COASTLINE JOURNAL

by Michael JS Cox, Simon Fraser University

(An edited version of this essay appears in Confluence, vol. 15 no.2, spring 2010)

Download this essay as a pdf file: Drinking This Champagne Water

Thomas Hill, Great Canyon of the Sierras - Yosemite, 1871

These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure…(John Muir, Nature Writings 228)

Sixty years separate Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s death (1778) from John Muir’s birth (1838). Muir is not considered a philosopher, and Rousseau is not considered an environmentalist, but each man had an abiding passion for the solace occasioned by long walks in nature, and saw in Nature^[1] an expression of God. Each loved the mountains, whether hiking or appreciating them from a distance, and each shared a love of flowers, and of moving water, and each saw himself reflected in the cold, still waters of alpine lakes. This paper addresses the parallels between these men, and the divergences and convergences, which until now have not been sufficiently explored.

In those papers I have read on Muir, references to Rousseau are scant. Several works compare Henry David Thoreau with Rousseau, most of them examining their social philosophies,[2] but as Joseph Lane (2006) notes, “the lines of intellectual transmission from Rousseau to Thoreau and his successors…are, at best, indirect.”

Indirect, but not indistinct. If I were to list several founders of contemporary environmental philosophy—which I am aware would be contentious—there is good reason to include Jean-Jacques Rousseau.^[3]

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by Aaron D. Sommers, University of New Hampshire

pdf version: Crane

Stephen Crane

The short story An Experiment in Misery is not more than ten pages long, yet the author, Stephen Crane, manages to successfully concentrate the thoughts, feelings and physical environment of an impoverished existence he felt many were doomed to live through. The harrowing tale, published in 1893, is a story that mirrors much of Crane’s other works, taking place in a nondescript date. While An Experiment in Misery is one of his less known works, it is a prototypical tale of literary realism and a testament to his talent as an American writer. (more…)

Patricia Kelly, Simon Fraser University.

download this essay: Kelly_Beauty

“Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chance of seeing it go down.” Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

What woman hasn’t felt the attention of a man? Women live with the effects of the subtle and direct gaze nearly everyday of their life. In the three Matisse Stories, A.S. Byatt writes of five intelligent, talented women – Susannah, Gerda, Peggy, Debbie, and Mrs. Brown – and the different ways they each live with the attention and gaze of men.

Susannah is a woman much like myself. She has reached or surpassed a mid-point in her life; she has each day of her existence been presented with the opportunity to struggle with the hazy and shadowy inner thoughts that could propel her into action. As an aging woman, she is quite used to the gaze, the attention of men and of women: starting with her own parents, her extended family – aunts and uncles, grandparents, too. Teachers would see her and decide in their own mind just how much attention she deserved and what behaviour would be rewarded. But Susannah would grow up to be a woman comfortable with herself, and for decades comfortable without the rituals of the beauty salon. As she grew through her twenties and thirties, men would pass judgment on her every feature. Attention is not always desired, but the gaze would not likely cause any damage to her. Susannah does not require the expert services of a stylist until the changes in her outward appearance become obvious.

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Renée L. Haggart, Simon Fraser University

Jane Austen has been both praised and criticized for more than a century over the manner and sparseness of visual description which characterize her novels. While Austen is highly interested in discussing the value of material objects, this is not at all the same as actually describing objects themselves. If such paucity of detail seems counterintuitive to the way in which Austen was known to have described her own work, as the “little bit of ivory” worked with “so fine a brush,” [1] it could be argued that it is due in part to a misinterpretation of this quote. Rather than a painstaking exploration of any one aspect of the minutiae of the material world, the “little bit of ivory” that Austen describes could instead refer to the narrow scope of the private domestic world which is the exclusive subject of her work.  When physical objects do make their occasional appearances and are described in any detail in an Austen novel, however, it is to significant effect. Mansfield Park stands out strikingly as a fine example, and will be discussed below in detail as a testament to Austen’s awareness of the power of objects, and her skill in using minimal description for maximum effect, what Nancy Armstrong calls the “clean line of Austen’s Minimalist art. “ [2] (more…)

Angie Allard, Simon Fraser University

download this essay as a pdf file: Allard_Frankenstein

Jay Hirabayashi, Kokoro Dance. Photo by Peter Eastwood

American philosopher Martha Nussbaum believes that everyone has the capacity for evil and that it is more closely connected with circumstance than with any innate human quality. In Upheavals of Thought she writes,

… in reality it seems likely that all humans are capable of evil, and that many if not most of the hideous evil doers are warped by circumstance, both social and personal, that play a large and sometimes decisive role in explaining the evil that they do (452).

Nussbaum’s argument is supported by empirical research. In his discussion on understanding evil acts, Paul Formosa cites Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments in which students, when told to do so by the researchers, continued to apply shocks to recipients even when they were unresponsive. For Formosa, these experiments were an example of an evil-encouraging situation, one that increases the likelihood of performing an evil act. He explains that individuals always act within a particular situation that, in many cases, allows or even encourages their evil behaviour (Formosa 10). (more…)

by Aaron Sommers, University of New Hampshire

Aaron Sommers graduated with an M.A.L.S. in 2002. He lives in New Hampshire, where, when he isn’t shoveling snow, he’s fending off invisible fans of his fiction.

In 1892 Leo Tolstoy published an article titled The First Step.[1] Originally written as the Preface to the Russian translation of The Ethics of Diet by Howard Williams it was published after his conversion to vegetarianism in 1889. While he wrote this article Tolstoy was concerned with the process towards righteousness. The steps to this goal consisted of many demanding rules of an ascetic lifestyle that included vegetarianism. Additionally, he also believed that many Russians misinterpreted Christianity and the adherents of this religion preferred “beefsteaks” to any enlightenment.[2] Food that tastes good incites other sensual thoughts, according to Tolstoy, making completion of any subsequent steps towards a good life unattainable.

Not only does he condemn eating meat, Tolstoy also uses this article to lament the popularity of augmenting meals. For instance, he prohibits the use of any sauces, spices or flowers while eating meals. This restriction is not based on health reasons. Like his source of inspiration Arthur Schopenhauer, these choices are grounded on moral imperatives rooted in abstract spirituality, especially Vedanta. In The First Step Tolstoy says “the satisfaction of a need has limits, but pleasure has none.[3]” Food, as he sees it, is a basic need for humans, and all living things for that matter. However, we enjoy the process more than any other living creature. He advises readers to avoid the seduction numerous pleasures of the palate await us.

While some people may dispute whether flavorings on bread constitute the arousal of desire, Tolstoy would assert that it is an example of “relaxing effort” towards a righteous life. His writing in this article encourages personal sacrifice, and this includes abandoning all material “amenities” such as pillows, sheets, cushions or anything else he considered unnecessary.[4] Interestingly, his sex life presents a complicated, often paradoxical picture. (more…)

By Michael Cox

One of my favourite books of all time, which also happens to be one of my favourite movies of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, has been thoroughly downgraded, one might even say trashed, by an article in the New Yorker.  The novel, Malcolm Gladwell writes in the August 10 issue, teaches us that there is one law for blacks–and white trash–and another for good old folks, the decent white folks of Maycomb, Alabama.

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, Mary Badham as his daughter Jean Louis "Scout" Finch.

At the conclusion of the book, Bob  Ewell, who has been embarrassed by Atticus in court (and accused of attacking his daughter), attacks Scout and her brother. The reclusive next-door neighbour Boo Radley comes to their defence and accidentally kills Ewell. But the sheriff convinces Atticus that it is in everyone’s best interest to say Ewell fell on his knife, saving Boo a trial and possible jail time. “Can you possibly understand?” Atticus asks Scout, after explaining to her that she must tell everyone who asks, that Ewell fell on his knife, and not that Boo stabbed him when he came to the children’s rescue.

“His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites…and another for white trash,” Gladwell writes. “A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb Alabama.” (more…)