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Go Down, Moses
William Faulkner 1942 (Vivid tales from the deeply rooted McCaslin family of Mississippi explore the human desire to dominate others.) Faulkner raises a novel, especially Go Down, Moses, like a mountain range. A small peak here, another one some indefinite distance to the side but nearer to the viewer, another apparently between them but actually much […]
Lyrical Ballads, and other early poems
William Wordsworth 1785-1799 (A poetic sage takes lessons on goodness and beauty from nature.) A man of wisdom, a poet of nature, is Wordsworth. These are the goals to which he aspires, goals that are discernable in his work from a very early age. He wrote many of his greatest poems in the years covered […]
Sappho’s poetic fragments
Sappho 7th-6th centuries BC (The tenth muse expresses beauty, love, and the contents of her heart.) Αιαι. Aiai! If only our dinner hosts still upheld the custom of ordering beautiful recitations over the wine! So it was in the days when some, at least, still believed in the Muses. On one of these evenings, Solon the […]
Passages from the American Notebooks
Nathaniel Hawthorne 1835-1853 (The exercise of a young author’s pen creates images of the New England landscape and its people.) Mrs. Sophia Hawthorne, after the death of her husband in 1864, respected his wish that no biography be written of him. However, in lieu of this, she released to an eager public three successive volleys […]
A Sand County Almanac
July 9, 2014 / 3 Comments on A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold 1948 (An ecologist contemplates and celebrates the land, and recommends an expansion of our moral world.) In today’s courses on ecology, forestry, conservation, environmental philosophy or land use, three personalities are routinely introduced as the fathers of modern concern for nature, the three who first and most strongly urged us to enlarge our […]
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