Thu, May 15, 2014 at 9:03 AM Fellas, I finished the Emerson bio, and thought i should share his philosophy of life. It is strange that he doesn’t mention friendship, since he consistently talked about its value and joy in his life. The days are gods. That is, everything is divine. Creation is continuous. There is no other world; this one is all there is. Every day is the day of judgment. The purpose of life is individual self-cultivation, self-expression, and fulfillment. Poetry liberates. Thought is also free. The powers of the soul are commensurate with its needs; each new …
Posts
Like People or Dogs
These four words prove that all you need is an opening lick on a whetstone. “Like people or dogs” Four words, that’s it. That is all it takes to sharpen a razor’s edge and shave the ordinary. I will share the entirety of the poem that starts “Like people or dogs”, but to set that up, a brief rambling on how Jesus of Nazareth taught me the value of a poetic whetstone. In the rabbinical tradition that Jesus participated in, a teacher would speak the opening lines of a Psalm and his students would recite the rest from memory. A teacher’s spoken cue to a lesson …
Charlie Chaplin in the Gears of Modern Times
Charlie Chaplin captured the flag of my attention as a boy. His Little Tramp persona is what did me in–the duck walk, bowler hat, narrow mustache, and cane. A bunch of daffy shticks that accented the physicality of his cerebral comedy. So winsome were his antics, I pinned a poster of Mr. Chaplin to my bedroom wall (an oddball move, I admit). When I showed my daughter a clip from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) last week she fell into a flurry of giggle fits. It was the iconic scene when Chaplin is working on the factory line. In the clip he is frantically …