Tag Archives: vitalism

July 12th marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau. We like anniversaries and birthdays in particular…we like to mark time, to celebrate occasions. And in fact, like most words, “occasion”* holds an etymological tension within it by meaning both a downfall and a falling together–which seems only right for a term that is communal, civic, and …

Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus, seems to me to clang like a hammer blow against a bell that tolls our self-inflicted doom. To quote Victor Frankenstein– None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there …

What may seem surprising as you listen is the way in which Thoreau’s understanding of death and life can inform our own considerations of what it means to live by an ethics of inclusion and acceptance of differences and to eschew what is given to us politically and socially as measured, hierarchical, and standardized forms of “knowing.” All this is …