Up@dawn 2.0: 'Who am I?' (etc.)-time yet again for introductions

Thursday, January 8, 2026

'Who am I?' (etc.)-time yet again for introductions

It's a real treat, relatively late in an academic career, to teach a new course for the first time. I'll be doing that next semester with Existentialism, and this semester (beginning in less than two weeks now) with Philosophy in Recent American Fiction. I always ask my new students some basic Opening Day questions. Here are my own responses, this time:

*Who are you? - I'm the Prof, probably the oldest guy in the room (though that isn't always the case, in MALA classes). I've been teaching at MTSU for a quarter century, but this is the first time I've offered THIS course. My special interest is in American philosophy, particularly that of pragmatist William James. [And btw: I am current president of the William James Society.]

*Why are you here? - I'm at MTSU because they hired me, not long after the Belmont provost un-hired me when I expressed sympathy for the Unitarian Universalist credo ("guided by reason and inspired by love, we celebrate diversity, confront oppression, and promote environmental and social justice"). And in retrospect, I'm glad he did! I've been happy at MTSU (and teach a course called Philosophy of Happiness). I'm in Middle Tennessee because I came to Vanderbilt (from Mizzou) for grad school and liked it enough to stay.

*What's your definition of philosophy? - "An unusually stubborn attempt to think [and write and speak] clearly" in the pursuit of wisdom. (The quoted/un-bracketed bit is, naturally, from William James.)

*What are the best and the most recent novels you've read? What did you like/dislike about them? Did you find in them anything "philosophical," by your definition? - Most recent, and among the best, are those by the two Richards (Ford and Powers) we'll be reading. We'll get into my thoughts (and yours) concerning their relation to wisdom. Suffice for now to say that Ford's Frank Bascombe is a character I find amusing and occasionally wise, living his life in Periods (The Existence Period, The Permanent Period, etc.); and Powers's Playground touches on themes I find vitally relevant and potentially either an advance or a big setback for humanity: the environment, and Artificial Intelligence. It's too soon to tell about that, but it's pretty clear that we've got to address those issues effectively as individuals AND as a species, if we're to survive and flourish for long.

Postscript. Frank says things like:

"For your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined".
"Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things".
"If you lose all hope, you can always find it again".
"Love isn't a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts."

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Privilege

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." -Elbert Hubbard, probably... and not Marcus Aurelius, though the Internet seems to think otherwise. Don't confuse him with looney L. Ron... ELBERT (1856-1915) also said other interesting things: “Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit... I believe in the hands that work, in the brains that think, and in the hearts that love...I believe in sunshine, fresh air, friendship, calm sleep, beautiful thoughts... Happiness is a habit—cultivate it.”

Marcus Aurelius on the dawn

He did have interesting things to say about it. "Betimes in the morning say to thyself, This day I shalt have to do with an idle curious man, with an unthankful man, a railer, a crafty, false, or an envious man; an unsociable uncharitable man. All these ill qualities have happened unto them, through ignorance of that which is truly good and truly bad... In the morning when thou findest thyself unwilling to rise, consider with thyself presently, it is to go about a man's work that I am stirred up. Am I then yet unwilling to go about that, for which I myself was born and brought forth into this world? Or was I made for this, to lay me down, and make much of myself in a warm bed?" AND... "The Pythagoreans were wont betimes in the morning the first thing they did, to look up unto the heavens... to put themselves in mind of orderliness, or good order, and of purity, and of naked simplicity. For no star or planet hath any cover before it." Meditations

Sunrise from the ISS

"I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living." -Fyodor Dostoevsky... “With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day from the depth of space, a day every ninety minutes, every day brand new and of infinite supply, it staggers them.” Samantha Harvey, Orbital

The brain is wider/with feathers

The Brain—is wider than the Sky— For—put them side by side— The one the other will contain With ease—and You—beside— The Brain is deeper than the sea— For—hold them—Blue to Blue— The one the other will absorb— As Sponges—Buckets—do— The Brain is just the weight of God— For—Heft them—Pound for Pound— And they will differ—if they do— As Syllable from Sound— EMILY DICKINSON also said “Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all...

Natural satisfaction

"The attitude of seeking fulfillment in the future and viewing each present act as means to later joys tends to destroy the natural satisfaction that attends the exercise of each of our parts. Once attention is shifted from the future and we begin to enjoy activities at the time we do them and for what they are, we have transcended the mentality that views life as a process of mediation toward distant ends... the action is justified in its own terms and not by reference to some ulterior end. It is chosen for enjoyment and enjoyed as our choice." John Lachs, Intermediate Man

Who's up

The author of William James's Springs of Delight: The Return to Life, Phil Oliver specializes in the American philosophical tradition with supporting interests in applied ethics (particularly Bioethics and Environmental Ethics), Anglo-American literature, history, humanism, naturalism, science and exploration, peripatetic ("walking & talking") philosophy, baseball, cycling, swimming, the pursuit of happiness, and the perpetual dawn of day. One of his favorite MTSU courses is The Philosophy of Happiness. He is academic advisor for minors in American Culture (American Studies), and a founding board member and current Vice-President of the William James Society. You can follow him on Threads, Instagram (@OSOPHER), Mastodon (@osopher@c.im), Substack (philoliver.substack.com) and on his blogsite Up@dawn (jposopher.blogspot.com) but of course, as Immanuel Kant and Monty Python's Brian Cohen agreed: You don't have to follow anybody. "Sapere aude," have the courage to think for yourself. But not by yourself. Good philosophy collaborates and converses.

Luxurious breath

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily... RWE, The Divinity School Address (Jy 15, 1838)

Circles

"The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul… if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned… The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which apprise us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding." RWE

Staggered

“With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day from the depth of space, a day every ninety minutes, every day brand new and of infinite supply, it staggers them.” Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Up and about, day owls, best effort

"To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine!" HDT

ISS Live-stream... Walden Soundscape

“There are day owls, and there are night owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business.'' Thoreau, Ltr to Blake
"I have thoughts that are fed by the sun..."

“This early piece of the morning is mine.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

"I also began in those years to keep early hours. [...] If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day — which is what I did." --Mary Oliver

Henry the cosmopolitan

Men frequently say to me, “I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.” I am tempted to reply to such,—This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar.... Walden, "Solitude"

Bertie the cosmopolitan

[The philosophic mind] will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole...Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man's true freedom, and his liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears. Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good. The Problems of Philosophy-"The Value of Philosophy"

Intelligence & hope

Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason... John Keats

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. Rebecca Solnit

Shipwreck is among life's permanent possibilities. William James

Butterfly of the moment

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” Vita Sackville-West

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

E.L. DOCTOROW

	Walden Woods Project (@TheWaldenWoods)
6/19/18, 9:52 AM "The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person."—Thoreau, "Journal," 3 February 1852

A stoic's dawn

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

To the mind’s natural protestation that staying under the blankets simply feels nicer, Aurelius retorts:

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

Our nature, he insists, is to live a life of service — to help others and contribute to the world. Any resistance to this inherent purpose is therefore a negation of our nature and a failure of self-love. He writes:

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.

Many centuries before psychologists identified the experience of “flow” in creative work, he considers a key characteristic of people who love what they do:

When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.

Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

He revisits the subject in another meditation:

When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic— what defines a human being — is to work with others. Even animals know how to sleep. And it’s the characteristic activity that’s the more natural one — more innate and more satisfying.

Marcus Aurelius

Brainpickings

“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ”

Every day

Write a page every day. That’s about 200 words, or 1,000 words a week. Do that for two years and you’ll have a novel that’s long enough. Nothing will happen until you are producing at least one page per day. John Grisham

What I did have, which others perhaps didn’t, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it. Doris Lessing

The most important thing is habit, not will. If you feel you need will to get to the keyboard, you are in the wrong business. All that energy will leave nothing to work with. You have to make it like brushing your teeth, mundane, regular, boring even. It’s not a thing of effort, of want, of steely, heroic determination. Stephen Hunter

Anthony Trollope

Every day for years, Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years. Having prospered so well, he urged his method on all writers: “Let their work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,—as men have sat, or said that they have sat.” The New Yorker, June 14, 2004

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

Trollope in brainpickings...

	Jon Winokur (@AdviceToWriters)
Sometimes I know what I believe because of what I’ve written. J.K. ROWLING

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words." Goethe

The awakening hour

In other words, do the important stuff first.

E.B. White

Beyond Charlotte's Web and Elements of Style, Elwyn Brooks White was funny and wise. He said:

-I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy it. This makes it hard to plan the day.

-A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.

-I always write a thing first and think about it afterwards, because the easiest way to have consecutive thoughts is to start putting them down.

-Never hurry, never worry.

-Be obscure clearly.

-Semicolons only prove that the author has been to college.

-I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

-And he told George Plimpton, in Paris Review: I think some writers have lost their sense of proportion, their sense of humor, and their sense of appreciation. I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they happen to strike me.

Any weather

Jefferson believed in the virtues of riding and walking. "Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise. and the weather should be little regarded." Jefferson once said. In fact. Jefferson believed the rainier and the colder the better. “A person not sick will not be injured by getting wet." Jon Meacham

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. HDT

Walking

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements... When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago... But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours—as the Swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life... When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? ...I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. Thoreau, Walking

"Solvitur Ambulando. It is solved by walking." Diogenes

Image result for man walking two dogs silhouette

"My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it." Montaigne

“If I couldn't walk fast and far, I think I should just explode and perish.” Charles Dickens

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” Nietzsche

"Walking articulates both physical and mental freedom...Home is everything you can walk to." Rebecca Solnit

"Walking isn't much good as a theoretical experience. You can dress it up any way you like, but walking remains resolutely simple, basic, analog. That's why I love it and love doing it." Geoff Nicholson

And more...

*Thoreau @dawn

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine!

Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air—to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.

All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world.

Up@dawn 2.0

Delight Springs

Thursday, January 8, 2026

'Who am I?' (etc.)-time yet again for introductions

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“Above all, do not loose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” Kierkegaard

Radnor Lake

Chocorua NH

SIU-C Campus Lake

SIU-C

	Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane)
6/14/17, 2:01 AM English is rich with terms abt dusk (blue hour, dimpsey, wolf-light), but less so - I think - for dawn/early-morning light. Do you know any? pic.twitter.com/Mt9bCz7PE9