Home » Posts tagged 'civilization'
Tag Archives: civilization
Arnold’s early poems
Matthew Arnold 1840-1849 (A man of intellect and of spiritual sensitivity contemplates the purpose of life and its struggles.) “Unwelcome shroud of the forgotten dead,/ Oblivion’s dreary fountain, where art thou”. What a dark way to begin one’s poetical efforts, at 18 years of age! And we need read no further to suspect (correctly) that in Matthew […]
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 […]
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 […]
Walden
Henry David Thoreau 1854 (A philosopher and naturalist returns from the woods to deliver a message: Wake Up! Think! Live Meaningfully!) The account of Thoreau’s temporary retreat from civilization and the philosophy he developed and tested during that time, is perhaps the greatest single work in American literature. I say this not so much because […]
The Time Machine
October 18, 2020 / 1 Comment on The Time Machine
H. G. Wells 1895 (A push on a lever, a blurry dizziness, a clap of thunder… and a veil falls away to reveal the world of our far distant descendants.) Breaking the rule that you have to proceed constantly forward in time at precisely one second per second is as old as the human imagination, […]
Continue Reading →