Thoreau | ZETEO

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Artistry, Joy, Complexity, Freedom

June 5, 2016 by Ed Mooney

Allowing the full Influx of the World Artistry mitigates disaster and keeps us alive. I mean both the artistry of the world and our individual artistry in responding to it. It’s a balancing act, a ballet on the back of a dancing bull. Artistry, incoming and outgoing, from the world and from us, gives us both freedom and happiness, both joy and misery, both terror and adventure. I used to think the world was full of either/or’s, and your life […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: love, philosophy, poetry, Thoreau

Leviathans, Apocalypse, Woolf, Melville

January 24, 2016 by Ed Mooney

I’m not sure what led me to open Moby Dick again. It’s become a book to browse rather than “get through.” And when a passage pops up, one can’t be in a rush. Going slowly I can unravel serpentine sentences that so often deliver gold. Why just now? Perhaps because I’ve moved to the seacoast where even square-riggers come into port come summer, and I have time for reverie. By coincidence, passages from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse were lingering […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: literature, love, Thoreau, writing

Whales, Meteors, Terrorists, Saviors

December 20, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Herman Melville was mesmerized by a mysterious white whale. A new movie in town, In the Heart of the Sea, recounts the more or less true story of a whale ramming a ship in 1820. The Essex from Nantucket was stove in, in the South Pacific. Moby Dick is a distant relative of that event. It turns out that Melville was fascinated by a white whale and also by an ominous white meteor streaming through the sky — not […]

Categories: Ed Mooney • Tags: books, death, film, literature, Meteors, movies, reading, Thoreau, whales

What might poetry give us?

September 3, 2015 by William Eaton

. . . re-embracing one of lyric poetry’s most traditional themes: the hopes and dismay of intimate, romantic relationships. . . . the LANGUAGES OF SELLING AND POLITICS never stop invading all of us and putting the same emptinesses on all of our tongues. Writing poetry today, I am tempted to say, is as difficult as learning to live by oneself.

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, Emily Dickinson, language, love, philosophy of language, poetry, relationships, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Wittgenstein

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How does the good become good?

June 4, 2015 by William Eaton

Two disparate analogies to help us begin thinking about how the process works. A drug company tests its latest concoctions—e.g. statins—to see what effects they have. Discovering something one of these concoctions can do—lower high LDL cholesterol—the company engages its public relations and advertising arms in trumpeting the value of doing this thing. Lowering LDL cholesterol becomes something essential to prolonging human life. (And this in a time when, for example, obesity and poverty are much more life-threatening than LDL […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: ethics, Jean-Paul Sartre, journalism, Marx, Thoreau

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Factual Mind-Sets, Communing Sensibilities

April 26, 2015 by Ed Mooney

As someone who writes quite a bit about religion from philosophical and literary — not to say, religious — points of view, I was not surprised but piqued by a Sunday opinion piece in the New York Times. Here is T. M. Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropologist who writes regularly for the Times on religion. Here she reports on “Faith vs. Facts.” A broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: religion, science, The Bible, thinking, Thoreau

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Wisdom as Sensuous Slowness

April 19, 2015 by Ed Mooney

What would it be to find wisdom in an unhurried way of life? What is it to discover a “sensuous slowness” in one’s life – to discover a Sabbath or sabbatical? Franco Berardi, an Italian Marxist, dons the cloak of a prophet. He foresees a cultural revolution based on . . . facing the inevitable with grace, discovering the sensuous slowness of those who do not expect any more from life than wisdom — the wisdom of those who have seen […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: Franco Berardi, Kierkegaard, slowness, Thoreau

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Idiotic Holiday

March 29, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Well, it’s Spring Break, or Spring Break is just over, and if it’s over, then Florida beaches may return to normal for this time of year. A friend, in a stroke of genius, remembered an apt line from Nietzsche. If not “found-art,” then in a relevant sense, “found-philosophy.” Here it is, from Morgenröte (The Break of Day or Dawn): The only thing that cannot be refused to these poor beasts of burden is their “holidays”—such is the name they give to […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: Hilary Putnam, holidays, Marx, Nietzsche, spring break, Thoreau, vacation

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Thoreau Can’t Count One

March 12, 2015 by Ed Mooney

In the last paragraph of the second chapter of Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I lived for,” Thoreau gives us a very quotable line: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” But that’s just the start of falling down a rabbit hole. He adds, “I drink at it: but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. . . I would drink deeper: fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: Thoreau

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