Is self-knowledge something accomplished in solitude, mulling over our past and our life with others – something that occurs on solitary walks or looking out over the sea?  Here is a friend and fine philosopher writing about a couple’s coming to know each other:  Sarah has been veiled from Chuck for most of the time he has known her.  While the veils protected her, kept her from being known, they also made it nearly impossible for her to make herself […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

—What is your purpose? So asks a recent New York Times Op-Ed column by David Brooks. That’s the title. Before narrowing down to ask us to sort out our purpose in life, Brooks observes that Intellectual prestige has drifted away from theologians, poets and philosophers and toward neuroscientists, economists, evolutionary biologists and big data analysts. These scholars have a lot of knowledge to bring, but they’re not in the business of offering wisdom on the ultimate questions. I think he’s […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

I just came across, for the twentieth time, that enigmatic sentence from Thoreau’s Walden. It opens his chapter, “Sounds”: . . . while we read only particular written languages . . .we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. It’s bad enough that Thoreau has “all things and events speak,” but how do they manage that without metaphor? Does a tree literally whisper? Do things and […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

This is a follow up to my last post, “Corporeal Words.” There, I paused with the thought, borrowed from the philosopher Kelly Jolley, that poetry lets words become bodies or objects. Thus they might set up a resonance with our own bodies. In a comment, Daniel D’Arezzo seemed to move us toward theology. He suggested that my drift would let the word become flesh. Although I applaud this aperçu, Daniel rejects it. I would argue that every poem is an argument—argues […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR