Some Segments of a River

<p>In this unique and compelling book the author examines side by side the works of Eastern mystical philosophers and poets and some of their Western counterparts not attempting to assimilate them to each other but rather to observe what sparks of insight fly when their writings are brought into alignment. He focuses throughout on their various conceptions of the imagination and more broadly of consciousness itself.</p><p>In the first part of the book he reads the work of the great American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens using as a framework the philosophy and aesthetics of Abhinavagupta a tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic. In subsequent parts he goes on to explore affinities between a wide range of Hindu Buddhist Taoist and Sufi philosophers and poets and a number of Western authors focusing in particular on Blake Keats and Shelley.</p><p>In prose both clear and seductively lyrical the author invites the reader to explore spiritual intellectual and aesthetic vistas at first no doubt unfamiliar in which he or she gradually becomes more and more at home. Throughout <em>Some Segments of a River</em> the author’s aim is to open up these vistas and to stir the reader’s own intuitive and imaginative powers—powers that are applicable to any endeavor and that quite simply in the words of Wallace Stevens “help us to lead our lives.”</p>