May Be, Ron, On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 4:25 PM, X Acto <[email protected]> wrote:
> John Carl, > The path may be,,,, with that of Emerson....godfather to William James. > > there may be a reconciliation of what you seek... > > -best > Ron > but dang I'm in love with Ed Abbey too: "Whatever he (Thoreau) did, he did well; he was an expert craftsman in everything to which he put his hand. But to no wage-earning occupation would he give his life. He had, he said, "other business." And this other business awaited him out in the woods, where, as he wrote, "I was better known." What was this other business? It is the subject of Walden, of his further books and essays, and of the thirty-nine volumes of Journal, from which, to a considerable extent, the books were quarried. Thoreau's subject is the greatest available to any writer, thinker and human being, one which I cannot summarize in any but the most banal of phrases "meaning" or "the meaning of life" (meaning all life, of course, not human life only) or in the technical usage preferred by professional philosophers, "the significance of existence". It is this attempt to encircle with words the essence of being itself--with our without a capital B--which gives to Henry's prose-poetry the disturbing, haunting, heart-opening quality that some call mysticism. Like the most ambitious poets and artists, he was trying to get it all in his work, whatever "it" may signify, whatever "all" may include. Living a life full of wonder--wonderful- Henry tries to impart that wonder to his readers. 'There is nothing inorganic... The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum, like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit; not a fossil earth but a living earth...' That the earth, considered whole, is a kind living being, might well seem like nonsense to the hardheaded among us. Worse than nonsense--mystical nonsense. But let us remember that a hard head, like any dense-hulled and thick-shelled nut, can enclose, out of necessity, only a tiny kernel of meat. Thinking meat, in this case. The hard head reveals, therefore, while attempting to conceal and shelter, its tiny, soft, delicate and suspicious mind." Yeah, Ed. that's what I'm talkin' 'bout. Go! "In her Memories of Hawthorne, Hawthorne's daughter Rose gives us this picture of Thoreau ice skating, with Emerson and Hawthorne, on the frozen Concord River: "Hawthorne", she writes, "moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave" (the marble faun); Emerson "closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost..." while Throeau, circling around them, "performed dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps." See. that's what I want in a metaphysics. dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps. Love YOU, Ron, John Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
