The Saunterer

Kurt Vonnegut’s definition of the human soul

    Kurt Vonnegut wrote:
    I’ll tell you what the human soul is. It’s the part of you that knows when your brain isn’t working right.

    (Quoted from the March 29, 2020, issue of The New York Times Book Review, page 6)

    For a brief biography of Kurt Vonnegut click here.

John Burroughs: Thank goodness for dogs

    About dogs, John Burroughs wrote this in the July, 1904, issue of Atlantic Monthly:

You can ignore him, and he is not offended; you can reprove him, and he still loves you; you can hail him, and he bounds with joy; you can camp and tramp and ride with him, and his interest and curiosity and adventurous spirit give to the days and the nights the true holiday atmosphere. With him you are alone and not alone; you have both companionship and solitude. Who would have him more human or less canine? He divines your thought through his love, and feels your will in the glance of your eye. He is not a rational being, yet he is a very susceptible being, and touches us at so many points that we come to look upon him with a fraternal regard.

Jaron Lanier on how the internet may be a force of social destruction

To Jaron Lanier, the internet “ could turn out to be the evilest invention of all time.” . . . “If you control the person’s reality, you control the person.”. . . “Never has a medium been so potent for beauty and so vulnerable to creepiness.” . . . “It is scary and awful how out of touch Silicon Valley people have become.”

    (Quoted from Maureen Dowd’s interview of Jaron Lanier in the Arts section of The New York Times, November 9, 2017. )
For a brief biography of Jaron Lanier, click here. For images of or relating to Jaron Lanier, click here.

Dwight Eisenhower on leadership

    According to President Eisenhower,

    A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

The source of Donald Trump's popularity

    Could it be that many people want a tough leader apart from the leader's aims? It's happened in history. Listen to Serge Schmemann, correspondent of The New York Times:

    In some circles Stalin has been making a comeback. His portrait hangs above the dashboard of trucks, a symbol of blue-collar nostalgia for a tough leader.

Katherine D. Kinzler on dialect as a source of discrimination

    If you are discriminated against, the cause may be the way you speak. Hear Katherine D. Kinzler:

    Linguistic bias is part of our basic cultural fabric. It is so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it. It’s sanctioned by the law, it’s allowed by culture, and it’s practiced so frequently that people do not even realize when it is happening. Linguistic discrimination is seen as normal and typical, and because of this, flies beneath the radar.

    (Quoted on page 12, The New York Times Book Review, August 2, 2020, in a review  of How You Say It, by Katherine D. Kinzler)

Federico Garcia Lorca on love for the countryside

    How much are you like the poet Federico Garcia Lorca? A lot if you feel as he did in saying:    

    I love the countryside. I feel myself linked to it in all my emotions. My oldest childhood memories have the flavour of the earth. The meadows, the fields, have done wonders for me. The wild animals of the countryside, the livestock, the people living on the land, all these are suggestive in a way that very few people understand. My very earliest experiences are associated with the land and work on the land.

  (Quoted from  The New York Review of Books, APRIL 5, 2018 issue)

Federico Garcia Lorca on love for the countryside

    How much are you like the poet Federico Garcia Lorca? A lot if you feel as he did in saying:    

    I love the countryside. I feel myself linked to it in all my emotions. My oldest childhood memories have the flavour of the earth. The meadows, the fields, have done wonders for me. The wild animals of the countryside, the livestock, the people living on the land, all these are suggestive in a way that very few people understand. My very earliest experiences are associated with the land and work on the land.

  (Quoted from  The New York Review of Books, APRIL 5, 2018 issue)

Patrick Williams on avoiding writer’s block

    Don't force good ideas to come to you. In time your subconscious mind will bring them to you. Patrick Williams:

    If your goals are so high that you want to see the results immediately, you’re going to hit writer’s block real hard. I start slow and easy. I sketch out ideas, think about them, I go for a drive, I play tennis – I just don’t allow myself to sit there.

Shakespeare, if born in the computer age, probably would have failed to be a great creator

The Saunterer believes:

Had Shakespeare been born after 1950, his character, a sufficient shield against sixteenth century temptations, would quite possibly yield to the many ways of killing time. Merely the presence of shopping malls, television, and transportation to faraway places might be enough to distract him, dilute his concentration, dull his wits, blight his responsibility to develop his high nature to his limit, robbing us of his great works.

    (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg, 2011.)