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“Thoreau walked out every morning like a glass ready to be filled with water.” This was John Cage’s admiring observation about Thoreau’s daily walking practice. And Thoreau wanted that glass to be as full as he could make it!
“I must walk with more free senses. It is as bad to study stars and clouds as flowers and stones. I must let my senses wander as my thoughts, my eyes see without looking. . . . The more you look the less you will observe . . . . What I need is not to look at all, but a true sauntering of the eye.” (Journal, September 13, 1852).
Thoreau worked hard to reach his ideal: a non-judgmental receptivity to whatever comes. And it resonated with 20th-century avant-garde composer and practicing Buddhist, John Cage, who gave himself these contemplative guidelines (that he knew Thoreau had lived by one hundred years earlier):
“[You] should be ready for a new experience, and the best way to be ready for a new experience is to be attentive and empty. By empty is meant open – in other words, the like and dislike of the ego doors should be down. And there should be a flow so that the experience of listening can come in.” (Conversations with Cage 235)
Immerse in the contemplative practices of Thoreau and Cage in this engaging presentation by Charles Junkerman. Thoreau (1817-1862) and Cage (1912-1992) engaged in a range of contemplative ways of living, including voluntary simplicity, self-relinquishment, meditative solitude, and what is called 'extrospection' (seeing through others' eyes, including other species and what are often assumed to be inanimate objects like rocks and trees.
Q&A will be included at the end of the presentation.
Charles Junkerman has had a 40-year career at Stanford, and served as Associate Provost and Dean of Continuing Studies for twenty-five years. He went emeritus in 2020, and continues to teach a range of courses regularly on European and American literature, with special interests in 19th-century English and American Romanticism (Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau). He has also written and lectured on Scottish history, British mountaineering, 19th-century landscape painting, Irish literature, and Native American photography. Charlie has taught in South Korea, acted as a mentor in a half-way house in Redwood City, participated in Northern Irish peace initiatives, and served as an advisor to Indian tribes in Oklahoma on issues regarding repatriation of artifacts.
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