Tag Archives: emerson

(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 his most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote perhaps his most famous sentences: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” The “gulf” is where we …

Interchange took a break this week. As a substitute, here’s a conversation with Christoph Irmscher about Louis Agassiz for your edification and your listening pleasure. This first aired on June 8, 2013 as part of the summer series The Custom House. Louis Agassiz, born in 1807 in Fribourg, Switzerland, came to the US in 1846 and very quickly became one …

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 …