🧩 Philosophy 1d ago · Maria Popova

Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living

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Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living
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“Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.”

“Do you need a prod?” the poet Mary Oliver asked in her sublime meditation on living with maximal aliveness. “Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” A paralytic prod descended upon Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) in his fifty-third year when a stroke left him severely disabled. It is a peculiar kind of darkness to be so violently

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