The Saunterer

Leon Battista Alberti on painting

    Leon Battista Alberti lived in the 1400s and some of his instructional writings on art have survived. Here he gives a practical tip involving squinting and a strategical tip about the value of sculpting to painting:

    It is very useful in evaluating the lights to squint or to close the sight with the eyelashes so that the lights are dimmed and seem painted in intersections. Perhaps it will be more useful to practise relief than drawing. If I am not mistaken, sculpture is more certain than painting. He who does not understand the relief of the thing he paints will rarely paint it well. It is easier to find relief in sculpting than in painting. To prove that this argument is to the point: in almost every age there are some mediocre sculptors, but inept or even ridiculous painters are even more common.

    (Quoted from page 94 of On Painting, by Leon Battista Alberti. Yale University Press, 1956.)
    For a brief biography of Leon Battista Alberti, click here. For images of or relating to Leon Battista Alberti, click here.

Diana Nyad on the power of bedtime self-suggestions

    Here’s something we do before nodding off. We pick from an art book a painting we like and look at it for a minute. Accordingly, we were interested to read that Diana Nyad uses the same method to learn Spanish verbs:

    I am a firm believer in imbuing the brain just before sleep with some empirical data, allowing that left brain to process those irregular verbs while at rest, and thus waking up a tad more fluent than when you went to bed.

    (Quoted from page 8 of The New York Times Book Review, October 11, 2015.)
    For a brief biography of Diana Nyad, click here. For images of or relating Diana Nyad, click here.

Eardley Bailey Denton on the invention of the bathroom

    What are the really great inventions? Not the electronic gadgets we see invented daily. Nothing of today beats road paving. Same for central heating, same for refrigeration.

    And don’t forget the bathroom. We’ll take that over a cell phone anytime. The cell phone has not been invented that can comfort like a warm bath.

    When Victoria became queen in 1837, Buckingham Palace had no bathroom. That changed and in 1882 Eardley Bailey Denton commented:

    It is now generally acknowledged that a dwelling cannot be considered as complete without a bathroom, and that its adoption should not be limited to the superior mansions of the wealthy, but that all classes of our population should . . . benefit by the comfort, cleanliness and healthfulness afforded by both hot and cold baths.

    (Quoted from page 117 of Water, by Veronica Strang. Reaktion Books, 2015.)
    Eardley Bailey Denton was a 19th century expert on sewage purification.
    For a brief biography of Veronica Strang, click here. For images of or relating Veronica Strang, click here.

John Ruskin on the ingredients of producing a masterpiece

    Two ingredients are required:

    When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece.

    (Quoted from page 334 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of John Ruskin, click here. For images of or relating John Ruskin, click here.

Adam Kirsch on what good critics do

    Although Adam Kirsch is thinking of literary critics below, his comments hold for critics of any thing, including parents of their children:

    Implicit in every criticism is an appeal: Do you feel as I do? If not, why not? Good critics make us think about these questions even when we disagree with their opinions — they do not close down thought and response, but extend their possibilities and heighten their urgency. In that sense, the best tribute a reader can pay to a critic is to become that critic’s critic himself.

    (Quoted from page 27 of the September 6, 2015, issue of The New York Times Book Review.)

    For a brief biography of Adam Kirsch, click here. For images of or relating Adam Kirsch, click here.

Blaise Pascal on “what is” and the soul that detects “what is”

    Nothing beyond us and nothing within us is absolutely fixed. Blaise Pascal explains how this can make for interesting communication and interpretation:

    Things have different qualities, and the soul different inclinations; for nothing is simple which is presented to the soul, and the soul never presents itself simply to any object. Hence it comes that we weep and laugh at the same thing.

    (Quoted from page 23 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.

John Ruskin on why it would be good to clear out all the people from Utah

    Was John Ruskin thinking of Utah when he said,

    The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them, he injures them by his presence.

    (Quoted from page 334 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of John Ruskin, click here. For images of or relating John Ruskin, click here.

Alfred North Whitehead on the responsibility to educate yourself

    Our mothers can do only so much. The rest falls to us at a relatively young age:

    Culture is an activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art. We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self-development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by mothers before the age of twelve. A saying due to Archbishop Temple illustrates my meaning. Surprise was expressed at the success in after-life of a man, who as a boy at Rugby had been somewhat undistinguished. He answered, “It is not what they are at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters.”

    (Quoted from page 13 of The Aims of Education, by Alfred North Whitehead. Mentor, 1949.)
    For a brief biography of Alfred North Whitehead, click here. For images of or relating to Alfred North Whitehead, click here.

Arundhati Roy on Big Dams

    To Arundhati Roy, Big Dams on rivers are terrible: Nations put them in to control their people:

    Big Dams are to a nation’s ‘development’ what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction . . . They represent the severing of the link, not just the link — the understanding — between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.

    (Quoted from The Cost of Living, by Arundhati Roy. Vintage Canada, 1999.)
    For a brief biography of Arundhati Roy, click here. For images of or relating Arundhati Roy, click here.

The Saunterer on how to be beautiful

    Saunter through the June 1913 issue of The Rotarian and on page 19 you will find the secret:

    What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.