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Tag Archives: thoreau
Who Exercises in the United States? And What Does It Mean?
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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Tagged America, exercise, fitness, in-and-out burger, life, Red State, thoreau, yoga
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Thoreau Cabins on Wheels: The Fiat 500 Series and The Spark
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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Tagged America, cars, ecology, Fiat, gas prices, life, thoreau
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Look
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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Tagged art, college, George Orwell, life, music, poetry, seeing, thoreau
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Zygmunt Bauman On What Made The Holocaust Possible (And Whether Something Like It Could Happen Again)
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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Tagged activism, freedom, moloch, rage against the machine, sociology, the Holocaust, thoreau, zygmunt bauman
3 Comments
Once a University Lecturer and Atheist, Father Lazarus El Anthony Talks about Being an Anchorite
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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Tagged anchorites, atheism, atheist, Egypt, God, Jesus, life, mothers, philosophy, psychology, the desert, thoreau
8 Comments
Entering the Twilight Zone via Solitude and Day Dreaming, and Maybe Meeting the Devil (or Rod Serling)
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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Tagged apostle Paul, creative writing, creativity, imagination, rod serling, Satan, solitude, St. Paul, the devil, the twilight zone, thoreau, walden
3 Comments
Sandra Foster, a Female Thoreau: A Little House of Her Own
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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Tagged a room of one's own, homes, life, retreat, solitude, thoreau, victorian, virginia woolf
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Spring is Approaching
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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Tagged birds, fire, Henry David Thoreau, life, love, melting, spring, sun, thoreau, walden
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Lancaster, California: A City without a Bookstore
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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Tagged Antelope Valley Press, books, bookstores, Christianity, Henry David Thoreau, Jesus, John Calvin, r. rex parris, reading, thoreau, walden, waldenbooks
8 Comments
Going Green by Driving Your Car?
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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Tagged autos, cars, climate change, earth, ecology, gaia, green, greenhouse gas, maryland, nature, thoreau
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I Like This Howard Zinn Quote
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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Tagged american history, gandhi, history, howard zinn, imperialism, liberalism, life, the present, thoreau, yoga
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Some Lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
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Tagged city, death, gnosticism, hope, life, literature, music, poetry, thoreau, transcendentalism, urban life, Walt Whitman
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Harper’s Index Has Been Catalogued, and is Now a Searchable Data Base!
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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Tagged diversion, evolution, fun, harper's magazine, life, math, pleasure, statistics, the Internet, thoreau, Whitman
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Close Literary Reading 101: Stories and Style
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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Tagged borges, close reading, English, fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, life, literature, mark twain, poetry, thoreau, writing
4 Comments
Quote of the Day
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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Tagged epistimology, Henry David Thoreau, knowledge, philosophy, psychology, religion, science, thoreau
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Certainty, Disorientation, and Imagination
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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Tagged agnosticism, apologetics, atheism, atheist, creative writing, imagination, literature, philosophy, poetry, religion, science, thoreau
4 Comments
Prometheus Unbound 