ZETEO

William James is known as the father of American Psychology and a Philosopher of Religious Experience par excellence. He also could exhibit a wide range of mood and sensibility. I just came across this – something new to me – in an account of James’ well-known struggles, especially in his youth, over meaning or purpose in his life: One of his early sketchpads contains what most scholars think is a self-portrait in red crayon—a young man, seated, hunched over, with […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

I’ve just received a collection of essays on nature that includes exchanges among academics allied with ecology, literature, and theology. What caught my eye was an essay titled, “Dream Writing.” It reminds me of Thoreau’s phrase, “dreaming awake.” That’s what it was to look skyward from his skiff in the center of Walden Pond. The author, Susan Pyke, writes from the University of Melbourne on literature and ecology. She wonders if reading poetry and novels can enter the body to animate […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

I always like Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker pieces. Reading his recent ruminations on Max Beerbohm is no exception. Gopnik touches on the fragility of Jewish and gay identities as they were negotiated in the ‘30s in America and in Britain, on the importance of voice in writing, and on Beerbohm’s great popularity between the wars. And something else jumped from the page. Gopnik makes an extraordinary generalization, marked by pithiness and grip. There are two kinds of extended sentences: “The […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR