Examining life through poetry

Poetry offers us a powerful vehicle for pursuing a deeper examination of life and its meaning.  Poet Mary Pinard has compiled this list of particularly relevant poems. Pinard teaches poetry and literature at Babson College; the latest collection of her own poems was published last year (Portal, Salmon Poetry, 2014).

Alexie, Sherman:  “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City” and “The Facebook

Sonnet”

Auden, W. H.:  “Musée Des Beaux Arts”

Bishop, Elizabeth: “The Fish”

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor:  “Work Without Hope”  (sonnet)

Collins, Billy:  “Questions about Angels,” and “Nostalgia”

Dickinson, Emily:  “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,”

Dolin, Sharon:  “For I Will Consider the Overlooked Dragonfly”

Heaney, Seamus:  “Digging”

Hudgins, Andrew:  “Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead”

Hughes, Langston:  “Harlem”

Kavanagh, Patrick:  “Epic”  (sonnet)

Kinnell, Galway:  “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” and “Blackberry Eating”

Keats, John:  “To Autumn”

Komanyakaa, Yusef:  “Facing It”

Kunitz, Stanley:  “The Round” and “The Layers”

Levertov, Denise:  “Witness”

Oliver, Mary:  “The  Kingfisher” and “Wild Geese”

Pinsky, Robert:  “Shirt”

Shelley, Percy Bysshe:  “Ozymandias”  (sonnet)

Stafford, William:  “Traveling Through the Dark”

Strand, Mark:  “Keeping Things Whole”

Swenson, May:  “Staring at the Sea on the Day of the Death of Another”  (sonnet)

Whitman, Walt:  “A Noiseless Patient Spider”

Wilbur, Richard:  “The Writer”

Yeats, William Butler:  “The Wild Swans at Coole,”

Another voice added to the examined life project. Although some indict Brooks as "hypocritical and sanctimonious", it's hard to dismiss his quest for meaning.

What Is Your Purpose?  by David Brooks, NYT May 5 2015

Every reflective person sooner or later faces certain questions: What is the purpose of my life? How do I find a moral compass so I can tell right from wrong? What should I do day by day to feel fulfillment and deep joy?

As late as 50 years ago, Americans could consult lofty authority figures to help them answer these questions.

Some of these authority figures were public theologians. Reinhold Niebuhr was on the cover of Time magazine. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote about everything from wonder to sin to civil rights. Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote a book called “On Being a Real Person” on how to live with integrity.

Other authority figures were part of the secular priesthood of intellectuals.

John Dewey advocated pragmatism. Jean-Paul Sartre and his American popularizers championed existentialism. Hannah Arendt wrote big books on evil and the life of the mind.

Public discussion was awash in philosophies about how to live well. There was a coherent moral ecology you could either go along with or rebel against.

All of that went away over the past generation or two. It is hard to think of any theologian with the same public influence that Niebuhr and Heschel had. Intellectuals are given less authority and are more specialized. They write more for each other and are less likely to volley moral systems onto the public stage.

These days we live in a culture that is more diverse, decentralized, interactive and democratized. The old days when gray-haired sages had all the answers about the ultimate issues of life are over. But new ways of having conversations about the core questions haven’t yet come into being.

Public debate is now undermoralized and overpoliticized. We have many shows where people argue about fiscal policy but not so many on how to find a vocation or how to measure the worth of your life. In fact, we now hash out our moral disagreement indirectly, under the pretense that we’re talking about politics, which is why arguments about things like tax policy come to resemble holy wars.

Intellectual prestige has drifted away from theologians, poets and philosophers and toward neuroscientists, economists, evolutionary biologists and big data analysts. These scholars have a lot of knowledge to bring, but they’re not in the business of offering wisdom on the ultimate questions.

The shift has meant there is less moral conversation in the public square. I doubt people behave worse than before, but we are less articulate about the inner life. There are fewer places in public where people are talking about the things that matter most.

As a result, many feel lost or overwhelmed. They feel a hunger to live meaningfully, but they don’t know the right questions to ask, the right vocabulary to use, the right place to look or even if there are ultimate answers at all.As I travel on a book tour, I find there is an amazing hunger to shift the conversation. People are ready to talk a little less about how to do things and to talk a little more about why ultimately they are doing them.

This is true among the young as much as the older. In fact, young people, raised in today’s hypercompetitive environment, are, if anything, hungrier to find ideals that will give meaning to their activities. It’s true of people in all social classes. Everyone is born with moral imagination — a need to feel that life is in service to some good.

The task now is to come up with forums where these sorts of conversations can happen in a more modern, personal and interactive way.

I thought I’d do my part by asking readers to send me their answers to the following questions: Do you think you have found the purpose to your life, professional or otherwise? If so, how did you find it? Was there a person, experience or book or sermon that decisively helped you get there?

If you have answers to these questions, go the website for my book, “The Road to Character,” click on First Steps and send in your response. We’ll share as many as we can on the site’s blog called The Conversation, and I’ll write a column or two reporting on what I’ve learned about how people find purpose these days.

More Thoreauvian counsel on the art of living

Thoreau on What It Really Means to Be Awake by Maria Popova

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

“The secret of success is… to be fully awake to everything about you,” Jackson Pollock’s father wrote in his beautiful 1926 letter of advice to his teenage son. But how does one become fully awake to the world, especially in our world, through which we increasingly sleepwalk on autopilot, in a trance of productivity? (How awake are we, really, when we’ve stopped bowling over in awe at the everyday miracle of clouds? Or the unexpected glory of wildflowers on the city sidewalk?) Wakefulness — that embodied attentiveness to life as it lives itself through us — seems as mysterious as our nocturnal escape into dreams, and often more elusive.

That’s what Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) explores in a beautiful passage from Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (public library) — another timeless treasure from the same Penguin Great Ideas series that gave us Seneca’s indispensable The Shortness of Life.

Thoreau — a man of great and enduring wisdom on subjects like the spiritual rewards of walking, the creative benefits of keeping a diary, and the best definition of success — extols the gift of the awake imagination:

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the wakening hour. Then there is at least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance fills the air — to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. 

Will more information help us find meaning? The Borgesian Library of Babel has already alerted us to the futility of this search. But here's another exposition on the subject...

In the Age of Information, Specializing to Survive 

By J. PEDER ZANE       NYT MARCH 19, 2015

Jonathan Haber majored in philosophy at Harvard University. And Yale. And Stanford. He explored Kant’s “The Critique of Pure Reason” with an Oxford don and Kierkegaard’s insights into “Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity” with a leading light from the University of Copenhagen.

In his quest to meet all the standard requirements for a bachelor of arts degree in a single year, the 52-year-old from Lexington, Mass., also took courses in English common law, Shakespeare’s late plays and the science of cooking, which overlapped with the degree in chemistry he earned from Wesleyan in 1985.

Here’s the brilliant part: Mr. Haber didn’t spend a dime on tuition or fees. Instead, he gorged from the smorgasbord of free courses offered by top universities. He documented the project on his website, degreeoffreedom.org, and in a new book exploring the wider phenomenon of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. He didn’t earn a degree — the knowledge may be free but the sheepskin costs dearly — but he was satisfied.

“I wouldn’t call myself a philosopher,” he said, “but I learned as much as most undergraduates.”

Mr. Haber’s project embodies a modern miracle: the ease with which anyone can learn almost anything. Our ancient ancestors built the towering Library of Alexandria to gather all of the world’s knowledge, but today, smartphones turn every palm into a knowledge palace.

Should an author's intentions matter?

If a text can mean anything the reader wants it to mean, then why read it in the first place?  Adam Kirsch offers an opinion (NYT 15 March).

No book could announce its author’s intentions more plainly than “Paradise Lost.” John Milton declared his purpose in the opening stanza: “That to the heighth of this great argument / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.” And that is how “Paradise Lost” was read for the first century and a half of its existence: as a vindication of God’s justice. Because the sacred drama of the Fall will conclude with the salvation of humanity through the sacrifice of Jesus, Adam comes to realize that all his suffering is divinely ordained for the best: “O goodness infinite, goodness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good!”

Then, in the late 18th century, something changed. Readers like William Blake and Percy Shelley opened the same poem that pious Christians had been enjoying for generations, only they discovered something surprising: The hero of the poem is not Adam, or Jesus, or God himself, but actually Satan, the incarnation of evil. Because all the other characters act out of obedience to a divine plan, they can’t be said to possess the characteristics of heroism — boldness, daring, pride. Only Satan, who acts in opposition to God, has those traits, and as a result, he gets the best speeches — as when he declares, after he is hurled into hell, that “All is not lost; the unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield.”

That is why, to Shelley, “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is . . . far superior to his God.” Yet how could it be that Milton, who was a deeply pious Christian and who explicitly said that his poem was meant to promulgate Christian truths, was actually, as Blake said, “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”? This could be possible only if the author was not actually the master of his own intentions. Perhaps Milton was ensnared by the false piety of his own time, and it took the antinomian insight of the Romantics to liberate him — to make him the poet of revolt that he secretly wanted to be all the time. Or perhaps the Romantics were simply imagining Milton as they wanted him to be. Either way, they permanently changed the way later readers would approach Milton’s epic; in a sense, they rewrote “Paradise Lost.”

As the old gringo and Tomás Arroyo consider their secret frontiers, this excerpt from C.G. Jung's Collected Works might resonate with them...

“The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing...He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths...There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus or, "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid"...He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. "His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law...The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization--absolute and unconditional--of its own particular law...To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being...he has failed to realize his own life's meaning.

The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way "Tao," and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one's destination reached, one's mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things.”

Some are less enthusiastic about the individualism extolled by Emerson and his transcendental colleague Thoreau...

The Foul Reign of Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’

Tom Gauld

By BENJAMIN ANASTAS Published: December 2, 2011 NYT

My first exposure to the high-flown pap of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” came in a basement classroom at the private boys’ school where I enrolled to learn the secrets of discipline and because I wanted, at age 14, to wear a tie. The class was early American literature, the textbook an anthology with the heft of a volume of the Babylonian Talmud; a ribbon for holding your place between “Rip Van Winkle,” by Washington Irving, and “Young Goodman Brown,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne; and a slick hardcover the same shade of green as the backside of a dollar bill.

Our teacher, let’s call him Mr. Sideways, had a windblown air, as if he had just stepped out of an open coupe, and the impenetrable self-confidence of someone who is convinced that he is liked. (He was not.) “Whoso would be a man,” he read aloud to a room full of slouching teenage boys in button-down shirts and ties stained with sloppy Joes from the dining hall, “must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness. . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” And then he let loose the real hokum: “Absolve you to yourself,” he read, “and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

I am sure that Mr. Sideways lectured dutifully on transcendentalism and its founding ideas — Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” and its gift of X-ray sight; Thoreau’s flight from a life of “quiet desperation” in society to the stillness of Walden Pond; the starred ceiling of the heavens that Ralph Waldo called the “Over-Soul,” uniting us with its magnetic beams — but what I remember most about that English class was the week that Mr. Sideways told us to leave our anthologies at home so that he could lead us in a seminar in how to make a fortune in real estate by tapping the treasure trove he referred to as “O.P.M.,” or Other People’s Money. He drew pyramids and pie charts on the blackboard. He gave us handouts.