need our mediation

re: the wildness of nature “red in tooth and claw”
re: mortality

unbearable to the human conscious and sensitive psyche

re: discomfort with the most natural, raw biological phenomena
re: anxiety, self-consciousness, shame

mediation
control
domestication
religion
culture
clothing

numbing/soothing agents
media (nowadays: cyberspace) vis-a-vis IRL
financialization vis-a-vis the real economy

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Hence the interest in that passage from Walden: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived … I wanted to suck out all the marrow of life … to reduce life to its lowest terms.”