The Saunterer

Kai Epstude, Neal J. Roese and Johnny Mercer on Sehnsucht

    From Kai Epstude and Neal J. Roese comes a nice explanation of sehnsucht:

    A German word that seems to have no obvious analog in the English language, although regret and yearning perhaps come closest. Sehnsucht is an aching feeling of longing for something deeply meaningful that probably can never come to fruition. Sehnsucht might focus on an imagined love that “might have been” but never came to be, but it may also center on an actual loved one who died long ago. In both cases there is a deep cherishing of the overall worth of that loved one; hence, positive affect is as much a component of Sehnsucht as is negative affect. The bittersweet essence of Sehnsucht was perhaps a significant reason the word was nominated as the third-most-beautiful word in the German language (Deutscher Sprachrat, 2004)!

    Listen to Johnny Mathis demonstrating Sehnsucht in Johnny Mercer’s song Laura by clicking here.

--  Laura  --
Laura is the face in the misty light,
footsteps that you hear down the hall.
The laugh that floats on a summer night
that you can never quite recall.
And you see Laura on the train that is passing thru.
Those eyes, how familiar they seem.
She gave your very first kiss to you.
That was Laura but she's only a dream.
   
    (Kai Epstude and Neal J. Roese are quoted from page 23 of their article, “The Functional Theory of Counterfactual Thinking”; Personality and Social Psychology Review, May 2008.)
    For bibliographic information on Kai Epstude, click here. For images of or relating to Kai Epstude, click here.       
    For bibliographic information on Neal J. Roese, click here. For images of or relating to Neal J. Roese, click here.
    For a brief biography of Johnny Mercer, click here. For images of or relating to Johnny Mercer, click here.

John Eliot Gardiner on singing in canon

    Recall from grade school the songs “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Three Blind Mice,” usually sung in canon. How canon-singing goes to the heart’s core John Eliot Gardiner explains:

    In an updated version of the medieval trivium, music in Lutheran schools was considered an adjunct to the study of grammar, logic and rhetoric, while singing was valued as a proven way of helping pupils to commit things to memory. They were taught the practical rudiments of music -– rules for clefs, rests and intervals, sight-reading and part-singing –- mostly by singing in canon. The beauty of canon-singing lay in its simplicity of means. All it took was just a single line of music, either distributed to the class or sung by the teacher. The first voice or group began, then, at a given point, the second entered with the same melody, and so on -– enough to reveal independence of voice lines and, through their combination, the ability to create polyphony. A fully fledged piece of harmony, formed by the layering and spacing out of melodic entries, emerged miraculously -– neatly illustrating the way music could be regarded, as one seventeenth-century theorist proposed, as “a Godly act . . . its song and sound . . . a heart-bell, which penetrates every little vein of the heart and its Affects (be a man a very Stoic or an immovable trunk).” It was also a vivid aural replica of the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres and of man’s place within the universe.
   
    (Quoted from page 40 of Bach, by John Eliot Gardiner. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.)
    For bibliographic information on John Eliot Gardiner, click here. For images of or relating to John Eliot Gardiner, click here.
    For "Frère Jacques" (“Are you sleeping?) sung in canon, click here.

Irving Langmuir on the value of self-learning

    Here is part of a letter from Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir, written when he was sixth-four in response to a ten-year-old boy’s letter to him describing the boy’s theories of the atom:

    You asked for a frank criticism. I shall try to make the kind of criticism you will make yourself a few years from now when you look back over what you have written. When you go deeply into the structure of matter as you are trying to do, you need very badly a good mathematical training. You must start to learn algebra, and I think you would not have much difficulty in getting the foundations of the knowledge of differential and integral calculus. I started both of these things myself in my second year in high school before receiving formal schooling in them. I found later that this is the very best way to learn things of this kind. The things you learn by yourself will always be more valuable to you than the things that somebody else teaches you.

    (Quoted from page 321 of Cathedrals of Science, by Patrick Coffey. Oxford University Press, 2008.)
    For a brief biography of Irving Langmuir, click here. For images of or relating to Irving Langmuir, click here.
    Patrick Coffey is a writer and professor of physical chemistry.