The Theme/The Passions of the Earth -- The Theme/The Passions of the Earth -- Section I -- Walking the Elemental Earth: Phenomenological and Literary "Foot Notes" -- ...And Unto Dust Return: The Remembered Earth -- The Splendor of the Earth - The Myth of the Fall in Walker Percy's Second Coming -- Coleridge and the Appearing Earth: An Essay on the Other in Language -- Section II -- Radical Empiricism and Phenomenological Descriptiveness in Friar Laurence's "Earth Monologue" in Romeo and Juliet -- Re-seeding the Burnt Wasteland: W. S. Merwin's The Rain in the Trees -- The Concept of "Earth" in Heidegger: History and the "Oblivion of Being" -- Section III -- Phenomenology of the Amorous Life: Literature, Earth, and the Absence of the Interval -- Earth, Home, and Exile: Being in Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger -- Toward the Poetic Constitution of Nature: Remarks on José María Heredia's Work -- Motherland: Sally Mann's Proustian Song of the Earth -- Gadamer's Debt to Husserl -- Section IV -- The Common Grounds of Philosophic and Tragic Wisdom: Reflections upon Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy -- An Incongruous Life-World: A Cultural Phenomenology of The Tailor and Ansty -- The Presence of Absence: Mirrors and Mirror Imagery in the Poetry of R. S. Thomas -- Section V -- Performing the Gendered Self in Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, and the Discourse on Fashion -- The Voice of Enchantment in Massenet's Manon -- The Splices in My Life: A Documentary or a Fictionary? -- Aesthetics and Negativity: Reading Mallarmé's "Victorieusement Fui ..." -- The Imaginative Mind: William Blake's Self-renewing Creative Imagination.