The Saunterer

Hugh Heclo on how to gain the deeper satisfactions of life

    What a vague concept is “the deeper satisfactions of life,” yet Hugh Heclo manages to explain them and tell how to get them:

    Striving to make yourself the celebrity star in your own life leaves you striving in an empty house of mirrors. . . .
    The deeper satisfactions we crave come from the strong bonds of mutual attachment to other people and larger causes outside ourselves. Then the mirrors become windows and doors into a wider world of loyalties. In that world a sense of well-being and happiness finds us rather than our frantically chasing it down. It is a place where a person has a chance to find the simple satisfaction that comes from doing a job the way it is suppose to be done. It is a place where enduring relationships can liberate us from self-preoccupation, where we gain by giving of ourselves. It is here, not in the glare of celebrity, that life gains an authentic sparkle. And while the popular culture might not notice or reward these larger loyalties, they are the kind of things you and I are likely to cherish when, from some terminus, we look back on the course our lives have taken.

    (Quoted from page 8 of On Thinking Institutionally, by Hugh Heclo. Paradigm Publishers, 2008.)
    For a brief biography of Hugh Heclo, click here. For images of or relating to Hugh Heclo, click here.

T. S. Eliot on the difference between creative thinking and critical thinking

    All human creations are a product of both creative thinking and critical thinking. Creative thinking gets the crude thing; critical thinking refines it. It’s as T. S. Eliot said:

    Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour: the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative.

    (Quoted from page 4 of The Way to Write, by John Fairfax and John Moat. St. Martin’s Press, 1981.)
    For a brief biography of T. S. Eliot, click here. For images of or relating to T. S. Eliot, click here.

The Saunterer on the connection between music and language

    As we once wrote:

    Common experience confirms that music serves language. A person unfamiliar with, say, the musical South Pacific has only to listen to its songs a few times to sing the lyrics from memory. Another who tries to memorize the lyrics by just hearing them recited a few times will not succeed nearly as well. Now, why?

    (We are quoting ourself from page 30 of the October 23, 2010, issue of Science News.)

The Pope on climate change

    The greatest cause of climate change is the Catholic Church’s 2000-year-long preaching that has led to overpopulated Earth. Now the Pope has opened his eyes and seen the effect (climate change) while remaining blind to the greatest cause. About this an editorial titled “Hope from the Pope” in the 25 June issue of Nature said:

    Alas, he [the Pope] remained silent on issues of contraception. With a world population heading towards a possible 10 million, the importance of family planning is clear. The Vatican has been brave on climate change. If it is serious about the fate of the planet and the welfare of its inhabitants, then it must be braver still on the issue of contraception.

Alice Kavounas on how it was then and how it now is

    We all have moments of remembering something meaningful in our past and comparing it with now. Alice Kavounas made it the basis of her poem “Two Chairs”:

Two Chairs

If I were sitting in this chair, with you
alongside in this identical one,
both of us leaning slightly forward
facing the dancing fire as we talked,
knowing that the fire was also dancing
on the polished floorboards, that all of it —
two chairs, our backs, the fire — was reflected
in the shimmer of the living room mirror,
this winter evening might have been one
to recall, perhaps mention, years from now
in a memoir. As it is, both chairs are empty.
The mirror has blackened. You are lost;
I am busy dismantling the house: books,
walls, floor — all of it consumed by fire.

    (Quoted from page 62 of Ornament of Asia, by Alice Kavounas. Shearsman Books, 2009.)

    For a brief biography of Alice Kavounas, click here. For images of or relating to Alice Kavounas, click here.

William Blake on being original

    We forget we’re a copycat society. It’s time we listen closely to William Blake:

    How ridiculous it would be to see the Sheep Endeavouring to walk like the Dog, or the Ox striving to trot like the Horse; just as Ridiculous it is to see One Man Striving to Imitate Another.

    (Quoted from page 348 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of William Blake, click here. For images of or relating William Blake, click here.

Henry David Thoreau on the idiocy of nations

    Our national idiocy probably got that way from the egotistically-driven idiocy of the male human. Henry David Thoreau:

    Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from the true end of life. The religion and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

    (Quoted from page 44 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.

Bernard DeVoto’s credo

    We’ve never read a credo that featured lazing about or having children or skipping out. Credos almost always center on putting goodness into the world through a lifetime of working. Bernard DeVoto’s is a case:

    I should find it hard to state exactly what my ambition as a mature man is. It would run something like this: to do good work, to do work in which I may take some satisfaction and my friends some pleasure; at the utmost, as Frost once said of Robinson, to put something on the record that will not easily be dislodged.

    (Quoted from page 294 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Bernard DeVoto, click here. For images of or relating Bernard DeVoto, click here.

Rudyard Kipling on the most powerful drug

    You won’t find the most powerful drug in the laboratories of Merck or Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson. Rudyard Kipling had it right:

    Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

    (Quoted from page 6 of Addiction Research Methods, edited by Peter G. Miller, John Strang, and Peter M. Miller. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.)

    For a brief biography of Rudyard Kipling, click here. For images of or relating to Rudyard Kipling, click here.

Christina Rossetti on ego and love in death

    We all know of ego and love in times when the one loved is alive, yet their relation may shift in times when the one loved is dead, and for this Christina Rossetti’s poem Remember is instructive.

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

 

    (Quoted from page 36 of Poems of Solace and Remembrance, edited by Paul Negri. Dover Publications, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Christina Rossetti, click here. For images of or relating to Christina Rossetti, click here.