The Saunterer

David M. Raup on the safety of Earth

    You can’t like something that can be unexpectedly dangerous to you. So should you like Earth? David M. Raup:

    Much of our good feeling about planet Earth stems from a certainty that life has existed without interruption for three and a half billion years. We have been taught, as well, that most changes in the natural world are slow and gradual. Species evolve in tiny steps over eons; erosion and weathering change our landscape but at an almost immeasurably slow pace. . . .
Is all this true or merely a fairy tale to comfort us? Is there more to it? I think there is. Almost all species in the past failed. If they died out gradually and quietly and if they deserved to die because of some inferiority, then our good feelings about earth can remain intact. But if they died violently and without having done anything wrong, then our planet may not be such a safe place.

    (Quoted from page 4 of Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck, by David M Raup. Norton, 1991.)
    For a brief biography of David M. Raup, click here. For images of or relating to David M. Raup, click here.

Oscar Wilde on art

    Pretty regularly we go Sauntering in art museums. Fantasy is a balance for being too much in the world. Oscar Wilde:

    Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven by a silver thread. Hers are the forms ‘more real than living men’, and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and when she calls monsters from the deep they come. She can bid the almond tree blossom in the winter, and send snow upon the ripe cornfield.

    (Quoted from page 29 of Intentions, by Oscar Wilde. Brentano’s, 1905.)

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

Winston Churchill on how schools teach too fast for absorption

    By learning slowly with lots of examples and with graphical methods of demonstration, education gets somewhere — as it did with Winston Churchill:

    By being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell — a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great — was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing — namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. Mr. Somervell had a system of his own. He took a fairly long sentence and broke it up into its components by means of black, red, blue and green inks. Subject, verb, object: Relative Clauses, Conditional Clauses, Conjunctive and Disjunctive Clauses! Each had its colour and its bracket. It was a kind of drill. We did it almost daily. As I remained in the Third Fourth (B) three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence — which is a noble thing.

    (Quoted from page 175 The Modern Stylists: Writers on the Art of Writing, edited by Donald Hall. The Free Press, 1968.)

    For a brief biography of Winston Churchill, click here. For images of or relating to Winston Churchill, click here.

Theodore von Kármán on the difference between science and engineering

    Which one in the following list differs fundamentally from the rest: art, poetry, religion, law, engineering, science? All but one create things: Art creates pictures; poetry, poems; religion, precepts of good behavior; law, rules for permitted behavior; engineering, bridges, airplanes, and such. Science stands alone: It discovers what is.

Theodore von Karman:

    The scientist discovers that which exists. An engineer creates that which never was.

    (Quoted from page 68 of Yale Scientific, Volumes 39-41. Yale Scientific Publications, 1964.)
For a brief biography of Theodore von Kármán, click here. For images of or relating to Theodore von Kármán, click here.

Ralph Richardson on acting

    No machine can inspire, and actors would be machine-like if they didn’t supply their imagination to their roles. As Sir Ralph Richardson put it,

    Acting means dreaming at fixed moments in fixed places. (Imagination might be called dreaming.) The actor must dream his own dreams underneath the playwright’s dialogue. What you see and hear on the stage is not all that the playwright has written. Beneath his worlds lie the dreams of the actor. If you even say a simple line, “Hello, my Darling,” without a dream behind it, without a personal fantasy of some sort, you are not acting.

    (Quoted from page 13 of So Therefore . . . A Practical Guide for Actors, by Al Ruscio. Routledge, 2012.)
    For a brief biography of Ralph Richardson, click here. For images of or relating to Ralph Richardson, click here.
    For a brief biography of Al Ruscio, click here. For images of or relating to Al Ruscio, click here.

Lorenzo de’ Medici Il Magnifico on gardens and Paradise

    Did early beautiful gardens shape our idea of Paradise or was it the other way around, the idea of Paradise suggested by early beautiful gardens? Lorenzo de’ Medici gave this answer:

    For ‘Paradise’ . . . means nothing more than a most pleasant garden, abundant with all pleasing and delightful things, of trees, apples, flowers, vivid running waters, song of birds and in effect, all the amenities dreamed of by the heart of man.

    (Quoted from page 47 of Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden, by Vanessa Remington and Roy Strong. Royal Trust Collection, 2015.)

     For a brief biography of Lorenzo de' Medici, click here. For images of or relating to Lorenzo de' Medici, click here.

    For professional information on Vanessa Remington and Roy Strong, click here.

Barnett Newman on the precedence of art over information

    A day spent in a good science museum is wonderful; a day spent in a good art museum, more wonderful. Barnett Newman:

    Man’s first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. . . . The human language is literature, not communication. Man’s first cry was a song. Man’s first address to a neighbor was a cry of power and solemn weakness, not a request for a drink of water.

    (Quoted from page 10 of Art in America 1945 — 1970, Jed Perl, editor. The Library of America, 2014.)
    For a brief biography of Barnett Newman, click here. For images of or relating to Barnett Newman, click here.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton on art and warm climates

    You wouldn’t expect those living in the far north two thousand years ago to have much art in their public places. They spent most of their time inside keeping warm. But you might expect art in public places where it was warm. Edward Bulwer-Lytton:

    It was early noon, and the forum was crowded alike with the busy and idle. As at Paris at this day, so at that time in the cities of Italy, men lived almost wholly out of doors: the public buildings, the forum, the porticoes, the baths, the temples themselves, might be considered their real homes; it is no wonder that they decorated so gorgeously these favourite places of resort, — they felt for them a sort of affection as well as a public pride.

    (Quoted from page 165 of The Last Days of Pompeii, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Harper & Brothers, 1835.)
    For a brief biography of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, click here. For images of or relating to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, click here.

G. M. "Morris" Carstairs on the consequences of far too many people on earth

    Morris Carstairs said the following some years ago, and every day now we see the truth of it:

    When, because of increasing over-population, the standards of living actually decline at the very times when people’s aspirations have been raised, the stage is set for further outbreaks of collective irrationality and violence.
    It is imperative that we recognise the gravity of this threat, because mankind today possesses weapons of such destructive power that the world cannot afford to risk outbreaks of mass violence; and yet the lesson of history points to just such a disaster, unless population control can be achieved before vast human communities degenerate into the semblance of concentration camp inmates, if not . . . pathologically aggressive apes.

    (Quoted from page 306 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Morris Carstairs, click here. For images of or relating Morris Carstairs, click here.

David George Haskell on the trouble with writings in the life sciences

    Hear David G. Haskell:

. . . wild animals enjoying one another and taking pleasure in their world is so immediate and so real, yet this reality is utterly absent from textbooks and academic papers about animals and ecology. There is a truth revealed here, absurd in its simplicity.

 (Quoted from page 15 of the Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 2015. Original source is David G. Haskell’s The Forest Unseen. Penguin, 2013.)
 For a brief biography of David G. Haskell, click here. For images of or relating David G. Haskell, click here.