The Saunterer

Roger A. Caras on people and animals

    No double-blind experiment is needed to confirm this:

    Generally, or at least very often, people with a deep interest in animals are the best people around.

    (Quoted from page 11 of A Dog is Listening, by Roger A. Caras. Fireside, 1992.)
    For bibliographic information on Roger A. Caras, click here. For images of or relating to Roger A. Caras, click here.

Northrop Frye on spirit and soul

    The next time you use the words spirit or soul compare what you mean with Northrop Frye’s meanings of them, for the religious (Christian) and for the secular:

    It goes without saying that the spirit is the immortal aspect of ourselves, and that the soul-body unit has to dissolve before it becomes fully emancipated. It is the body that Jesus assumed at the resurrection, and is for us the “risen body” in which we share that state. Angels, or whatever forms of existence are assumed to occupy higher levels than our ordinary one, are regularly called spiritual beings. These are the traditional associations, but the word spirit is versatile enough to include secular areas as well. Behind the crowds lining up in Red Square to view the body of Lenin is some such axiom as: “Lenin is dead, but his spirit still lives on.” No other word than “spirit” would seem appropriate here.
    The soul is usually thought of as the seat of consciousness (Genesis 2:7), and consciousness includes a will to keep on being conscious: no consciousness is separable from such a will. Machines may do many things that resemble consciousness, but as they have no will to do these things, but depend on being plugged in or turned on, we do not think of them as conscious. So the soul-body unit is a persisting hierarchy in which the will of a soul continuously dominates. This persistence gives the unit a single identity, in which, as we noted, we call ourselves the same person at seventy that we were at seven, despite all the obvious changes.

    (Quoted from pages 124-25 of Words With Power, by Northrop Frye. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990)
    For bibliographic information about Northrop Frye, click here. For images of or relating to Northrop Frye, click here.

Gustave Flaubert’s secret to happiness

    Composers are happy. The medium of composition doesn’t matter. If you compose computer code or  clay pots, you will be happy. Flaubert’s happiness was in composing stories:

    Work, work, write -- write all you can while the muse bears you along. She is the best battle-steed, the best coach to carry you through life in noble style. The burden of existence does not weigh on our shoulders when we are composing. It is true that the fatigue and the feeling of desertion that follow are all the more terrible. Let it be so, however.   

    (Quoted from page 285 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Gustave Flaubert, click here. For images of or relating to Gustave Flaubert, click here.

Lord Dunsany on us and the cosmos

    Little sentences may hold mighty ideas, as Lord Dunsany’s:

Man is a small thing,
and the night is very large
and full of wonders.

    (Quoted from page 51of The Laughter of the Gods, by Lord Dunsany. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922)
    For bibliographic information about Lord Dunsany (Edward Plunkett ), click here. For images of or relating to Lord Dunsany, click here.

Gertrude Jekyll on the garden in March

    If seed catalogs come, can gardens be far behind? Now catalog season is here, and Gertrude Jekyll reminds us of March when gardens begin to stir:

    A kind of sullen dullness pervades all plant life. Sweet-scented shrubs do not give off their fragrance; even the woodland moss and earth and dead leaves withhold their sweet, nutty scent. The surface of the earth has an arid, infertile look; a slight haze of an ugly grey takes the colour out of objects in middle distance, and seems to rob the flowers of theirs, or to put them out of harmony with all things around. But a day comes, or, perhaps, a warmer night, when the wind, now breathing gently from the south-west, puts new life into all growing things.

    (Quoted from page 44 of Wood and Garden, by Gertrude Jekyll. Longmans, Green and Co., 1899)
    For bibliographic information about Gertrude Jekyll, click here. For images of or relating to Gertrude Jekyll, click here.

Franklin D. Roosevelt on the responsibility of a nation’s people

    In Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1940 Inaugural Address he said this:

    Lives of nations are determined not by the count of years, but by the lifetime of the human spirit. The life of a man is threescore years and ten. . . . The life of a nation is the fulness of the measure of its will to live. . . . A nation, like a person, has a body. A nation, like a person, has a mind. . . . A nation, like a person, has something deeper, something more permanent. . . . It is that something which matters most to its future, which calls for the most sacred guarding of its present.

    (Quoted from page 59 of Memoirs of a Revolutionist, by Dwight Macdonald. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957)
    For bibliographic information on Franklin D. Roosevelt, click here. For images of or relating to Franklin D. Roosevelt, click here.
    For bibliographic information on Dwight Macdonald, click here. For images of or relating to Dwight Macdonald, click here.

Loretta Swit on what to do with your life

    The way of all time is Loretta Swit’s way:

    I feel that these things that are being done in the puppy mills are evil, and I think we must as a society fight evil and rid ourselves of these things. You have to drop everything and start caring. Get involved -– this is the only world you have. If you’re not helping to make things better, what good is your life? You use your life to make things better, to help others. That’s the life you want to live.   

    (Loretta Swit is quoted from page 9, All Animals, July-August 2010, published by The Humane Society of the United States.)
    For bibliographic information on Loretta Swit, click here. For images of or relating to Loretta Swit, click here.
    For Loretta Swit’s website, click here.

Richard Feynman on the unreasonableness of computer reasoning

    Here’s the insight of a genius, Richard Feynman:

    When we are all finished, and we have a mathematical theory by which we can compute consequences, what can we do? It really is an amazing thing. In order to figure out what an atom is going to do in a given situation we make up rules with marks on paper, carry them into a machine which has switches that open and close in some complicated way, and the result will tell us what the atom is going to do! If the way that these switches open and close were some kind of model of the atom, if we thought that the atom had switches in it, then I would say that I understood more or less what is going on. I find it quite amazing that it is possible to predict what will happen by mathematics, which is simply following rules which really have nothing to do with what is going on in the original thing. The closing and opening of switches in a computer is quite different from what is happening in nature.

    (Quoted from page 171 of The Character of Physical Law, by Richard Feynman. MIT Press, 1967.)
    For bibliographic information on Richard Feynman, click here. For images of or relating to Richard Feynman, click here.

Albert Einstein on the limits of science

    Science can tell us about almost everything in the world, but the language it tells us in differs from the language of ordinary meaning. So, much science is of limited help for improving our lives, “information” that fails to inform. Hear Albert Einstein:

    It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

    (Quoted from page 25 of Cosmic Crisis and Creation, by Kenyon Wright. AuthorHouse, 2012.)
    For a brief biography of Albert Einstein, click here. For images of or relating to Albert Einstein, click here.
    Kenyon Wright is founder of the Scottish Environmental Forum, and the Scottish Churches group on the Environment.

H. Giles on singing and memory

    More of needed: professors who sing their lectures. For, H. Giles reminds us, the words we hear we forget, where singing puts them into memory:

    A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

    (H. Giles is quoted from page 21 of Musical Messages for Every Day of the Year: A Musician’s Birthday Book, by Rebekah Crawford. G. Schirmer, 1907.)
    Rebekah Crawford, 1845-1934, wrote about music.