Rewarding Reads – Worthwhile Online Journals

Over the past couple of years, I’ve found a few online journals that provide thoughtful, interesting, well-written commentary on a number of subjects.

With hope that knowledge of them might be rewarding to others, I will go through them here in no particular order.

The Conversation

First up is The Conversation. Subtitled on the masthead as “Academic rigour, journalistic flair,” it actually lives up to the billing.

It began in 2011 in Australia and now produces editions centred in a number of countries, including the US, Canada, UK, New Zealand and France.

The journal covers topics in Science & Tech, Culture & Society, Politics, Health and quite a few more categories.

Articles of interest that I’ve recently read include “The surprising reason why insects circle lights at night: They lose track of the sky,” “When is criticism of Israel antisemitic? A scholar of modern Jewish history explains,” and “Atlantic Ocean is headed for a tipping point − once melting glaciers shut down the Gulf Stream, we would see extreme climate change within decades, study shows.”

My interests are wide-ranging, and this journal manages to provide articles that touch on a lot of the areas that I would like to know more about.

Atlas Obscura

Next on my list is Atlas Obscura which bills itself as “The Definitive Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders.”

Recently it has taken a more commercialized turn. They are now organizing festivals and selling courses such as “Lockpicking with Schuyler Towne” and “Bird Taxidermy with Allis Markham.” I don’t think I’m their target audience for those ventures.

But there are still articles and short notes about many fascinating locations across the world.

Recent articles of interest: “For Hundreds of Years, People Thought California Was an Island,” “Mysterious Writing System From Easter Island May Be Completely Unique,” and the compilation article, “12 Amazing Athletic Competitions You Should Be Watching.”

The latter includes “Inside the High-Flying World of Estonian Swinging,” and “Meet the Man Who Wants to Make Sitting an Extreme Sport.” Extreme chair sitting sounds like my kind of athleticism these days.

Psyche

Since I have a degree in psychology and a life-long interest in matters bearing on culture and consciousness, the online journal Psyche fits my curiosity.

For instance, I’ve always thought Jung’s understanding of psychology to be the most profound of all the historical figures in that field.

The article entitled “For Jung, architecture was a tool to represent the psyche” I found engrossing. It asks the question, “How are we creating spaces for the forgotten dimensions of the mind?” To find out what that might mean, you’ll have to read the article.

A couple of other items I found of interest: “Innovative three-year-olds expose the limits of AI chatbots” and “What does switching from paper to screens mean for how we read?”

I found especially moving the article on “How one man saved 160 lives with an extended hand and a warm cup of tea,” when he intervened in suicide attempts.

Nature Briefing & Nature Briefing: Anthropocene

I subscribe to these lists of posts from Nature, in general, and also the Anthropocene category they offer (anthropocene is a term coined to describe the geological epoch that begins with significant human impact on the earth).

Some items I learned about:

– A glowing petunia, with genes from bioluminescent mushrooms, has hit the US market.

– The first rechargeable calcium battery has been developed.

– Student researchers have used machine learning to read text hidden inside burnt, unopenable scrolls recovered from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum.

– United States climate scientist Michael Mann won a significant defamation lawsuit, securing over $1 million in damages against two conservative commentators who disparaged his research and compared him to a convicted child molester.

– Hurricanes might need a new category. Due to the increasing strength of hurricanes, two scientists are recommending adding a sixth category to the 1-5 of the Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale.

ScienceDaily

Since I’m writing science-fiction novels, I want to keep up with what’s going on in science. Often items in ScienceDaily as with Nature give me ideas to extrapolate from.

The site offers an email newsletter. Some recent items:

– Researchers 3D-print functional human brain tissue.

– By growing animal cells in rice grains, scientists dish up hybrid food.

– Why elderly adults lose billions to scams.

– Pain-based weather forecasts could influence actions. What?! This is about how weather affects chronic pain sufferers.

– Neural prosthetic device can help restore memory.

Quanta

Quanta Magazine is perhaps the most thought provoking entry on this list. The topics range from consciousness to bees to black hole information paradoxes. Sometimes the discussions are specialized enough to be beyond me.

Some articles of note:

– How Did Altruism Evolve.

– How to Build An Origami Computer.

– The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot set, Math’s Most Famous Fractal.

– A New Spin on the Quantum Brain.

– The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality.

I realized on reading some of the math-related articles, such as the one about the history of the Mandelbrot set, that I don’t understand what professional mathematicians do at all. The mind, the mental processes, of a top-flight (or even a medium-flight) mathematician are difficult for me to imagine. How, in the rarefied intangibility of it all, while scribbling esoteric symbols on a blackboard, do they arrive at anywhere conclusive? And yet they do.

Hakai

Hakai Magazine has become one of my favorites and is worthy of wider notice.

It is based in British Columbia where I live. Launched in 2015, it explores science, society, and the environment highlighting coastal life around the world.

The name is inspired by Hakai Pass in the Hakai Lúxvbálís Conservancy, one of the largest protected marine areas on the west coast of Canada, located about 400 kilometers north of Vancouver.

Some of their articles:

– In the Face of Mounting Climate Risks, the Insurance Safety Net Is Falling Apart.

– A River Runs Above Us. A comprehensive article about atmospheric rivers.

– Working With Purpose, Forever. Or, how to keep shareholders from ruining your business. About a new model for business structures.

– Banking on the Seaweed Rush. Can seaweed do it all?

If any of these publications pique your interest, give them your attention, and in some cases your donations to help keep them afloat. Intelligent information is not so easy to come by these days.

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Note:

There are two more online journals I’d like to mention.

One is Noema. They “publish essays, interviews, reportage, videos and art on the overlapping realms of philosophy, governance, geopolitics, economics, technology and culture.”

The other is Aeon. They have essays written by serious and creative thinkers on philosophy, psychology, science, society and culture.

Synthetic Biology: Where Will the World End Up?

We hear a lot of fearful hysteria or adoring glorification of the new large language model (LLM) pseudo-intelligences like Chat GPT.  The LLMs may show to some the imminent arrival of the Singularity, or to others the advent of over-hyped artificial entities which humans can con themselves into worshiping.

But if we must be alarmist about coming technological changes, there is another stream of more extreme hazard.  After reading “Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology“, you may want to run down the street waving your arms and tearing off your clothes to sob at the sky.

Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology

If you can manage to wade through the bureaucratic and academic language of this compilation of papers from the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme, published in 2019, you will realize that none of the authors, or indeed, any one else are able to realistically suggest how to prevent the widespread weaponization of biology.  And why would anybody want to weaponize biology?  For the same reasons we see all about us on the internet where individual hackers and state actors manipulate the digital world.  For power and money.  Biological ransomware, anyone?

I’m working on a science-fiction novel which incorporates genetic engineering and synthetic biology set far in the future, so I’m reading a lot of background information on the subject.

Despite all the attention paid to AI, synthetic biology is a technological revolution going on in parallel with it and with nanotechnology that portends much greater danger to the human race and other living creatures than a few chatbots imitating intelligence on the web.

Some of the upcoming and ongoing hazards listed in an article on biosecurity threats in the above compilation include:

Dual use
Bioweapon
Ecological impact
Accidental release
Bioterrorism
Gain of function
Societal impact
Information access
Lower barriers
Uncertain consequences
DIY community

“Dual use” in this context needs some explanation.  It describes how an aspect of technology can do good, and also be capable of causing great harm.  For instance, synthetic biology can be used to engineer microbes that can produce biofuels from renewable resources. While this has the potential to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and mitigate climate change, the same technology can be used to create novel biological agents for biowarfare or bioterrorism.

Gain of Function

“Gain of function” can mean:

By introducing new genes or modifying existing ones, synthetic biologists can create organisms with new or improved properties, such as increased resistance to disease, enhanced metabolic activity, or improved growth rate.

We’ll come back to this one, and the flaws inherent in this conceptualization.

One can also imagine parents demanding inheritable genes changed in their children to enhance a desired trait, such as musicality, tallness, large muscles or swaggering belligerence, with no idea of potential long-term consequences for their children, subsequent progeny, and the world at large.

Do It Yourself (DIY) Biology Hacking

The so-called Do It Yourself (DIY) community threat brings home a lot of the others.

The recent emergence of CRISPR as a gene-editing tool has enabled precise and inexpensive methods of engineering individual organisms, biological systems, and entire genomes.

CRISPR and similar tools along with the ability to order biological and genetic components online has enabled a movement of “citizen scientists” interested in synthetic biology experiments to become an international phenomenon over the last few years.

Often with little prior knowledge of the field, enthusiasts meet in makeshift labs to take crash courses in biotechnology and conduct hands-on experiments. Simple protocols found online and specialized kits costing US$150–US$1,600 have driven the movement’s rapid expansion. DIY Bio labs can be found in most major cities. There are hundreds if not thousands of such groups worldwide.  Bio-hackers are a reality.

A complex issue on the horizon is the development of benchtop DNA synthesizers. These devices would allow operators to synthesize DNA in house, reducing the need to order from a provider likely to screen an order.

“Managing” Biosecurity

Another article in the above compilation examines the challenges to managing biosecurity.

It makes three points:

1. Security threats from synthetic biology are fundamentally different from those posed by chemicals, explosive, or radioactive material. Actors can use genetic engineering and editing technologies to alter or create a variety of platforms, including viruses, microorganisms, multicellular organisms, prions, and even cell-free systems.
2. Exposure and vulnerability to synthetic biology threats are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify at present. We cannot confidently predict which platform might be used to generate a biological threat or weapon. We cannot know what the target of a biological attack will be, whether it be humans, important crops, livestock, native species, the environment, or other assets.
3. It is hard to predict the consequences of release because it is unknown how the weapon will be deployed against the target. The new ability to modify almost all eukaryotic cells means that any biological system could be a mechanism of disruption for such a weapon. (“Eukaryotic” cells are more complex and have a definite nucleus.)

Even such a vital and basic structure as soils are vulnerable to genetic manipulation of the organisms that dwell therein which creates the ecosystem that grows our food.

Threats Emerge at Convergence Points

One learns in this document that emerging threats are likely to arise at the convergence points of new developments. So where synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and AI and computer advances meet, we can expect new hazards, many unanticipated, to make themselves known.

For instance last year a drug-developing AI invented 40,000 potentially lethal molecules in six hours. Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of “bad actor” mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference.

I wanted to return to some of the problems with “gain of function” manipulations mentioned above, which are usually lauded for their beneficial effects.  The main problem is one of arrogance, and the blinders provided by greed and ambition.

One example: Researchers hunted for unintended consequence of genetically modified potatoes with supposed improved sugar metabolism in the plant.  They produced more amino acids than they were supposed to. This “was not known to be related to the sugar breakdown pathway targeted by the genetic manipulation.”

Another: Genetically modified canola was also investigated which had been changed to increase beneficial carotene.  The scientists found that “unpredictable unintended effects, in contrast, fall outside present understanding… Where the beneficial carotene content in transgenic canola was raised, the composition of fatty acids was also altered.  There is no known connection between fatty acid synthesis and the carotenoid pathway.”

One of the problems with much “gain of function” research is that unexpected or non-target results are ignored or not reported.

Unintended Consequences

As one review of scientific studies states:

“That is, unintended effects arise because the organism is a tightly integrated whole; but because we have hardly begun to understand the complex web of interactions within this whole, the effects remain unpredictable.

“So while the genetic engineer wants control, stability, regularity, and constancy, life plays itself out in dynamism, unpredictability, and change.”

If anything, I have understated the risks that have already and will likely in future develop from the rise of synthetic biology.  They are not just here in developed nations, but across the rest of the world in the midst of all the political and environmental upheaval going on everywhere.  It is sobering.

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Additional notes:

I found, in addition to the more recent summary document that initiated this post, that two articles by Craig Holdredge in In Context #19 gave a welcome detailed overview of the nature of risks associated with synthetic biology.  They are:

“Understanding the Unintended Effects of Genetic Manipulation” and “Some Examples of Unintended Effects of Genetic Manipulation.”

The images above are from (top down): Syngulon.com and Meer.com.

Halls of Sun, Corridors of Rain

Over the years, as a would-be writer, I jotted words into notebooks which I stashed away for decades.

There are freewriting efforts, poetry, observations, quotations and many abortive attempts at stories and novels in there.  Many more than I remember.

Nearing 72, I feel the need to perform archaeology on the life hinted at in those notebooks. They run from the early 1970s until today.  It is difficult to gauge their interest, if any, to others, but I still hope that a stray insight or quote resonates with the occasional reader. 

I only seek to make more sense to myself.

*    *    *

Good title – Halls of Sun, Corridors of Rain. (1986)

*    *    *

To the adequate expression of our truest and deepest feelings.  These are the solid things. (1977)

*    *    *

This is ridiculous.  Here I am a grown man at 26, and with a few words of criticism, I’m about to cry. (1977)

*    *    *

Mad as a bag of cats. (2018)

*    *    *

See people’s characters relative to the deals they attempt to make with the essential emptiness of human life.  The terrifying emptiness.  The fecund emptiness. (1987)

*    *    *

Is this a real thing?  In bug-ridden country, tie dragonflies to shoulders to chase away the bugs.  Catching them must be a trick. (1987)

*    *    *

“Reason – by which I mean the ability to grasp the moral sense, not just the ‘facts’ of reality….” — Erazim Kohak  (1987)

*    *    *

The true sacred life doesn’t lend itself to institutionalization.  (1970s)

*    *    *

The task of culture is to provide the individual with the conviction that he is an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action. (1970s)

*    *    *

So much is expressed by the spirit with which people move their bodies as they walk.  (Early 1980s)

*    *    *

Confucius: “Look closely into a man’s aims, observe the means by which he pursues them, and discover what brings him contentment.  How can a man hide his character?”  Also useful for writing.  (Early 1980s)

*    *    *

Having a notebook and being a ‘writer’ gives you permission to be anywhere, watching anything.  (Late 1980s)

*    *    *

At a café, an older woman eating cake, sipping coffee with a kind of desperation.  Her lower face, when she looks at people talking is mute, stiff; only her eyes show feeling.  She’s slightly buck-toothed, and keeps her mouth closed as if to hide. (Late 1980s)

*    *    *

“Three things are to be considered: a man’s estimation of himself, the face he presents to the world, and the estimate of that man made by other men.  Combined they form an aspect of truth.” — Paul Scott (1980s)

*    *    *

“A reader should want to know the character infinitely.” — Arturo Vivante (1980s)

*    *    *

Colin Turnbull studied the Mbuti in Central Africa and found they don’t have a specific word for ‘god’. “The closest is the word ndura which can be translated as ‘forest’. … Ultimately, ndura does mean the forest, but more than that it means forestness. And this is the quality of life by which they measure everything that is good in their lives. All that is positive is related to ndura, this life-giving quality.” (1984)

*    *    *

“We no longer recognize spiritual pain, the distressed soul, although we suffer from that disease more than any other.” — Michael Shallis (1985)

*    *    *

When my brothers and I were kids, whenever we tasted something good, we wanted to make it into a sandwich.  “Hey, Ma, I want a peach sandwich….” (late 1970s)

*    *    *

Sun sinks low

Cloud shadows ride
      the mountains

Purple and yellow flowers                                        (1988)

 

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Note: To be continued, probably. 

Beta Reader Exchange?

I’ve finished a second science-fiction novel. This one is set just ahead of us in the middle of this century, which is rather daring given the speed of change.

I like to put characters in science-fictionish environments and explore what might happen with them. This second novel is part of a trilogy I’m calling The Three Eras. The first was set way in the future, in the Third Era. This one is in the First Era, and the next is in the Second. The stories are all in the same universe but each stands alone with only historical connections.

You might think that it would make sense to write them in chronological order, but my mind has worked itself out differently. It may have something to do with ease of writing. The third novel, of the Second Era, promises to be the most difficult. I’m going to have to do a lot of research, which I’ve already started, on such matters as space elevators and genetic manipulation.

But for the just completed novel set in the relatively near future (third draft or so) let me give you the pitch for it:

“What if an intellectual, even spiritual genius, like a young combined Einstein and Simone Weil, appeared as a young girl? In the middle of the 21st century, in the midst of societal decay, climate disruption and technological change, a young investigator searches for a brilliant girl who has gone missing. This is a novel about a young man still suffering from the suicidal death of his sister who makes it his mission to rescue a genius girl who wants to save humanity. He must overcome an international crime cartel, local corruption, and social and environmental disruption, to find her and keep her safe.”

Voluntary first readers?

Before I get serious with sending it out to literary agents, I would like a beta-reader or two to give it the once over. For those unfamiliar with the term, a beta-reader is a voluntary first reader who gives the writer their reactions.

I propose that if anyone has their own novel work-in-progress who also needs a beta-reader then we could exchange first chapters or synopses to see if we still want to proceed. My throw-away email for this is: 5cfstkof5osg@opayq.com .

There are beta-reader groups and services available on-line. One I’ve found which I’ve signed up for is the Critters Writers Workshop. It is “home to several on-line critique groups (aka workshops) for professional and professionally aspiring writers, artists, and creators in any endeavor.” It is free (donations welcome) and one pays for being read by reading others and writing critiques. Originally it was set up as a science-fiction and fantasy workshop, but now there are groups for all types of writing.

It is a hangover from the old internet when coming together in creative ways was the prime mover rather than the exciting possibilities of monetization, branding and Meta. The interface is a little old-fashioned, run by a guy who hearkens back to the old days. It can be hard sometimes to find the exact information you’re looking for, but I like the atmosphere of it.

So we’ll see how this goes….

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Three Books for the Writer Self – 2) The Winged Life

In the second book of this series of posts, we have The Winged Life: The Poetic Voice of Henry David Thoreau, by poet and rogue shaman Robert Bly, published in 1992 (HarperPerennial).

It is especially fitting to discuss this book now since Bly died just last November in his nineties after sadly being afflicted with dementia.

Reading several of Bly’s obituaries, I realized more fully how influential he became as an American poet. And not just a poet. He was famously opposed to the Vietnam War. And after his 1990 book Iron John: A Book About Men (which called, the New York Times obit notes, for “a restoration of primal male audacity”), he was catapulted to cultural prominence.

As Tony Hoagland writes in his 2011 essay about Bly: “From that time on, Bly’s true companions would largely not be other American poets, but cultural thinkers.”

It makes sense that Bly would write this commentary on Thoreau, for he had many of the same values and ways of seeing that moved both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau. Bly continued the tradition, if we may call it that, of the Transcendentalists, of not needing any intermediary for spiritual insight.

The structure of the book consists primarily of five parts, each one introduced with a commentary by Bly and followed by excerpts from the variety of Thoreau’s writing. (The wonderful woodcuts by Michael McCurdy add greatly to the contemplative tone of the book.)

“Part One – The Bug in the Table” sets the stage for this series of meditations on who Thoreau was as a man, and how he perceived himself and the world around him in those times of the 1840s. How different the world was then! Yet Bly lets us see how relevant much of what concerned the man of Concord still is today.

Transparent Eyeball

As noted in the introductory post, Bly highlights, at the very beginning, these sentences by Thoreau’s friend and mentor, Emerson:

“Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball.” This book is an exploration of how this kind of experience pervades Thoreau’s life. Nature is the inspiration of his entire outlook.

In Bly’s words now: “Many young men and women want to marry nature for vision, not possession. …The soul truth assures the young man or woman … that in human growth the road of development goes through nature, not around it.”

He excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden the story of “the strange and beautiful bug” which came out from an old table made from apple-tree wood, which had been in a farmer’s kitchen for a lifetime, but its egg must have been deposited in the original tree while it still existed. It was heard gnawing its way out of the table for some time, no doubt awakened by the heat of an urn or other contrivance.

Thoreau says: “Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society… may unexpectedly come forth….”

Bly comments: “This is a marvelous tale…. The story suggests that there is an unhatched abundance inside us that we ourselves have not prepared. Our psyche at birth was not a schoolchild’s slate with nothing written on it, but rather an apple-wood table full of eggs. We receive at birth the residual remains of a billion lives before us.”

In this Part One there are nineteen texts, comprised of poems, Journal passages and excerpts from Walden. This organization is similar in each of the following Parts.

Thoreau was remarkable for his rambles, his long walks in the woods almost every day. As one other selection of his writing from this Part puts it:

“I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they really are, grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it. … It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him.”

So As Not to Live Meanly

Part Two is called “The Habit of Living Meanly.” In Bly’s commentary, he notes that Thoreau observed how many of the people around him took on that habit. Living meanly to Thoreau meant living without sincerity, living to other’s standards, living like a kind of human ant occupied with small burdens. “The ancient metaphor for living meanly is sleep,” Bly says.

Thoreau sought a deeper life, which to every person must be at least partially different. Bly remembers that the first sentence of Thoreau’s that he ever memorized was:

“Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.”

Thoreau feels grief for the life wasted about him. In that famous quote from Walden given here:

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.”

Part Three is entitled “Going the Long Way Round.” As Bly says, Thoreau’s major life decision was his resolution to live what he understood to be a sincere life. “Thoreau wanted greatness, and he wanted to live greatly, but most of all he wanted not to live meanly.”

The Importance of Moratoriums

The young Thoreau insisted on taking a moratorium, a pause in the designs of the world upon him. Bly says, “I feel that Thoreau’s declaration of the need for a moratorium is his greatest gift to the young.”

In Thoreau’s case his moratorium, in the years before he published Walden, may have gone on too long. He resigned himself to not being at home in either male or female company.

Thoreau wrote in his journal: “By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.”

His pursuit of solitude is further illustrated by one of his Journal entries: “By poverty, i.e. simplicity of life and fewness of incidents, I am solidified and crystallized, as a vapor or liquid by cold. It is a singular concentration of strength and energy and flavor.”

In Part Four, “Seeing What is Before Us,” Bly momentarily revisits Emerson for his description of what it was like to walk with Thoreau: “It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it by paths of his own.” Emerson recounts how detailed and patient Thoreau was in his observations of nature, taking with him an old book to flatten flowers in, a diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, a hand-held microscope, a jackknife and twine. Thoreau knew to the day when each type of wildflower would bloom.

Faculties of the Soul

Thoreau read widely, everything from Eastern spiritual books to Goethe and Schelling. These perspectives informed his detailed descriptions of the nature around him. He seemed to take to heart Coleridge’s advice that “each object rightly seen unlocks a new faculty of the Soul.” Thoreau asserted in his Journal, against our separation from nature, that “I am made to love the pond and the meadow….”

At the end of this section, after a brief discussion of Thoreau’s ability to also know darkness, Bly writes: “We feel in Thoreau’s life the presence of a fierce and long-lived discipline, and one reward of that discipline was his grasp of the wildness in nature.”

Walden Pond

In the final Part Five, “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World,” Bly notes that Thoreau was certain that the civilizations of Greece, Rome and England have been sustained by the primitive forests that surround them, and “that these same nations have died and will end when the forests end.”

Bly suggests that Thoreau was one of the first writers in America to accept the ancient idea that nature is not a fallen world, but instead a veil for the divine world.

Refreshed by Nature

In Thoreau’s words:

“We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”

Bly concludes his book with an insightful brief biography of Thoreau, who died in his forty-fourth year of tuberculosis.

Bly does a good job of presenting the man to us. Thoreau had his greatness, and his limitations — there is much more depth in Bly’s examination then I am able to touch on here. But what might we take from all this?

It would be wise, I think, for us as writers, and as human beings, to take long walks in wild places. And pay attention to what we see and feel. There is no good substitute.

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Notes

This is the second book considered in this series of posts after:

Three Books for the Writer Self – Introduction

Three Books for the Writer Self – 1) The Soul’s Code

For my own encounters with Thoreau and Emerson, there are the posts A Walk With Hank, and Chant the Beauty of the Good.