Existentialism Is A Mysticism

"Nothingness lies coiled the heart of being--like a worm." Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel Barnes, p. 56.

A Religious Thinker

The work of John Hick.

Below Freshet and Frost and Fire

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time."

Henry David Thoreau, American Dervish
"Where I lived," Walden.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Prophet

William Blake's Mahomet ("Visionary Heads" series).

When English Protestantism Was Interesting

Fecundity In Three Acts

Act One: The Burgeoning Branches.

Act Two: The Venus of Willendorf.

Act Three: Existential Reflection.

Advice From William Faulkner

Baba Afdal/Afzal Kashani

Just another poet-saint from Iran.

American Transcendentalism's Worthy Successor

I was raised by unconscious Calvinists. In my late teens, I decided to investigate Calvinism and to make explicit and conscious for myself what had been hitherto implicit and unconscious. Claustrophobia quickly set in. My discovery of Jonathan Edwards provided some relief--with his notion of "the sense of the heart"--after all he was, in the words of Morton White, "like St. Augustine...a mystic who could argue."

In the end, however, I chose Kierkegaardian faith-as-passion and Bonhoeffer's late humanism over Edwards since the latter still found it necessary to come to Calvinism's defense.

Over time (and after reading Ghazali in the mid-1990's), faith-as-passion transmuted into the religion of longing (tasawwuf) and Bonhoeffer's Menschlichkeit evolved into Camus's "profound and radical this-worldliness [combined] with an explicit rejection of traditional Christian theodicy" [James Woelfel, Bonhoeffer's Theology, 28].

Although I invoke Camus, it is Henry Miller's essay "The Wisdom of the Heart" that contains a precise formula of the position I had come to by my junior year in college:

The whole secret of salvation hinges on the conversion of word to deed, with and through the whole being. It is this turning in wholeness and faith, conversion, in the spiritual sense, which is the mystical dynamic of the fourth-dimensional view. I used the word salvation a moment ago, but salvation, like fear or death, when it is accepted and experienced, is no longer "salvation." There is no salvation, really, only infinite realms of experience providing more and more tests, demanding more and more faith.

Miller was the self-conscious disciple of Whitman and, as such, offered in his "fourth-dimensional view" or "wisdom of the heart" a worthy successor to American Transcendentalism.

The Illegitimate Fourth Estate

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea...By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on illusory foundations."

Henry David Thoreau
American Dervish

The Modern Library and Everyman's Library

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."

Henry David Thoreau
American Dervish

I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the debt of gratitude I owe to the publishing ventures known as The Modern Library and Everyman's Library. Over the years, I have accumulated god knows how many volumes of Modern Library and Everyman's Library editions. Two in particular (one from each series) achieved canonical status in my affections: Walden and Other Writings (Thoreau, The Modern Library) and The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays (Albert Camus, Everyman's Library).

Part of the experience of reading is irreducibly aesthetic: the look of a book, the way it feels in one's hand, the heft of the pages, the typeface, the solid stitching of the spine--these qualities (and more) contribute to the way in which a book's contents will be received by a reader.

Both The Modern Library and Everyman's Library produce books that a reader wants to pick up, to hold, to mull over and, over the long term, to cherish. The very look and feel of their editions persuade us that, as Thoreau mused,

"The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones."

In this (as in most things he mused about) Thoreau was unquestionably correct; but had the book as it presented itself to us not intimated this truth by its very appearance, we might never have ventured to peruse its pages. Our miracles, then, would have gone unexplained, and new ones never revealed.

Whoever said "Don't judge a book by its cover" was only partially right. No doubt, covers may (and often do) deceive us; but they also invite us into territory that we would not have explored had the initial invitation not been extended.

The Model American Dervish

The first shock to my intellect came sometime around 1972 when I read the New Testament (from Matthew's gospel to John's Apocalypse). That was serious reading; to my recollection, the first I'd ever really done on my own (i.e., outside of school).

The second shock came in the summer of 1973, when I read Thoreau's Walden (at Swain's Lake, New Hampshire, pictured here).

It is not likely that I would be who I am today had I not read the New Testament at that tender age; I am certain, however, that, had I not read Walden then, I would be someone else altogether.

Thoreau is our model American dervish.

An American Tale

The Morgan’s dazzling Islamic manuscript paintings

Calling Dr. Swift! Calling Dr. Swift!

Where, O where, is the good Doctor when you need him?

Nota Bene