Thoreau's Axe : : Distraction and Discipline in American Culture / / Caleb Smith.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
• VerfasserIn: Smith, Caleb,
• MitwirkendeR: Apess, William,; Baird, Robert,; Buckminster, J. S.,; Child, Lydia Maria,; Clay Fish, Henry,; Clayton, Thomas,; Dana, James,; Dickinson, Emily,; Douglass, Frederick,; Eddy, A. D.,; Jacobs, Abraham,; James, William,; Kelley, William D.,; Lee, Jarena,; Mc-Ilvaine, J. H.,; Melville, Herman,; More, Hannah,; Morrison, Toni,; Palmer Peabody, Elizabeth,; Paul, Susan,; Plato, Ann,; Poe, Edgar Allan,; Reed, Austin,; Rouquette, Adrien,; Thoreau, Henry David,; Turner, Nat,; Watkins, William,; Whitman, Walt,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.)

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. 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. 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. Smith examines how Americans came to embrace attention, mindfulness, and other ways of being “spiritual but not religious,” and how older Christian ideas about temptation and spiritual devotion endure in our modern ideas about distraction and attention.Smith explains that nineteenth-century worries over attention developed in response to what were seen as the damaging mental effects of new technologies and economic systems. A “wandering mind,” once diagnosed, was in need of therapy or rehabilitation. Modeling his text after nineteenth-century books of devotion, Smith offers close readings of twenty-eight short passages about attention. Considering social reformers who designed moral training for the masses, religious leaders who organized Christian revivals, and spiritual seekers like Thoreau who experimented with regimens of simplified living and transcendental mysticism, Smith shows how disciplines of attention became the spiritual exercises of a distracted age.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Distraction and the Disciplines of Attention -- Part I. From the devil to distraction -- Introduction -- 1 “Wandring or distraction” -- 2 “Satan had hidden the very object from my mind” -- 3 “Hundreds of thousands have their appetite so depraved” -- 4 “My non-compliance would almost always produce much confusion” -- 5 “Opium-like listlessness” -- 6 “Morbid attention” -- 7 “The shell of lethargy” -- Part II. Reform -- Introduction -- 8 “A white man could, if he had paid as much attention” -- 9 “The cultivation of attention as a moral duty” -- 10 “The heart must be cultivated” -- 11 “You might see him looking steadily at something” -- 12 “Their nobler faculties lie all undeveloped” -- 13 “Subdued and tender” -- 14 “If he wanted to kill time” -- Part III. Revival -- Introduction -- 15 “All attention to the last sermon” -- 16 “The power of fixed and continuous attention” -- 17 “The relations of business and religion” -- 18 “My mind was powerfully wrought upon” -- 19 “I began to direct my attention to this great object” -- 20 “Hear me now, love your heart” -- 21 “Read these leaves in the open air” -- Part IV: Devotion -- Introduction -- 22 “Noble sentiments of devotion” -- 23 “Savoir attendre” -- 24 “The greatest exercise of mind” -- 25 “A true sauntering of the eye” -- 26 “If we do not guard the mind” -- 27 “The valves of her attention” -- 28 “Aroma finer than prayer” -- Afterword -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index -- A NOTE ON THE TYPE