🖌️ The Essential Facts of Life, Friendship, Tending the Soul, and Immortal Poems
Monday Muse (Vol. 37)
Dear Friends,
Here is the latest Monday Muse with a selected reading (from Thoreau), perennial reminder/question, and a poem (by Emily Dickinson) to help you start your week. Be wise and be well!
📿 Thoreau — On the Essential Facts of Life
This week’s morning meditation is courtesy of The Wisdom School podcast (Apple or Spotify). Today’s meditation is a short selected reading from the writings of the American essayist Henry David Thoreau.
📌 Perennial Reminder(s)
Aristotle’s vision of philia gets something deeply right. He acknowledges a wide variety of friendships—friendships of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue—and he counts familial relationships as forms of friendship, too. We moderns are inclined to make distinctions, both contrasting kin and kindred and distinguishing romantic partners from mere friends, even ‘friends with benefits.’ Aristotle’s more inclusive view is more revealing: relationships with family are central to our lives as social animals, fending off loneliness, as romance can also do. When I write about ‘friendship’ here I mean to include romantic partners and family members with whom one happens to be close. Frustratingly, we have no word that means exactly this; “philia” is too broad, since it includes relationships that are purely pragmatic: “You scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours.” Our subject is not mere association, or one’s attitude to useful strangers, but the significance of love. […]
Source: Life is Hard by Kieran Setiya (Listen to my conversation with Kieran on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.)
💡 Perennial Question(s)
How does one tend the soul?
Virgil puts it another way. He says that human beings have a river that runs through their souls, but unlike a natural river that readily finds its way to the sea, the human stream can become blocked or diverted. It may flood or become polluted before reaching the fullness of the ocean, which is to say it may be ruined before it finds the divine, though it never stops having the capability to do so. It needs tending and maintaining to ensure that it flows as richly as it can, guided by the broadest vision. […]
Source: Dante’s Divine Comedy by Mark Vernon (Listen to my conversation with Mark Vernon on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.)
📜 Perennial Poem(s)
This week’s poem comes from the American poet Emily Dickinson.
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage help but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he know no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school where children played
At wrestled in a ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scacely visible,
The counice but a mound.
Since then tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.
🔥 Recommendation(s)
This week’s recommendation is the source of the poem above, Immortal Poems of the English Language. It’s a comprehensive anthology of enduring English language poetry featuring entries from 150 British and American poets. It could be a good gift idea for any poetry lovers!
🎧 Recent Podcast(s)
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Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
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