The Saunterer

Byron Wien on seeking a career

    Be happy all of your life: pick a job you love. He puts it this way:

    When seeking a career as you come out of school or making a job change, always take the job that looks like it will be the most enjoyable. If it pays the most, you’re lucky. If it doesn’t, take it anyway.

    (Quoted from page 20 of the May 23, 2016, issue of Barron’s.)

    For a brief biography of Byron Wien, click here. For images of or relating to Byron Wien, click here.

Richard Feynman on the essence of revolutions

    Richard Feynman’s view is attractive for any kind of revolution—scientific, educational, or a change in one’s principles of living:

        Correct theories of physics are perfect things, and a replacement theory must be a new perfect thing, not an imperfection added onto an old perfect thing. This is the essence of “revolution,” the replacement of the old with a new, not the adding more crap onto the old.

    (Quoted from page 94 of Bankrupting Physics, by Alexander Unzicker. Palgrave, 2016.)

    For a brief biography of Richard Feynman, click here. For images of or relating to Richard Feynman, click here.
    For a brief biography of Alexander Unzicker, click here. For images of or relating to Alexander Unzicker, click here.

Bryan R. Wilson on charismatic leaders (and saviors)

    Many political conservatives say that Donald Trump is charismatic. Many liberals say he is repulsive. What is going on?—charisma and repulsiveness are antonyms. Perhaps Bryan Wilson has the answer:

    We may suppose that without the impress of external events, the growth of anxieties, and the disruption of normal life, there would be little demand for a man of supposed extraordinary supernatural power, and that it would be difficult for such an individual to arise. Once a society has experienced events of this kind, however, the impulse to look for such a man to deal with the new evils appears to grow almost as a normality in itself. . . . The basis of charisma is less the quality of the actual leader who comes to be called charismatic, than the will to believe.

    (Quoted from page 94 of The Noble Savages: The Primitive Origins of Charisma and Its Contemporary Survival, by Bryan R. Wilson. University of California Press, 1975.)
    For a brief biography of Bryan R. Wilson, click here. For images of or relating to Bryan R. Wilson, click here.

Louis Armstrong’s trick of the trade for trumpet players

    Writing, gardening, cooking—every profession or craft has little-known techniques. Here is Louis Armstrong’s:

    Everybody wants to know why I play stronger than any other trumpets. Well, it ain’t nothing mysterious. Ain’t no witch doctor, two-head stuff. If you take the soreness out of your lips, you can put pressure on the horn.
    How to do it? I bathe my lips every night, soon as I leave the stand, with witch hazel and lip salve and sweet spirits of nitre. And I bathe ‘em again before I go to bed.
    Sweet spirits of nitre will take the soreness out of anything, man. Oh, it stings! You put it on and then grab a chair for about five minutes, and too many trumpet players ain’t got the guts to stand the ache.
    Or they won’t use the salve, ‘cause it’s greasy. It’s not bad, smells like strawberry.
    Now, when I get up to work, I put witch hazel and sweet spirits of nitre on again, and by the time I get to the club tonight, I’m okay again.
    Sure, my lips are scarred up—I been playin’ that horn 50 years—but they’re relaxed at all times, and that’s it. If your lips swell up a fraction on the mouthpiece, you’re in trouble with your notes.

    (Excerpted from pages 94-95 of Music in the Air: The Selected Writings of Ralph J. Gleason, edited by Toby Gleason. Yale University Press, 2016.)
    For Louis Armstrong playing "St. James Infirmary," click here.
    For a brief biography of Louis Armstrong, click here. For images of or relating to Louis Armstrong, click here.
For information about Toby Gleason, click here.

Rien Fertel on the statistics of eating meat

    This is from "Hunting Made Humanity," Rien Fertel’s review of Marta Zaraska’s book Meathooked:

    This year, the average American will eat more than 270 pounds of meat, despite the heightened risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer that comes with every bite. We will consume three hamburgers a week on average, even though a single burger has the same carbon footprint as 320 miles of driving. (The production and consumption of meat are responsible for up to 22% of global greenhouse gases, according to a 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.) One Gallup poll found that 25% of Americans agree that animals deserve “the exact same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation.” Yet we enthusiastically devour a whole ark of animals that, in one way or another, suffer for our pleasure.

    (Quoted from page C8 of the February 27-28, 2016 issue of The Wall Street Journal.)
    For a brief biography of Rien Fertel, click here. For images of or relating to Rien Fertel, click here.

James Campbell on why e-books give an inferior reading experience

    We side with James Campbell’s view that to read literature on a device like Kindle is to miss much of its meaning and emotional effect:

    These light, well-made little books, we said to a friend, are good enough to eat. And with that hackneyed remark came a revelation: reading a “book” without the actual book, with no cover, texture, press of print on page—on a reading device, in short—is like eating without flavour, drinking with no bouquet. Consuming Le Grand Meaulnes in Poche format is as good as scoffing a dish of pieds de cochon, washed down with cidre brut; to read on a “device” is like chewing vitamin pills for lunch.

    (Excerpted from page 36 of the October 11, 2013, issue of the Times Literary Supplement.)
    For a work biography of James Campbell, click here.

Maria Callas on her purpose in singing

    This is how she describes it:

    Singing for me is not an act of pride, but an effort to elevate towards those heavens where everything is harmony.

    (Quoted from page 208 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Maria Callas, click here. For images of or relating to Maria Callas, click here.

Ayn Rand on her religion

    This is how she describes her religion:

    I have only one religion: the sublime in human nature. There is nothing to approach the sanctity of the highest type of man possible and there is nothing that gives me the same reverent feeling, the feeling when one’s spirit wants to kneel, bareheaded. Do not call it hero-worship, because it is more than that. It is a kind of strange and improbable white heat where admiration becomes religion, and religion becomes philosophy, and philosophy-–the whole of one’s life.

    (Quoted from page 208 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Ayn Rand, click here. For images of or relating to Ayn Rand, click here.

Jerome Kagan on the role of illusions in living

    A life free of illusions, Jerome Kagan notes, cannot be happy:

    The poet Wallace Stevens understood that each person must invent the goals he or she decides are worth pursuing. “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” Stevens may have read a comment by the Marquise du Châtelet, the mistress of Voltaire, who wrote, “To be happy one must be susceptible to illusions for it is to illusions that we owe the majority of our pleasures. Unhappy is the one who has lost them.”

    (Excerpted from page 235 of On Being Human, by Jerome Kagan. Yale University Press, 2016.)
For a work biography of Jerome Kagan, click here. For images of or relating to Jerome Kagan, click here.

William Shakespeare on need as the mother of ready acceptance

    When we are tired enough, Motel 6 isn’t so bad. Shakespeare:

    Where is this straw, my fellow?
    The art of our necessities is strange,
    That can make vile things precious.

    (Excerpted from page 125 of The Middle Parts of Fortune, by Frederic Manning. New American Library, 1977.)
    For a work biography of Frederic Manning, click here. For images of or relating to Frederic Manning, click here.