The Saunterer

Immanuel Kant on outer and inner laws

    Immanuel Kant:

    Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and persistently I reflect upon them: the starry heaven about me and the moral law within me. I see them in front of me and unite them immediately with the consciousness of my own existence.

    (Quoted from page xiii of The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes. Pantheon Books, 2008.)
    For a brief biography of Immanuel Kant, click here. For images of or relating to Immanuel Kant, click here.
    For a brief biography of Richard Holmes, click here. For images of or relating to Richard Holmes, click here.

D. H. Lawrence on painting

    D. H. Lawrence’s advice to painters:

    Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little. I have lived enough among painters and around studios to have had all the theories — and how contradictory they are — rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories. . . Theorise, theorise all you like — but when you start to paint, shut your theoretic eyes and go for it with instinct and intuition.

    (Quoted from page 69 of The Creative Process. New American Library, 1952.)
    For a brief biography of D. H. Lawrence, click here. For images of or relating to D. H. Lawrence, click here.

Gertrude Jekyll on beauty

    In the following paragraph, Kristine F. Miller pieces together Gertrude Jekyll’s words about beauty:

    “As in the case of the private garden,” a public garden “should be a beautiful and restful place, full of delight to the eye and refreshment to the mind.” For those who do not “consciously recognize beauty, or understand what makes for beauty,” beauty is the “most wholesome of teachers.” Beauty not only gives joy but also “teaches admiration and reverence, the first qualities that constitute the finest forms of worship.”

    (Quoted from page 23 of Almost Home: The Public Landscapes of Gertrude Jekyll, by Kristine F. Miller. University of Virginia Press, 2013.)
    For a brief biography of Gertrude Jekyll, click here. For images of or relating to Gertrude Jekyll, click here.
    For a brief biography of Kristine F. Miller, click here. For images of or relating to Kristine F. Miller, click here.

The Saunterer on goodness and life’s purpose

     In the early years of my teaching career I met some students who thought that goodness is whatever they decide it is. Later in my book, The Life of the Creative Spirit, I wrote Chapter 8, “How Inner and Outer Excellence Run Each Other,”showing that goodness is absolute. And because it is, life has a purpose. Here is the chapter:

    Many are the ways of expressing the interplay between the maker and what is made:
    One’s skills hone the job, and the job hones one’s skills.
    Or equivalently:
    Improvements made on products make improvements on the improver.
    Or equivalently:
    Inventing the invention invents the inventor.
    Or equivalently:
    Inner excellence begets outer excellence, and outer excellence begets inner excellence.
    Inherent in these expressions are two modes of creation: creation by projection and, in response to this, creation by transformation. Michelangelo, by his excellence, projected the excellence of the Sistine Chapel’s frescoes. Wrestling with the problems of his project transformed him into a more capable projector.
    By following in each project the compass of your creative spirit, a guiding hand will unnoticeably operate across projects. You head toward nearby outer horizons, trying to create much goodness, days or weeks away, and somehow this inches you toward the best of all inner horizons, a lifetime away. No matter that you can barely see beyond the current project to the next, you have only to ply squarely into the steepest gradient of increasing outer goodness that you can manage, and the response is the just-right transformation of your inner goodness, boosting your skills and determination, fitting your mind to do the next and best most difficult projects. No amount of playing, schooling, and book learning can by themselves so thoroughly search out and correct your weaknesses, nor so sustain your intent.
    Now and again the above is challenged with this claim: “Goodness is whatever I make it, and I can make it be anything I want.” And this: “Life has no purpose. It’s all a meaningless game.” Such claims are untrue. Goodness is absolute, not whatever one personally declares it to be. First, nothing but goodness is the basis for lighting the creative spirit. Make anything else great, and the spirit refuses to recognize it. And second, only goodness has a future and gives its creator a future. If as a substitute for creating good things we create trivial things, or perverted things, or evil things, we curb the expansion of our development. The guiding hand forsakes us.
    To illustrate, imagine you have the taxing project whose vision is to sit in more seats of an empty football stadium in eight hours than anyone has before. You have to devise an efficient route for moving around, and a way to avoid getting weary and sore. Then at the scheduled time, adhering to plan, you do it, sitting in 18,773 seats. You have gone up against a mass of resistance, and some people came to watch. On the action-reaction principle it has changed you. But if ever there is a meaningless game it is this. The project is trivial, its basis other than goodness. How do you know? First, your spirit failed to light up; it can’t for stunt work. Second, if you continue over the years creating stunts, you will look back and see that your mind grew into a freakish, limited affair, unable to create anything of great worth to people.
    Types of stunts outnumber what they seem. Though we naturally think of physical daredevils, a stunt is anything that concentrates on inventing and carrying out difficult means to unworthwhile visions, visions which if achieved could not possibly light the spirit. Solving a hard but useless scientific problem is a stunt. So is developing a complex device to do a job no one might ever want done. So is writing an essay that struggles with a small idea in a big way. Whatever the stunts, gone by middle age is the stunt-maker’s desire to conquer frivolous complexities. And worse, the potential for imagining fine visions atrophies for lack of use.
    If stunt making kills the guiding hand, a quicker way to its death is to take pains to create perverted products, making them as poorly as one can. Although no sane person does this, the possibility is instructive. In pursuing the more perverse, almost immediately the direction to it is lost, not to mention interest. Imagine a perverted scientist who seeks to make the falsest claims imaginable. Soon the scientist is without a criterion, as it is uncertain to say which in a large collection of falsehoods is falser, as falseness can be evaluated only in the region near truth. Or take perverted art. Trying to write down the least-moving poem reaches a point where, among a thousand nominees, it is impossible to tell which doggerel is worse. Or take perverted mountaineering. In a topsy-turvy world where climbers start from peaks and lower themselves down, soon no one knows which route to try, or much cares.
    As for the evil-minded given to malignant aims, to producing fiendish tricks, the antithesis of goodness, they lack inclination to perceive what is more damnable beyond the unfeeling cruelties they have done. Once a good thing is blown to smithereens, there is little depraved gratification in going to finer bits.
    Goodness is boundless, evilness has a nearby limit. Goodness attracts constructors, those who believe in union among people. Evilness attracts levelers, those who believe in estrangement. The leveler is quick to arrive at where all alternatives go to equally black states of disfigurement and ill emotion. The competence of the leveler at leveling is unable to grow on and on.
    It is in the best interest of evil people to realize that being evil perpetrates its destruction on themselves. It denies them the guiding hand, denies them keeping company with quality, denies them the evolution and renewal of themselves. In place of this it deals them an existence like boulders, cold and static, hidebound and lonely.
    None of this — creating the trivial, the perverted, or the evil — is a match for creating goodness. By creating goodness, the guiding hand operates, deepening and widening mind so that mind can more deeply and widely create, the mutually sustaining and spiritually vitalizing circle that, uniquely among alternatives, deserves to be called life. Life that is always with prospects of better ahead. Life that gathers the ingredients for its future advances as it goes. Life that responsibly emanates from creativity, goodness, excellence, and quality. Life that scraps banal values and engages sublime ones. Life that is unfailing in curiosity and fresh ideas. Life in which most every day is the time of one’s life.

(Quoted from pages 48 to 51 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
THIS WILL BE THE ONLY POST UNTIL FEBRUARY 26, 2015.

Dick Cavett on the value of rereading

    Demonstrating his point with Huckleberry Finn, Dick Cavett said:

    “Huck” is a great illustrator of “Vlad” (I didn’t actually know him) Nabokov’s admonition that there is no such thing as reading. Only rereading. Try it with a book you read and think you know. It’s as if the thing’s been rewritten and filled with gems that you missed the first time. Try it, even with a few pages you’ve just read. We’d all have been better off to have read half as many books. Twice.

    (Quoted from page 6 of the December 21, 2014, issue of The New York Times Book Review.)

    For a brief biography of Dick Cavett, click here. For images of or relating to Dick Cavett, click here.

John Charles Van Dyke on the aesthetic sense

    It’s sad how the politicians and the masses declare what’s important. John Charles Van Dyke:

    To speak about sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense — the power to enjoy through the eye, the ear, and the imagination — is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it.

    (Quoted from page 60 of The Desert, by John Charles Van Dyke. Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1911.)
    For a brief biography of John Charles Van Dyke, click here. For images of or relating to John Charles Van Dyke, click here.

Blaise Pascal on religious conviction

    The reason for the terrorist attacks in France was explained by a Frenchman almost 400 years earlier. Blaise Pascal:

    Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

    (Quoted from page 153 of Pensees, by Blaise Pascal. Digireads.com Publishing, 2005.)

    For a brief biography of Blaise Pascal, click here. For images of or relating to Blaise Pascal, click here.

Oscar Wilde on children and their parents

    Does this ring true with you?

    Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely if ever do they forgive them.

    (Quoted from page 22 of An Unsolicited Gift: Why We Do What We Do, by Dennis Friedman. Arcadia Books, 2010.)

    For a brief biography of Oscar Wilde, click here. For images of or relating to Oscar Wilde, click here.

    To learn about psychiatrist Dr. Dennis Friedman and his ideas, click here.

Wallace Stegner on rivers as a restorative

    About the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, Wallace Stegner wrote:

    By such a river it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired or old. Every sense applauds it. Taste it, feel its chill on the teeth: it is purity absolute. Watch its racing current, its steady renewal of force: it is transient and eternal. And listen again to its sounds: get far enough away so that the noise of falling tons of water does not stun the ears, and hear how much is going on underneath — a whole symphony of smaller sounds, hiss and splash and gurgle, the small talk of side channels, the whisper of blown and scattered spray gathering itself and beginning to flow again, secret and irresistible, among the wet rocks.

    (Passage from "The Sound of Mountain Water," by Wallace Stegner. Quoted here from page 35 of The Sacred Earth, edited by Jason Gardner. New World Library, 1989.)
    For a brief biography of Wallace Stegner, click here. For images of or relating to Wallace Stegner, click here.

Arthur E. Brown on the measure of humanness

    The Saunterer puts the measure of humanness not on the capacity to think but on the capacity to grieve. By this, chimpanzees are our equals. Here is naturalist Arthur E. Brown’s account of a chimpanzee grieving:

    With the chimpanzee, the evidences of a certain degree of genuine grief were well marked. The two animals had lived together for many months, and were much attached to each other; they were seldom apart and generally had their arms about each other’s neck; they never quarreled, even over a pretended display of partiality by their keeper in feeding them, and if occasion required one to be handled with any degree of force, the other was always prepared to do battle in its behalf on the first cry of fright. After the death of the female, which took place early in the morning, the remaining one made many attempts to rouse her, and when he found this to be impossible his rage and grief were painful to witness. Tearing the hair, or rather snatching at the short hair on his head, was always one of his common expressions of extreme anger, and was now largely indulged in, but the ordinary yell of rage which he set up at first, finally changed to a cry which the keeper of the animals assures me he had never heard before, and which would be most nearly represented by hah-ah-ah-ah-ah, uttered somewhat under the breath, and with a plaintive sound like a moan. With this he made repeated efforts to arouse her, lifting up her head and hands, pushing her violently and rolling her over. After her body was removed from the cage — a proceeding which he violently opposed — he became more quiet, and remained so as long as his keeper was with him, but catching sight of the body once when the door was opened and again when it was carried past the front of the cage, he became violent, and cried for the rest of the day. The day following, he sat still most of the time and moaned continuously.

    (Quoted from “Grief in the Chimpanzee,” by Arthur E. Brown. The American Naturalist, Vol. 13. No. 3, 1879. Pp. 173-175.)
    Arthur E. Brown was the superintendent of the Philadelphia Zoological Garden.