The Saunterer

Fanny Brice on why you should always keep love in your life

    Here is Fanny Brice’s serious side of speaking:

    After the emotion is ended in your life, I found I got great joy from just being myself and relaxing. When love is out of your life, you’re through in a way. Because while it is there it’s like a motor that’s going, you have such vitality to do things, big things, because love is goosing you all the time. I found, after the love, that I needed help to keep going.

    (Quoted from page 267 of The Fabulous Fanny, by Norman Katkov. Knopf, 1953.)
    For a brief biography of Fanny Brice, click here. For images of or relating to Fanny Brice, click here.
    To see a short video of Fanny Brice playing Baby Snooks in a skit with Judy Garland, click here.
    For a brief biography of Norman Katkov, click here. For images of or relating to Norman Katkov, click here.

Francis Ponge on the function of poetry

    This is how Francis Ponge describes the function of poetry:

    It is to nourish the spirit of man by giving him the cosmos to suckle. We have only to lower our standard of dominating nature to raise our standard of participating in it in order to make the reconciliation take place. When man becomes proud to be not just the site where ideas and feelings are produced, but also the crossroad where they divide and mingle, he will be ready to be saved. Hope therefore lies in a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man that he becomes almost speechless, and later re-invents a language. Poets should in no way concern themselves with human relationships, but should get to the very bottom. Society, furthermore, takes good care of putting them there, and the love of things keeps them there; they are the ambassadors of the silent world. As such, they stammer, they murmur, they sink into the darkness of logos–-until at last they reach the level of roots, where things and formulas are one.
    This is why, whatever one says, poetry is much more important than any other art, any other science. This is also why poetry has nothing in common with what appears in the poetry anthologies of today. True poetry is what does not pretend to be poetry. It is in the dogged drafts of a few maniacs seeking the new encounter.

    (Quoted from page 18 of Ecological Intelligence: Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature, by Ian McCallum. Fulcrum Publishing, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Francis Ponge, click here. For images of or relating to Francis Ponge, click here.
    For a brief biography of Ian McCallum, click here. For images of or relating to Ian McCallum, click here.

Rose Macaulay on why making a big deal of family stinks

    Do you or don’t side with Rose Macaulay when she says,

    As to one’s country, why should one feel any more interest in its welfare than in that of any other countries? And as to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals –- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?

    (Quoted from page 134 of The World My Wilderness, by Rose Macaulay. Little, Brown, 1950.)
    For a brief biography of Rose Macaulay, click here. For images of or relating to Rose Macaulay, click here.

Rumi on not judging people by their cover

    Especially with people, appearances are deceiving. Rumi:

The Name

You should try to hear the name the Holy One has for things.
There is something in the phrase: “The Holy One has taught
   him names.”
We name every thing according to the number of legs it has;
the other one names it according to what it has inside.
Moses waved his stick; he thought it was a “rod,”
but inside its name was “dragonish snake.”
We thought the name of Blake was “agitator against priests,”
but in eternity his name is “the one who believes.”
No one knows our name until our last breath goes out.

    (Quoted from page 268 of News of the Universe: poems of the twofold consciousness, chosen and introduced by Robert Bly. Sierra Club Books, 1980.)
    For a brief biography of Rumi, click here. For images of or relating to Rumi, click here.
    For a brief biography of Robert Bly, click here. For images of or relating to Robert Bly, click here.

Elliot W. Eisner on efficiency in educaton

    Educators, heed Professor Eisner's advice:
   
    We have had a tendency, especially in the United States, to embrace a form of technical rationality designed to assuage our anxiety about the quality of our schools. The tack that we have taken is to specify in no uncertain terms our expectations, to prescribe content and procedures related to them –- “alignment” it is called –- and then to monitor and to measure the consequences. The tacit view is to create an efficient system, a system that will help us achieve, without surprise or eventfulness, the aims that we seek.
    The arts, in contrast, have little room on their agenda for efficiency, at least as a high-level value. Efficiency is largely a virtue for the tasks we don’t like to do; few of us like to eat a great meal efficiently or to participate in a wonderful conversation efficiently, or indeed to make love efficiently. What we enjoy the most we linger over. A school system designed with an overriding commitment to efficiency may produce outcomes that have little enduring quality.

    (Quoted from page xiii of The Arts and the Creation of Mind, by Elliot W. Eisner. Yale University Press, 2002.)
    For a brief biography of Elliot W. Eisner, click here. For images of or relating to Elliot W. Eisner, click here.

Edward Gibbon on how Twitter dumbs us down

    When some future historian writes a book called The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, laying the cause at the feet of Twitter for its cultivating tens of millions of scatterbrains, the author can justifiably say, “Edward Gibbon warned us”:

    Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which all our studies may point. Through neglect of this rule, gross ignorance often disgraces great readers; who, by skipping hastily and irregularly from one subject to another, render themselves incapable of combining their ideas. So many detached parcels of knowledge cannot form a whole.

    (Quoted from page 396 of The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon. B. Blake Publisher, 1837.)
    For a brief biography of Edward Gibbon, click here. For images of or relating to Edward Gibbon, click here.

Doris Lessing’s caution to mothers

    Often forgotten by mothers is this:

    Children can’t be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can’t be a wellspring to live from. Or they shouldn’t be.

    (Quoted from page 78 of Family Wisdom, by Susan Ginsberg. Columbia University Press, 1996.)
    For a brief biography of Doris Lessing, click here. For images of or relating to Doris Lessing, click here.
    For a brief biography of Susan Ginsberg, click here. For images of or relating to Susan Ginsberg, click here.

Walt Whitman on how animals are better than people

    Of course they just are, and that’s all there is to it. Yet if you want some specifics you have only to listen to Walt Whitman:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid
    and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
     owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
     of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

    (Lines from page 40 of Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman. Digireads.com Publishing, 2006.)
    For a brief biography of Walt Whitman, click here. For images of or relating to Walt Whitman, click here.

Mark Twain on the origin of the universe

    The Big Bang theory is so blah blah next to Mark Twain’s:

    It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could ‘a’ laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they’d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

    (Quoted from page 165-66 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade), by Mark Twain. Harper & Brothers, 1912.)
    For a brief biography of Mark Twain, click here. For images of or relating to Mark Twain, click here.

Albert Lee Strickland on the healing power of music

    As Albert Lee Strickland explains:

    For the human heart and mind, music is a gift that brings hope and comfort through even the darkest times. As we cope with the losses that beset us throughout life, certain songs and musical works bring to mind poignant memories that refresh our grief. Whether Mozart’s Requiem or a Top 40 tune, music has the capacity to cue the recall of happy moments shared with loved ones whose death has left us bereft. At other times, a lyric or melody sets us thinking about our own mortality.

    (Quoted from 17 of The Last Dance: Entering Death and Dying, by Lynne Ann DeSpelder and Albert lee Strickland. McGraw Hill, 2009.)
    For interrelated biographies of Albert Lee Strickland and Lynne Ann DeSpelder, and a photo of them, click here.