The Saunterer

Henry David Thoreau on “Why read the classics?”

    Our answer is because you’ll grow a great mind like his. And his was great, because only a great mind grown on the classics could have worked out his answer:

    Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

    (Quoted from page 72 of Walden and “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau. Signet Classic, 1960.)
    For a brief biography of Henry David Thoreau, click here. For images of or relating to Henry David Thoreau, click here.

John Maynard Keynes on hoarding wealth

    We excerpt the following from John Maynard Keynes' famous 1930 essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”:

    The love of money as a possession -- as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -- will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

    For a brief biography of John Maynard Keynes, click here. For images of or relating to John Maynard Keynes, click here.

Andrew Wyeth on the past

    To Andrew Wyeth the past was free of dates:

    I don’t have much feeling for the past. My feeling for history is not connected with dates: It is the way the landscape looks in the moonlight.

    (Quoted from page 200 of Unknown Terrain: The Landscapes of Andrew Wyeth, by Beth Venn and Adam D. Weinberg. Whitney Museum of American Art, 1998.)
    For a brief biography of Andrew Wyeth, click here. For images of or relating to Andrew Wyeth, click here.

Stephen Wolfram on mathematical reasoning

    Reading Stephen Wolfram below suggests why mathematical reasoning, at least the greatly creative kind, is unteachable:

    Of the limited set of people exposed to higher mathematics, different ones often seem to think in bizarrely different ways. Some think symbolically, presumably applying linguistic capabilities to algebraic or other representations. Some think more visually, using mechanical experience or visual memory. Others seem to think in terms of abstract patterns, perhaps sometimes with implicit analogies to musical harmony. And still others –- including some of the purest mathematicians -– seem to think distinctly in terms of constraints, perhaps using some kind of abstraction of everyday geometrical reasoning.
    (Quoted from page 1177 of A New Kind of Science, by Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram Media, 2002.)
    For a brief biography of Stephen Wolfram, click here. For images of or relating to Stephen Wolfram, click here.

John Cleese on not giving of oneself

    Not that any is needed, but the proof that most of us approve of donating to charitable causes is that we laugh at John Cleese’s Monty Python skit where he plays a banker to whom his solicitor has asked him to donate a pound to an orphanage. First he thinks he’s being asked because it’s an investment opportunity, then maybe a tax scam. His solicitor says it’s neither:

Cleese: No? Well, I’m awfully sorry I don’t understand. Can you just explain exactly what you want.
Solicitor: Well, I want you to give me a pound, and then I go away and give it to the orphans.
Cleese: Yes?
Solicitor: Well, that’s it.
Cleese: No, no, no, I don’t follow this at all, I mean, I don’t want to seem stupid but it looks to me as though I’m a pound down on the whole deal.
Solicitor: Well, yes you are.
Cleese: I am! Well, what is my incentive to give you the pound?
Solicitor: Well, the incentive is -– to make the orphans happy.
Cleese: (genuinely puzzled) Happy? . . . You’re quite sure you’ve got this right? . . .

    (Quoted from “Motivation, Cognition, and Charitable Giving,” by Robert Frank. Page 130 in: Giving: Western Ideas of Philanthropy, J. B. Schneewind, Indiana University Press, 1996.)

    We invite you to look at the opposite view -- “Lewis Carroll on giving of oneself," posted on The Saunterer, July 16, 2014 -- by clicking here.

    For a brief biography of John Cleese, click here. For images of or relating to John Cleese, click here.

Richard Avedon on a limit to photography

    As he tells it:

    I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera. I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is already there. I can only record. I cannot interpret her. There is no going further than who she is. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait.

    (Quoted from page 36 of Growing Up with Audrey Hepburn, by Rachel Moseley. Manchester University Press, 2002.)
    For a brief biography of Richard Avedon, click here. For images of or relating to Richard Avedon, click here.
    For a brief biography of Audrey Hepburn, click here. For images of or relating to Audrey Hepburn, click here.
    For a brief biography of Rachel Moseley, lick here.

Lewis Carroll on giving of oneself

    Lewis Carroll brings clarity and comprehension to something we’ve all wondered about: the possibility or impossibility of purely altruistic acts.

    And so you have found out that secret--one of the deep secrets of Life--that all, that is really worth the doing, is what we do for others? Even as the old adage tells us, “What I spent, that I lost; what I gave, that I had.” Casuists have tried to twist “doing good” into another form of “doing evil,” and have said “you get pleasure yourself by giving this pleasure to another: so it is merely a refined kind of selfishness, as your own pleasure is a motive for what you do.” I say it is not selfishness, that my own pleasure should be a motive so long as it is not the motive that would outweigh the other, if the two came into collision. The “selfish man” is he who would still do the thing, even if it harmed others, so long as it gave him pleasure: the “unselfish man” is he who would still do the thing, even if it gave him no pleasure, so long as it pleased others. But, when both motives pull together, the “unselfish man” is still the unselfish man, even though his own pleasure is one of his motives!

    (Quoted from page 196 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Lewis Carroll, click here. For images of or relating to Lewis Carroll, click here.

Roger Fry on art and ethics

    As Roger Fry describes it,

    Art doesn’t begin until you’ve got past the stage of ethics. Ethics is a balance of conflicting claims, Art is a free expression.

    (Quoted from page 249 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Roger Fry, click here. For images of or relating to Roger Fry, click here.

Brad Holland on baby boomers

    Born between 1946 and 1964, have they missed learning some essentials of human being?

    The medium is the message. This is an overall rule of thumb for baby boomers. Boomers also tend to confuse emotions for thoughts, sentimentality for sensitivity and public relations for public policy.

    (Quoted from page 37 of Never Touch a Painting When it’s Wet. BIS Publishers, 2013. Edited by: Anneloes van Gaalen.)
    For a brief biography of Brad Holland, click here. For images of or relating to Brad Holland, click here.
    For a brief biography of Anneloes van Gaalen, click here. For images of or relating to Anneloes van Gaalen, click here.

Henri Matisse on the value of travel

    The value depends on the traveler’s maturity:

    The mind of a man who is still developing can be intoxicated by places like Tahiti because his pleasures are confused (that is to say that when he has felt the voluptuous roundness of a Tahitian woman, he imagines that the sky is clearer). But when a man is formed, organized, with an ordered brain, he no longer makes these confusions and better knows the source of his euphoria, of his dilatation. Consequently, he doesn’t risk interrupting the course of his own development. It is thus for the painter. A voyage made at the time when the mind is already formed has a usefulness different from that of a voyage made by a young man.

    (Quoted from page 227 of Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview. The Getty Research Institute, 2013.)
    For a brief biography of Henri Matisse, click here. For images of or relating to Henri Matisse, click here.