The Saunterer

Gustave Flaubert on the gratifications that creating brings the creator

    The gratifications come from creatively solving problems produced by creating. This is true for all kinds of creative work, and here is how Flaubert explains it for his, writing:

    I love my work with a love that is frenzied and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly. Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don’t come, when I find I haven’t written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride which makes me pant after a chimera. A quarter hour later everything changes; my heart is pounding with joy. Last Wednesday I had to get up and fetch my handkerchief; tears were streaming down my face. I had been moved by my own writing; the emotion I had conceived, the phrase that rendered it, and the satisfaction of having found the phrase—all were causing me to experience the most exquisite pleasure.

    (Quoted from page 1 of First Person Singular: Writers on Their Craft, compiled by Joyce Carol Oates. Ontario Review Press, 1983.)
    For a very brief biography of Gustave Flaubert, click here. For images of or relating to Gustave Flaubert, click here.

Georges Braque on painting with contained emotion

    His advice holds for creative writing too. Don’t force your emotion for what you are creating into what you are creating. Let the work itself produce whatever emotion it is able to.

    Nobility grows out of contained emotion. Emotion should not be rendered by an excited trembling; it can neither be added on nor be imitated. It is the seed, the work is the flower.

    (Quoted from page 287 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Georges Braque, click here. For images of or relating to Georges Braque, click here.

Simon Goldhill on the need to distinguish history from nostalgia

    Simon Goldhill writes that nostalgia is in part a response to rapid social change and feelings of insecurity. In part, it is what anyone who is growing older might feel, as their childhood becomes vividly distant. But these nostalgic images are a shoddy replacement for any sophisticated understanding of history — the complex story of the past, and the intricate forces that link the past and the present — and that is why we should be worried when politicians play the nostalgia card. When we forget that the questions “where have we come from?” and “where are we going?” are integrally linked, we drastically reduce our chances of self-understanding or effective action. If we oversimplify history, we will live — as both Cicero and Kant predicted — with the shallow mindfulness of children.    

    (Quoted from “Look back with danger: Why nostalgia is not what it used to be,” by Simon Goldhill. Page 15 in the May 5, 2017 issue of the Times Literary Supplement.)

    For a work biography of Simon Goldhill, click here. For images of or relating to Simon Goldhill, click here.

Calvin Trillin on teaching by example

    The most effective way for parents to teach is by their example. Hear Calvin Trillin:    

    What strikes me as odd now is how much my father managed to get across to me without those heart-to-hearts which I’ve read about fathers and sons having in the study or in the rowboat or in the car. . . . Somehow I understood completely how he expected me to behave, in small matters as well as large, even though I can’t remember being given any lectures about it beyond the occasional, undramatic "You might as well be a mensch.”

    (Quoted from”Messages from My Father,” by Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker, June 20, 1994.)
    For a brief biography of Calvin Trillin, click here. For images of or relating to Calvin Trillin, click here.

Thomas Henry Huxley on the real reason for educating the masses

    This, Thomas Henry Huxley’s reason to educate the masses, is light years from Donald Trump’s:

    The politicians tell us, “You must educate the masses because they are going to be masters”. The clergy join in the cry for education, for they affirm that the people are drifting away from church and chapel into the broadest infidelity. The manufacturers and the capitalists swell the chorus lustily. They declare that ignorance makes bad workmen; that England will soon be unable to turn out cotton goods, or steam engines, cheaper that other people; and the, Ichabod! Ichabod! the glory will be departed from us. And a few voices are lifted up in favour of the doctrine that the masses should be educated because they are men and women with unlimited capacities of being, doing, and suffering, and that it is as true now, as ever it was, that the people perish for lack of knowledge.

    (Quoted from page 304 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Thomas Henry Huxley, click here. For images of or relating to Thomas Henry Huxley, click here.

Robert Frost on how a new evil thing cancels an old evil thing

    Robert Frost’s poem Evil Tendencies Cancel is about this. But don’t get excited. What it doesn’t mention is that this is no permanent cure. Better to title it Today’s Evil Tendency Replaces Yesterday’s. The guise of evil is ever shifting, always leaving the world with evil of a new kind. The poem:

Will the blight end the chestnut?
The farmers rather guess not.
It keeps smouldering at the roots
And sending up new shoots
Till another parasite
Shall come to end the blight.

    (Quoted from page 407 of Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.)
    For a brief biography of Robert Frost, click here. For images of or relating to Robert Frost, click here.

Winston Churchill on fake news

    For this Internet age, a force for furthing fake news, fitting is this remark attributed to Winston Churchill:            

    A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.

    (Quote from page 36 of The Times Literary Supplement, September 29, 2017.)
    For a brief biography of Winston Churchill, click here. For images of or relating to Winston Churchill, click here.

Mahatma Gandhi on developed countries hogging resources

    Mahatma Ghandi put it this way:

    It took Britain half the resources of this planet to achieve its prosperity. How many planets will India require for its development?

    (Quoted from page 48 of Climate Change and Society, by John Urry. Polity, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of Mahatma Gandhi, click here. For images of or relating to Mahatma Gandhi, click here.

Paul Fletcher on what has happened to sexual intercourse

    Paul Fletcher puts the obvious this way:    

    Sex has been unhinged from its reproductive role and now serves a very different economy of desire. Sex has been socially appropriated for the body and its pleasures and has been removed from the public realm of marriage, state, and church. Sex is no longer about the future—children, security, continuity—but about “experience.”

    (Quoted from the front matter of Erotic Attunement, by Cristina L. H. Traina. The University of Chicago Press, 2011.)

    For Paul Fletcher’s website, click here.

How poetry moves imagination to make feelings

    Here is a poem by James Stephens, picked by the Saunterer to show how the factually false in poetry can be emotionally stimulating:    

Mad Patsy said, he said to me,
That every morning he could see
An angel walking on the sky;
Across the sunny skies of morn
He threw great handfuls far and nigh
Of poppy seed among the corn;
And then, he said, the angels run
To see the poppies in the sun.

    (Quoted from page 9 of The Way to Write, by John Fairfax and John Moat. St. Martin’s Press, 1981.)
    For a brief biography of James Stephens, click here. For images of or relating to James Stephens, click here.