The Saunterer

Harold Bloom on the universal essence of Shakespeare’s King Lear

    Harold Bloom has distilled King Lear to a 21st century truth:

    Incessantly I reread “King Lear,” and find what takes my apprehension to its limits. Nature dwindles to nothing. Familial love turns destructive. Intergenerational strife becomes murderous. In this bad autumn I echo Lear: “We cry that we are come unto this great stage of fools.”

    (Quoted from page 12 of the December 25, 2016, The New York Times Book Review.)
    For a brief biography of Harold Bloom, click here. For images of or relating to Harold Bloom, click here.

James D. Williams on brainwashing children into believing creationism

    According to James D. Williams, here is the brainwashing plan that gets it done:

    With creationists targeting young children with books, .e.g., “Dinosaurs by Design” or “Dinosaurs of Eden,” or comics and posters that refute science and replace accepted geology with tales of a global flood, misconceptions can be implanted very early on. This tactic was reported by the author at the 2009 British Humanist Association International conference in London. Creationists appeal to the interest that children naturally have in dinosaurs and fossils. Using this appeal to reinforce a misconception is nothing short of an intellectual abuse of children through what I call “insidious creationism,” the deliberate, slow, subtly harmful implanting of a scientific untruth. This is not done by the creationist community through ignorance, as those responsible are fully cognisant of the actual scientific standpoint on evolution and its acceptance by the overwhelming majority of scientists. Since evolution as a concept is not formally taught in primary schools in the UK, it makes such challenges to creationist misconceptions harder to mount.

    (Quoted from page 1258 of “Belief versus acceptance: Why do people not believe in evolution?," by James D. Williams. Bioessays 31. 2009.)

    For a brief biography of James D. Williams, click here. For images of or relating to James D. Williams, click here.

Joan Acocella on the purpose of swearing

    Reviewing two new books on swearing (What the F, by Benjamin K. Bergen, Basic Books, and In Praise of Profanity, by Michael Adams, Oxford University Press), Joan Acocella tells of swearing’s cathartic power:

    When you drop your grocery bag into a puddle or close the window on your finger, geez Louise is not going to help you much. Fuck is what you need, the more so, Adams says, because it doesn’t just express an emotion; it states a philosophical truth. By its very extremeness, it is saying that “one has found the end of language and can go no further. Profanity is no parochial gesture, then. It strikes a complaint against the human condition.”

    (Quoted from “‘Fuck’ing Around” by Joan Acocella, page 24 of the February 9, 2017, issue of The New York Review of Books.)
    For a brief biography of Joan Acocella, click here. For images of or relating to Joan Acocella, click here.

Winston Churchill on “Are we alone in the universe?”

    In an unpublished 1950's essay of Winston Churchill’s that has just come to light, he pondered on the likelihood of extraterrestrials. Here is a part of it:

    I am not sufficiently conceited to think that my sun is the only one with a family of planets. I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.

    (Quoted from “A Lost Essay from Churchill, On Alien Life,” by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura. The New York Times, February 16, 2017. Page A11.)

    The Saunterer's argument to the same conclusion is that surely somewhere out there is a better singer than Elvis Presley. If he is the best the Universe can produce, it's not much of a Universe.  
    For a brief biography of Winston Churchill, click here. For images of or relating to Winston Churchill, click here.

 

 

Maarten Schmidt on the limits to cleverness

    When you are so clever you can explain any observation, cleverness stops being useful. Following is Maarten Schmidt's suspicion there might be no limit to some people’s cleverness:

    But I must also say that I’m very impressed, and sometimes alarmed by the cleverness of theoretical physicists and astronomers. When I say alarmed what I have in mind—and I’m not meaning to be facetious—is that one wonders at times whether if one invented some observations—which none of us ever thinks of, by the way—and presented them in the right way, one wonders whether or not quite soon there would be a number of reasonably authoritative explanations about them.

    (Quoted from page 109 of Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists, by Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer. Harvard University Press, 1990.)
For a brief biography of Maarten Schmidt, click here. For images of or relating to Maarten Schmidt, click here.

Garrett Hardin on the pollution problem

    Garrett Hardin rightly lays the blame:

    The pollution problem is a consequence of population. It did not much matter how a lonely American frontiersman disposed of his waste. “Flowing water purifies itself every 10 miles,” my grandfather used to say, and the myth was near enough to the truth when he was a boy, for there were not too many people. But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

    (Quoted from "The Tragedy of the Commons," by Garrett Hardin; page 1245 of the 13 December 1968 issue of Science.)
    For a brief biography of Garrett Hardin, click here. For images of or relating Garrett Hardin, click here.

Lou Duva on never having to work

    Lou Duva, boxing promoter, manager, and trainer, died last week at 94. He believed in an old Italian proverb about work:

    If you love what you’re doing, you don’t have to work a day in your life.

    (Quoted in Lou Duva’s obituary in the 9 March 2017 issue of The New York Times.)
    For a brief biography of Lou Duva, click here. For images of or relating Lou Duva, click here.

Jimmy Carter on rivers as indicators of the condition of landscapes

    Although Jimmy Carter gave his observation almost a half century ago, it seems to the Saunterer fully as true now as then, possibly more:

    Whatever we do to a landscape can ultimately be seen in the river into which that landscape drains and we have done terrible things to many landscapes. To achieve the goals of the Clean Water Act, we must stop using our rivers and landscapes as though they were disposable. It takes more care and money, in the short run, to manage nature well than it does to abuse it, but the dividends are great.

    (Quoted from page 2 of the March, 2017, issue of The Highlands Voice, newsletter of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy.)
    For a brief biography of Jimmy Carter, click here. For images of or relating Jimmy Carter click here.

Robert Hughes on art and political correctness

    On the subject of political correctness, Robert Hughes never minced words:

    And then, because the arts confront the sensitive citizen with the difference between good artists, mediocre ones and absolute duffers, and since there are always more of the last two than the first, the arts too must be politicized; so we cobble up critical systems to show that although we know what we mean by the quality of the environment, the idea of “quality” in aesthetic experience is little more than a paternalist fiction designed to make life hard for black, female and homosexual artists, who must henceforth be judged on their ethnicity, gender and medical condition rather than the merits of their work.

    (Quoted from Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, by Robert Hughes. Oxford American Lectures, April 22, 1993.)
    For information about Culture of Complaint, click here. For images of or relating to Robert Hughes, click here.

Robert Henri on the effort of making art

    Behind Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” or behind Claude Monet’s painting “The Magpie” is what? Robert Henri tells us:

    A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.

    (Quoted from page 242 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Robert Henri, click here. For images of or relating Robert Henri, click here.