The Gita within Walden

The Gita within Walden PDF Author: Paul Friedrich
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791477479
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
This book explores and interprets the myriad connections between two spiritual classics, Henry David Thoreau's Walden and the Bhagavad-Gita. Evidence shows that Thoreau took the Gita with him when he moved to Walden Pond, and the books have much in common, touching on ultimate ethical and metaphysical questions. Paul Friedrich looks at how each work speaks to fundamental problems of good and evil, self and cosmos, duty and passion, reality and illusion, political engagement and philosophical meditation, sensuous wildness and ascetic devotion. His examination moves through several stages, from an analysis of key symbols, such as the upside-down tree, to an exposition of social, ethical, and metaphysical values, to a consideration of the many sources of these syncretic works. This book should be of lively interest to those concerned with the origins of Indian and American thought, activism, and poetry.

Walden's Shore

Walden's Shore PDF Author: Robert M. Thorson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674728408
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Walden's Shore explores Thoreau's understanding of the "living rock" on which life's complexity depends--not as metaphor but as physical science. Robert Thorson's subject is Thoreau the rock and mineral collector, interpreter of landscapes, and field scientist whose compass and measuring stick were as important to him as his plant press.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers PDF Author: Henry David Thoreau
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Concord River
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description


Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For PDF Author: Henry Thoreau
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141964294
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Book Description
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. Thoreau's account of his solitary and self-sufficient home in the New England woods remains an inspiration to the environmental movement - a call to his fellow men to abandon their striving, materialistic existences of 'quiet desperation' for a simple life within their means, finding spiritual truth through awareness of the sheer beauty of their surroundings.

The Gita within Walden

The Gita within Walden PDF Author: Paul Friedrich
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791476185
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Looks at the connections between Thoreau’s Walden and the work that influenced it, the Bhagavad-Gita.

Godsong

Godsong PDF Author: Amit Majmudar
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525435298
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A fresh, strikingly immediate and elegant verse translation of the classic, with an introduction and helpful guides to each section, by the rising American poet. Born in the United States into a secularized Hindu family, Amit Majmudar puzzled over the many religious traditions on offer, and found that the Bhagavad Gita had much to teach him with its "song of multiplicities." Chief among them is that "its own assertions aren't as important as the relationships between its characters . . . The Gita imagined a relationship in which the soul and God are equals"; it is, he believes, "the greatest poem of friendship . . . in any language." His verse translation captures the many tones and strategies Krishna uses with Arjuna--strict and berating, detached and philosophical, tender and personable. "Listening guides" to each section follow the main text, and expand in accessible terms on the text and what is happening between the lines. Godsong is an instant classic in the field, from a poet of skill, fine intellect, and--perhaps most important--devotion.

The Great Work of Your Life

The Great Work of Your Life PDF Author: Stephen Cope
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 055380751X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
An inspiring meditation on living a purposeful life draws on the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita to present the spiritually relevant story of a young warrior in crisis and God in disguise.

Wild Fruits

Wild Fruits PDF Author: Henry David Thoreau
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393321159
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Thoreau presents information about the "'unnoticed wild berry whose beauty annually lends a new charm to some wild walk, '" along with what "may be considered Thoreau's last will and testament, in which he protests our desecration of the landscape, reflects on the importance of preserving wild space 'for instruction and recreation, ' and envisions a new American scripture."--Jacket.

Culture and Rhetoric

Culture and Rhetoric PDF Author: Ivo Strecker
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845459296
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
While some scholars have said that there is no such thing as culture and have urged to abandon the concept altogether, the contributors to this volume overcome this impasse by understanding cultures and their representations for what they ultimately are – rhetorical constructs. These senior, international scholars explore the complex relationships between culture and rhetoric arguing that just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric. This intersection constitutes the central theme of the first part of the book, while the second is dedicated to the study of figuration as a common ground of rhetoric and anthropology. The book offers a compelling range of theoretical reflections, historical vistas, and empirical investigations, which aim to show how people talk themselves and others into particular modalities of thought and action, and how rhetoric and culture, in this way, are co-emergent. It thus turns a new page in the history of academic discourse by bringing two disciplines – anthropology and rhetoric – together in a way that has never been done before.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau PDF Author: Laura Dassow Walls
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022634469X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
"[The author] traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and 'America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.' By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated? Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, [the author] presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him."--