one feeling of touching it. A different feeling is to touch the same thing when its temperature is higher than yours. Try this experiment: In a cool morning in the mountains, lie on a smooth granite slab; do it again in the warm afternoon.
    (2) The senses aren’t five–-hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch. There is a sixth, and anyone standing before a meteorite in a display case should beg to use it (along with touch). It is heft: to know the piece through lifting it, gauging its weight and resistance to momentum change.
    (3) Hugs are nice for touch, but the next time you give a standing hug bend backwards and sense the heft of the one hugged, in a further way telling you about the person.
   
    (Margaret Atwood is quoted from page 256 of The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. First Anchor Book Edition, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Margaret Atwood, click here. For images of or relating to Margaret Atwood, click here.

Michelangelo on excellence of nature

    Michelangelo had this rhetorical question:

    What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?

    (Quoted from page 248 of The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican, by Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner. HarperOne, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Michelangelo, click here. For images of or relating to Michelangelo, click here.
    For a brief biography of Benjamin Blech, click here. For a brief biography of Roy Doliner, click here.

M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt on the value of literature

    The February 09, 2007, post on the Saunterer quoted E. M. Forster on how art, not science, is the best guide to solving interpersonal difficulties. Literature is art, and below we have a past editor and a current editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature confirming E. M. Forster:
    Asked in an interview, “Why study literature?,” M. H. Abrams said:

    Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.

    Added Stephen Greenblatt:

    Literature is the most astonishing technological means that humans have created, and now practiced for thousands of years, to capture experience. For me the thrill of literature involves entering into the life worlds of others. I’m from a particular, constricted place in time, and I suddenly am part of a huge world-–other times, other places, other inner lives that I otherwise would have no access to.

    (Quoted from page 31 of the August 26, 2012, issue of The New York Times Book Review.)
    To see E. M. Forster’s related comment, click here.
    For a brief biography of M. H. Abrams, click here. For images of or relating to M. H. Abrams, click here.
    For a brief biography of Stephen Greenblatt, click here. For images of or relating to Stephen Greenblatt, click here.

Baruch Spinoza on laws as the cause of criminals

    Without prohibition, there would have been no Al Capone or Bugs Moran. Without federal security laws, no Bernard Madoff. In 1677, Baruch Spinoza wrote on how laws beget lawbreakers, create criminals:

    All laws which can be violated without doing anyone any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of man that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men’s thoughts toward these very objects; for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden. He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it.
    (Quoted from page 217 of Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World, by Tom Feiling. Pegasus Books, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Baruch Spinoza, click here. For images of or relating to Baruch Spinoza, click here.
    For a brief biography of Tom Feiling, click here. For images of or relating to Tom Feiling, click here.

Joshua Reynolds on achieving excellence

    Even though Joshua Reynolds is here thinking of painting, his lesson holds for all creative work:

    The impetuosity of youth is disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege and desires to take the citadel by storm. They wish to find some shorter path to excellence, and hope to obtain the reward of eminence by other means than those which the indispensable rules of art have prescribed. They must, therefore, be told again and again that labor is the only price of solid fame, and that, whatever their force of genius may be, there is no easy method of becoming a good painter.

    (Quoted from page 148 of Classical Painting Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice, by Juliette Aristides. Watson-Guptill Publications, 2008.)
    For a brief biography of Joshua Reynolds, click here. For images of or relating to Joshua Reynolds, click here.    
    For a brief biography of Juliette Aristides, click here. For images of or relating to Juliette Aristides, click here.

E. V. Rieu on where to bury a dear cat

    Bury her deep, down deep in your heart, alive in memory. These are lines from E. V. Rieu’s “Cat’s Funeral”:

No more to watch bird stir;
     No more to clean dark fur:
No more to glisten as silk;
No more to revel in milk;
     No more to purr.

Bury her deep, down deep;
     She is beyond warm sleep.
She will not walk in the night;
She will not wake to the light.
     Bury her deep.

    (Quoted from page 44 of One Hundred Years of Poetry for Children, by Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark. Oxford University Press, 2007.)
    For a brief biography of E. V Rieu, click here. For images of or relating to E. V Rieu, click here.

Noël Coward on composing songs

    If you create the lyrics first, it constrains creating the tune. If you create the tune first, it constrains creating the lyrics. Which is best for overall effect-–tight constraint tackled first, looser one second-–or looser first, tighter second? (The answer applies as well to composing the elements of one's life.) Noël Coward’s reasoned answer:

    Being a natural musician, I found it easier to write to tunes jangling in my head than to devote myself to mastering iambics, trochees, anapaests, or dactyls. If a tune came first I would set words to it. If the words came first, I would set them to music at the piano.
    This latter process almost invariable necessitated changing the verse to fit the tune. If you happen to be born with a built-in sense of rhythm, any verse you write is apt to fall into a set pattern and remain within its set pattern until it is completed. This is perfectly satisfactory from the point of view of reading or reciting, but when you attempt to set your pattern to a tune, either the tune gives in and allows itself to be inhibited by the rigidity of your original scansion or it rebels, refuses to be dominated and displays some ideas of its own, usually in the form of unequal lines and unexpected accents. This is why I very seldom write a lyric first and set it to music later.

    (Quoted from page 10 of Noël Coward: The Complete Lyrics, by Noël Coward. The Overlook Press, 1998.)
    For a brief biography of Noël Coward, click here. For images of or relating to Noël Coward, click here.

Francis Galton on how to be successful

    In Francis Galton’s view, the greatest of all acquired powers is a capacity to work your tail off:

    By natural ability, I mean those qualities of intellect and disposition, which urge and qualify a man to perform acts that lead to reputation. I do not mean capacity without zeal, nor zeal without capacity, nor even a combination of both of them, without an adequate power of doing a great deal of very laborious work.

    (Quoted from page 47 of The Nature and Nurture of Giftedness, by David Yun Dai. Teachers College Press, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Francis Galton, click here. For images of or relating to Francis Galton, click here.
    For a brief biography of David Yun Dai, click here. For images of or relating to David Yun Dai, click here.