The Litchfield Literary Review

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The Art of H. C. Westermann

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Doubt thou the stars are fire;

Doubt that the sun doth move;

Doubt truth to be a liar;

But never doubt I love.

Hamlet  Act Two, Scene Two

"From an evolutionary perspective, one of the most striking things about human beings is our long period of immaturity. We have a much longer childhood than any other species any other species. Why make babies so helpless for so long and thus require adults to put so much work and care into keeping their babies alive?
 
"Across the animal kingdom, the intelligence and flexibility of adults are correlated with the immaturity of babies. 'Precocial' species such as chickens rely on highly specific innate capacities adapted to one particular environmental niche, and so they mature quickly. 'Altricial' species (those whose offspring need [long] care and feeding by parents) rely on learning instead. Crows, for instance, can take a new object, such as a piece of wire, and work out how to turn it into a tool, but young crows depend on their parents for much longer than chickens.
 
"A learning strategy has many advantages, but until learning takes place, you are helpless. Evolution solves this problem with a division of labor between babies and adults. Babies get a protected time to learn about their environment, without having to actually do anything. When they grow up, they can use what they have learned to be better at surviving and reproducing-and taking care of the next generation. Fundamentally, babies are designed to learn.
 
"Neuroscientists have started to understand some of the brain mechanisms that allow all this learning to occur. Baby brains are more flexible than adult brains. They have far more connections between neurons, none of them particularly efficient, but over time they prune out unused connections and strengthen useful ones. Baby brains also have a high level of the chemicals that make brains change connections easily.

"The brain region called the prefrontal cortex is distinctive to humans and takes an especially long time to mature. The adult capacities for focus, planning and efficient action that are governed by this brain area depend on the long learning that occurs in childhood. This area's wiring may not be complete until the mid-20s.
 
"The lack of prefrontal control in young children naturally seems like a huge handicap, but it may actually be tremendously helpful for learning. The prefrontal area inhibits irrelevant thoughts or actions. But being uninhibited may help babies and young children to explore freely. There is a trade-off between the ability to explore creatively and learn flexibly, like a child, and the ability to plan and act effectively, like an adult. The very qualities needed to act efficiently-such as swift automatic processing and a highly pruned brain network-may be intrinsically antithetical to the qualities."

Alison Gopnick,  "How Babies Think"
Scientific American   July 2010

Washington Irving

     "During the second decade of the nineteenth century, writer Washington Irving developed an acute sense that his native land was no longer the same place it had been just a generation earlier. Irving had conservative and nostalgic sensibilities, and he sought to express some of his amazement at the transformation that had taken place in America by writing his story 'Rip Van Winkle.' Irving had his character Rip awaken from a sleep that had begun before the Revolution and had lasted twenty years. When Rip entered his old village, he immediately felt lost. The buildings, the faces, the names were all strange and incomprehensible. 'The very village was altered - it was larger and more populous,' and idleness, except among the aged, was no longer tolerated. 'The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility' - a terrifying situation for Rip, who had had 'an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour.' Even the language was strange - 'rights of citizens - elections - members of Congress - liberty ... and other words which were a perfect babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle.' When people asked him 'on which side he voted' and 'whether he was
Federal or a Democrat,' Rip could only stare 'in vacant stupidity.'
     " 'Rip Van Winkle' became the most popular of Irving's many stories, for early nineteenth-century Americans could appreciate Rip's bewilderment. Although superficially the political leadership seemed much the same - on the sign at the village inn the face of George Washington had simply replaced that of George III -beneath the surface Rip, like most Americans, knew that 'every thing's changed.' In a few short decades Americans had experienced a remarkable transformation in their society and culture, and, like Rip and his creator, many wondered what had happened and who they really were.
 "Before the Revolution Of 1776 America had been merely a collection of disparate British colonies composed of some two million subjects huddled along a narrow strip of the Atlantic coast - European outposts whose cultural focus was still London, the metropolitan center of the empire. Following the War of 1812 with Great Britain - often called the Second American Revolution - these insignificant provinces had become a single giant continental republic with nearly ten million citizens, many of whom had already spilled into the lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The cultural focus of this huge expansive nation was no longer abroad but was instead directed inward at its own boundless possibilities.
     "By 1815 Americans had experienced a transformation in the way they related to one another and in the way they perceived themselves and the world around them. And this transformation took place before industrialization, before urbanization, before railroads, and before any of the technological breakthroughs usually associated with modern social change. In the decades following the Revolution America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change but came to expect it and prize it.
     "The population grew dramatically, doubling every twenty years or so, as it had for several generations, more than twice the rate of growth of any European country. And people were on the move as never before. Americans spread themselves over half a continent at astonishing speeds. Between 1790 and 1820 New York's population quadrupled; Kentucky's multiplied nearly eight times. In a single decade Ohio grew from a virtual wilderness (except, of course, for the presence of the native Indians, whom white Americans scarcely acknowledged) to become more populous than most of the century-old colonies had been at the time of the Revolution. In a single generation Americans occupied more territory than they had occupied during the entire 150 years of the colonial period, and in the process killed or displaced tens of thousands of Indians.
     "Although most Americans in 1815 remained farmers living in rural areas, they had become, especially in the North, one of the most highly commercialized people in the world. They were busy buying and selling not only with the rest of the world but increasingly with one another, everyone, it seemed, trying to realize what Niles' Weekly Register declared 'the almost universal ambition to get forward.' Nowhere in the Western world was business and working for profit more praised and honored."

 Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty, 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

 This seemed like a good place for Man as an industrial palace, 1926 poster by Fritz Kahn (German).

 Wu Guanzhong

"I am getting more serious because I understand life better now. That is perhaps an instinctive response to my understanding of life now, which is fuller, heavier and also darker."

      Wu Guanzhong, whose fusion of Western modernism and traditional Chinese painting made him one of China’s most forward-looking and admired artists, died on Friday in Beijing at age 90. In 1950, Mr. Wu returned to China after three years of study in Paris, where he came under the spell of van Gogh, Utrillo and Modigliani and enthusiastically embraced modernism’s license to experiment. Trained in traditional Chinese ink and brush painting, as well as Western-style oil painting, he went on to develop an artistic hybrid style expressed in landscape views captured on painting trips all over China and beyond. During the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Wu, along with his colleagues and students at the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts in Beijing, was sent to do hard labor in a remote village in Hebei Province, in the northeast. He was forbidden to paint for three years. In 1972, along with other notable artists, he was summoned back from internal exile by Premier Zhou Enlai and commissioned to paint a large mural at the Beijing Hotel.

     He returned to ink and brush painting, which he had studied under Pan Tianshou, in part because of the space constraints of his apartment in Beijing. In 1978 he had his first one-man show, which traveled throughout China. In 1992 the British Museum organized an exhibition of his work, "Wu Guanzhong: A 20th-Century Chinese Painter." Mr. Wu won recognition as one of China’s most original artists and became a darling of Asian and Western collectors. In 2009 his works fetched nearly $40 million at auction. This month his 1974 oil painting "Panoramic View of the Yangtze River" sold for $8.4 million at an auction in Beijing.

Writers in Black and White

James Ellroy (Above)

James Joyce (Above)

John Reed (Above)

"War means an ugly mob-madness, crucifying the truth tellers, choking the artists, sidetracking reforms, revolutions, and the working of social forces"

"In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt."

Leo Tolstoy