How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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- Publication/creation
- London : George Routledge, 1932.
- Physical description
- xiv, 374 pages ; 22 cm
- Contributors
- Wolfe, W. Béran 1900-1935.
- Notes
-
This edition was reprinted in 1933, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1946 and 1948.
Copy 1 Note: 1937 reprint. X158203
- Attribution and usage
-
Wellcome Collection
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The image contains the following text:
find the happiest sphere of his compensation in the
designing of advertising posters and the like.
Most of the great philosophers of history, and a great
many of the poets and writers of fantastic tales, have been
men and women who have been unable to see the world
about them, and have compensated by inventing a world
of visual images to help them supplement their actual
vision. If you suffer from defects of vision it will repay
you to read the lives of eminent artists, poets,
philosophers, novelists, and astronomers to learn how
others, similarly affected, have brought beauty and
knowledge and solace into the world. The blind Homer
who gave the world the glories of the Odyssey and the
IliadPis an example of a splendid line of courageous
men and women who have not been daunted by their
defects, a line that includes Goethe, Spinoza, Goya,
Whistler, Braille, Helen Keller, and others equally
notable.
Similarly that deaf giant Beethoven points the way to
compensation for defects of hearing. Demosthenes, the
stutterer, became the greatest orator of ancient times.
Moses, also a stutterer, became a great religious leader.
The most famous chefs are men who have suffered from
dyspepsia, while many of the most famous track athletes
and long distance runners suffered from rickets as
children ; John Hunter, the physician who first described
angina pectoris, died of the disease he discovered and
first described. Harry Houdim, the Nemesis of hand¬
cuffs and locks, utilized an abnormal mobility of his
joints until he became a virtuoso in the art of getting
out of tight places.
Investigate any genius and you will find that he is
compensating for some organic or other defect by
intensive training in the compensation of his anomaly
in terms of social usefulness. Genius without social
usefulness is unthinkable. The infinite capacity for taking
pains, said to be the chief characteristic of genius, is part
of the job of compensation. Only a man who is spurred
to supreme compensation by a torturing sense of