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Study guide to The Inward Morning by Henry Bugbee pg. 181- 209
“Ah, the eagerness to comprehend, to sift and cull the meaning of things past, to find ourselves again in the significance that suggests and summons the remote, some far-off place and time toward which we yearn and dream; there, surely, reality dwelt and a man lived, or someday will live again.” pg. 178
In this penultimate seminar on Henry Bugbee’s seminal work, The Inward Morning, we cover a lot of territory—much of which is not terrestrial. This reading is centered on Bugbee’s time at sea on a minesweeper in the Pacific theater of World War II. As with many who serve in the military, this experience had a profound influence upon his life and how he saw the world. But unlike most enlisted men, it became the catalyst for a metaphysics of meaning expressed in a doctoral dissertation called The Sense and Conception of Being, written upon his return in just 8 months and completed in 1947.
The two central focuses of our discussion are the act of reflection and the consequence of choice—and the possible relationship between the two. The Inward Morning, in general, is a reflection upon reflection: a series of reflections (journal entries) trying to understand how reflection upon our experiences shapes us. This becomes most explicit in this section of the work, as he reviews the character of the men with whom he served in WWII and the sorts of actions they took whilst tossed about at sea. Like his earlier childhood reminiscences, these too become an occasion for meditation upon how one lives—on how to live authentically one’s own destiny whilst living in communion with others.
