What happens to our notion of Romanticism when Scotland is part of the picture? The question calls for a disciplinary conception of the humanities rather different from the one that prevails in the institutions of English literary history.
No one can miss the current hype over evolution and creation. It made the front page of the New York Times on October 6, 2005, when the paper displayed a picture of two rafting trips proceeding side by side through the Grand Canyon, one finding evidence there for the great flood of Genesis, the other signs of gradual geological erosion.
A group of artists in Turkey rent an apartment together in a diverse, intergenerational neighborhood; instead of using the space to paint or display, they invite their neighbors to dinner, create a playroom for children, and organize a neighborhood parade. They call their work Oda Projesi (The Room Project).
“It is well to have some water in your neighborhood,” suggests Thoreau in Walden. Punning on “well” (itself a kind of “walled-in” pond), he suggests that digging into apparently solid ground to discover water below offers a salutary reminder that “earth is not continent but insular”—that is, land masses even as large as continents do not so much contain as they are contained— surrounded—by bodies of water.