The Hammock Papers: Happy Birthday, Amundsen

16 July 2021

Happy Birthday, Amundsen

Roald Amundsen was born on this day in 1872.

Our daily routine was soon working smoothly, and everyone gave the impression of being eminently fitted for his post. We constituted a little republic on board the Gjoa. We had no strict laws. I know myself how irksome this strict discipline is. Good work can be done without the fear of the law. As the result of my own experience I had determined to apply the system of freedom on board as far as possible, to let everyone feel hat he was independent in his own sphere. This creates among sensible people a voluntary spirit of discipline, of far greater value than enforced rule. Everyone thus obtains the consciousness that he is a man who is depended upon as a thinking being and not as a wound-up machine. The zeal for work is doubled, and so is the work itself I can recommend to all the system adopted on board the Gjoa. My comrades also seemed to value it, and the voyage of the Gjoa was far more like a holiday trip of comrades than the prelude to a serious struggle lasting for years.

Roald Amundsen, from The North-West Passage

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL