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Krutch, Joseph Wood

Joseph Wood Krutch was born in Knoxville, Tenn. and was a drama critic for The Nation from 1924 to 1952. He was a professor at Columbia from 1937 to 1952. Some of his other books include Samuel Johnson, Human Nature and the Human Condition, and More Lives Than One.

What man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants. The Modern Temper, 1929.

 

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so, and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence. Ibid.

 

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature, and morality takes no account of the art in life. Ibid.

 

The faculty of wonder tires easily and a miracle which happens everyday is a miracle no longer, no matter how many times one tells oneself that it ought to be. The Desert Year, 1952.

 

When a wild animal is described as vicious, it usually means only that if you try to kill him he will sometimes defend himself. Ibid.

 

To be reminded that one is very much like other members of the animal kingdom is often funny enough, though it is never, like being compared to a machine, merely humiliating. The Best of Two Worlds, 1953.

 

I do not too much mind being somewhat like a cat, a dog, or even a frog, but I resent having it said that even an electronic calculator is like me. Ibid.

 

The cockroach and the bird were both here long before we were. Both could get along very well without us; although it is perhaps significant that of the two the cockroach would miss us the most. American Scholar, Spring, 1953.

 

The most materialistic of historians do not deny the influence upon a people of the land on which they live. The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist's Interpretation, 1955.

 

Either love . . . is something which we share with animals or it is something which does not really exist in us. Ibid.

 

Sometimes it is said that Eternity must be more like Now than like anything else we can imagine. If this is so then perhaps birds live in a series of almost discontinuous eternities. And many of them seem to be eternities of Joy. The Great Chain of Life, 1956

 

The robin who visits his nestlings every five minutes is busy turning bugs into birds, Ibid

 

Field observers who have made the all-too-few classic studies of the higher mammals in freedom have shown conclusively that some of them not only protect their young but educate them in ways clearly implying a kind of awareness related to our own. Ibid.

 

It must have been only a few thousand years ago that men developed a language capable of conveying any practically useful information as precise as that used by the bee when he tells his fellows how to find a good pasture he has discovered. Ibid.

 

No vertebrate animal is more than hunter and storer but many lower creatures are. Many of the domestic arts had been elaborately evolved by insects and become complex "cultures" millions of years before man or any of his direct ancestors invented the simplest techniques to make his manner of getting a living very different from that of the mere beast of prey. Ibid.

 

One of the most important, one of the most fateful developments of thought during the last few centuries has been that which stresses the closer and closer identity of human with animal nature, Ibid.

 

If we are ever to regain a respect for ourselves it may be that we shall regain it by the discovery that the animals themselves exhibit, in rudimentary form, some of the very characteristics and capacities whose existence in ourselves we had come to doubt because we had convinced ourselves that they did not exist in the creatures we assumed to be our ancestors. Ibid.

 

Even if man is no more than an animal, the animal may be more than we once thought him. Ibid.

 

Evolution implies development, not the sudden appearance of something totally new, Ibid.

 

Literally nothing is wasted. Everything nourishes something else until the bacteria finally get hold of it and return it to the soil after breaking it down once more into inorganic compounds which no animal could eat but which plants can again transform into protein. Ibid.

 

Hamlet shared the ancient delusion that decently buried men become the food of maggots, though actually, "the devouring worm" cannot reach them. But he had, in general, the right idea when he exclaimed: "A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm." Ibid.