🧩 Philosophy 1d ago · Maria Popova

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

Brainpickings
View Channel →
Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living
Source ↗ 👁 0 💬 0
“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

Comments (0)

Sign in to join the discussion

More Like This

Mini-Heap
Daily Nous · 8h ago
Sleeping Beauties: David Byrne on Why Transformative Ideas Fall Dormant and How They Awaken to Change the World
The Marginalian · 18h ago
Improvisation and the Quantum of Consciousness
The Marginalian · 1d ago
How to Remake Yourself When You Are Undone: Lincoln and the Gift of His Suicidal Depression
The Marginalian · 1d ago
AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Daily Nous · 1d ago
📰
A summary of a viral Chinese essay on what a DeepSeek kernel engineer's opinion on automating his own job
LessWrong · 1d ago