How to Be More Alive: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent on Breaking the Trance of Near-living

The point, of course, is to make yourself alive — to feel the force of being in your sinew and your spirit, to tremble with the beauty and the terror of it all, to breathe lungfuls of life that gasp you awake from the trance of near-living induced by the system of waste and want we call civilization.

Inside the system, these opportunities for raw aliveness are not easily found — they must be sought, seized, and then surrendered to.

At four-thirty in the afternoon of June 17th, 1914, a month bef...