Poetry adds an extra dimension to sleeping outdoors.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Adam's Curse", "Fern Hill", "Poem in October", "Sleeping in the Forest", "Song of the Open Road", "Stopping by the Woods on a Showy Evening", After Apple-Picking, Anam Cara, Dylan Thomas, John O'Donohue, Mary Oliver, Nature, Robert Frost, sleep, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats | In the memorial service held in honor of my philosophy colleague Alan Paskow, we listened to some observations Alan recorded about his favorite poem, Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill.” I share them with you here. Alan recorded them for his funeral service and I think I understand why.
Last Thursday we had our memorial service for my friend Alan Paskow, the philosophy colleague whom I have written about several times. In my own remarks I invoked Plato’s Crito. I said that, for the three-plus years that Alan lived with the diagnosis of a terminal illness, he was like Socrates after having drunk the hemlock He knew that he was dying but he used his illness as an opportunity to explore with others what it meant. Like Socrates, he was a teacher to the end.