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"Prize-winning essayist Scott Russell Sanders explores the role of imagination in art, science, and ethics. He shows that bold acts of imagination are key to healing our divided society and damaged Earth. If it were not so common a talent, we would recognize imagination as a superpower rivaling anything dreamed up for comic-book heroes. How astonishing, that the mind can envision possibilities not present to eyes, ears, or fingers. How astonishing, that a painter can see shapes and colors on a blank canvas, a composer can hear notes amid silence, a mathematician can formulate equations never before written. How astonishing, that people suffering under tyranny can foresee liberation and survivors living among ruins can lay out a path to recovery. Woven through his reflections on issues vital to human survival and flourishing, Sanders tells the story of his own intellectual and moral journey from a childhood religion to an adult philosophy of life. He reveals how that philosophy is tested when his son is diagnosed with stage-four cancer. He recounts how he and his wife, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, leave their beloved old house and build a new one to accommodate her needs, and how they turn their handsome new shell into a home and their raw city lot into a garden"--… (mais)
An enjoyable collection on environmental issues that combines religious and scientific study, as well as the teachings of philosophers and writers such as David Thoreau. ( )
Thoughtful, glum, loving, moving, knowledgeable, beautifully written, and ultimately hopeful. It is our ability to imagine, to learn that wonder plus terror equals awe, to embrace kinship as kindness, and the Earth and all her life as holy, that will allow us to heal our troubled world. ( )
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life ... -William Blake, America: A Prophecy
Old ways of seeing do not change because of evidence; they change because a new language captures the imagination. -Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild
I know that this point of view is not terribly fashionable these days, but I think we "do" have a responsibility, not only to ourselves and to our own time, but to those who are coming after us. (I refuse to believe that no one is coming after us.) And I suppose that this responsibility can only be discharged by dealing as truthfully as we know how with our present fortunes, these present days. -James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son
Dedicatória
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
For my guides to Alaska, and to other riches ...
Kathleen Dean Moore and Frank Moore
Debbie Clarke Moderow and Mark Moderow
Carolun Servid and Dorik Mechau
Hank Lentfer
Richard Nelson
Frank Soos
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
We are in trouble.
Citações
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
With each added layer of technology that insulates us from the discomforts and demands of nature, we find it easier to believe that we really are separate beings, lords of Creation, free of the constraints that affect every other species. (p. 52)
... I wish to consider what impulse, aside from coercion or desperation, might move us to create a civilization more in keeping with the constraints and patterns of Earth's living systems, and more encouraging of peace and justice among our own kind. (p. 114)
Kinship and Kindness: By way of another intriguing etymology, the word "holy" derives from the same root as "healthy, heal, and whole." Buried in those two classic religious terms, "soul" and "holy", is a recognition that each living being arises from the same source, and is therefore kindred and precious. (p. 127)
If all we know of Earth is what comes to us through earbuds and screens, or through windows and books, we may grasp the unit of life as a concept, but we are unlikely to feel kinship with other animals and plants, let alone with mountains and rivers and stones. The feeling of kinship is the source of kindness; we treat with respect and care those people, creatures, and places we regard as kin. (p. 128)
The ideal of universal benevolence arises from a sense of universal kinship. The impulse to care for all of our fellow beings and to protect the land is an evolutionary inheritance as fundamental, if not yet as powerful, as our selfishness and tribalism. Science has confirmed that the unity of life proclaimed by the world's spiritual traditions is a fact of nature. Art can help us to perceive this unity - this holiness - and to feel it as a fact of the heart. But to know it in our depths, ... we need to open ourselves to wildness, the shaping energy that permeates all being. We need to seek the soul's true home, either inwardly, through contemplation, or outwardly, in the woods and fields, on the blue waters, under the stars. (p. 128-29)
... I feel wonder and terror in about equal measure. When those emotions combine, they produce awe, and awe is the root of reverence. To speak of nature as sacred is to say it is of utmost value, independent of our place or our fate. To speak of nature as holy is to acknowledge it as the force that generates and shapes everything. It is our source, our sustenance, our home. It is the divinity we can sense and study. (p. 163)
... prayer [including chanting] becomes a way of communing with earthly life, a reminder of our kinship with everything that breathes. (p. 165)
And the more we decipher, the more we realize that everything is connected to everything else, near and distant, living and nonliving, as mystics have long testified. This connectedness, this grand communion, is what I have come to think of as soul - no my soul, as if I were a being apart, but the soul of Being itself, the whole of things. (p. 167)
Whether there is a Creator who loves the world, I cannot pretend to know. But we are the ones, we humans with our insatiable appetites and disruptive technology, who need to love our bit of the world, this magnificent planet. Think of how you love your child, if you have a child, or how you love the children of others... Think of how you love whatever you passionately love: music, flowers, painting, poetry, baseball, language, dance, the first frog calls of spring, the return of sandhill cranes, the sound of rain on a metal roof, the full moon in a clear night sky, the splash of the Milky Way, every atom and whisper of the one with whom you share your bed. That is how we must love the world. (p. 169)
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
And so is the human imagination, this visionary power that gets us into trouble and may, with our gathered effort, get us out again.
Autores Resenhistas (normalmente na contracapa do livro)
Idioma original
CDD/MDS canônico
LCC Canônico
▾Referências
Referências a esta obra em recursos externos.
Wikipédia em inglês
Nenhum(a)
▾Descrições de livros
"Prize-winning essayist Scott Russell Sanders explores the role of imagination in art, science, and ethics. He shows that bold acts of imagination are key to healing our divided society and damaged Earth. If it were not so common a talent, we would recognize imagination as a superpower rivaling anything dreamed up for comic-book heroes. How astonishing, that the mind can envision possibilities not present to eyes, ears, or fingers. How astonishing, that a painter can see shapes and colors on a blank canvas, a composer can hear notes amid silence, a mathematician can formulate equations never before written. How astonishing, that people suffering under tyranny can foresee liberation and survivors living among ruins can lay out a path to recovery. Woven through his reflections on issues vital to human survival and flourishing, Sanders tells the story of his own intellectual and moral journey from a childhood religion to an adult philosophy of life. He reveals how that philosophy is tested when his son is diagnosed with stage-four cancer. He recounts how he and his wife, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, leave their beloved old house and build a new one to accommodate her needs, and how they turn their handsome new shell into a home and their raw city lot into a garden"--
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