The Saunterer

Robertson Davies on documents

    Why do some people want to write instead of wanting to have babies? Robertson Davies has a fictional character explain:

    As an historian I had all my life been aware of the extraordinary importance of documents. I had handled hundreds of them: letters, reports, memoranda, sometimes diaries; I had always treated them with respect, and had come in time to have an affection for them. They summed up something that was becoming increasingly important to me, and that was an earthly form of immortality. Historians come and go, but the document remains, and it has the importance of a thing that cannot be changed or gainsaid. Whoever wrote it continues to speak through it. It might be honest and it might be complete; on the other hand it could be thoroughly crooked and omit something of importance. But there it was, and it was all succeeding ages possessed.

    (Quoted from page 534 of The Deptford Trilogy, by Robertson Davies. Penguin Books, 1990.)
    For a brief biography of Robertson Davies, click here. For images of or relating to Robertson Davies, click here.

Herbert A. Simon on administrators

    When you come to think of it, spouses are administrators of their world of marriage. Bear that in mind as you read Herbert Simon’s idea that a fault of administrators is they oversimplify the world:

    Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty--that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple.

    (Quoted from 45 of Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott. Yale University Press, 1998.)
    For a brief biography of Herbert A. Simon, click here. For images of or relating to Herbert A. Simon, click here.   
    For a brief biography of James C. Scott, click here. For images of or relating to James C. Scott, click here.