Henri Rousseau, The Flamingos
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762)
I thought that I’d take a bit of a break from the dark clouds that are milling around outside and share a post from a number of years back that emphasized one of the better, if not the best, traits available to us humans: kindness. For many folks it sometimes feels as though it has become a rare bird these days. So much so that when it does make an appearance it takes your breath away in wonder.
I’ve been extremely fortunate to have seen this rare bird several times over the years.
Running this older short post turned out to be not so simple. It featured the quote above and attributed it to the wonderful artist Henri Rousseau, a favorite of mine. It seemed right at the time this post originally ran but now something seemed off. I began to question when and where Henri Rousseau uttered or wrote this. At the time it originally ran I sometimes made the mistake of blindly trusting what the Google machine and the internet as a whole told me.
Someone out there had to be doing the due diligence in verifying these things, right?
Well, over the years I have learned from such incidents that this is not the case. Sometimes– often actually– wrong info is adopted as fact by a wide swath of the internet. As a result, I have begun to try to locate and verify the source of the quotes and passages I use here.
Looking at this quote this morning, I decided I better do that due diligence. Took a mere minute to discover that the quote was not from the French painter Rousseau but was instead from a book by the 18th century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was a leading light in the Age of Enlightenment and had a huge influence on modern thought. His writings on the social contract between the people and government had a great effect on Thomas Jefferson as he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
I would have liked to believe it was Henri Rousseau’s thought. It seems like something he might have said, based on the feel I get from his work. There’s a kind of inherent kindness in it. But it makes more sense that it comes from the great philosopher.
That kindness in itself is a form of wisdom is surely a philosophical concept.
Anyway, my break, where all I wanted to do was share some Rousseau paintings that I love, turned into this.
Oh, well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Please don’t ask me where that phrase comes from or who said it first, though I think it was Plato.
Or Groucho.
We’ll let that one go for today. That would be the kind thing to do.
Here’s a song, (What’s So Funny ‘Bout?) Peace, Love, and Understanding, that was a hit in 1979 for Elvis Costello. While I love that version, I also love the original from Nick Lowe who wrote and recorded the song in 1974. This is a more recent performance from Lowe. It has a gentleness and quietness that differs from the original, having more the feel of the wisdom of which Rousseau wrote. He is accompanied here by Los Straitjackets adorned as always in their Mexican wrestling masks. They have been around for a very long time and are an instrumental group that primarily plays surf rock. Fun stuff.
Redtree Times 