Tag Archives: thoreau

Who Exercises in the United States? And What Does It Mean?

Posted on January 8, 2014 by

Who exercises in the United States? Richard Florida of The Atlantic summarizes some recent research: [E]xercise may treat diseases as effectively as drugs, as one BMJ study recently showed. Everyone knows it, but not everybody does it. Just a month after making those New … Continue reading →

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Thoreau Cabins on Wheels: The Fiat 500 Series and The Spark

Posted on August 17, 2013 by

I am soooo in love with the Fiat 500 series microcars, and am tempted to buy one whenever I see them on the road (which is frequently; microcars are everywhere in California). But I already have a small car and … Continue reading →

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Look

Posted on December 19, 2012 by

Really. Look. __________ No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking … Continue reading →

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Zygmunt Bauman On What Made The Holocaust Possible (And Whether Something Like It Could Happen Again)

Posted on May 30, 2012 by

In Modernity and the Holocaust (2000 edition), sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (b. 1925) explores the question of responsibility: who or what is responsible for the direction of the modern world? He explores this question via the prism of the Holocaust and has a provocative thesis: … Continue reading →

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Once a University Lecturer and Atheist, Father Lazarus El Anthony Talks about Being an Anchorite

Posted on October 21, 2010 by

Lazarus El Anthony was a university lecturer in literature and philosophy in Australia, an atheist of 40 years and a Marxist. Then his mother died. And he entered the desert. And:

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Entering the Twilight Zone via Solitude and Day Dreaming, and Maybe Meeting the Devil (or Rod Serling)

Posted on June 30, 2010 by

Last week, I wrote a meditative piece on the role that solitude plays in the life of the mind, and how I felt it to be akin to entering Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone (see here). I suggested that if you expose … Continue reading →

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Sandra Foster, a Female Thoreau: A Little House of Her Own

Posted on June 23, 2010 by

Virginia Woolf once wrote of the great human need, for intellectual and emotional flourishing, of having a room of one’s own. And the New York Times today has a profile of a 40-something woman, Sandra Foster, who has built her own … Continue reading →

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Spring is Approaching

Posted on March 1, 2010 by

Are you noticing? Here’s a bit from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden  (1854, chapter 17): The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh hawk, sailing low over the meadow, is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. … Continue reading →

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Lancaster, California: A City without a Bookstore

Posted on February 19, 2010 by

Lancaster, California’s only general purpose bookstore—serving a city of close to 200,000 people—closed a couple of weeks ago. It was a Waldenbooks, and, ironically, it shut down within about a week of the city’s mayor—R. Rex Parris—making this comment to a gathering of 160 … Continue reading →

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Going Green by Driving Your Car?

Posted on February 4, 2010 by

Are human carbon emissions actually greening the Earth? According to the UK’s Independent, a new study says that trees today are growing faster in Maryland than they did 225 years ago (the oldest trees in the study), and the researchers attribute … Continue reading →

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I Like This Howard Zinn Quote

Posted on January 29, 2010 by

From “The Optimism of Uncertainty,” The Nation, 2004: The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous … Continue reading →

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Some Lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

Posted on January 20, 2010 by
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Harper’s Index Has Been Catalogued, and is Now a Searchable Data Base!

Posted on January 16, 2010 by

How cool is this? Harper’s Magazine has made its popular Index searchable! You can now go to the Harper’s Index page here, type in, say, “evolution” or “Walt Whitman,” and find suprising and curious little stats about them. Sometimes you might even … Continue reading →

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Jack Ritchie’s Deflationary Naturalism: A Problem for Atheism?

Posted on December 17, 2009 by

Brian Leiter on Wednesday directed his blog readers’s attention to Jack Ritchie’s Understanding Naturalism (2009), quoting a recent review of the book that says in part: The attitude Ritchie recommends for the genuine or serious naturalist is metaphysical agnosticism (cf. 104, 143, 148, … Continue reading →

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Close Literary Reading 101: Stories and Style

Posted on September 15, 2009 by

I thought it might be fun (at least for me) to lay out, in a series of short blog posts, some of the basic terms and ideas that I present to my students when talking about the “close reading” of literary texts. Maybe … Continue reading →

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Quote of the Day

Posted on May 11, 2009 by

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

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Certainty, Disorientation, and Imagination

Posted on January 9, 2009 by

One reason that I am an agnostic is that I think that both atheists and theists can sometimes be too dismissive of DISORIENTATION as a means of accessing the IMAGINATION. If we know too much of the end of a story, … Continue reading →

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“Fences Make Good Neighbors”: A Painting of a Meadow with a Fence Running Through It (1875)

Posted on October 18, 2008 by
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