The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature
Finding Nirvana in the Classics
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
HOW THE LITERATURE WE LOVE CONVEYS THE AWAKENING WE SEEK
Suppose we could read Hemingway as haiku . . . learn mindfulness from Virginia Woolf and liberation from Frederick Douglass . . . see Dickinson and Whitman as buddhas of poetry, and Huck Finn and Gatsby as seekers of the infinite . . . discover enlightenment teachings in Macbeth, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, and The Bluest Eye.
Some of us were lucky enough to have one passionate, funny, inspiring English teacher who helped us fall in love with books. Add a lifetime of teaching Dharma — authentic, traditional approaches to meditation and awakening — and you get award-winning author Dean Sluyter. With droll humor and irreverent wisdom, he unpacks the Dharma of more than twenty major writers, from William Blake to Dr. Seuss, inspiring readers to deepen their own spiritual life and see literature in a fresh, new way: as a path of awakening.
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Sluyter (Cinema Nirvana), a retired prep school English teacher, posits in this lighthearted survey that there are enlightenment lessons to be found in Western classics, whether in works by Dr. Seuss or Aretha Franklin. In "Unutterable Visions," he suggests the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald (namely, The Great Gatsby) holds the lesson to "be your own light," while, in "Love Nonetheless," he praises the "boundless compassion" that can be found in Toni Morrison's writing, specifically The Bluest Eye. "Eternity's Sunrise," meanwhile, sees him analyze the oeuvre of William Blake, who found the divine in "every ordinary object," and Sluyter makes a strong case in "Look Again" that Mr. Rogers saw life as "inherently beautiful." While not all the essays are equally convincing—his pieces on kindness in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the internal satipatthana in the works of Virginia Woolf feel less fleshed out and require a bit more buy-in from readers—Sluyter's angle is nonetheless an original one, and the execution is pleasantly breezy. Those with an appreciation of literature and spirituality will appreciate Sluyter's fresh takes.
