Monday, October 11, 2021
6:10 a.m. I thought, last night, let’s get through the second half of Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings.” We went through the first 50 in May, and several months have gone by, just as in his day half were published in “The Dial” and the other half only months later. I was looking at the work I have done, including the sessions I am calling Life More Abundantly, and thinking we should get this done. The first set took us from May 11 to 23, not so long a time.
But read before we comment.
All 50?
Scan, at least, to get the overall sense of it. The first set were about being. The second set perhaps center more on doing, or so you have suspected. Scan first, then we can talk.
Okay. I didn’t exactly scan them, certainly not carefully or slowly, but enough to get the idea. Oddly, they seem much more clearly written than the first 50.
Then let us begin.
[LI. REFORM. The trump of reform is sounding throughout the world for a revolution of all human affairs. The issue we cannot doubt; yet the crises are not without alarm. Already is the axe laid at the root of that spreading tree, whose trunk is idolatry, whose branches are covetousness, war, and slavery, whose blossom is concupiscence, whose fruit is hate. Planted by Beelzebub, it shall be rooted up. Abaddon is pouring his vial on the earth.]
Alcott’s customary inflated written prose, but the meaning is clear. He sees that the ages have come around to another period of cleansing. There is no need to think he was wrong because the job wasn’t completed. In fact, this clear-sighted visionary could see, could feel, he knew, that the 1840s in America were the beginnings of a new era. That he did not know how long it would take is nothing against him. Neither do you know.
[LII. REFORMERS. Reformers are metallic; they are sharpest steel; they pierce whatsoever of evil or abuse they touch. Their souls are attempered in the fires of heaven; they are mailed in the might of principles, and God backs their purpose. They uproot institutions, erase traditions, revise usages, and renovate all things. They are the noblest of facts. Extant in time, they work for eternity; dwelling with men, they are with God.]
He might have added, as his friend Emerson undoubtedly would have added, if only silently, that they are very uncomfortable companions, especially when and insofar as they are mistaken. Moderation and perspective are no part of a reformer as Alcott sketches him.
[LIII. ARMS. Three qualities are essential to the reformer,—insight, veneration, valor. These are the arms with which he takes the world. He who wields these divinely shall make an encroachment upon his own age, and the centuries shall capitulate to him at last. To all else, are institutions, men, ages, invulnerable.]
Insight, veneration, and valor. He says these are all and are enough. A few moments’ thought will show you the undesirability of any two of these in the absence of a third. Insight and veneration without valor may be mere timidity. Insight and valor without veneration may be all crusading zeal and no compassion. Veneration and valor without insight may be romanticized crusades tilting at windmills. You have to give this to him: He was seeing clearly.
[LIV. HERESY. The reformer substitutes things for words, laws for usage, ideas for idols. But this is ever a deed, daring and damned, for which the culprit was aforetime cropped, exiled, or slain. In our time, his sentence is commuted to slight and starvation.]
Here you might suspect Alcott of feeling sorry for himself, or rather for his plight, and consoling himself that in earlier times it would have been worse. We don’t think that was in his mind, though. As ever, he was thinking abstractly, as though he were Emerson’s “transparent eyeball.”
[LV. SIMPLICITY. The words of a just man are mirrors in which the felon beholds his own features, and shrinks from the portrait painted therein by the speaker. Beware of a just man, he is a limner of souls; he draws in the colors of truth. Cunning durst not sit to him.]
Again, he wasn’t thinking of himself as the just man. He was speaking abstractly.
[LVI. PERSON. Divinely speaking, God is the only person. The personality of man is partial, derivative; not perfect, not original. He becomes more personal as he partakes more largely of divinity. Holiness embosoms him in the Godhead, and makes him one with Deity.]
It will pay you to consider this somewhat cryptic saying in light of the idea that humans are communities becoming units, or anyway learning to act as units. That will turn this seemingly empty paragraph into one more piece of evidence of how much more the man saw and felt than he was able to clearly express. (Besides, who would he have been able to express it to? Emerson, maybe, but how many others? Alcott was alone in a way you can only faintly imagine.)
[LVII. PORTRAITS. We are what we seek; desire, appetite, passion, draw our features, and show us whether we are gods or men, devils or beasts. Always is the soul portraying herself; the statue of our character is hewn from her affections and thoughts.—Wisdom is the soul in picture; holiness in sculpture.]
Here Alcott’s accompanying prose defect gets in the way a little. That is, on the one hand he is often too high-flying, too airy-fairy sounding. On the other hand, sometimes he is as cryptic and terse as Thoreau, but a little too cryptic, when only an extra word or two would have helped a reader follow his thought. Suppose he had said, “Wisdom is the soul in picture. Holiness is the soul in sculpture.” Wouldn’t those three words more have helped the spark jump?
Even there, though, the meaning is a little vague. What is the distinction he is drawing between portraiture and sculpture?
Isn’t it clear? What you seek is the portrait of your ideals, you might say. What you do is the self you are actually living.
Clear as you say it, not before. But was that his meaning?
We smile. Keep going.
[LVIII. PERSONALITY. Truth is most potent when she speaks in general and impersonal terms. Then she rebukes everybody, and all confess before her words. She draws her bow, and lets fly her arrows at broad venture into the ages, to pierce all evils and abuses at heart. She wounds persons through principles, on whose phylactery, “thou art the man,” is ever written to the eye of all men.]
This one seemed clear until the final sentence.
He is merely saying, “If the shoe pinches, you’ll recognize why.” You are part of everything; you are also a specific, definite part of everything.
[LIX. POPULARITY. The saints are alone popular in heaven, not on earth; elect of God, they are spurned by the world. They hate their age, its applause, its awards, their own affections even, save as these unite them with justice, with valor, with God. Whoso loves father or mother, wife or child, houses or lands, pleasures or honors, or life, more than these, is an idolater, and worships idols of sense; his life is death; his love hate; his friends foes; his fame infamy.]
Again the high-flying prose, but can you see why Emerson loves his “tedious archangel”? This is nothing but what Jesus said.
[LX. FAME. Enduring fame is ever posthumous. The orbs of virtue and genius seldom culminate during their terrestrial periods. Slow is the growth of great names, slow the procession of excellence into arts, institutions, life. Ages alone reflect their fulness of lustre. The great not only unseal, but create the organs by which they are to be seen. Neither Socrates nor Jesus is yet visible to the world.]
Yet again, the disparity between his ability to see and his ability to express clearly. Partly it is his awkward style; partly it is as he says, “The great not only unseal, they created the organs by which they are to be seen.” Only, in his case, he could not create those organs. Others – and, mostly, the lapse of time – had to do it. Yet in another sense, his writings, once absorbed, will change the reader so that they become self-evident upon a re-reading. That is a form of creating the organs by which they are to be seen.
Now, there is almost an hour, and we are 20% through. Good work, but don’t set yourself an implicit goal of ten per session. Take it as it comes.
Okay. Thanks as always for this.