The Saunterer

Konrad Lorenz on overpopulation

    Every night the TV news is full of wars and killing. The cause is plain. Konrad Lorenz:

    Overpopulation of the earth, because of the superabundance of social contacts, forces every one of us to shut himself off in an essentially “inhuman” way, and which, because of the crowding of many individuals into a small space, elicits aggression.

    (Quoted from page 310 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Konrad Lorenz, click here. For images of or relating to Konrad Lorenz, click here.

Thomas Henry Huxley on experiencing nature

    Many have explained that experiencing nature goes on not in the eyes but in the mind. Yet have any put that better than Thomas Huxley?

    To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.

    (Quoted from page 282 of Primary Education; Vol. 11, June 1903.)
    For a brief biography of Thomas Huxley, click here. For images of or relating to Thomas Huxley, click here.

Hildreth Meière on craftsmanship

    When we were six we first saw Radio City Music Hall’s art deco murals, and it seemed they were from a god. Now we know a human was that god, Hildreth Meière:

    I believe that real craftsmanship is becoming scarce — that the spirit of craftsmanship is dying out in many crafts with the older generation who grew up in them. I believe that architects and designers must do all that they possibly can to encourage younger people to enter these crafts. One of the ways that this can be done is by recognizing the dignity of the craftsman’s contribution, and acknowledging it publicly.

    (Quoted from page176 of The Art Deco Murals of Hildreth Meière, by Catherine Coleman Brawer and Kathleen Murphy Skolnik. Andrea Monfried Editions, 2014.)
    For images of some of Hildreth Meière's art deco murals, click here.
    For a brief biography of Hildreth Meière, click here. For images of or relating to Hildreth Meière, click here.

Henry David Thoreau on the value of the Internet

    His opinion of the Internet is a sure extrapolation of his opinion of the post office and newspapers:

    For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life — I wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.

    (Quoted from page 68 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.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi on art

    Trust Yasuo Kuniyoshi, a Japanese immigrant to the United States, to feel the truth of his comment:

    What is it that makes for vitalization and progress if not new sources of inspiration from other civilizations.

    (Quoted from page 140 of Made In the U.S.A.: American Art From The Phillips Collection. Yale University Press, 2013.)
    For a brief biography of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, click here. For images of some of Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s paintings, click here.

Henri Matisse on creative work

    Pages 55-56 of my book, The Life of the Creative Spirit, collect various phrases expressing the motive for a labor of love:

    “Work is about voyaging, not about landings” — “The hunt is everything, the trophy nothing” — “The allure is in the game, not in the stakes.” To Robert Louis Stevenson it was, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to have arrived.” To Emerson it was, “Everything good is on the highway.” To Montaigne, “The journey not the arrival matters.” And to Shakespeare, “Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

    The other day I came across another that gets at the idea differently, Henri Matisse’s:

    To arrive is to be in prison.

    (From The Matisse Nobody Knew, by Rosamond Bernier. DVD by Kultur.)
    For a brief biography of Henri Matisse, click here. For images of or relating to Henri Matisse, click here.

    For a brief biography of Rosamond Bernier, click here. For images of or relating to Rosamond Bernier, click here.

Edward Gibbon on the two educations

    If done right, from college we learn more than the subjects we study and receive degrees for. Best of all, we learn how to educate ourselves for the rest of our lives, verifying Edward Gibbon’s point: 

    Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.

    (Quoted from page 238 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Edward Gibbon, click here. For images of or relating Edward Gibbon, click here.

David Bornstein on raw ideas

    Send raw ideas out into the world and they will probably go no further. What to do instead? David Bornstein tells:

    An idea is like a play. It needs a good producer and a good promoter even if it’s a masterpiece. Otherwise the play may never open: or it may open but, for lack of an audience, close after a week.

    (Quoted from page 91 of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, by David Bornstein. Oxford University Press, 2007.)
    For a brief biography of David Bornstein, click here. For images of or relating to David Bornstein, click here.

Alfred Einstein on the Eroica symphony

    In the Saunterer’s last post Leonard Bernstein had his say about the Eroica symphony, and now Alfred Einstein has his:

    Beethoven expressed a strange wish when he gave his Eroica to the world, or rather, one that has come to appear strange to us. He wished the work to be placed at the beginning and not the end of the concert program. He considered his symphony too long, too difficult and exhausting to be performed at the end of the evening when the audience might not be alert, attentive and understanding.

    Nowhere today is there a conductor who respects Beethoven’s wish. No doubt the present-day conductor would plead that the Eroica long ago ceased to be a difficult work, and that in dimensions and pretensions it has been outdone by dozens of other symphonies.

    And he would be right; modern conductors are always right. There is no contradicting them. But an interesting point remains — why is it that modern conductors always put the Eroica at the end of their programs? The reason is that, in spite of its one hundred and thirty years of age, the Eroica, though it may have been surpassed in dimensions and pretensions, has never been surpassed in effect. The conductor wants his audience to disperse with minds freshly stamped with the most powerful impression of the whole concert. And no matter how jaded and drooping the audience, it cannot help responding to the Eroica’s whip and spur — most certainly not when the theme of the finale is shouted out by eight horns as I can remember having heard it once.

    The aim of the conductor of the twentieth century — and of the latter half of the nineteenth — is effectiveness, excitement, intoxication, where Beethoven wanted understanding, or better, perhaps, elevation through understanding. The difference is profound.

    (Quoted from page 168 of Alfred Einstein On Music, by Catherine Dower. Greenwood Press, 1991.)
    For a brief biography of Alfred Einstein, click here. (Alfred Einstein was no relation to Albert Einstein, but they once met.)
    For a brief biography of Catherine Dower-Gold, click here. For images of or relating to Catherine Dower-Gold, click here.

Leonard Bernstein on the inevitability of the Eroica symphony

    Ludwig van Beethoven, as Leonard Bernstein explains, seems not to have so much written the Eroica (Italian for heroic) as to have mined it out of the human soul:

    There have been more words written about the Eroica symphony than there are notes in it: in fact, I should imagine that the proportion of words to notes, if anyone could get an accurate count, would be flabbergasting. And yet, has anyone ever successfully “explained” the Eroica? Can anyone explain in mere prose the wonder of one note following or coinciding with another so that we feel that it’s exactly how those notes had to be? Of course not. No matter what rationalists we may profess to be, we are stopped cold at the border of this mystic area.

    (Quoted from page 11 of The Joy of Music, by Leonard Bernstein. Simon and Schuster, 1959.)
    To see and hear Leonard Bernstein conducting the Eroica, click here.
    For a brief biography of Leonard Bernstein, click here. For images of or relating to Leonard Bernstein, click here.
    For a brief biography of Ludwig van Beethoven, click here. For images of or relating to Ludwig van Beethoven, click here.