#albert schweitzer

[entheognosis]

[ma-pi-ma]

Non dire mai che al mondo non c'è più nulla di bello.

C'è sempre qualcosa che può stupirti in un albero, come il fremito di una foglia.

Albert Schweitzer

[guy60660]

Albert Schweitzer

[linesonscreens]

Let's Read Peanuts (The 50s are over, but the trauma of the cold war will last us a lifetime) – April 1960

There are lots of great strips I just don't have room to comment on. I strongly encourage everybody to read along at the official GoComics page or by purchasing the Fantagraphics hardcover collections.

April 3, 1960

Nice use of shadow and silhouette in this one. I heard that Schulz kept making these because he liked drawing rain and I believe it.

April 4, 1960

“Okay on the count of three we shove him in a locker.”

April 8, 1960

I was going to point out that a while back Charlie Brown was terrified of getting murdered by a librarian because he failed to return a book on time but I think he just remembered all that at the end there.

April 14, 1960

Yeah... I think we all know why she read CB's letter to the class and that was definitely not the conclusion they came to.

April 17, 1960

Lucy/Schroeder update: Still the best part of the strip. I don’t talk about it much because they’re usually just solid jokes that I can’t add much to, but it remains true.

April 25, 1960

She said the thing! 

Also I looked it up and was surprised to find out that this comic actually precedes the phrase “Happiness is a warm gun” by a lot, which I’d just always assumed it was parodying for some reason. The phrase was first widely popularized by a Beatles song with the same name but they in turn got the song title idea from a 1968 article in The American Rifleman magazine which was itself parodying the Peanuts book “Happiness is a Warm Puppy”, which was released in 1962. 

So yeah, Schulz indirectly inspired a Beatles song.

April 26, 1960

Could be worse. Imagine if he discovered anime.

Also, who???

~googles~

Ah, OK I get it now. Albert Schweitzer was a polymath (sort of an academic jack of all trades) who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his philosophy of "Reverence for Life”. Schulz probably heard about him through his religious writings.

Skimming his Wikipedia page I’m not sure how to feel about him. He seems both well intentioned but also a bit of a crank. He's a man who took up medicine in his 30s so he could open a hospital in Gabon, Africa because he believed all life was holy, but also the guy who wrote this:

When the indigenous people express their discontent for being dominated by the whites, I tell them that without us they would no longer exist, since they would have killed each other off or would have ended up in the cooking-pot of the Pahouins [also known as the Fang, a leading Gabonese tribe]. They cannot rebut this argument. In general, despite the mischief for which the whites are guilty in their work of colonisation everywhere, they can however assert that they have brought peace to conquered peoples.

(Have they though, Albert? Have they!?!?)

Honestly, I’d need to do a much deeper dive into his life and writings in order to form a decent opinion. I’ve seen it said that his hospital was a dilapidated mess where Albert rejected modern medical approaches and constantly badgered his staff, but also that those criticisms are exaggerated and don't factor in just how much he was working under a shoestring budget and extraordinarily stressful circumstances.

Was he a misunderstood saint? A decent man who happened to absorb the attitudes of the times he lived in? A quack who wrote his own PR? I have no idea, and in the interest of being fair I'll leave that sort of speculation to people who actually know what they're talking about.

I will say though that it absolutely tracks that Schulz was familiar with Schweitzer's work. He seems like exactly the kind academically-minded religious thinker that Schulz would gravitate towards.

Oh, and he wrote music too!

April 30, 1960

That’s $5 if you factor in inflation by the way. Do with that what you will.

[kchasm]

Ryu Number: Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer was a German-born philosopher, theologian, and physician. His personal philosophy was based around the idea of "reverence for life": He believed that there was nothing of the objective world itself that evinced any innate meaning or ethical quality, and that the world was composed of life seeking to sustain itself, which occurred at the expense of other lives. Schweitzer proposed a system of ethics founded on a thoughtful and constant awareness of the reverence for life—all living things—from which should result the effort—through actions—to strengthen and develop it. In short: It was good to maintain and further life and it was bad to damage and destroy life, and one ought to commit to the former as much as possible while minimizing the latter as much as could be managed.

…Did I explain that all right? I don't feel like I got that all right, not really. I suspect I'm mangling the guy's principles here in some way, and I can't do a lot more than apologize. I might not have failed my philosophy classes in university, but I can't honestly say I aced them, either. Just sort of floated through while managing to keep my head above water,

Anyway, praxis manifested itself notably in his running of a hospital in French Equatorial Africa (later Gabon)—founded originally in 1913 before World War I broke out and, as a German citizen in French territory, he was removed. He returned to the hospital in 1924, and headed its operation until his death in 1965.

Yeah, all of that was really heavy, wasn't it? If you want to take a moment before crossing the readmore, I totally understand.

If you didn't already know, here's where you learn that both Ryu and Darth Vader show up as guest fighters in Brawlhalla. There's always someone who doesn't know about Brawlhalla, and I love letting them know that Brawlhalla exists. (Rayman is there too.)

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga includes a trailer for the then-upcoming Lego Indiana Jones video game. Watch it, and you can buy Indiana Jones from the shop. And then play as him, of course.

Dude's a bit clean-shaven, but it's him. He's got the whip and everything.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was a TV show based on, uh, well, the chronicles of young Indiana Jones. These semi-edutainment stories would usually see Indy getting tangentially involved with real-life historical events and meeting momentarily with real-life historical figures. The episodes were later edited and released across three DVD sets as The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, each the sets including a DVD-ROM that let you install a slightly more educational computer game version of one of the stories in the set.

Quality-wise, these games are a little, uh.

Also Indiana's really blond in these for some reason.

Still counts, though. Including the parts where questionably drawn Indiana gets to meet the various questionably drawn historical figures.

(Incidentally, for his work, Albert Schweitzer got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. This makes him one among a surprisingly large number of Nobel Peace Prize laureates with Ryu Numbers. Larger than you'd think, I'd mean. Or at least larger than you'd think if I asked you to guess how many Nobel Peace Prize laureates had Ryu Numbers and then told you you had only five seconds to answer.)

(It's more than ten, anyway.)

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

No me importa saber si un animal puede razonar. Solo sé que es capaz de sufrir y por ello lo considero mi prójimo.

— Albert Schweitzer

[arnesaknussemm]

L'esempio non è la cosa che influisce di più sugli altri: è l'unica cosa.

Albert Schweitzer

[musenemesis]

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

– Albert Schweitzer