Not For Me, Maybe For You

 

What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?: Discover a Life Filled with Purpose and Joy Through the Secrets of Jewish Wisdom by Michal Oshman is a fine book, and if you don’t have a wide Jewish background, this book is a great start.  

I have two issues that are a problem for me, but probably not others.  I don’t believe that we have something like a stable, unchanging soul.  The author does and it is key to her thesis.  I also do not believe that we have a singular destiny.  Maybe we have more than one?

I also have a prejudicial attitude about people who coach executives and work on corporate culture.  But that is my problem.  Additionally, I am not sure how "secret" this Jewish wisdom actually is...

A Nationalist Whitman

 

Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps may surprise people who read Leaves of Grass ages ago and have a foggy memory of its contents.  The title suggests that Whitman is a nature poet, enraptured by trees, the seasons, and the country.  While this is certainly true, it is not the whole story.  Leaves of Grass celebrate the bustle of city life, trade, commerce, and the capitalism of the day.

Drum Taps displays an often-nationalist, Whitman.  These (mostly) Civil War poems bring out the martial tendencies in Whitman, exhibiting a poet who saw the glory in war.  Yet this is not completely true: as a nurse in Union hospitals, Whitman also saw the horrible cost of battle, and many of these poems reflect this.

Like all of Whitman’s work, Drum Taps is complex.  The most famous of these poems is “O Captain! My Captain!” about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and featured in the movie Dead Poet’s Society. In context, it takes on other meanings.

A New Species and New Questions

 

Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins by Lee Berger and John Hawks tells the increasingly more tangled story of the genius homo.  The hominid they discovered, homo naledi, with its primitive features and small brain, should not have been alive when it was, 250,000 years ago, when Homo Sapiens were evolving in Africa.  But they were, and they also buried their dead in a deep inaccessible cave, and created figurative art on the walls.

The more we discover about the genus homo, the more notions we must jettison.  Is it a part of the genus homo’s makeup to bury the dead, and create figurative art?  Is it simply an outgrowth of our species?  A fascinating question.  With this discovery, I lean toward yes.