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10. Wonder and Affliction: Thoreau’s Dionysian World
- Fordham University Press
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Thoreau's writing evokes Nietzschean themes of tragedy and Dionysian religion, provokes comparison with a number of Kierkegaardian motifs, and prompts reflection on the possibility of human communication with animals. Thoreau works at redemptive writing, giving us this-worldly perceptions of heaven and hell as moments in achieving (or losing) sensory affinity with things. His writing recalls Hamlet's "wonder-wounded hearing" and his wildly startling eloquence, and it displays what Stanley Cavell calls "passionate speech" - that is, invitations to improvisation in the disorder of desire. Argument unfolds within image, drama, parable, and myth, supplementing bare-bones argument. The resulting confluence of wonder, poetry, and philosophy earns a place in the tradition of those great moral philosophers who attentively trace the contours in our troubled world of delight, affliction, despair, awe, and final serenity.