Marshal McDonald

The monastic mornings of one Marshal McDonald.

Marshal spends his hours at the coffee shop in the company of some of the most provocative and mischievous thinkers in and out of print. He seems to more than hold his own among them.

Here’s what he’s exploring via his latest reading list (take a deep breath):

Magister Ludi, Hermann Hesse
Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley
The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson
Hu Hua Ching, Lao Tzu
Metapatterns, Tyler Volk
Sensing Semiosis, Floyd Merrell
Against the Tide, Roger Scruton
Call of the Tribe, Mario Varga Llosa
Porius, John Cowper Powys,
Accent on Form, L.L. Whyte
Entering Stillness, Lousi Komjathy
Consciousness and Culture, Jean Gebser
Essays by Garry Wills.
A bio of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There’s method to Marshal’s madness. He pans for ideas, reading a chapter or two of one author and relating each to next. He maintains notes religiously and uses the word “tinkering” to help explain what he’s doing.

There is invariably a pile of books at the ready in front of him.

He’s been exploring language and linguistics, semantics and semiosis, history of religions, quantum physics and nanoscale structures, cell biology, molecular physics, human evolution, Jungian psychology, Taoism, hierarchy theory, evolution of consciousness and the psychology of mathematics/symbolism.

“In former times I read so that I could win arguments and persuade people to my point of view,” he admits. But now he wades into dense, intellectual concepts as an end in itself.

It’s taken years of brief hellos to get to know Marshal. There isn’t the slightest trace of scholarly pretense about the man.

He speaks with a disarming back-home drawl, knows how to work with his hands, and has served two enlistments as a member of the United States Navy Band. He may be the only person at our coffee shop who’s achieved the elusive Double C on the trumpet.