Tag Archives: walden

(Original air date: July 30, 2019) Forget the haters – they have not read deliberately nor with imagination, only as partisans. You could do much worse than spend many hours reading and studying just two of Thoreau’s great essays, “Civil Disobedience” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” The first, influential for a non-violent response to tyranny, the second, recognizing …

In the liner notes to the album Pithecanthropus Erectus, Charles Mingus calls the title song “his conception of the modern counterpart of the first man to stand erect – how proud he was, considering himself the “first” to ascend from all fours, pounding his chest and preaching his superiority over the animals still in a prone position. Overcome with self-esteem, …

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 …

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 …