Word: walden
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...sensible and consistent 19th century philosophical masterpiece have been so often praised for his least accomplishments (as a naturalist and social entice) and so rarely credited for what he achieved as poet and prophet. Harvard Philosophy Professor Stanley Cavell argues in his newly published essay. The Senses of Walden, that the neglect of Walden stems from the failure of philosophers to take Thereau's book seriously...
Cavell follows the lead of Charles Anderson, who proposed in 1969 that Walden, always a difficult book to assign a genre be taken out of the usual categories of prose essay or autobiography and considered as a united heroic poem. Cavell carries the redefinition a step further he examines Walden as scripture, a holy book with a philosophical doctrine and a prophetic meaning with hymns and parables, epics and parables, epics and a comprehensible symbolic unity. With a swipe he disposes of such essentially irrelevant questions as the importance of Thoreau's mysterious journals or the divergences of Thoreau...
...most original insight in Cavell's essay is his identification of the central philosophical question in Walden the problem of free will and determinism. Men determine themselves through the mythologies they create whether the mystery of predestination or demigod at technology mystery of predestination or the damaged of technology. Thoreau says, He proceeds from there to create a mythic life this own at Walden Ponds which has written call to his neighbors, and to us, to awaken and shed the necessities we have brought upon ourselves Thoreau clearly realizes that the casting off and rebuilding of one's own life...
...wasted: a good-if perhaps too pat-idea, and some fine supporting performances, especially by Martin Sheen as an unctuous Army surgeon, Barnard Hughes as a frightened public health official, and Robert Walden as a callous clinician out from Washington to observe. Scott's direction is precise and more than promising. What Rage lacks is real tough-mindedness and courage, qualities it perhaps once had but seems to have lost somewhere along the way to the Army base...
...That in order to secure her release Peter and John then set but to blackmail a cop who is dealing the confiscated dope on the sly? That complications follow--from the introduction of heroin to a mock-up of the South Station to a climactic shoot-out at Walden Pond between the cops and the Mafia? That Peter and Susan survive it all to ride off into the sunset...