This new series of posts that I’ll post on a regular basis is called “Blogontology.” Broken down, that’s blog and ontology (which is the study of the nature of existence.) In essence, it’s a blogger’s attempt to understand the world and the nature of ’being.’ It’s become a part of my normal daily routine to read a passage by a philosopher during my daily prayers.
Right now, I’m hooked on the two most well know American Transcendentalists, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’ve included links to databases of their work on my blogroll, as most of the time quotes that I use here will be referenced back to those sites.
This first quote comes from Chapter 2 of Thoreau’s Walden and has been a significant guide for me this week.
“Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep…To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor…
… I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
- Henry David Thoreau
The whole context of this passage can be viewed at the following page: