The Saunterer

Alexander Calder on art and reality

    In an interview, Alexander Calder said:

    I think I am a realist. . . . I make what I see. It’s only the problem of seeing it. . . . The universe is real but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it.

    (Quoted from page 42 of The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists, by Katharine Kuh. De Capo Press, 2000.)
    For a brief biography of the Alexander Calder, click here. For images of or relating to the Alexander Calder, click here.
    For a brief biography of Katharine Kuh, click here. For images of or relating to Katharine Kuh, click here.

General George Patton on the importance of self confidence

    On D-day General George Patton wrote to his son, a West Point cadet:

    I am sure that if every leader who goes into battle will promise himself that he will come out either a conqueror or a corpse he is sure to win. There is no doubt of that. Defeat is not due to losses but to the destruction of the soul of the leaders. . . .
    The most vital quality a soldier can possess is SELF CONFIDENCE, utter, complete and bumptious. You can have doubts about your good looks, about your intelligence, about your selfcontrol but to win in a war you must have NO doubts about your ability as a soldier.

    (Quoted from page 240 of War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars, by Andrew Carroll. Scribner, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of General George S. Patton, click here. For images of or relating to General George S. Patton, click here.
    For a brief biography of Andrew Carroll, click here. For images of or relating to Andrew Carroll, click here.

Dmitri Shostakovich on art and the fear of death

    Dmitri Shostakovich saw a connection between creating art and fearing death:

    Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling. The irony lies in the fact that under the influence of that fear people create poetry, prose, and music; that is, try to strengthen their ties with the living and increase their influence on them.

    (Quoted from page 273 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Dmitri Shostakovich, click here. For images of or relating to Dmitri Shostakovich, click here.

Charles F. Kettering on the trouble with us

    This is how he describes it:

    The trouble is that we don’t get interested in the commonplace things — and it is the commonplace things that go to make up the universe.

    (Quoted from page 194 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Charles F. Kettering, click here. For images of or relating to Charles F. Kettering, click here.

Henry David Thoreau on the advantage of doing things by hand

    Working by hand gets to the same place as working with mechanical or human aids, but the journey by hand produces a great side effect, often more valuable than the place, touching nature and going far in forming mind and heart:

    Early in the morning I worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where I could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the green berries deepened their tints by the time I had made another bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass — this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.

    (Quoted from page 108 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.

Charles Darwin on how evolution repurposes body parts

    The bodies of animals that evolution produces are, Darwin believed, like the machines Rube Goldberg produced:

    Although an organ may not have been originally formed for some special purpose, if it now serves for this end we are justified in saying that it is specially contrived for it. On the same principle, if a man were to make a machine for some special purpose, but were to use old wheels, springs, and pulleys, only slightly altered, the whole machine, with all its parts, might be said to be specially contrived for that purpose. Thus throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery of many ancient and distinct specific forms.

    (Quoted from page 61 of Defining Darwin, by Michael Ruse. Prometheus Books, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Charles Darwin, click here. For images of or relating to Charles Darwin, click here.
    For images of some of Rube Goldberg’s machines, click here.
    For a brief biography of Rube Goldberg, click here.
    For a brief biography of Michael Ruse, click here. For images of or relating to Michael Ruse, click here.

Alfred Hitchcock on drama

    That people prefer suspense to truth is apparent in Alfred Hitchcock’s remark:

    Drama is life with the boring parts left out.

    (Quoted from page 132 of Advocacy, by John A. Daly. Yale University Press, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of Alfred Hitchcock, click here. For images of or relating to Alfred Hitchcock, click here.
    For a brief biography of John A. Daly, click here. For images of or relating to John A. Daly, click here.

John Muir on the worth of nature

    Nature was nearly pristine when John Muir wrote the following, but with every day since of greater and greater overpopulation. . . .

    Freshness and beauty are everywhere; flowers are born every hour; living sunlight is poured over all, and every thing and creature is glad. Our world is indeed a beautiful one, and I was thinking, on going to church last Sabbath, that I would hardly accept of a free ticket to the moon or to Venus, or any other world, for fear it might not be so good and so fraught with the glory of the Creator as our own.

    (Quoted from page 344 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of John Muir, click here. For images of or relating to John Muir, click here.

Charles Jencks on the architectural placebo

    Out of high school, the college the Saunterer went to was rich in ivy and old architecture, seemingly aiding academic mood, influencing thinking. Yet maybe the effect was without physical cause. Charles Jencks:

    As most people know, the placebo is a fake cure that works because it operates on the beliefs of patients. Since the 1950s and the work of Henry Beecher with phoney morphine injections (made with salt water), the scientific community has taken the placebo seriously and has seen how it works very well in some cases. These positive outcomes typically concern pain, inflammation, and what are called psychogenic problems.
    Today’s voluminous literature on the placebo effect often quotes the figure that it is effective in thirty-three percent of the cases. That number refers, variously, to the amount of total improvement in a patient’s health or the percentage of patients who show improvement. However crude a statistic, it does beg some questions: how can phoney things work? Or to inject a legal perplexity: how can we license witch doctors? Or, switching the discussion to architecture: how do we gauge the effect of a building on health if, like the placebo effect, it is partly in the mind? To put the question differently: is there an architectural placebo?

    (Quoted from page 32 of Can Architecture Affect Your Health?, by Charles Jencks. ArtEZ Press, 2012.)
    For a brief biography of Charles Jencks, click here. For images of or relating to Charles Jencks, click here.

James Parker on what children’s books teach about effective writing

    What they taught him is that some advice given in writing courses and books is wrongheaded, such as "Do not repeat yourself." Indeed, reading to his son at bed taught him the power of repetition:

    First let me recall some of the literary revelations and disclosures that attended the early years of bedtime reading-aloud. In that situation — book, bed, child — the air itself gives its verdict on the text, weighing and testing the words as they become sound. I learned very quickly, for example, the value of repetition — its mysterious penetration, its steady increase of power.

    And other lessons too:

    Keep it crisp; tell a good story; don’t muck about; don’t be afraid to say the same thing twice, if it’s important; respect the reader; have some loyalty to your characters; and when you feel the urge to get descriptive, sit on it. (Much of this comes under Elmore Leonard’s 10th rule of writing: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”)

    (Quoted from "Bookends," by James Parker, in the June 15, 2014 issue of The New York Times Book Review.)