Monday, January 24, 2022
7 a.m. FRCP. You’re up. Yesterday I thought we’d talk about the Transcendentalists, but we went off in another direction. Today, then? Or, something else?
We can talk about Transcendentalists if you wish.
I am assuming I did not pluck Walden from the shelf where it has sat, since I moved in here, practically – seven years ago in March – for no reason. I browse like that, picking up the book that calls me, but in seven years, and well before that, this one did not, and now it did. I don’t believe in coincidences or meaningless choices, so I usually wait to see what happens. And everything I’m reading is like I’m reading for the first time with eyes open, even passages I know by heart.
And that is the point, of course, or one of them. What we have been conveying to you as concepts, Thoreau lived, even though framing it in quite different contexts, different concepts.
I understand that; it wasn’t just words. He was telling his experience as best he could. It’s a wonder that he had any readers at all, and another wonder that Walden was reprinted when it finally sold its 2,000 copies, or however many it was. Thinking about it, I see that Walden like anything is about striking sparks. There are passages that are dead to me in one mood or at one time of my life, and vividly alive in other moods or times. The difference can’t be in the unchanging book, but in me, the reader.
But is this what you want to talk about?
Well, I thought so. Now I’m vague on why. Why don’t you ramble with it?
Rambling is something we do all too well. We somewhat rely upon 3D focus to keep us within bounds, you realize.
Very well. It happened that America in the first decades after the War of 1812 was a very free, unstructured society as a whole. In New England, before the massive flood of immigrants in the 1840s, and to a large extent even afterward, there was universal literacy, and a respect for education, for thrift, for “getting ahead,” for making one’s way. This expressed in various ways. One was a group of serious, even scholarly, men – mostly men – many of them ministers or, like Emerson, ex-ministers, because so many scholarly youths went into the ministry as one of four possible careers suited to an educated man: medicine, the law, pedagogy, the ministry.
Some of these New Englanders – emotionally and intellectually centered on Boston – found themselves taken by a new and incendiary way of perceiving life. It was German idealism, as translated by Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc. Many of these New Englanders could read German, but those who couldn’t, could read Carlyle, say. They could club together and subscribe to the Edinburgh Review. In short, they could participate in a vital current of thought, even though they were at the far end of the Atlantic community.
They found themselves somewhat in an anomalous position. Men of substance (regardless of income or assets), men of education, participants in the heady air of prosperity and promise that was America before the Civil War, they were nonetheless out of tune with bustling, get-ahead American materialism – and equally out of tune with their inherited religious tradition. Not only were they unable to believe as the Puritans believed, they were unable to accept even the milder strictures of Unitarianism. The Transcendental Idealists of Germany and England [Britain, actually: Scotland played a central role] broke the ice for their American contemporaries, and America’s underdeveloped political and social structure gave them room to breathe new air, dream new dreams.
It was that same sense of new possibilities that led to the St. Louis Hegelians, and to all the new model communities: Oneida, New Harmony, Brook Farm.
Yes. America in the 1840s was alive with the breaking-up of the old and the first stirrings of the new.
Like America in the 1960s.
Very like. And it was the way these men began to think that changed everything, for they put it all into a new light. Emerson’s “American Scholar” address to Harvard Divinity School, for instance, said something that would be absolutely commonplace in your time, but was revolutionary then: “Stop looking to England and Europe and the past, and put your mind to the world around you, here, now.” He didn’t put it in those words, but that’s what it amounted to.
And did those boy respond! Their elders mostly didn’t like it, but the youth of that day suddenly found that someone had said things they believed and hadn’t even realized they believed. And, as Emerson said to himself in his old age, that boy (meaning his younger self) was right and all the world and authorities were wrong, and came round to him.
But much as I enjoy this, it’s talking to myself. What’s the relevance for anyone overhearing us?
This. We, and you, are living what Thoreau lived, and Emerson, and Melville and Whitman and so many others. And the reader may also; it is merely a matter of willingness to be awake and to question past assumptions. You could, if you wished to, quote page after page of Walden, showing how Thoreau saw as we see, only – why do it that way, when the book is available to all? So, we’re pointing.
Herd to show the relevance of the Transcendentalists without quoting them, though.
And equally hard to have those quotations hit home without context.
Oh., I don’t know. I first read Walden in 1970, when I was 24, and it rang true down to my bones. I remember copying that paragraph from “Where I lived, and What I Lived for.” I went to the woods to live deliberately – [Below.]
Well, we’re inviting others not to read of your experience, but to have their own. Not everybody will be set afire by Thoreau. Perhaps they will respond better to Emerson, or Whitman, or for that matter, Coleridge or Wordsworth or Carlyle. Or Kant, if their tastes run to the original metaphysics.
I feel like we’re missing the point, here. Refocusing.
Henry Thoreau had none of the intellectual backdrop you have, but had a much wider one, if different. He could read seven languages. He conversed regularly with Emerson and Alcott. He read Carlyle, etc. when they were still new and provocative. You can’t do any of that, so what’s the point? How can he affect you?
Resonance, of course.
More than that: recognition. Something inside you responded with a shock of recognition, and that is the point, to wake you (or anyone) to what they are and don’t know they are; what they know and don’t know they know.
Walden as alarm clock, then.
No, more like a letter from a friend, like the inscription you put in the front of Muddy Tracks.
Yes. [“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.”]
Nobody was put into 3D to fail, although it is not obvious. You can’t know another’s life, as we keep saying. But you can take inspiration from another’s thought, and you can learn to get behind their words to figure out what they thought and how they saw things. The world is full of things to help you; it’s up to you to open your eyes to the good news.
Strange session, somewhere between you and me. I felt like it could be me writing it, since it used what I already know, yet it was flavored differently, coming at things from a different angle. Came quickly, too, t is only 7:55. Theme?
“The Transcendentalists and you,” perhaps.
Our thanks as always.
—–
The full paragraph:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”