It doesn't offer redemption (as "Manhattan" did) through Louis Armstrong and Flaubert, Willie Mays and Mozart, but through the immediate contemplation of street life and carnival whimsicalities, of the sun and the sea — of the transitory moments, perceptions, and impressions to be rescued from oblivion, with the confidence that they're worth the effort to do so.
It doesn't offer redemption (as "Manhattan" did) through Louis Armstrong and Flaubert, Willie Mays and Mozart, but through the immediate contemplation of street life and carnival whimsicalities, of the sun and the sea of the transitory moments, perceptions, and impressions to be rescued from oblivion, with the confidence that they're worth the effort to do so.
It requires that the persons involved be motivated, it requires that they perform tasks that stress the areas in which they require improvement, and it requires immediate feedback and contemplation of performance.
Having called modern humans to action against adversity and even against the inevitability of death, he engaged Homeric language to lead them in Aristotelian contemplation, not for any immediate resolution of perils in the world but as an end in itself: "I know not if I shall ever anchor".
You end up contemplating your own contemplation.
As for the philosophers like Kierkegaard and Becker, cited earlier, who castigate those of us who ignore our mortality, we suggest that sometimes the contemplation of mortality can be disabling and distract us from seeking immediate goods (such as those Dworkin highlights) or relieving suffering.
Use the fact of the divine, immediate reality of God to lift you into the kind of grand, passive contemplation that is, after all, one of richest, sweetest experiences available to anyone.
It appears as Wisdom, which consists in the contemplation of all that exists in the Intellectual-Principle, and as the immediate presence of the Intellectual-Principle itself.
In serious contemplation of death, Rosenzweig suggests, one experiences nothingness in a particular, and particularly immediate fashion.
We are addicted to immediate gratification, removed from the necessity to take time for decision making, for rumination and contemplation, thinking things through.
Ms. Luker lifted "The Folks Who Live on the Hill" out of its usual niche as a dreamy contemplation of marital happily ever after and treated it as breezy, upbeat song of immediate anticipation.
