The Saunterer

W. Somerset Maugham on not delaying your important work

    Time's a-wastin': When you have a big important job of a lifetime waiting to do, get right on it. Hear W. Somerset Maugham:

    In youth the years stretch before one so long that it is hard to realize that they will ever pass, and even in middle age, with the ordinary expectations of life in these days, it is easy to find excuses for delaying what one would like to do but does not want to; but at last a time comes when death must be considered. . . . I have long thought that it would exasperate me to die before I have written this book and so it seemed to me that I had better set about it at once. When I have finished it I can face the future with serenity for I shall have rounded off my life’s work.

    (Quoted from page 8 of The Summing Up, by W. Somerset Maugham. The Literary Guild of America, 1938.)
    For a brief biography of W. Somerset Maugham, click here. For images of or relating to W. Somerset Maugham, click here.

Friedrich Nietzsche on which thinkers to admire

    This is what Friedrich Nietzsche said:

    The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

    (Quoted from page 91 of The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by W. Kaufmann. The Viking Press, 1964.)
    For a brief biography of Friedrich Nietzsche, click here. For images of or relating to Friedrich Nietzsche, click here.

Allan Sandage on how to choose a profession

    Pulled by its magic, a young Allan Sandage chose cosmology. That’s a good way for deciding what you want to spend your life doing. But as usual the magic was like the hook of a great opening for a story; what follows couldn't match it. Here is a relevant part of an interview with Sandage:

    It sounds like you took cosmology seriously, though.

    Oh, very seriously. It was like going to a cathedral. I had the feeling that the world was magic. I went to Caltech still feeling as I had as a child that the world was magic, and that it had enchantment. Everything I had looked at from the time I was a child was enchanting, and I had to grab it somehow. Then I went to Caltech, and that was a very hard experience. The magic disappeared, in the understanding of what was required to do real research.

    What do you mean when you say the “world was magic”? Can you tell me about that?

    I can’t. It’s gone. But I can remember something of what the child did feel. The world was spirit. I would go into the woods and see flowers and simply became overwhelmed. It was a continual experience of surprise, joy, and amazement that there is something rather than nothing. By magic, I suppose I mean mystery.

    (Quoted from page 72 of Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists, by Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer. Harvard University Press, 1990.)
    For a brief biography of Allan Sandage, click here. For images of or relating to Allan Sandage, click here.

Wassily Kandinsky on emotion and feeling in painting

    Wassily Kandinsky tells us that emotion and feeling come into the work of art at two places:

    The work of art consists of two elements; the inner and the outer.
    The inner element, taken by itself, is the emotion in the soul of the artist. This emotion is capable of calling forth what is, essentially, a corresponding emotion in the soul of the observer.
    As long as the soul is joined to the body, it can as a rule only receive vibrations via the medium of the feelings. Feelings are therefore a bridge from the nonmaterial to the material (in the case of the artist) and from the material to the nonmaterial (in the case of the observer).
    Emotion—feelings—the work of art—feelings—emotion.

    (Quoted from page 292 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Wassily Kandinsky, click here. For images of or relating Wassily Kandinsky, click here.

The Club of Rome on how having too many people on earth at once is destroying it

    The Club of Rome took “too many people” to be more than one billion. Beyond that would risk mass rebellion, world anarchy (we seem on the tip of it now):

    A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income.

    (The Club of Rome’s view is quoted from page 157 of Energy and Climate Wars: How naive politicians, green ideologues, and media elites are undermining the truth about energy and climate, by Peter C. Glover and Michael J. Economies. Continuum, 2010)

    For a brief biography of Peter C. Glover, click here. For a brief biography of Michael J. Economides, click here.

D. H. Lawrence on how religion, work, and love support living

    This is how D. H. Lawrence describes it:

    When you come to think that we are such transitory little dots, it is no wonder we are sometimes lonely. Religion, work, love all link us on to an eternity—the one of singing, the other of influencing, the last of being.

    (Quoted from page 207 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)

    For a brief biography of D. H. Lawrence, click here. For images of or relating to D. H. Lawrence, click here.

John Berger on how Picasso painted feeling

    Let’s quote Michael Berger about Guernica, Picasso’s painting in response to the destruction of the town by that name in Spain on April 26, 1937, by German bombers:

    Picasso did not try to imagine the actual event. There is no town, no aeroplanes, no explosion, no reference to the time of day, the year, the century, or the part of Spain where it happened. . . . Guernica is a painting about how Picasso imagines suffering; and just as when he is working on a painting or sculpture about making love the intensity of his sensations makes it impossible for him to distinguish between himself and his lover, just as his portraits of women are often self-portraits of himself found in them, so here in Guernica he is painting his own suffering as he daily hears the news from his own country.

    (Quoted from page 141 of Michael Jackson’s book, The Work of Art, Columbia University Press, 2016):

    To see an image of Guernica, click here.
    For a brief biography of John Berger, click here. For images of or relating to John Berger, click here.

Maxim Gorki on our debt to books

    Books make us better. As Maxim Gorki put it:

    All that is good in me I owe to books.

    (Quoted from page 141 of Soviet Literature. Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1973.)
    For a brief biography of Maxim Gorki, click here. For images of or relating to Maxim Gorki, click here.

Martin Buber on art

    We expect a deep thinker like Martin Buber to have a deep definition of art:

    Art . . . is the realm of “between” which has become a form. Consider great nude sculptures of the ages: none of them is to be understood properly either from the givenness of the human body or from the will to expression of an inner state, but solely from the relational event which takes place between two entities which have gone apart from one another, the withdrawn “body” and the withdrawing “soul.”

    (Quoted from page 63 of Martin Buber: On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity, by Martin Buber. The University of Chicago Press, 1992.)
For a brief biography of Martin Buber, click here. For images of or relating to Martin Buber, click here.

Barbara Ehrenreich on the difference between real uplift and verbal uplift

    As Barbara Ehrenreich remarked,

    I like being called Ms. I don’t want people saying “man” when they mean me, too. I’m willing to make an issue of these things. But I know that even when all women are Ms., we’ll still get sixty-five cents for every dollar earned by a man. Minorities by any other name—people of color, or whatever—will still bear a huge burden of poverty, discrimination and racial harassment. Verbal uplift is not the revolution.

    (Quoted from page 189 of Beyond Political Correctness, by Stephen Richer and Lorna Weir. University of Toronto Press, 1995.)
    For a brief biography of Barbara Ehrenreich, click here. For images of or relating to Barbara Ehrenreich, click here.