CURIOSITY AND WORK November 1, 2008
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In his memoir, Touch and Go, Studs Terkel wrote, “My curiosity keeps me going. My epitaph is all set: ‘Curiosity did not kill this cat.’ I took a vacation once–it involved a beach–and to tell you the truth, I had no idea what to do with myself. It was torture. Work is life. Without it, there is no life.” He published his memoir in November 2007 and died a year later when he was 96.
FOOD November 1, 2008
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Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, says “Don’t eat food that won’t eventually rot. Don’t eat packaged food with more than five ingredients. And don’t eat anything with ingredients you can’t pronounce.”
SCIENCE AND WISDOM November 1, 2008
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In her book Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist, marine biologist Eva Saulitis says scientific method creates a shape, “a net of words.” Data, facts — these increase our knowledge — “but the step to wisdom is less certain.”
GRANDMA MOSES October 14, 2008
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Grandma Moses, who certainly made an interesting life for herself, said “Life is what we make it — always has been, always will be.”
EINSTEIN ON HAPPINESS September 27, 2008
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Einstein could have been describing a friend of mine when he said, “A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.” That should be true for women too, but I’m not there yet.
EINSTEIN ON WISDOM September 27, 2008
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Einstein said, “Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” I agree, and I’m still working on it.
SHAKESPEARE AND MUSIC August 25, 2008
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In reviewing a musical event involving Shakespearean themes, Alex Ross of the New Yorker says, “When composers have tried to set Shakespeare [to music], they have run up against the problem that his verse creates music in the mind, next to which even the most inspired efforts may be found wanting.” Maybe that’s why I can still hear the rhythms if not the exact words of the famous Shakespearean passages I had to memorize a long time ago.
BIODIVERSITY July 19, 2008
Posted by thenaturalist in E. O. Wilson, Nature/Natural History.add a comment
Edward O. Wilson, in his Foreword to a June 2008 collection of scientific essays entitled Sustaining Life, says: “We do not float above the biosphere in some higher spiritual or technoscientific plane. Life swarms around us, and even in us…. For many reasons, not least our own well-being, we need to take better care of the rest of life. Biodiversity … will pay off in every sphere of human life, from medical to economic, from our collective security to our spiritual fulfillment.”
ROGER TORY PETERSON ON NATURAL HISTORY June 12, 2008
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Roger Tory Peterson once wrote, “The serious study of natural history is an activity which has far-reaching effects in every aspect of a person’s life. It ultimately makes people protective of the environment in a very committed way. It is my opinion that the study of natural history should be the primary avenue for creating environmentalists.” My feelings exactly . . . .
COLLECTORS AND COLLECTIONS May 24, 2008
Posted by thenaturalist in Curiosity, Interesting, Nature/Natural History.add a comment
In his 2007 book Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, Arthur MacGregor quotes 17th century philosopher and statesman, Francis Bacon, as saying that a proper collection was “a model of universal nature, made private.” MacGregor, who is a curator at the Ashmolean Museum in England, shows that the “purposeful collecting” of Western European collectors embodied nothing less than revolutionary thought on cosmology and nature.
