Wisdom is a complex human trait, characterized by a marriage of the intellect with the emotions, and put into action. By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. [attributed to Confucius] The saddest aspect of life right now is that science…
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Value for Wednesday of Week 25 in the season of Ripening
Taking Initiative – Making a Difference
People can take initiative, and thereby shape their own world, their communities, and the world at large.
- Initiative . . . is doing the right thing without being told. [Elbert Hubbard]
- Without initiative, leaders are simply workers in leadership positions. [attributed to Bo Bennett]
- Hold up a mirror and ask yourself what you are capable of doing, and what you really care about. Then take the initiative – don’t wait for someone else to ask you to act. [attributed to Sylvia Earle]
- Students must have initiative; they should not be mere imitators. They must learn to think and act for themselves – and be free. [Cesar Chavez]
Initiative distinguishes the excellent worker from the good worker. Both show up on time every day and work but the person who shows initiative is more highly valued. People who made a difference are at the root of human progress and advancement.
“Initiative and follow-through are essential for academic, professional, and personal success.” They are about “seizing the opportunity”. “. . . proactive work behavior’s future orientation allows individuals to establish a connection with the future and thus to experience their work as meaningful.” Success leads to success. Taking initiative is a hallmark of the valued trait of being a self-starter.
In work and other team settings, “initiative is related to performance . . .” “. . . personal initiative in terms of proactiveness and innovation is positively and significantly associated with social entrepreneurial venture creation.”
Real
True Narratives
Saul Bellow re-invented the American novel with a vision and diligent effort.
- Zachary Leader, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1994 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)
- Zachary Leader, The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 (Knopf, 2018): “ . . . it’s difficult to write an endearing biography of Bellow. “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Bellow inquired on his deathbed. Leader put the question on the first page of Volume 1, and it bookends this two-volume opus. Nevertheless, he has managed to write a sympathetic, judicious, 700-page second volume here, which one can recommend on its own merits. I even came to admire Bellow more at the end than the beginning. How on earth did Leader do it?”
- Saul Bellow, ed. Benjamin Taylor, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction (Viking, 2014).
Other true narratives on initiative:
- Evan Hughes, Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life (Henry Holt & Company, 2011). “Throughout the book, the physical landscape most vividly evoked is Brooklyn’s celebrated view of the Manhattan skyline, which is to say, a landscape of ambition.”
- Julia Sweig, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight (Random House, 2021): “To paraphrase the former Texas Governor Ann Richards, Lady Bird did everything more recent first ladies did, but ‘backwards and in high heels.’”
- Lisa Napoli, Susan, Linda, Nina and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR (Abrams, 2021): “The book is a lesson in how the fringe project of one generation becomes the mainstream of the next.”
- Jennifer Homans, Mr. B.: George Balanchine’s 20th Century (Random House, 2022): “. . . he founded what would become in 1948 the New York City Ballet, America’s de facto national ballet company. There he almost single-handedly revitalized the language of an increasingly brittle and conservative art form.”
- Rachel Jamison Webster, Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family (Henry Holt and Co., 2023): “In 1753, Benjamin Banneker, a free Black farmer in Baltimore County, Md., carved a clock almost entirely out of wood. According to most sources, he based his design on a pocket watch he had borrowed from a family friend and disassembled; he had never seen a larger clock up close.”
From the dark side:
- Michael Shnayerson, Bugsy Siegel: The Dark Side of the American Dream (Yale University Press, 2021): “After a potted history of Siegel’s adolescence on the Lower East Side, where, thanks to his quicksilver temper, the teenage tough acquired his nickname, the book picks up steam, recounting Siegel’s subsequent exploits during the interwar years as a bootlegger, bookmaker and occasional hit man.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
In Les Misérables, Valjean takes on a new name to hide his identity, and creates a thriving business, from which many people prosper.
From time immemorial, M. sur M. had had for its special industry the imitation of English jet and the black glass trinkets of Germany. This industry had always vegetated, on account of the high price of the raw material, which reacted on the manufacture. At the moment when Fantine returned to M. sur M., an unheard-of transformation had taken place in the production of "black goods." Towards the close of 1815 a man, a stranger, had established himself in the town, and had been inspired with the idea of substituting, in this manufacture, gum-lac for resin, and, for bracelets in particular, slides of sheet-iron simply laid together, for slides of soldered sheet-iron. This very small change had effected a revolution. This very small change had, in fact, prodigiously reduced the cost of the raw material, which had rendered it possible in the first place, to raise the price of manufacture, a benefit to the country; in the second place, to improve the workmanship, an advantage to the consumer; in the third place, to sell at a lower price, while trebling the profit, which was a benefit to the manufacturer. Thus three results ensued from one idea. In less than three years the inventor of this process had become rich, which is good, and had made every one about him rich, which is better. He was a stranger in the Department. Of his origin, nothing was known; of the beginning of his career, very little. It was rumored that he had come to town with very little money, a few hundred francs at the most. It was from this slender capital, enlisted in the service of an ingenious idea, developed by method and thought, that he had drawn his own fortune, and the fortune of the whole countryside. On his arrival at M. sur M. he had only the garments, the appearance, and the language of a workingman. It appears that on the very day when he made his obscure entry into the little town of M. sur M., just at nightfall, on a December evening, knapsack on back and thorn club in hand, a large fire had broken out in the town-hall. This man had rushed into the flames and saved, at the risk of his own life, two children who belonged to the captain of the gendarmerie; this is why they had forgotten to ask him for his passport. Afterwards they had learned his name. He was called Father Madeleine. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume I – Fantine; Book Fifth – The Descent Begins, Chapter I, “The History of a Progress in Black Glass Trinkets”.]
Saul Bellow re-invented the American novel.
- Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March: A Novel (1953): “It all starts for Augie when the boarder, a stern old lady from Odessa, the family’s chief support next to the city charities, takes over the management of Augie and his brothers from their bemused and half-blind mother. Mrs. Lausch tries to bring them up according to the standards of Czarist Russia fifty years earlier, with a little Machiavellianism thrown in.”
- Saul Bellow, Seize the Day: A Novel (1956): “It is the intense world of the ordinary, the mean daily detail, the outrage of being alive, the existential sense of one's self as human creature, which is bravely at the center of Mr. Bellow's fiction. Each detail is cruel, plain, irremediable, yet one feels that it is about to burst forth into the radiance of consciousness.”
- Saul Bellow, Herzog: A Novel (1964): “The position of the 43-year-old hero and title character of Saul Bellow’s latest and best novel is absurd. Moses E. Herzog believes in reason, but is suffering from a protracted nervous crisis, following the collapse of his second marriage, that leads him to the brink of suicide. He deplores the current vogue for crisis ethics, dionysiac revivals and thrilling apocalypses, yet is professionally an intellectual historian of the Romantic Movement who travels about with a paperback volume of Blake’s poems in his valise.” Herzog earned Bellow a U.S. National Book Award and a Prix International award.
- Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet: A Novel (1970): “At 70 plus, Arthur Sammler is old enough to be metaphysical. Beyond desire, beyond competition, with nothing further to gain or prove, he lives in that twilight zone of the human condition where philosophy, poetry and parody shade into each other.”
- Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift: A Novel (1975): “The Humboldt of the title, who is too plainly modeled after the late Delmore Schwartz not to be acknowledged, is the most solid inspiration, the ‘lion’ of this book. But he is represented as a toothless one, caged by circumstance, tamed by the captivity of the human condition.”
- Saul Bellow, Ravelstein: A Novel (2000), is “a lively, lovely, haunting novel that caresses Allan Bloom's life via the thinly disguised eponymous figure Abe Ravelstein. It will be remembered that Bloom, a life-term academic with a fine reactionary mind, wrote what was by contemporary standards an esoteric text, but one with a message about the state of higher education that was concise and economical enough to excite the right: rock 'n' roll had dulled a generation's brains, the wisdom of the Greeks was lost in a welter of insignificant relativism, knowledge of American history had been replaced by ‘'a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures.'’ This was a fight everyone wanted to get in on.”
Poetry
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Robert Schumann, Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54 (1845) (approx. 28-36’) (list of recorded performances), “proffered a totally new idea of a piano concerto. In place of fiery virtuosic display, ‘putting fingers to work and musicianship to sleep’, K. 54 also demanded sensitivity, poise, clarity, and control from the soloist.” “Early listeners were struck, as Clara had been, by the extent to which the piano and the orchestra interacted, as opposed to the more standard turn-taking of the forces in standard virtuoso concertos of the day.” Schumann said: “I used to compose almost all of my shorter pieces in the heat of inspiration . . . Only from the year 1845 onwards, when I started to work out everything in my head, did a completely new manner of composing begin to develop.” Top recorded performances include those by Cortot (Ronald) in 1934, Lipatti (Karajan) in 1948, Gieseking (Karajan) in 1953, Rubinstein (Krips) in 1959, Rudolf Serkin (Ormandy) in 1964, Kovacevich (Colin Davis) in 1970, Kempff (Kubelik) in 1974, Bar-Niv (Rodan) in 197?, Moravec (Neumann) in 1976, Argerich (Rostropovich) in 1978, Pollini (Abbado) in 1989, Perahia (Abbado) in 1997, Andsnes (Jansons) in 2003, Pires (Gardiner) in 2014, Lisiecki (Pappano) in 2016, Rana (Nézet-Séguin) in 2023, Leonskaja in 2024, and Tetzloff (Gardiner) in 2025.
Many artists have adapted works of great composers for their instruments and ensembles.
- A notable example is Phantasm, whose members have adapted works by Johann Sebastian Bach for Baroque viol consort, including Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Their album series consists of “The Well-Tempered Consort - I” (2020) (67’), “The Well-Tempered Consort – II” (2021) (70’) and “The Well-Tempered Consort - III” (2021) (65’).
- Pete Malinverni, “On the Town: Pete Malinverni Plays Leonard Bernstein” (2022) (59’) is an upbeat treatment of some of Bernstein’s most popular tunes.
Similarly, musicians have adapted the work of other musicians to their own styles:
- John Beasley, “MONK’estra Plays John Beasley” (2019) (68’)
- Mike Kaupa, Ric Vice & Tom George, “Stardust: Songs of Hoagy Carmichael” (2021) (51’)
- Leon Lee Dorsey, “Thank You Mr. Mabern” (2021) (52’)
- Matthew Shipp, William Parker & Guillermo E. Brown, “The Trio Plays Ware” (2015) (52’)
- Harold Mabern, “Mabern Plays Coltrane” (2021) (65’)
Showpieces for violin, performed by:
- Fritz Kreisler
- Itzhak Perlman
- Arthur Grumiaux
- Jascha Heifetz
- Salvatore Accardo
- Jaime Laredo
- Hilary Hahn
- Maxim Vengerov
Violin showpieces composed by:
Albums:
- The Tubby Hayes Sextet, “Tubby the Tenor”, originally issued as “Tubbs in N.Y.” (1961) (45’): the value is best illustrated by Hayes’ forward and assertive sax playing, and also the playing of side men Clark Terry and Eddie Costa.
- Charles Lloyd Quartet, “Montreux Jazz Festival 1967” (1967) (100’): four great jazz artists, each taking his turn soloing, and contributing to group play
- Ensemble albums by Harold Land, including “Westward Bound” (2021) (72’), “The Fox” (1959) (37’), “West Coast Suite” (2012) (69’), and “A New Shade of Blue” (1971) (53’)
- Kristina Socanski, “Philip Glass: Piano Solo” (2022) (73’): “Because she doesn’t exaggerate her effects . . . Socanski has expanded the meaning of Glass’s music. She has made it her own, which after all is the performer’s prerogative, and thankfully so, because this is where great interpreters thrive.”
