Thoreau′s Axe – Distraction and Discipline in American Culture
Thoreau′s Axe – Distraction and Discipline in American Culture How nineteenth-century "disciplines of attention" anticipated the contemporary concern with mindfulness and being "spiritual but not…
Specifikacia Thoreau′s Axe – Distraction and Discipline in American Culture
Thoreau′s Axe – Distraction and Discipline in American Culture
How nineteenth-century "disciplines of attention" anticipated the contemporary concern with mindfulness and being "spiritual but not religious"Today, we're driven to distraction, our attention overwhelmed by the many demands upon it--most of which emanate from our beeping and blinking digital devices. In Thoreau's Axe, Smith explores the strange, beautiful archives of the nineteenth-century attention revival--from a Protestant minister's warning against frivolous thoughts to Thoreau's reflections on wakefulness at Walden Pond. This may seem like a decidedly twenty-first-century problem, but, as Caleb Smith shows in this elegantly written, meditative work, distraction was also a serious concern in American culture two centuries ago.
Smith examines how Americans came to embrace attention, mindfulness, and other ways of being "spiritual but not religious," and how