“Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,––though long parched by the dead drought of the earthly life,––in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these […]
“Not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous––why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be […]
“Let me make a breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I––being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude,––how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’ standing orders, ‘Keep your weather eye […]
“Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness […]
David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature is not a breezy book. From the first page, it plunged me into a fervid mode of double-layered analysis in which my struggle to comprehend the text was mirrored by efforts to track my personal reactions to whatever content I was able to wrest from it. Early on, […]
“If you’ve ever been a college undergraduate taking Philosophy 101, you’ve probably encountered the concept of philosophical solipsism. According to solipsism, reality exists only inside your own mind. What follows then is that you can only be certain of your own status as a conscious being. Everyone else might be some sort of mindless marionette […]
“Was my father kind to animals? I thought so as a child, but I knew less about the lives of lab rats then. Let’s just say that my father was kind to animals unless it was in the interest of science to be otherwise. He would never have run over a cat if there was […]
“The idea that we would spend the holiday talking about anything as potentially explosive as my arrest was a fiction, and we all knew this even as I was being made to promise to do so. My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family […]
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to shake my head when asked by another scifi enthusiast if I’ve ever read Dune. To be unfamiliar with Frank Herbert’s classic is to leave a giant of the genre unexplored––to dismiss a leap forward in our thinking about technology and futurism. Now that I’ve […]
“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace––those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote […]