"We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should be their toys. So the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

^ That's a great quote, ribbons: so well-written with its simple images. I'm not too sure that it has ever been possible to get children interested in stones and sky rather than dolls and drums, but I like his idea of the poet's life, "set on a key so low and plain" and being "tipsy with water".

More recent artists who have sung about a similar approach:-

Paul Simon: “You want to be a writer, don’t know how or when? / Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.”
Nick Drake: "You can take the road that takes you to the stars now /I can take a road that'll see me through."
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Yes Philomena Cunk can be quite funny, but she has a rather limited range with her humour. When she does interviews, it's quite amusing to see how genuine experts respond. Here's a few on the topic of music:-

Thanks, Lisna! Those lyrics by Paul Simon and Nick Drake are well chosen and in perfect harmony with Waldo’s thoughts. :) While reading that quote from Emerson’s The Poet, its reference to children and the string about “withdrawing their eyes from the plain face” brought to mind this Gertrude Stein quote from her memoir Picasso:

“A child sees the face of its mother, it sees in it a completely different way than other people see it, I am not speaking of the spirit of the mother but of the features and the whole face, the child sees it from very near, it is a large face for the eyes of a small one, it is certain the child for a little while only sees a part of the face of its mother, it knows one feature and not another, one side and not the other, and in his way Picasso knows faces as a child knows them and the head and the body. He was then commencing to try to express this consciousness and the struggle was appalling because, with the exception of some African sculpture, no one had ever tried to express things seen not as one knows them but as they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them.”

Thanks for posting that – and yes, the experts’ reactions to her in-character deadpan delivery is what makes it funny! “That’s no laughing matter, we’re talking about people’s lives here.” :laughing: