The Saunterer

Umberto Eco on reading to extend living

    Reading is Umberto Eco’s prescription:

    The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.

    (Quoted from “The Irrepressible Lightness of Umberto Eco,” by Carlin Romano. The Chronicle Review, March 11, 2016, page B4.)
    For a brief biography of Umberto Eco, click here (where besides you will see one of his great sentences: “When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”)
    For a brief biography of Carlin Romano, click here.

Ismail Serageldin on scientists playing God

    Ismail Serageldin asks for scientists to practice wisdom in human gene editing, but is that just wasted advice when the population is content in rushing ahead toward boiling themselves in global warming? A huge part of wisdom is getting your priorities straight.

    Literature, from Icarus to Frankenstein, gives us the image of disasters following in the steps of hubris of scientists who wanted to play God. But you must recognize that we have been playing God ever since we domesticated plants and animals. And we do so every time today when we turn on the lights at night and turn night into day. . . . We need knowledge but we also need wisdom.

    (Ismail Serageldin speaking on December 1, 2016, at the International Summit on Human Gene Editing.)
    For a brief biography of Ismail Serageldin, click here. For images of or relating to Ismail Serageldin, click here.

Rabindranath Tagore on the danger of going overboard on logic

    Here in a nutshell is the case for the liberal arts:

    A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

        (Quoted from page 10 of “Compelling Images Through Storytelling: Comment on “Imaginary, But by No Means Unimaginable: Storytelling, Science, and Historical Archaeology,” by Barbara J. Little. Historical Archaeology, 2000, 34(2):10 —13.)

    For a brief biography of Rabindranath Tagore, click here. For images of or relating Rabindranath Tagore, click here.
    For a brief biography of Barbara J. Little, click here. For images of or relating Barbara J. Little, click here.

Sinclair Lewis on standing up to organizational wrongs

    Sinclair Lewis wrote this letter of protest to the Pulitzer Prize Board:

Sirs:
    I wish to acknowledge your choice of my novel Arrowsmith for the Pulitzer Prize. That prize I must refuse, and my refusal would be meaningless unless I explained the reasons.
    All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous. The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards; they tend to write this, or timorously to avoid writing that, in order to tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee. . . . The Pulitzer Prize for Novels signifies, already, much more than a convenient thousand dollars to be accepted even by such writers as smile secretly at the actual wording of the terms. It is tending to become a sanctified tradition. There is a general belief that the administrators of the prize are a pontifical body with the discernment and the power to grant the prize as the ultimate proof of merit. . . . Only by regularly refusing the Pulitzer Prize can novelists keep such a power from being permanently set up over them. . . . Between the Pulitzer Prizes, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and its training-school the National Institute of Arts and Letters, amateur boards of censorship, and the inquisition of earnest literary ladies, every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
    I invite other writers to consider the fact that by accepting the prizes and approval of these vague institutions, we are admitting their authority, publicly confirming them as the final judges of literary excellence, and I inquire whether any prize is worth that subservience.

    (Quoted from page 233 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Sinclair Lewis, click here. For images of or relating Sinclair Lewis, click here.

Edna St. Vincent Millay on standing up to organizational wrongs

    Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote this letter of protest to the League of American Penwomen:

Ladies:
    I have received from you recently several communications, inviting me to be your Guest of Honour at a function to take place in Washington some time this month. I replied, not only that I was unable to attend, but that I regretted this inability; I said that I was sensible to the honour you did me, and that I hoped you would invite me again.
    Your recent gross and shocking insolence to one of the most distinguished writers of our time has changed all that.
    It is not in the power of an organization which has insulted Elinor Wylie, to honour me.
    And indeed I should feel it unbecoming on my part, to sit as Guest of Honour in a gathering of writers, where honour is tendered not so much for the excellence of one’s literary accomplishment as for the circumspection of one’s personal life.
    Believe me, if the eminent object of your pusillanimous attack has not directed her movements in conformity with your timid philosophies, no more have I mine. I too am eligible for your disesteem. Strike me too from your lists, and permit me, I beg you, to share with Elinor Wylie a brilliant exile from your fusty province.

    (Quoted from page 234 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, click here. For images of or relating Edna St. Vincent Millay, click here.

Van Wyck Brooks on knowing what is truly important

    During the lead-up to electing a President, Van Wyck Brooks’ observation should be front and center in our minds:

    The main thing in times like ours is not to lose the sense of the difference between the minor and the major.

    (Quoted from page 257 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Van Wyck Brooks, click here. For images of or relating Van Wyck Brooks, click here.

Philip Lieberman on why our ancient ancestors probably were as smart as us

    Across time, technological accomplishments are no indication of brain power. Philip Lieberman:

    Could a thirtieth-century archaeologist conclude that some quantum jump in cognitive ability occurred in the short space of 200 years by comparing the remains of Boeing 747 aircraft to George Washington’s horse-drawn coach? Can we thus conclude that the human beings who lived 100,000 years ago and had modern-looking skulls were stupider than somewhat more modern-appearing humans who lived 35,000 years ago and had fancier stone and bone tools?

    (Quoted from page 26 of Eve Spoke, by Philip Lieberman. W. W. Norton, 1998.)
    For a brief biography of Philip Lieberman, click here. For images of or relating to Philip Lieberman, click here.

James McNeil Whistler on artists and Nature

    Artists aim not to reproduce the image that is Nature. Artists aim to take elements from Nature and create an image that is Art. That’s why landscape paintings, for instance, are more attractive than Nature itself:

    Nature contains the elements, in color and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful—as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony.

    (Whistler said this in the public lecture he gave in England at Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly, on February 20,1885. The Saunterer quotes it from page 293 of Margaret C. Conrads’ Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American paintings, 2007.)
    For a brief biography of James McNeil Whistler, click here. For images of or relating James McNeil Whistler, click here.

Anthony Stevens on sleeping and dreaming

    We sleep and we dream, but is it incidental or necessary? Anthony Stevens:

    If sleeping and dreaming do not perform vital biological functions, then they must represent nature’s most stupid blunder and most colossal waste of time.

    (Quoted from page 91 of Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming, by Anthony Stevens. Harvard University Press, 1995.)
    For a brief biography of Anthony Stevens, click here. For images of or relating to Anthony Stevens, click here.

Henry David Thoreau on the limits of detecting Nature

    Go out in Nature and open to the widest all your senses and you get only a tiny slice of what is there. There is vastly more to It than what we think there is, explains Thoreau:

    If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

    (Quoted from page 194 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.