Please help us continue having these discussions on Patreon, or follow us on other Podcast channels here: https://linktr.ee/solomon_smith

Taylor returns to take Milo and Jack through ten great works of American "Gnostic" literature, beginning with Emerson’s Nature and ending, exactly a century later, with Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Along the way: Jones Very believes himself to be Christ, Hawthorne discovers the stain in creation, Ahab declares war on visible reality, Whitman meets the “real Me”, Dickinson confronts an inaccessible God, and Melville, Bierce, West, and Faulkner push the American suspicion of the world into ever darker territory.

Part two of our Gnostic Bonanza; the first part - on the original Gnostics - available here: https://youtu.be/brOyXDlaA-Y?si=DQGCLCq61lwZm4PG

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

03:24 I. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature (1836)

11:15 II. Jones Very – Essays and Poems (1839)

18:48 III. Nathaniel Hawthorne – Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

24:46 IV. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick (1851)

34:55 V. Walt Whitman – Sea-Drift / “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (1860)

41:21 VI. Emily Dickinson – Poems (1861–65)

50:53 VII. Herman Melville – Clarel (1876)

59:01 VIII. Ambrose Bierce – Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)

1:04:10 IX. Nathanael West – Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

1:07:38 X. William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

1:21:04 American Gnosticism – Final Thoughts