Flashes of lightning, resounding thunder, gloomy fog, brilliant sunshine...these are the life manifestations of the skies. The concrete visceral experiences that living under those skies stir within us are the ground for individual impulses, emotions, sentiments that in their interaction generate their own ever-changing clouds. While our intellect concentrates on the discovery of our cosmic position, on the architecture of the universe, our imagination is informed by the gloomy vapors, the glimmers of fleeting light, and the glory of the skies. Reconnoitering from the soil of human life and striving towards the infinite, the elan of imagination gets caught up in the clouds of the skies. There in that dimness, sensory receptivity, dispositions, emotions, passionate strivings, yearnings, elevations gather and propagate. From the "Passions of the Skies" spring innermost intuitions that nourish literature and the arts.
SECTION I .- On the Cosmology of Literature: Parallel Universes and Meaning Beyond Information Rebecca M. Painter.- Skies Passions: Reflections on La piel cielo Alira Ashvo-Munoz .- The Genealogy of Heaven in Poetic Literature Ion Soteropoulous and George Comtesse.- A Critique of John Searles View of the Logic of Fictional Discourse Aydan Turanli.- The Recovery of Archaic Truth in Literature: Light and Darkness in the Perception of Space in the Human Imagination Lawrence Kimmel.- SECTION II.- The Disenchantment of the Sky in Tom Stoppards Jumpers Raymond J. Wilson III .- Big Mind: The Nature of Consciousness as Internal Spaciousness in Transpersonal Experience Bruce Ross .- Leopardis Noncturnal Muse Marcella Tarozzi Goldsmith.- Aerial Passion, The Face, and the Deleuzean Close-up: Samuel Becketts... but the clouds Mary F. Catanzaro.- Wonder of Emptiness Kiymo Murata-Soraci.- On Concentric Circles of Being Revisited Friedrich Nietzsche and the idea of eternal recurrence Matti Itkonen.- SECTION III.- Passions Delirium, Passions Torment - A Discussion of One Womans Arousal in Kate Chopins The Awakening Saundra Tara Weiss.- Flesh, World and Devil: Towards a Phenomenological Exposition of the Aesthetic Interpretation of Christianity in the Light of Some Tolstoys Short Works Victor G. Rivas Lopez.- Valerys Materialist Conception of Consciousness and its Consequences Insook Webber.- Cyber-Salvation: Body in Virtual Skies Mariola Sulkowska-Janowska.- "Erit Ergo Spiritui Subdita Caro Spiritalis" (The Spiritual Flesh will Therefore be Subject to the Spirit): The Heavenly Pleasures of the Disembodied and Reembodied - An Essay on Augustine and the Problem of Embodiment George Heffernan.- All My Sons: Arthur Millers Sky Play in Light of Soren Kierkegaards Either/Or Raymond J. Wilson III.- SECTION IV .- Sky that Surrounds Near to Far Tony Raczka.- On the Dialectical Condition of the Purity of Poetry, Love and Madness in Tarkovskys Homesickness Victor G. Rivas Lopez.- Traveling to Other Worlds: Visitation to the Heavens as Transpersonal Experience in Rock Art Bruce Ross.- Harold Pinters The Homecoming Through the Lens of Amartya Sens The Idea of Justice Emil Roy.- The Stream of Consciousness: Literary Psychology as the First Uniquely American Phenomenology in the Works of William James and His Swedenborgian and Transcendentalist Milieu Eugene Taylor.-.