On Writing Well.... (1) William Zinsser.

On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction (1). William Zinsser. Second Edition. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. 1980.

Why read it? Thoughts on how to write clear nonfiction. The author defines good writing as having an “aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next.” And he says “ 'clutter' is the disease of American writing, a society strangling on unnecessary words, circular constructions … and meaningless jargon.” I don’t care how good a writer you think you are, you will learn something from this book.

Sample Quotes and Ideas:

“Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important.” p. 7. ……….

“…every long word that could be a short word, every adverb which carries the same meaning that is already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what….” p. 7. ……….

“The reader is a person with an attention span of about twenty seconds…assailed on every side by forces competing for his time by newspapers and magazines, by television and radio and stereo, by his wife and children and pets, by his house and yard and all the gadgets that he has bought to keep them spruce, and by that most potent of competitors sleep.” p. 9.

“A clear sentence is no accident.” p. 13. ……….

“Consider all the prepositions that are routinely draped onto verbs that don’t need any help: head up; free up; face up to; we no longer head committees, we head them up; we don’t face problems any more; we face up to them when we can free up a few minutes.” p. 14. ……….

“ ‘Clutter’ is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, a salesman into a marketing representative, a dumb kid into an underachiever and garbage collector into waste disposal personal.” p. 16.

“Clutter from inter-office memos: ‘The trend to mosaic communication is reducing the meaningfulness of concern about whether or not demographic segments differ in their tolerance of periodicity.’ ”p. 16. ……….

“Clutter from the computer world: ‘We are offering functional digital programming options that have built-in parallel reciprocal capabilities with compatible third-generation contingencies and hardware.’ “ p. 16. ……….

“Clutter from the Pentagon: 'Invasion' = a reinforced protective reaction strike; need for credible second-strike capability and counterforce deterrence.” p. 16.

To be continued.

The Star Thrower (3). Loren Eiseley.

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1978.

Why read it? Eiseley’s sentences and essays haunt the reader. You can’t let them go, dismiss them. They remain in your mind, hooked there by ideas and images. The lead story in this collection of his essays, “The Star Thrower,” projects the image of a lonely man walking the beach at dawn, picking up stranded starfish and flinging them back into the ocean so they can resume living. What does that image suggest to you?

Sample Quotes and Ideas:

“What is it we are part of that we do not see, as the spider was not gifted to discern my face, or my little probe into her world?” p. 120. ……….

“Civilizations…are transmitted from one generation to another in invisible puffs of air known as words….” p. 123. ………..

“Like a mutation, an idea may be recorded in the wrong time, to lie latent like a recessive gene and spring once more to life in an auspicious era.” p. 124. ………

“It has been said that great art is the night thought of man.” p. 126.

Summary of the story, “The Fifth Planet.” An amateur astronomer has been led to believe that between Mars and Jupiter there had been a fifth planet that had been blown to bits and that meteors from it were hitting Earth. He kept studying these meteors, hoping to find fossils which would prove life was “out there.” But after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he no longer cares whether he finds evidence of life on that fifth planet. He concludes that that planet, if life existed on it, probably met the fate that this planet inevitably must—blown to bits by our own technology.

Quotes from “The Star Thrower”:

“Death is the only successful collector.” p. 172. ……….

“…there is little or nothing that remains unmeasured: nothing, that is, but the mind of man.” p. 174. ……….

"The power to change is both creative and destructive.” p. 176. ………

“…tools increasingly revenged themselves upon their creators.” p. 178. ……….

“Man’s powers were finite; the forces he had released in nature recognized no such limitations.” p. 179. ……….

“I love the lost ones, the failures of the world.” p. 182. ……….

“The Thrower who loved not man, but life.” p. 185. ……….

“Somewhere, my thought persisted, there is a hurler of stars, and he walks, because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat.” p. 185.

Comment: Hope you found some ideas to think about. RayS.

The Star Thrower (2). Loren Eiseley.

Why read it? Eiseley’s sentences and essays haunt the reader. You can’t let them go, dismiss them. They remain in your mind, hooked there by ideas and images. The lead essay in this collection of his essays, “The Star Thrower,” projects the image of a lonely man walking the beach at dawn, picking up stranded starfish and flinging them back into the ocean so they can resume living. What does that image suggest to you?

Sample Quotes and Ideas:

“A little while ago—about one hundred million years, as the geologist estimated time in the history of our four-billion-year-old planet…. “ p. 67. ……….

“I was the only man in the world who saw him do it. Everybody else was hurrying.” p. 92. …………

“Ascending ape or fallen angel—man would have to make his choice.” p. 99.

On the faces on Easter Isle: “…the faces are formless, nameless; they represent no living style…are therefore all men and no man and they stare indifferently upon that rolling waste which has seen man come and will see him fade once more into the primal elements from which he came.” p. 105. ……….

“…I once received an unexpected lesson from a spider.” p. 117. ……….

“The specialized perish with the environment that created them.” p. 119.

To be continued.

The Star Thrower (1). Loren Eiseley.

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1978.

Why read it? Eiseley’s sentences and essays haunt the reader. You can’t let them go, dismiss them. They remain in your mind, hooked there by ideas and images. The lead story in this collection of his essays, “The Star Thrower,” projects the image of a lonely man walking the beach at dawn, picking up stranded starfish and flinging them back into the ocean so they can resume living. What does that image suggest to you?

Sample Quotes and Ideas:

“…those who have retained a true taste for the marvelous and who are capable of discerning in the flow of ordinary events the point at which the mundane world gives way to quite another dimension.” p. 28. ……….

“There is nothing more alone in the universe than man.” p. 37. ……….

“…man is so locked in his own type of intelligence—an intelligence that is linked to a prehensile, grasping hand giving him power over his environment….” p. 38.

“Man without writing cannot long retain his history in his head.” p. 41. ……….

“Man’s greatest epic, his four long battles with the advancing ice of the great continental glaciers, has vanished from human memory without a trace.” p. 41. ……….

“Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts.” p. 41.

“[Man] …is himself a consuming fire.” p. 45. ……….

“Homo duplex must learn that knowledge without greatness of spirit is not enough…or there will remain only his calcined cities and the little charcoal of his bones.” p. 52. ……….

“As adults we are preoccupied with living. As a consequence, we see little.” p. 54.

“I was a man trapped in the despair once alluded to as the utterly hopeless fear confined to moderns—that no miracles can ever happen.” p. 55. ……….

“The only thing that characterizes a miracle, to my mind, is its sudden appearance and disappearance within the natural order, although, strangely, this loose definition would include each individual person.” p. 57. ……….

After encountering a fox that invited him to play: “…but, as Thoreau once remarked of some peculiar errand of his own, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society.” p. 65.

To be continued.

The Immense Journey (2). Loren Eiseley.

New York: Random House. 1946/1957.

Why read it? Series of essays concerned with the meaning of evolution. Eiseley bridges the two cultures of science and art. By profession he is a paleontologist. He views evolution as a continuing process, to become—who knows what? Men and women as they are now will not be the men and women of the far future. We are working out what we are going to be.

Eiseley’s sentences are blends of metaphor, paradox, and suggestiveness. He may seem to be speaking directly, but he almost never is. The reader of Eiseley’s essays always has plenty of room for reflection. Eiseley begins his essays with little incidents in his daily experience.

Sample quotes and ideas:

“…all a part of one of life’s strangest qualities—its eternal dissatisfaction with what is, its persistent habit of reaching out into new environments and, by degrees, adapting itself to the most fantastic circumstances.” p. 26. ……….

“…the reaching out that began a billion years ago is still in process.” p. 31. ……….

”The ingredients [of life] are known; they are to be had on any drug store shelf.” p. 32.

“It gives one a feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic….” p. 34. ……….

“It pays to know there is just as much future as there is past; the only thing that doesn’t pay is to be sure of man’s own part in it.” p. 34. ……….

“Never make the mistake of thinking life is now adjusted for eternity.” p. 35. ……….

“There are things still coming ashore.” p. 39. ……….

“We are one of many appearances of the thing called life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.” p. 43.

“Francis Thompson, the English poet, once wrote that one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.” p. 46. ……….

“…our heads, the little globes which hold the midnight sky and the shining, invisible universes of thought, have been taken about as much for granted as the growth of a yellow pumpkin in the fall.” p. 62. ……….

“Creature of dream, he [man] has created an invisible world of ideas, beliefs, habits, and customs which buttress him about and replace for him the precise instincts of the lower creatures.” p. 65. ……….

“Man had escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future.” p. 87.

“The hand that hefted the ax, out of some blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly.” p. 101. ……….

“The world, I have come to believe, is a very queer place, but we have been part of this queerness for so long that we tend to take it for granted.” p. 118. ……….

“Sometimes of late years I find myself thinking the most beautiful sight in the world might be the birds taking over New York after the last man has run away to the hills.” p. 136.

“The shape [of man] is the evolutionary product of a strange, long wandering through the attics of the forest roof, and so great are the chances of failure, that nothing precisely and identically human is likely ever to come that way again.” p. 116.

“Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever.” p. 117.

Comment: Like Emerson, Eiseley writes with the sentence and every sentence stimulates a series of related thoughts. RayS.

The Immense Journey (1). Loren eiseley.

New York: Random House. 1946/1957.

Why read it? Series of essays concerned with the meaning of evolution. Eiseley bridges the two cultures of science and art. By profession he is a paleontologist. He views evolution as a continuing process, to become—who knows what? Men and women as they are now will not be the men and women of the far future. We are working out what we are going to be.

Eiseley’s sentences are blends of metaphor, paradox, and suggestiveness. He may seem to be speaking directly, but he almost never is. The reader of Eiseley’s essays always has plenty of room for reflection. Eiseley begins his essays with little incidents in his daily experience.

Sample quotes and ideas:

“I believe in Christ in every man who dies to contribute to a life beyond his life.” p. x. ……….

J.W. Krutch: “We think of ourselves as the climax of evolution, but we may be hardly more than its beginning.” p. xiv. ……….

J. W. Krutch: “This end in view is not mere survival but a fuller and fuller realization of the potentialities of life and mind.” ……….

J.W. Krutch: “Actually we already have more facts than we know how to interpret or how to use wisely.” p. xv.

“The creature [fossil] had never lived to see a man, and I, what was I never going to see?” p. 3. ……….

“…offered…as a somewhat unconventional record of the prowlings of one mind which has sought to explore, to understand, and to enjoy the miracles of this world.” p. 8. ……….

“...I have tried to put down such miracles as can be evoked from common earth.”

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” p. 10. ……….

“It [water] can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snow flake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast up by the sea.” p. 11. ……….

“No utilitarian philosophy explains a snow crystal….” p. 18. ……….

“There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake….” p. 19.

To be continued.

The New Golden Bough (3)

Sir James George Frazer. A New Abridgment. Ed. Dr. Theodore H. Gaster. New York: New American Library. 1890 (1959).

Why read it? Study of primitive rites and cultures, vestiges of which underlie our own modern culture. A study of primitive superstitions.

Sample Quotes and Ideas (3)

“In Bilaspore, a district of India, when the chief men of the village meet in council, no one present should twirl or spindle [rod for spinning thread]; for they think…the discussion, like the spindle, would move in a circle and never be wound up.” p. 48.

“Just as the savage eats many animals or plants in order to absorb desirable qualities with which he believes them to be endowed, so he avoids eating many others lest he acquire undesirable qualities which he attributes to them.” p. 49.

“In Kursk, a province of southern Russia, when rain is much wanted, the women seize a passing stranger and throw him into the river or souse him from head to foot.” p. 76.

“The Thompson Indians of British Columbia think that when the loon calls loud and often, it will soon rain, and that to mimic the cry of the bird may bring the rain down.” p. 78.

“The legendary Salmoneus, King of Elis, made mock thunder by dragging bronze kettles behind his chariot….” p. 81.

“At an eclipse of the sun the Ojibways used to imagine that it was being extinguished…shot fire-tipped arrows in the air, hoping to rekindle his expiring light.” p. 81.

“To the savage, the world in general is animate, and trees and plants are no exception to the rule…thinks they have souls like his own, and treats them accordingly. Why should the slaughter of an ox or a sheep be a greater wrong than the felling of a fir or an oak, seeing that a soul is implanted in these trees also?” p. 108.

Comment: From these quotes, you can see that the author traces many, many superstitions to ancient times. The information is incredibly interesting. This is a book that will require slow and careful reading of incident after incident illustrative of human superstition. However, you will learn a lot about those old sayings your mother, Aunt May and Grandma said to you when you were young. And the book helps to warn you of today’s modern superstitions that are hidden under the advice of brokers in the stock market and prescriptions by medical doctors of a pill for every ill. Bill Bradley, for example, a candidate for president in 2000, said of his wife’s treatment of her cancer with chemotherapy by doctors that it will one day be seen as just as effective as bloodletting.

Frazer concludes: “…and as science has supplanted its predecessors [magic and religion], so it may hereafter be itself superseded…by some totally different way of looking at the phenomena….” p. 740.