Advanced American Literature

Monday, March 12, 2007

HUCK FINN ESSAY QUESTIONS

On our in-class essay day… (one week after your forum) you will be asked THREE of the following questions and MUST RESPOND TO ONE OF THEM. Your responses will be assessed according to our analytic traits for writing. Though six points are possible for each trait, you will be scored out of five.

1. Twain paints a bleak, depressing picture of the Phelps Plantation. Compare and contrast Huck’s view of life on the plantation to life on the raft. In what way is his view affected by his recent loss of Jim? Cite examples from the novel to support your argument.

2. Huck is shocked when Tom Sawyer tells him he will help steal Jim out of slavery. What does Tom know about Jim and how does that affect his decision? How does Huck view Tom as a member of society? How does he view himself? Support your answer with examples from the novel.

3. Jim acts as an informant in the case of the king and duke’s Royal Nonesuch show. In what way is justice being done? Why do you think Jim is seen in a different light in this section of the novel? Do his actions seem believable? Defend your argument with examples from the novel.

4. The contrasting personalities of Huck and Tom provide the reader with the satiric humor in these chapters. In what way do their personalities contrast? How are Tom’s romantic notions brought out in the plan to free Jim? How does Huck disagree? Cite examples from the novel to support your argument.

5. Tom and Huck disagree on the idea of stealing and borrowing. What does Huck call borrowing? What does Tom consider stealing? When does Tom consider stealing all right? When is it wrong? Support your argument with quotes from the novel.

6. In this section of the novel Tom already knows that Jim has been freed by Miss Watson. In view of this fact, how do you interpret his actions in the plan of escape? Is Tom unusually cruel to Jim by making him wait unnecessarily? Why doesn’t he tell Huck and Jim? Explain your answer.

7. Two different types of morality are demonstrated in the novel. Contrast Huck’s morality with Tom’s. How are they different? Explain the origins of each of the boys’ sense of morality? Cite examples from the novel to support your argument.

8. Twain often satirizes the religious sensibilities of his day through the characters in the novel. In what way is he satirizing Uncle Silas’s prayers with Jim? Do you feel Uncle Silas is being kind to Jim? Why does Jim feel his kindness? Explain your answer.

9. Jim is taken out of his prison to help Huck and Tom with the grindstone. In what way is this humorous incident ironic? Why does Jim go back to his prison? Why doesn’t he leave while he has the chance? Why don’t the boys help him to escape? Explain your answer.

10. Tom often prescribes cruel treatment for Jim in order to carry out his elaborate plan of escape. How does one account for his lack of sensitivity to Jim’s feelings? Is Tom a cruel person? How does Tom treat other people in the novel? Cite examples from the novel to support your argument.

11. Tom works on a coat of arms for Jim. Does he have sufficient knowledge of this subject? Is his knowledge limited? Why doesn’t he give Huck the definitions of “fess” and “bar sinister”? Support your answer with examples from the novel.

12. Jim unselfishly gives up his freedom so they can get a doctor for Tom. Does this act seem consistent with Jim’s character? Why does he do it? Describe one other instance in the novel where Jim is unselfish. Cite examples from the novel to support your argument.

13. Tom is happy when they reach the raft in spite of the fact that he has a bullet in his leg. Why is he happy? Why doesn’t he want to see a doctor? What instructions does Tom give Huck about the doctor? How is this a part of Tom’s plan of escape? Explain your answer with examples from the novel.

14. Huck invents stories throughout the novel to get himself out of tight situations. Is Huck’s story to the doctor as believable as his stories have been in the past? Does the doctor doubt Huck? Are there any flaws in his story? Use examples from the novel to support your argument.

15. Jim is often referred to as a noble character in the novel. In what way is his nobility shown in the last few chapters. How does he show courage by helping the doctor? Why does he do it? What price does he pay? Support your answer with examples from the novel.

16. The men who are attending to Jim want to hang him as an example to other slaves who might attempt to escape. Why do they decide against it? How does this incident satirize the morality of the men? Cite examples from the novel to explain your answer.

17. At the end of the novel Huck wants to escape so Aunt Sally will not try to “sivilize” him. How has the meaning of the word “sivilize” changed for Huck? In what way has Huck grown as a character in the novel? Give examples from the novel to support your argument.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Huck Finn Project

While we are reading Huck Finn we will use various strategies to better understand the book and what it has to tell us. While it is easy to mock and ridicule the wide range of seemingly “unacademic” strategies teachers use to get info into their students’ heads, sometimes these actually work better than the old standards that consist of a series of leading questions to be written or spoken about. Sound familiar? So, warm up your wagging fingers, do your special eye-rolling exercises, practice your deep sighs and disgruntled huffs of resentment… It’s project time! You may propose some projects be done as a team but these must be approved. Any project that is turned in as a team and yet has not been approved by me will not be accepted. Moreover, I expect that two-person projects be twice as good!
Option I: Jim’s Journal: This option asks you to get in character as Jim and keep a DAILY journal as the story unfolds. In other words, you will keep a journal as if you were Jim. The quality of work here will be reflected in the following components:
o extent to which you inhabit the character (e.g., sound and think like he would)
o overall quality of your writing (note: you may write in the same vernacular style that Twain used but you must be consistent and effective in your use of this style)
o thoroughness: extent to which your journal reflects on and includes the entire novel
o insight: extent to which your entries show insight into the characters and the story
(Option: you could, if you prefered, write your journal as Mark Twain. Many writers keep journals of what they think while they write their books. What would Twain be thinking and saying to himself about this book as he writes it?)
Option II: Graphic Novel: This option allows the artistic students to use their skills to recreate the story in a graphic novel (i.e., comic book) format. If you are really technologically oriented and want to show off, you could make yours animated and interactive. The quality of your work here will be determined by the following:
o quality of the art work: it should look sharp--both the pictures and the text.
o extent to which your graphic novel includes the entire story of Huck Finn
o inclusion of an introduction in which you explain what you tried to capture in your recreation of the novel (e.g., "I wanted to emphasize the extent to which they reject society and reveal themselves as rebels in the American spirit. I did this because...and showed it by...")

Option III: Formal Essay: This option asks you to choose an idea or character central to the book and examine that idea in depth in an essay. You may also consider taking some recurring aspect of American history or culture and writing an essay in which you discuss how Huck Finn relates to that theme (e.g., the American spirit of independence). Your essay must accomplish the following:
o It must be at least five-pages typed (double-spaced, 12-point font).
o It should clearly identify the thesis of the paper early on and maintain that focus throughout.
o It must examine its subject carefully, supporting each of its supporting elements with examples from appropriate sources (e.g., Huck Finn , your history book, etc.).
o It must be original in its focus so as to avoid questions of whether it was or could have been lifted off the Internet.
(Note: you must approve your topic with me first.)
Option IV: Be the Teacher: You will teach an entire class period in which you lead a discussion on a particular set of themes or some other focused topic as it relates to Huck Finn. During this 45-minute period you will prepare and be ready to do the following:
o facilitate a class discussion on selected, important themes
o introduce your lesson with some opening remarks
o use visual aids--video clips, handouts, posters, overheads--to help the class think about and understand the ideas you present
o write a one page follow-up analysis of what you set out to accomplish, how well they/you accomplished this goal and a reflection about what you would do differently.
Option V: Publish your Own Newspaper: This option asks you to create a six-page newspaper with all the appropriate elements common to a newspaper of that era. (You can find examples of newspapers on the web by visiting the Cyberguide for Twain’s novel.) … http://www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/score/huckcen/huckcentg.html
Your work will be assessed according to the quality of the following:
o the writing
o the formatting and overall appearance and layout of the paper
o the extent to which the paper shows understanding of and insight into the novel Huck Finn
o demonstrated mastery of the computer to create the paper

Huck Finn Project

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

EMILY DICKINSON

Confident Despair and the Circuitry of Truth
The Poetry of Emily Dickinson

For Emily Dickinson, poetry is an expression of her ceaseless pursuit of Truth and, in a sense, Immortality. To the extent that her idealized progress toward certain knowledge must be engaged with the ill-suited mortal faculties of sense and comprehension of what is sensed while tied to an imperfect world, this progress is perpetually frustrated. In stark contrast with the romantic and transcendental temperament of many of her American and Continental contemporaries, though, Dickinson acknowledges her imperfect, human perspective as an ineluctable element of her quest. Her poetry, then, can be seen both as the instrument by which she reworks her perception and as the product of that reworking.

Within this dynamic relationship, however, Dickinson consistently returns to a few primary symbols which seem to represent some unchanging elements and conditions of the quest as a whole. The most prevalent of these symbols are related to visual perception: the night, which is the symbol of her benighted, “fallen” perception, or spiritual blindness; noon and the sun, which represent absolute visionary glory, fulfillment of quest, the eradication of any division between perceiver and perceived; and physical eyesight itself, which must mediate between these two absolutes and align the real and temporal with an envisioned ideal. But the relationships among night, noon, and perception are dynamic and in constant flux; truth can only be glimpsed obliquely. “The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind” (P 1129)–that is, true vision involves the ability to perceive relationships, to comprehend noon in terms of the night which is the human condition, the only condition Dickinson knows firsthand.

Poetic vision, therefore, is not a transcendental oneness with noon, a facile appropriation of the object of spiritual longing into the frame of a mere perceptual moment (though Dickinson did experience such moments, characterizing the them as “ecstatic instants”) but rather a multi- faceted endeavor toward gaining perspective upon that object, a perspective which absolutely necessitated distance. Dickinson characterizes the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived as paradoxically self-defeating, precisely: “Perception of an object costs / Precise the Object’s loss” (P 1071). What this means is that; 1) in order to see something, one must be separate from it and that 2) complete identification with an object necessarily precludes one’s perception of it. The most impressive and ominous logical off-shoot of this (one that resurfaces under innumerable guises throughout the Dickinson canon) is that in order to really know the capital concepts of God or Truth, to know anything at all, the singular identity of the perceiver must cease to exist.

But if the quest cannot be completed short of death, let alone organized into a single coherent thrust, individual moments of vision–attainments of true perspective–can be recorded, shaped into discrete poetic wholes. In order to place herself–a poet working “at night”–in an appropriate relationship to “noon,” the object of quest, it was necessary to experiment constantly with visionary perspectives in her poems; thus the poems often appear as fictions, the arguments of artificial personae bound to deliberately static (and therefore imperfect) perspectives. Some of these personae utter seemingly profound truths, but often the fictions also subtly qualify the speakers’ claims; sometimes the personae are still naive, in the state of innocence–and their naïveté is obvious, rather pathetic; and on occasion the speakers simply make fools of themselves.

To understand the complexity of Dickinson’s quest is to become sensitive to her various, often cunning uses of personae and their inadequately recognized affect: dramatic irony. To this affect, she creates a variety of fictions whose personae represent differing postures and attitudes toward the quest itself. Some speakers are self-deluding, others are merely complacent,
and still others make bold claims for the speaker’s own perception and intelligence, her need to scrutinize carefully perceptual relationships–measuring distances, establishing ratios between perceptual gains and losses–and thus her ability to hold her own in her courtship with death. The burden of establishing a link with omnipresence then, for Dickinson, falls not upon faith but upon human perception, which must constantly adjust its focus, never relax into certainty; otherwise, these narrow, artificial conceptions may be mistaken for the infinitely complex reality.

This perpetual shifting of perspectives from one poem to the next gives the body of Dickinson’s work an animated quality, an illusion of movement comprised of a series of flickering glimpses. As such, her poems have often been characterized as fragmentary bits of insight which make up a large, loosely related whole, but actually the opposite is true: the canon itself is fragment while individual poems are each self-contained units, singular perspectives. This is the paradox of a quest which requires numberless strategies, the sum of which–if the number were finite–would succeed in producing complete vision, and thus the poet’s union with it in the act of envisioning, the fulfillment of the quest. In the act of establishing the inextricable relationship between perception and its object’s loss, between artistic gain and personal depravation, she finds her identity and the role of her own “physiognomy” in the quest for immortality.
The noon of spiritual fulfillment is omnipresent, and to achieve it one must have “developed” sophisticated eyes. But since human perception, no matter how shrewdly developed, can sustain only instants of vision, oblique glimpses of immortality, the inevitable state of the human questor is despair. For Dickinson, however, this despair contains the key to its own transcendence, precisely because the energy of her quest is so unflagging, and her understanding of its conditions and limitations so thoroughly clear-sighted. As the poems examined above should indicate, the human night and the spiritual noon have their multi-faceted relationship through the mediation of perception and through the creation of poetic stances which enhance perceptual effectiveness. The following excerpt is a clear statement of the central emotional stance underlying this delicate mediation:

‘Tis failure–not of Hope–
But Confident Despair–
Advancing on Celestial Lists–
With faint–Terrestrial power–

‘Tis Honor–though I die–
For That no Man obtain
Till He be justified by Death–
This–is the Second Gain–
(P 522)

This poem is one of her most ambitious: it charts the poet’s quest from those presumptuous hopes of a naive questor to the “confident despair” which is the poet’s mature stance; and, like much of Dickinson’s canon, it points toward death as the crux of all meaning and relationship. The poem also contains an intense and beautiful pride, claiming the “honor” inherent in a quest that can achieve no sustained fulfillment; this honor itself sustaining and helps maintain the difficult stance of confident despair. The speaker who feels herself “Advancing on Celestial Lists– / With faint–Terrestrial power–“ knows that no certainty or true justification can exist on this side of death; but, if she despairs at the “faintness” of her own vision, she nonetheless remains confident in its relationship with the noon of her pictured fulfillment. Confidence in the reality of grace, despair at its incalculable distance–here the central paradox of Dickinson’s poetic insight, that perception of an object requires its loss, is stated poignantly in terms of her religious/artistic quest as a whole. Only through the effort of her poetic strategies could she alleviate that loss, cultivating a vision of her own questing self and of her position.

Emily Dickinson Presentation Assignment

Follow these steps:

1. Go to www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson
2. Read the poems until you find one that you like.
3. Copy and paste it into a Word document.
4. List all of the reasons that you like it.
5. List all of the words that you don’t know, including their secondary and archaic meanings.
6. Address each of our 13 poetry questions.
7. Decide which 5 of the 13 questions gave you the most interesting ideas.
8. Sign up for your presentation day and time.
9. Dig deeper into those 5 questions and use them as the basis of your presentation.
10. Give me a list of all of the equipment you will need.
11. Create your presentation, making sure that you do the following things:
a. Create an outline that highlights the information you will be covering in class.
b. Create any materials (audio, video, pictures, handouts, overheads) you will need to get your ideas into our heads.
c. Streamline your presentation so that it takes exactly 10 MINUTES!
d. Rehearse your presentation and your timing in front of others.
e. At least one day BEFORE your presentation slot, double check to make sure that EVERYTHING WORKS!!!
f. Teach us your poem.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

SAMPLE ESSAY #1

Eroticism in the Poetry of Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman's poems often alude or directly state sexuality. While he tries hard to write about women and men the same, he treats homosexual eroticism and heterosexual eroticism differently.

In the poem "I Sing the Body Electric," Whitman has equal stanzas for both men and women. But they are all very different. When Whitman describes women he seems to be very detached and speaks from a more general veiw. In each section about women he mostly writes stuff about them that has to do with things like motherhood. But not sexually. As Whitman is describing the two sexes in their daily lives, the woman was a mothering cow. In stanzas about the auction of slaves, he describes the woman as "the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates and mothers." Every time Whitman describes women, he goes back to this maternal image of them. Even when Whitman has a few short lines about the female sexuality, he immediately has a line of "She is to conceive daughters as well as sons.

Whitman's writing style is also different when he writes the female sections. His words seem to be more natural and flowy like a woman is just a part of nature. He uses phrases like "folds of their dress" and "bend of legs, negligent flowing hands..."

Even though Witman gives male and female equal time in the poem, you can tell he is clearly drawn to the man. He was compairing a woman in flowing dress on the street to naked swimmers and wrestlers. The way he describes man is so much more passionate and erotic. He always seems to talk of women from a detached voice but seems to actually be watching men, or physically touching them. He describes an old farmer then says "you wish to sit by him in the boat, that you and him might touch each other." Whitman is never physically with any woman he decribes.

Try as he might, Whitman is clearly prone to homoeroticism. You simply can't compare birthing mothers to naked swimmers and say Whitman is not homoerotic. Even though he acknowledges women's sexuality, he simply does not find them erotic.

SAMPLE ESSAY #2

W.E.B. Du Bois at Odds With Booker T. Washington

Du Bois voiced his first public criticism of Washington in The Souls of Black Folk, a series of essays permeated with his growing resentment. What caught the public eye was the section entitled “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” which, though it recognized the Tuskegee educator’s achievements, unmistakably took him to task on a number of counts. Washington’s educational program, declared Du Bois, was “unnecessarily narrow,” and had developed into a “gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.” His failure to see, in Du Bois’s estimation, that no educational system could exist “on any other basis than that of the well-equipped college or university,” and his corresponding overemphasis on industrial training was stunting the growth of Black higher education and destroying the opportunity for developing the best minds of the race.

As Du Bois admitted, however, some of the criticism of Washington stemmed from “mere envy” and from “the disappointment of displaced demagogues and the spite of narrow minds.” Even Du Bois’s own attacks occasionally showed a distinctly personal element. But Washington could afford to me magnanimous; the fact that the Anti-Slavery Society, a British organization, should have felt it necessary to ask his advice before extending a welcome to Du Bois demonstrates how completely Washington dominated the scene. It was this very domination which the opposition group so resented. Their differences with Washington sprang from a sincere and significant disagreement on the approach to Black advancement, but mainly they feared that the ascendancy of the “Tuskegee Machine,” as Du Bois called it, had given Washington a power over Black affairs which they felt should not be vested in any individual.

In the realm of civil rights Washington had spoken against disenfranchisement and lynching, but his protest was far too mild for Du Bois, and his voluntary surrender of full citizenship had “without a shadow of a doubt” aided White society’s supposed design to take away the Black ballot and assign Blacks to “a distinct status of civil inferiority.” Furthermore, Du bois asserts, Washington’s emphasis on self-help released White society, Northern or Southern, from any and all responsibility to the betterment of its Black counterpart. It was not a problem for one race or for one region, as Washington tended to think, but a problem for the nation as a whole. For Du Bois, a Black could not hope for success “unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group.”

Finally, Du Bois warned of a group of “educated and thoughtful” Blacks who were alarmed by some of Washington’s theories and who had never accepted whole-heartedly his leadership, thrust upon them as it had been by “outer pressure.” Their criticism had been largely hushed by public opinion, but they now felt “in conscience bound” to ask of the nation three things: the right to vote, civic equality, and the education of youth according to ability. So far as Washington preached thrift, patience, and industrial training for the masses, they would support him. “But,” Dubois concludes, “so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty and voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds – so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this – we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.”
During the last twelve years of his life Washington was pursued relentlessly by his self-appointed gadfly, Du Bois. Soon abandoning the measured, restrained tones of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois elaborated his attack to take issue with Washington on almost every point of his program. This is not to say that the public viewed them as champions of opposing armies, as Du Bois often characterized their ideological relationship; for most laymen of the time had not even heard of Du Bois. But within the narrow circle of Blacks anxious to have a part in determining race leadership and program, the struggle between Washington and Du Bois was of real significance.
Except for a common dedication to the cause of race advancement, the personalities of the two men seem to differ as widely as their ideas. Washington was a practical realist, interested primarily in attaining tangible goals; Du Bois was romantic, willing and eager to fight for principle even at the expense of the surer gains he saw as the fruits of compromise. In contrast to Du Bois’s poetic temperament, Washington’s was simple, direct, prosaic. Though Du Bois as an intellectual liked to deal with ideas, while Washington preferred men and things, Du Bois was by far the more emotional. Washington was first and last an American, while Du Bois characterized himself first and last as Black. Washington possessed a genuine humility and an ability to identify himself with the common man; Du Bois was imperious, egocentric, and aloof. To Du Bois, Washington’s faith in man and God was somewhat naive.

In his critique of the Tuskegee philosophy, Du Bois denied the hypothesis on which Washington’s program rested: the necessity of cooperation with the White South. He could not agree that there was a solidarity of interest between the Southern Black and the Southern White which made the race problem one to be solved from within. The price for cooperation and support, according to Do Bois, was too high: “Today the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken. . . . He must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong. . . . His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers.” Even had he rationally accepted Washington’s premise, Du Bois would likely have found it hard to follow him emotionally; for to Du Bois the White man was an enemy rather than a friend.

Since both men were educators, their divergence in educational philosophy became the focal point of their most widely publicized and ideologically telling disagreement. To Du Bois, an intellectual who had no doubt that the really important things in life lay in the realm of the mind, Washington’s emphasis on bank accounts and ownership of property was an abhorrent debasement of human (and especially Black) potential. Deploring the fact that “for every social ill the panacea of wealth has been urged,” he insisted that “the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.” He wailed at Washington’s sense that education should begin at the bottom and expand upward.

He therefore championed the cause of higher education for the best Black minds at institutions like Fisk, Atlanta, and Howard, setting forth the doctrine of the “Talented Tenth,” a term which became the trade-mark of his educational philosophy: “The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”

Washington vigorously denied that he opposed the higher training and ambition of the brighter minds of the race. “I would not by any means have it understood,” he insisted, “that I would limit or circumscribe the mental development of the Negro student.” Recalling the many industrial schools of Germany, where Du Bois, ironically, received much of his education, he made plain his opposition to the “ill-advised” notion that industrial education meant class education to which Blacks should be confined. Industrial education “should be given in a large measure to any race, regardless of color, which is in the same stage of development as the Negro,” he maintained.

SAMPLE ESSAY #3

The Lost Colony of Roanoke, 1588

Almost all Americans have heard of the lost colony of Roanoke. There are many things, however, that you might not know. Did you know, for example, that Roanoke was one of the first English colonies on American soil? How about that Europeans were the very first to settle on Roanoke? What about how the colony was lost in 1588? There are several different ideas on how this colony was lost that even historians can’t agree on.

Some people say the entire population was killed off by a hurricane. Oddly, however, all of the buildings were still there, just deserted. A hurricane would have destroyed the buildings, not just the people.

Others think that Roanoke was ravaged by a disease. Strangely, there were no bodies found. How can you die and have your body disappear? Quite a ridiculous theory isn’t it?

Another theory is that the 90 men, 17 women and nine children of Roanoke simply left the colony and settled on Chesapeake Bay to keep other English settlers from stealing their land. This idea also has problems.

First, these weren’t the original English settlers, but a second group coming to pick up the fifteen men that were stranded on Roanoke by first colonists the year before. This second group’s mission was to save that original group of 15, but was delayed by a storm and ended up stranded themselves and had to rebuild Roanoke.

Second, this group was actually waiting to be helped by the English because the natives were angry and they were kind of scared. In fact, they sent the Governor, John White back to England to ask for help. Unfortunately, Governor White got delayed by storms and the captain refused the passage back to Roanoke because it was winter.

Then, England’s war with the Spanish required all available larger boats. Governor White had to get smaller boats with greedy captains who attempted to rob other boats but got robbed themselves. This left the colonists at Roanoke for two years afraid of the natives who might attack them. So, the colonists were not afraid of the English, but were actually waiting for them.

This led to another popular theory that the people of Roanoke were killed by natives. Again, though, there were no bodies found at the site. Strangely, there was also no evidence of any recent battle.
It could also be that the people of Roanoke went to live with the only friendly group of natives, the Croatoans. Actually, the word “croatoan” was carved in a fence post and was also is the name of a nearby island. This is very probable. It might be what really happened!

It is an incredible fact that historians up to now have no sure explanation about what exactly happened to the colonists and the residents of Roanoke in 1588. There are several different theories about what happened during that three year period. Some, as we know, include a hurricane or the spread of a disease. Even peculiar yet popular theories such as extraterrestrial abductions have been issued. After looking at all the theories and evidence, the most probable explanation for what happened to Roanoke is that the colonists were stranded, waited for the English, but had to leave the colony and stay with the Croatoans.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

"Self-Reliance" Assignments

Assignment on Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”
Quotation Analysis Exercise (20 pts for content, 20 points for style)

Hopefully you have read this essay, otherwise, this is going to be tremendously taxing. Your job here is to teach the class what the following quotations from “Self-Reliance” mean. You will have ninety seconds per group member to do so starting Friday, the day after tomorrow. You may use any means at your disposal to accomplish this. You may break your discussion of the quotation among yourselves any way you see fit, but consider that you will each be scored individually. Bear in mind the diversity of depth, length and quality of our Thoreau assignments before the break. Some were brilliant and thoughtfully put together. Some were sloppy and half-hearted at best. Try not to be the group that squanders its time and slaps things together at the last moment, it will be obvious. In order to receive full credit for the content of your presentation, you must do the following:

Find the quotation your group has been given in its original context.
Discuss what it means within that context.
Discuss how it could be applied now.
Discuss what the impact of its current application might be.

Style credit will be awarded according to our Analytic Traits for speaking.

1. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
2. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
3. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
4. What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
5. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
6. It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.
7. Traveling is a fool's paradise.
8. Insist on yourself; never imitate.
9. Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.
10. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
11. Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
12. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Assignment on Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”
Discussion Question Exercise (20 points for content, 20 points for style)

Below are your discussion questions for “Self-Reliance.” You will have ninety seconds per group member to respond to them in class one week from today. As you may have noticed from my seeming inability to approach such things in a consistent manner, questions like these can be approached and addressed in a variety of ways. Individually, cooperatively, competitively… It’s almost as if I’m just not quite sure of the one best way to do things, isn’t it? Given the subject matter here, I think it only fitting to leave you almost entirely to your own devices in deciding how you will deal with one of these questions. You may choose any single question below to answer. Please note, however, that if you choose a question already chosen by anyone else, you will be grouped together during your response time on Wednesday. So, things could work out like a group presentation, like a forum, like a debate, like an individual speech… It’s all up to you. Of course, everyone will have to rely on themselves for their grade.

Both Style and Content credit will be awarded according to our Analytic Traits for speaking.

1. How is Emerson's idea of Self-Reliance different from and similar to the common use of the term (take care of your own needs and don't depend on others outside yourself)?
2. Is Emerson really saying, "Believe anything you want to believe and do anything you want to do"? Is he really saying, "Nothing outside yourself matters"?
3. In what ways is Emerson speaking religiously -- that is, about our relationship to the divine?
4. Emerson's religious ideas are claimed today by groups as diverse as the Unitarian Universalists and the Mormons. Does this make sense? How have such different religious groups made use of Emerson's ideas, especially those in "Self-Reliance"?
5. How does Emerson's "Self-Reliance" inspire the environmental and sustainable growth movements today?
6. What would Emerson think of the survivalist movement?
7. What would Emerson think of 21st century American capitalism?
8. Would Emerson's ideas as expressed in this essay result in a stronger or weaker government? More or less democracy?
9. Was Emerson a liberal or conservative -- and in what ways? (You might also want to read Emerson's essay "The Conservative.")
10. What would Emerson think about today's libertarianism?
11. If you're familiar with the work of Ayn Rand, how is Emerson alike, how is he different?
12. What would Emerson say about the human capacity for good and for evil?
13. How have Emerson's ideas helped shape our concept of the American Dream?

ANALYSIS OF EMERSON'S "SELF-RELIANCE"

THE FOLLOWING IS TAKEN FROM THE WEBSITE: http://www.transcendentalists.com/self_reliance_analysis.htm
IF YOU WANT TO FOLLOW ANY OF THE LINKS OR SEEK MOR INFORMATION, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU GO THERE AND BEGIN YOUR DIGGING.

Help in understanding Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, Self-Reliance:

"It is said to be the age of the first person singular" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your own mind." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Self-Reliance

Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" is often the first or only exposure students get to Emerson's thought. Here are some resources to help understand this essay:

Background:

What is Transcendentalism?
An essay introducing the background and context of Transcendentalism, for help in understanding where Emerson's ideas came from.

Transcendentalism - Definitions
From Emerson himself, with some dictionary and other simple definitions listed as well.

Transcendentalism
Basic information on Transcendentalism - links to the two items above plus more.

Self-Reliance Online

Self-Reliance - HTML searchable copy of the text at EmersonCentral.com

About Emerson's essay, "Self-Reliance"

On Self-Reliance
Ann Woodlief's excellent introduction to the Emerson essay, Self-Reliance.

Emerson and the Irony of Self-Reliance: An American Response to Nihilism
An article by Alfred I. Tauber (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader). Looks at the problem of selfhood in Emerson's essay and relates that to relevance today, especially in religious belief in our increasingly-secular age.

Versions of Romanticism From Emerson's Self-Reliance
A short essay, some selections from the essay, and some excellent questions for thinking about Emerson's ideas.

Culture of the Common Man
A short introduction to American culture about 1841, looking at Emerson's essay and its relationship to ideas of democracy, culture and the masses.

Self-Reliance and Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Unitarian Universalist minister muses about the position of Emerson in that faith today, where he's often considered a "prophet of religious liberalism."

Self-Reliance (1841) - about the book and its author

Essays based on Self-Reliance

Note to lazy students: don't think to copy these -- your teacher also knows where they are! They're here to show some examples of how students have approached the topic. Rely on your own self!

After Reading Emerson's Self-Reliance

Self-Reliance and Creative Destruction - by Bryan Caplan

Self-Reliance Now - Kristen Rosenfeld

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance - Piper S. Colemanscurry

Response to Emerson’s Self-Reliance

Writing about Self-Reliance

If you're trying to write an essay on what Self-Reliance means, be sure to take Emerson's own ideas into consideration! A good teacher assigning an essay on Self-Reliance will admire a student who takes Emerson's thought seriously. Parroting back what you think the teacher wants to hear about Emerson is to violate the very spirit of the essay!

But that doesn't mean that you can write just anything. Emerson's essay urges us to take our ideas seriously, not lightly. Does your idea resonate with your innermost voice of reason and conscience?

Quotations from "Self-Reliance"

It's worth thinking about these quotations. Try to figure out what they mean. Sometimes they make more sense when you see them in context -- do a search on the essay online to find their context.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.
Travelling is a fool's paradise.
Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Some questions to think about:

How is Emerson's idea of Self-Reliance different from and similar to the common use of the term (take care of your own needs and don't depend on others outside yourself)?
Is Emerson really saying "Believe anything you want to believe and do anything you want to do"? Is he really saying "Nothing outside yourself matters"?
In what ways is Emerson speaking religiously -- that is, about our relationship to the divine?
Emerson's religious ideas are claimed today by groups as diverse as the Unitarian Universalists and the Mormons. Does this make sense? How have such different religious groups made use of Emerson's ideas, especially those in "Self-Reliance"?
How do Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Thoreau's ideas (in "Walden" and elsewhere) inspire the environmental and sustainable growth movements today?
What would Emerson think of the survivalist movement?
What would Emerson think of 21st century American capitalism?
Would Emerson's ideas as expressed in this essay result in a stronger or weaker government? More or less democracy?
Was Emerson a liberal or conservative -- and in what ways? (You might also want to read Emerson's essay "The Conservative.")
What would Emerson think about today's libertarianism?
If you're familiar with the work of Ayn Rand, how is Emerson alike, how is he different?
What would Emerson say about the human capacity for good and for evil?
How have Emerson's ideas helped shape our concept of the American Dream?
Should students read more essays of Emerson, or just this one? Is this the best selection from Emerson for a high school or college student?

A closing thought:

Like many thinkers, Emerson's thought evolved through his lifetime. He later came to value social reform movements and group action more than he did in his early life. This was perhaps partly due to the maturity one gains in the life cycle, perhaps partly due to the failure of individual philanthropy to solve the increasing social problems of his age, perhaps partly due to the issue of slavery, in which the individual interests of slave vs. slaveholder were in stark contrast. But certainly, Emerson's later writing was more interested in relationships among people, and ethical behavior, than early works like "Self-Reliance" may indicate. Nevertheless, the worldview expressed in "Self-Reliance" is not, I would contend, one of radical separation of the individual from the rest of the universe, though Emerson has sometimes been accused of that view.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Emerson's "The New-England Reformers"

New England Reformers
from Essays: Second Series (1844) Ralph Waldo Emerson page updated 11/22/00 with major revisions and new editing
A Lecture read before the Society in Amory Hall, on Sunday, 3 March, 1844

Whoever has had opportunity of acquaintance with society in New England, during the last twenty-five years, with those middle and with those leading sections that may constitute any just representation of the character and aim of the community, will have been struck with the great activity of thought and experimenting. His attention must be commanded by the signs that the Church, or religious party, is falling from the church nominal, and is appearing in temperance and non-resistance societies, in movements of abolitionists and of socialists, and in very significant assemblies, called Sabbath and Bible Conventions, — composed of ultraists, of seekers, of all the soul of the soldiery of dissent, and meeting to call in question the authority of the Sabbath, of the priesthood, and of the church. In these movements, nothing was more remarkable than the discontent they begot in the movers. The spirit of protest and of detachment, drove the members of these Conventions to bear testimony against the church, and immediately afterward, to declare their discontent with these Conventions, their independence of their colleagues, and their impatience of the methods whereby they were working. They defied each other, like a congress of kings, each of whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another, that no man should buy or sell: that the use of money was the cardinal evil; another, that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife, that God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No; they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these incessant advances of thine; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming; and the tyranny of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect world was to be defended, — that had been too long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitos was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts of homœopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their wonderful theories of the Christian miracles! Others assailed particular vocations, as that of the lawyer, that of the merchant, of the manufacturer, of the clergyman, of the scholar. Others attacked the institution of marriage, as the fountain of social evils. Others devoted themselves to the worrying of churches and meetings for public worship; and the fertile forms of antinomianism among the elder puritans, seemed to have their match in the plenty of the new harvest of reform.
With this din of opinion and debate, there was a keener scrutiny of institutions and domestic life than any we had known, there was sincere protesting against existing evils, and there were changes of employment dictated by conscience. No doubt, there was plentiful vaporing, and cases of backsliding might occur. But in each of these movements emerged a good result, a tendency to the adoption of simpler methods, and an assertion of the sufficiency of the private man. Thus it was directly in the spirit and genius of the age, what happened in one instance, when a church censured and threatened to excommunicate one of its members, on account of the somewhat hostile part to the church, which his conscience led him to take in the anti-slavery business; the threatened individual immediately excommunicated the church in a public and formal process. This has been several times repeated: it was excellent when it was done the first time, but, of course, loses all value when it is copied. Every project in the history of reform, no matter how violent and surprising, is good, when it is the dictate of a man's genius and constitution, but very dull and suspicious when adopted from another. It is right and beautiful in any man to say, 'I will take this coat, or this book, or this measure of corn of yours,' — in whom we see the act to be original, and to flow from the whole spirit and faith of him; for then that taking will have a giving as free and divine: but we are very easily disposed to resist the same generosity of speech, when we miss originality and truth to character in it.
There was in all the practical activities of New England, for the last quarter of a century, a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social organizations. There is observable throughout, the contest between mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a steady tendency of the thoughtful and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritual facts.
In politics, for example, it is easy to see the progress of dissent. The country is full of rebellion; the country is full of kings. Hands off! let there be no control and no interference in the administration of the affairs of this kingdom of me. Hence the growth of the doctrine and of the party of Free Trade, and the willingness to try that experiment, in the face of what appear incontestable facts. I confess, the motto of the Globe newspaper is so attractive to me, that I can seldom find much appetite to read what is below it in its columns, "The world is governed too much." So the country is frequently affording solitary examples of resistance to the government, solitary nullifiers, who throw themselves on their reserved rights; nay, who have reserved all their rights; who reply to the assessor, and to the clerk of court, that they do not know the State; and embarrass the courts of law, by non-juring, and the commander-in-chief of the militia, by non-resistance.
The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent appeared in civil, festive, neighborly, and domestic society. A restless, prying, conscientious criticism broke out in unexpected quarters. Who gave me the money with which I bought my coat? Why should professional labor and that of the counting-house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of the porter, and woodsawyer? This whole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person whom I pay with money, whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each asked of the other. Am I not too protected a person? is there not a wide disparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister? Am I not defrauded of my best culture in the loss of those gymnastics which manual labor and the emergencies of poverty constitute? I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society; I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.
The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the efforts for the reform of Education. The popular education has been taxed with a want of truth and nature. It was complained that an education to things was not given. We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of a spider. The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, 'All summer in the field, and all winter in the study.' And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men. The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of the planet through a telescope, is worth all the course on astronomy: the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, out-values all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.
One of the traits of the new spirit, is the inquisition it fixed on our scholastic devotion to the dead languages. The ancient languages, with great beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of genius, which draw, and always will draw, certain likeminded men, — Greek men, and Roman men, in all countries, to their study; but by a wonderful drowsiness of usage, they had exacted the study of all men. Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and Greek had a strict relation to all the science and culture there was in Europe, and the Mathematics had a momentary importance at some era of activity in physical science. These things became stereotyped as education, as the manner of men is. But the Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high and dry on the beach, and was now creating and feeding other matters at other ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools and colleges, this warfare against common sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato.
But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing? What was the consequence? Some intelligent persons said or thought; 'Is that Greek and Latin some spell to conjure with, and not words of reason? If the physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to come at their ends, I need never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring is gone out of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating, and go straight to affairs.' So they jumped the Greek and Latin, and read law, medicine, or sermons, without it. To the astonishment of all, the self-made men took even ground at once with the oldest of the regular graduates, and in a few months the most conservative circles of Boston and New York had quite forgotten who of their gownsmen was college-bred, and who was not.
One tendency appears alike in the philosophical speculation, and in the rudest democratical movements, through all the petulance and all the puerility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the superfluous, and arrive at short methods, urged, as I suppose, by an intuition that the human spirit is equal to all emergencies, alone, and that man is more often injured than helped by the means he uses.
I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and the indication of growing trust in the private, self-supplied powers of the individual, to be the affirmative principle of the recent philosophy: and that it is feeling its own profound truth, and is reaching forward at this very hour to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede that in this, as in every period of intellectual activity, there has been a noise of denial and protest; much was to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by those who were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish, — and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two, or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses.
The criticism and attack on institutions which we have witnessed, has made one thing plain, that society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him: he has become tediously good in some particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.
It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration. Do not be so vain of your one objection. Do you think there is only one? Alas! my good friend, there is no part of society or of life better than any other part. All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike. Do you complain of our Marriage? Our marriage is no worse than our education, our diet, our trade, our social customs. Do you complain of the laws of Property? It is a pedantry to give such importance to them. Can we not play the game of life with these counters, as well as with those; in the institution of property, as well as out of it. Let into it the new and renewing principle of love, and property will be universality. No one gives the impression of superiority to the institution, which he must give who will reform it. It makes no difference what you say: you must make me feel that you are aloof from it; by your natural and super-natural advantages, do easily see to the end of it, — do see how man can do without it. Now all men are on one side. No man deserves to be heard against property. Only Love, only an Idea, is against property, as we hold it.
I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor to waste all my time in attacks. If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? the street is as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie. When we see an eager assailant of one of these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel amidst the rags of a beggar.
In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of false churches, alike in one place and in another, — wherever, namely, a just and heroic soul finds itself, there it will do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put forth, it shall abrogate that old condition, law or school in which it stands, before the law of its own mind.
If partiality was one fault of the movement party, the other defect was their reliance on Association. Doubts such as those I have intimated, drove many good persons to agitate the questions of social reform. But the revolt against the spirit of commerce, the spirit of aristocracy, and the inveterate abuses of cities, did not appear possible to individuals; and to do battle against numbers, they armed themselves with numbers, and against concert, they relied on new concert.
Following, or advancing beyond the ideas of St. Simon, of Fourier, and of Owen, three communities have already been formed in Massachusetts on kindred plans, and many more in the country at large. They aim to give every member a share in the manual labor, to give an equal reward to labor and to talent, and to unite a liberal culture with an education to labor. The scheme offers, by the economies of associated labor and expense, to make every member rich, on the same amount of property, that, in separate families, would leave every member poor. These new associations are composed of men and women of superior talents and sentiments: yet it may easily be questioned, whether such a community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good; whether those who have energy, will not prefer their chance of superiority and power in the world, to the humble certainties of the association; whether such a retreat does not promise to become an assylum to those who have tried and failed, rather than a field to the strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of men, because each finds that he cannot enter it, without some compromise. Friendship and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of the human race, banded for some catholic object: yes, excellent; but remember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He in his friendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles or multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one.
But the men of less faith could not thus believe, and to such, concert appears the sole specific of strength. I have failed, and you have failed, but perhaps together we shall not fail. Our housekeeping is not satisfactory to us, but perhaps a phalanx, a community, might be. Many of us have differed in opinion, and we could find no man who could make the truth plain, but possibly a college, or an ecclesiastical council might. I have not been able either to persuade my brother or to prevail on myself, to disuse the traffic or the potation of brandy, but perhaps a pledge of total abstinence might effectually restrain us. The candidate my party votes for is not to be trusted with a dollar, but he will be honest in the Senate, for we can bring public opinion to bear on him. Thus concert was the specific in all cases. But concert is neither better nor worse, neither more nor less potent than individual force. All the men in the world cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than one man can. But let there be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then is concert for the first time possible, because the force which moves the world is a new quality, and can never be furnished by adding whatever quantities of a different kind. What is the use of the concert of the false and the disunited? There can be no concert in two, where there is no concert in one. When the individual is not individual but is dual; when his thoughts look one way, and his actions another; when his faith is traversed by his habits; when his will, enlightened by reason, is warped by his sense; when with one hand he rows, and with the other backs water, what concert can be?
I do not wonder at the interest these projects inspire. The world is awaking to the idea of union, and these experiments show what it is thinking of. It is and will be magic. Men will live and communicate, and plough, and reap, and govern, as by added ethereal power, when once they are united; as in a celebrated experiment, by expiration and respiration exactly together, four persons lift a heavy man from the ground by the little finger only, and without sense of weight. But this union must be inward, and not one of covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse of the methods they use. The union is only perfect, when all the uniters are isolated. It is the union of friends who live in different streets or towns. Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter the union, the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke. Government will be adamantine without any governor. The union must be ideal in actual individualism.
I pass to the indication in some particulars of that faith in man, which the heart is preaching to us in these days, and which engages the more regard, from the consideration, that the speculations of one generation are the history of the next following.
In alluding just now to our system of education, I spoke of the deadness of its details. But it is open to graver criticism than the palsy of its members: it is a system of despair. The disease with which the human mind now labors, is want of faith. Men do not believe in a power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims. We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables. A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me; "that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on." I am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as the maxim of the tyrant, "If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused." I notice too, that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear: 'This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.' We do not believe that any education, any system of philosophy, any influence of genius, will ever give depth of insight to a superficial mind. Having settled ourselves into this infidelity, our skill is expended to procure alleviations, diversion, opiates. We adorn the victim with manual skill, his tongue with languages, his body with inoffensive and comely manners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of limitation and inner death we cannot avert. Is it strange that society should be devoured by a secret melancholy, which breaks through all its smiles, and all its gayety and games?
But even one step farther our infidelity has gone. It appears that some doubt is felt by good and wise men, whether really the happiness and probity of men is increased by the culture of the mind in those disciplines to which we give the name of education. Unhappily, too, the doubt comes from scholars, from persons who have tried these methods. In their experience, the scholar was not raised by the sacred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends. He was a profane person, and became a showman, turning his gifts to a marketable use, and not to his own sustenance and growth. It was found that the intellect could be independently developed, that is, in separation from the man, as any single organ can be invigorated, and the result was monstrous. A canine appetite for knowledge was generated, which must still be fed, but was never satisfied, and this knowledge not being directed on action, never took the character of substantial, humane truth, blessing those whom it entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of expression, the power of speech, the power of poetry, of literary art, but it did not bring him to peace, or to beneficence.
When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief. What remedy? Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole aspect of things changes. I resist the skepticism of our education, and of our educated men. I do not believe that the differences of opinion and character in men are organic. I do not recognize, beside the class of the good and the wise, a permanent class of skeptics, or a class of conservatives, or of malignants, or of materialists. I do not believe in two classes. You remember the story of the poor woman who importuned King Philip of Macedon to grant her justice, which Philip refused: the woman exclaimed, "I appeal": the king, astonished, asked to whom she appealed: the woman replied, "from Philip drunk to Philip sober." The text will suit me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, but in man in two moods, in Philip drunk and Philip sober. I think, according to the good-hearted word of Plato, "Unwillingly the soul is deprived of truth." Iron conservative, miser, or thief, no man is, but by a supposed necessity, which he tolerates by shortness or torpidity of sight. The soul lets no man go without some visitations and holy-days of a diviner presence. It would be easy to show, by a narrow scanning of any man's biography, that we are not so wedded to our paltry performances of every kind, but that every man has at intervals the grace to scorn his performances, in comparing them with his belief of what he should do, that he puts himself on the side of his enemies, listening gladly to what they say of him, and accusing himself of the same things.
What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic minster, the German anthem, when they are ended, the master casts behind him. How sinks the song in the waves of melody which the universe pours over his soul! Before that gracious Infinite, out of which he drew these few strokes, how mean they look, though the praises of the world attend them. From the triumphs of his art, he turns with desire to this greater defeat. Let those admire who will. With silent joy he sees himself to be capable of a beauty that eclipses all which his hands have done, all which human hands have ever done.
Well, we are all the children of genius, the children of virtue, — and feel their inspirations in our happier hours. Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged: in the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience have been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals. In the circle of the rankest tories that could be collected in England, Old or New, let a powerful and stimulating intellect, a man of great heart and mind, act on them, and very quickly these frozen conservators will yield to the friendly influence, these hopeless will begin to hope, these haters will begin to love, these immovable statues will begin to spin and revolve. I cannot help recalling the fine anecdote which Warton relates of Bishop Berkeley, when he was preparing to leave England, with his plan of planting the gospel among the American savages. "Lord Bathurst told me, that the members of the Scriblerus club, being met at his house at dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened to the many lively things they had to say, begged to be heard in his turn, and displayed his plan with such an astonishing and animating force of eloquence and enthusiasm, that they were struck dumb, and, after some pause, rose up all together with earnestness, exclaiming, 'Let us set out with him immediately.'" Men in all ways are better than they seem. They like flattery for the moment, but they know the truth for their own. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting them, and speaking to them rude truth. They resent your honesty for an instant, they will thank you for it always. What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike through the world, which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave a sense of reality, though it come in strokes of pain. I explain so, — by this manlike love of truth, — those excesses and errors into which souls of great vigor, but not equal insight, often fall. They feel the poverty at the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world. They know the speed with which they come straight through the thin masquerade, and conceive a disgust at the indigence of nature: Rousseau, Mirabeau, Charles Fox, Napoleon, Byron, — and I could easily add names nearer home, of raging riders, who drive their steeds so hard, in the violence of living to forget its illusion: they would know the worst, and tread the floors of hell. The heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Cæsar, have treated life and fortune as a game to be well and skillfully played, but the stake not to be so valued, but that any time, it could be held as a trifle light as air, and thrown up. Cæsar, just before the battle of Pharsalia, discourses with the Egyptian priest, concerning the fountains of the Nile, and offers to quit the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will show him those mysterious sources.
The same magnanimity shows itself in our social relations, in the preference, namely, which each man gives to the society of superiors over that of his equals. All that a man has, will he give for right relations with his mates. All that he has, will he give for an erect demeanor in every company and on each occasion. He aims at such things as his neighbors prize, and gives his days and nights, his talents and his heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit himself in all men's sight as a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen, of a noted merchant, of a man of mark in his profession; naval and military honor, a general's commission, a marshal's baton, a ducal coronet, the laurel of poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowledgment of eminent merit, have this lustre for each candidate, that they enable him to walk erect and unashamed, in the presence of some persons, before whom he felt himself inferior. Having raised himself to this rank, having established his equality with class after class, of those with whom he would live well, he still finds certain others, before whom he cannot possess himself, because they have somewhat fairer, somewhat grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage of him. Is his ambition pure? then, will his laurels and his possessions seem worthless: instead of avoiding these men who make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him, and seek their society only, woo and embrace this his humiliation and mortification, until he shall know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and his brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the soul which gives the lie to all things, will tell none. His constitution will not mislead him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought, high and unmatchable in the presence of any man, if the secret oracles whose whisper makes the sweetness and dignity of his life, do here withdraw and accompany, him no longer, it is time to undervalue what he has valued, to dispossess himself of what he has acquired, and with Cæsar to take in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, 'All these will I relinquish, if you will show me the fountains of the Nile.' Dear to us are those who love us, the swift moments we spend with them are a compensation for a great deal of misery they enlarge our life; — but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life: they build a heaven before us, whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior society, wishes to be convicted of his error, and to come to himself, so he wishes that the same healing should not stop in his thought, but should penetrate his will or active power. The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness, than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit. What he most wishes is to be lifted to some higher platform, that he may see beyond his present fear the transalpine good, so that his fear, his coldness, his custom may be broken up like fragments of ice, melted and carried away in the great stream of good will. Do you ask my aid? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish more to be a benefactor and servant, than you wish to be served by me, and surely the greatest good fortune that could befall me, is precisely to be so moved by you that I should say, 'Take me and all nine, and use me and mine freely to your ends'! for, I could not say it, otherwise than because a great enlargement had come to my heart and mind, which made me superior to my fortunes. Here we are paralyzed with fear; we hold on to our little properties, house and land, office and money, for the bread which they have in our experience yielded us, although we confess, that our being does not flow through them. We desire to be made great, we desire to be touched with that fire which shall command this ice to stream, and make our existence a benefit. If therefore we start objections to your project, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or of the race, understand well, that it is because we wish to drive you to drive us into your measures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted with a belief that you have a secret, which it would highliest advantage us to learn, and we would force you to impart it to us, though it should bring us to prison, or to worse extremity.
Nothing shall warp me from the belief, that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It has had a name to live in some dogmatic theology, but each man's innocence and his real liking of his neighbor, have kept it a dead letter. I remember standing at the polls one day, when the anger of the political contest gave a certain grimness to the faces of the independent electors, and a good man at my side looking on the people, remarked, "I am satisfied that the largest part of these men, on either side, mean to vote right." I suppose, considerate observers looking at the masses of men, in their blameless, and in their equivocal actions, will assent, that in spite of selfishness and frivolity, the general purpose in the great number of persons is fidelity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign.
If it were worth while to run into details this general doctrine of the latent but ever soliciting Spirit, it would be easy to adduce illustration in particulars of a man's equality to the church, of his equality to the state, and of his equality to every other man. It is yet in all men's memory, that, a few years ago, the liberal churches complained, that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession: a religious church would not complain. A religious man like Behmen, Fox, or Swedenborg, is not irritated by wanting the sanction of the church, but the church feels the accusation of his presence and belief.
It only needs, that a just man should walk in our streets, to make it appear how pitiful and inartificial a contrivance is our legislation. The man whose part is taken, and who does not wait for society in anything, has a power which society cannot choose but feel. The familiar experiment, called the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary column of water balances the ocean, is a symbol of the relation of one man to the whole family of men. The wise Dandini, on hearing the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras, and Diogenes read, "judged them to be great men every way, excepting, that they were too much subjected to the reverence of the laws, which to second and authorize, true virtue must abate very, much of its original vigor."
And as a man is equal to the church, and equal to the state, so he is equal to every other man. The disparities of power in men are superficial; and all frank and searching conversation, in which a man lays himself open to his brother, apprizes each of their radical unity. When two persons sit and converse in a thoroughly good understanding, the remark is sure to be made, See how we have disputed about words! Let a clear, apprehensive mind, such as every man knows among his friends, converse with the most commanding poetic genius, I think, it would appear that there was no inequality such as men fancy between them; that a perfect understanding, a like receiving, a like perceiving, abolished differences, and the poet would confess, that his creative imagination gave him no deep advantage, but only the superficial one, that he could express himself, and the other could not; that his advantage was a knack, which might impose on indolent men, but could not impose on lovers of truth; for they know the tax of talent, or, what a price of greatness the power of expression too often pays. I believe it is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in other directions, has added to his fitness for his own work. Each seems to have some compensation yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hindrance operates as a concentration of his force.
These and the like experiences intimate, that man stands in strict connexion with a higher fact never yet manifested. There is power over and behind us, and we are the channels of its communications. We seek to say thus and so, and over our head some spirit sits, which contradicts what we say. We would persuade our fellow to this or that; another self within our eyes dissuades him. That which we keep back, this reveals. In vain we compose our faces and our words; it holds uncontrollable communication with the enemy, and he answers civilly to us, but believes the spirit. We exclaim, 'There's a traitor in the house!' but at last it appears that he is the true man, and I am the traitor. This open channel to the highest life is the first and last reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I have never expressed the truth, and although I have never heard the expression of it from any other, I know that the whole truth is here for me. What if I cannot answer your questions? I am not pained that I cannot frame a reply to the question, What is the operation we call Providence? There lies the unspoken thing, present, omnipresent. Every time we converse, we seek to translate it into speech, but whether we hit, or whether we miss, we have the fact. Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence, that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.
If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make themselves good in time, the man who shall be born, whose advent men and events prepare and foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connexion with a higher life, with the man within man; shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native but forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful, which works over our heads and under our feet. Pitiless, it avails itself of our success, when we obey it, and of our ruin, when we contravene it. Men are all secret believers in it, else, the word justice would have no meaning: they believe that the best is the true; that right is done at last; or chaos would come. It rewards actions after their nature, and not after the design of the agent. 'Work,' it saith to man, 'in every hour, paid or unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward: whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn, or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought: no matter, how often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.'
As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond surfaces, and to see how this high will prevails without an exception or an interval, he settles himself into serenity. He can already rely on the laws of gravity, that every stone will fall where it is due; the good globe is faithful, and carries us securely through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned: we need not interfere to help it on, and he will learn, one day, the mild lesson they teach, that our own orbit is all our task, and we need not assist the administration of the universe. Do not be so impatient to set the town right concerning the unfounded pretensions and the false reputation of certain men of standing. They are laboring harder to set the town right concerning themselves, and will certainly succeed. Suppress for a few days your criticism on the insufficiency of this or that teacher or experimenter, and he will have demonstrated his insufficiency to all men's eyes. In like manner, let a man fall into the divine circuits, and he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius is the only liberating influence. We wish to escape from subjection, and a sense of inferiority, — and we make self-denying ordinances, we drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail: it is all in vain; only by obedience to his genius; only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise before a man, and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison.
That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. The life of man is the true romance, which, when it is valiantly conducted, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. All around us, what powers are wrapped up under the coarse mattings of custom, and all wonder prevented. It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them, that it is just as wonderful, that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?

Emerson's "Nominalists and Realists"

Nominalist and Realist
from Essays: Second Series (1844)

In countless upward-striving waves The moon-drawn tide-wave strives; In thousand far-transplanted grafts The parent fruit survives; So, in the new-born millions, The perfect Adam lives. Not less are summer-mornings dear To every child they wake, And each with novel life his sphere Fills for his proper sake.
ESSAY VIII Nominalist and Realist
I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not find it. Could any man conduct into me the pure stream of that which he pretends to be! Long afterwards, I find that quality elsewhere which he promised me. The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books. The man momentarily stands for the thought, but will not bear examination; and a society of men will cursorily represent well enough a certain quality and culture, for example, chivalry or beauty of manners, but separate them, and there is no gentleman and no lady in the group. The least hint sets us on the pursuit of a character, which no man realizes. We have such exorbitant eyes, that on seeing the smallest arc, we complete the curve, and when the curtain is lifted from the diagram which it seemed to veil, we are vexed to find that no more was drawn, than just that fragment of an arc which we first beheld. We are greatly too liberal in our construction of each other's faculty and promise. Exactly what the parties have already done, they shall do again; but that which we inferred from their nature and inception, they will not do. That is in nature, but not in them. That happens in the world, which we often witness in a public debate. Each of the speakers expresses himself imperfectly: no one of them hears much that another says, such is the preoccupation of mind of each; and the audience, who have only to hear and not to speak, judge very wisely and superiorly how wrongheaded and unskilful is each of the debaters to his own affair. Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never. When I meet a pure intellectual force, or a generosity of affection, I believe, here then is man; and am presently mortified by the discovery, that this individual is no more available to his own or to the general ends, than his companions; because the power which drew my respect, is not supported by the total symphony of his talents. All persons exist to society by some shining trait of beauty or utility, which they have. We borrow the proportions of the man from that one fine feature, and finish the portrait symmetrically; which is false; for the rest of his body is small or deformed. I observe a person who makes a good public appearance, and conclude thence the perfection of his private character, on which this is based; but he has no private character. He is a graceful cloak or lay-figure for holidays. All our poets, heroes, and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many parts to satisfy our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous interest, and so leave us without any hope of realization but in our own future. Our exaggeration of all fine characters arises from the fact, that we identify each in turn with the soul. But there are no such men as we fable; no Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor Washington, such as we have made. We consecrate a great deal of nonsense, because it was allowed by great men. There is none without his foible. I verily believe if an angel should come to chaunt the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some precious atrocity. It is bad enough, that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society, who has fine traits. He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a cripple. The men of fine parts protect themselves by solitude, or by courtesy, or by satire, or by an acid worldly manner, each concealing, as he best can, his incapacity for useful association, but they want either love or self-reliance.
Our native love of reality joins with this experience to teach us a little reserve, and to dissuade a too sudden surrender to the brilliant qualities of persons. Young people admire talents or particular excellences; as we grow older, we value total powers and effects, as, the impression, the quality, the spirit of men and things. The genius is all. The man, — it is his system: we do not try a solitary word or act, but his habit. The acts which you praise, I praise not, since they are departures from his faith, and are mere compliances. The magnetism which arranges tribes and races in one polarity, is alone to be respected; the men are steel-filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle, and say, 'O steel-filing number one! what heart-drawings I feel to thee! what prodigious virtues are these of thine! how constitutional to thee, and incommunicable.' Whilst we speak, the loadstone is withdrawn; down falls our filing in a heap with the rest, and we continue our mummery to the wretched shaving. Let us go for universals; for the magnetism, not for the needles. Human life and its persons are poor empirical pretensions. A personal influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say, it is great, it is great; if they say, it is small, it is small; you see it, and you see it not, by turns; it borrows all its size from the momentary estimation of the speakers: the Will-of-the-wisp vanishes, if you go too near, vanishes if you go too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who can tell if Washington be a great man, or no? Who can tell if Franklin be? Yes, or any but the twelve, or six, or three great gods of fame? And they, too, loom and fade before the eternal.
We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic. We adjust our instrument for general observation, and sweep the heavens as easily as we pick out a single figure in the terrestrial landscape. We are practically skilful in detecting elements, for which we have no place in our theory, and no name. Thus we are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men and in bodies of men, not accounted for in an arithmetical addition of all their measurable properties. There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society. England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England, I should not find, if I should go to the island to seek it. In the parliament, in the playhouse, at dinner-tables, I might see a great number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men, — many old women, — and not anywhere the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It is even worse in America, where, from the intellectual quickness of the race, the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise, and more slight in its performance. Webster cannot do the work of Webster. We conceive distinctly enough the French, the Spanish, the German genius, and it is not the less real, that perhaps we should not meet in either of those nations, a single individual who corresponded with the type. We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone. And, universally, a good example of this social force, is the veracity of language, which cannot be debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the sentiments, which the language of the people expresses. Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.
In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life, and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind. Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. Property keeps the accounts of the world, and is always moral. The property will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have been in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time considered, with the compensations) in the individual also. How wise the world appears, when the laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, and the completeness of the municipal system is considered! Nothing is left out. If you go into the markets, and the custom-houses, the insurers' and notaries' offices, the offices of sealers of weights and measures, of inspection of provisions, — it will appear as if one man had made it all. Wherever you go, a wit like your own has been before you, and has realized its thought. The Eleusinian mysteries, the Egyptian architecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that there always were seeing and knowing men in the planet. The world is full of masonic ties, of guilds, of secret and public legions of honor; that of scholars, for example; and that of gentlemen fraternizing with the upper class of every country and every culture.
I am very much struck in literature by the appearance, that one person wrote all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of reporters in different parts of the field of action, and relieved some by others from time to time; but there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative, that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope's Odyssey yesterday: it is as correct and elegant after our canon of today, as if it were newly written. The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done, I feel as if I did; what is ill-done, I reck not of. Shakspeare's passages of passion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of the present year. I am faithful again to the whole over the members in my use of books. I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a manner least flattering to the author. I read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and the imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment, for its rich colors. 'Tis not Proclus, but a piece of nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see the author's author, than himself. A higher pleasure of the same kind I found lately at a concert, where I went to hear Handel's Messiah. As the master overpowered the littleness and incapableness of the performers, and made them conductors of his electricity, so it was easy to observe what efforts nature was making through so many hoarse, wooden, and imperfect persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid and soul-guided men and women. The genius of nature was paramount at the oratorio.
This preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of that deification of art, which is found in all superior minds. Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes. Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much. In modern sculpture, picture, and poetry, the beauty is miscellaneous; the artist works here and there, and at all points, adding and adding, instead of unfolding the unit of his thought. Beautiful details we must have, or no artist: but they must be means and never other. The eye must not lose sight for a moment of the purpose. Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and the cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. When they grow older, they respect the argument.
We obey the same intellectual integrity, when we study in exceptions the law of the world. Anomalous facts, as the never quite obsolete rumors of magic and demonology, and the new allegations of phrenologists and neurologists, are of ideal use. They are good indications. Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time. So with Mesmerism, Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial Church; they are poor pretensions enough, but good criticism on the science, philosophy, and preaching of the day. For these abnormal insights of the adepts, ought to be normal, and things of course.
All things show us, that on every side we are very near to the best. It seems not worth while to execute with too much pains some one intellectual, or aesthetical, or civil feat, when presently the dream will scatter, and we shall burst into universal power. The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes.
Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all the agents with which we deal are subalterns, which we can well afford to let pass, and life will be simpler when we live at the centre, and flout the surfaces. I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals. Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in household matters, the divine man does not respect them: he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the surface of the water. But this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh particulars. It is all idle talking: as much as a man is a whole, so is he also a part; and it were partial not to see it. What you say in your pompous distribution only distributes you into your class and section. You have not got rid of parts by denying them, but are the more partial. You are one thing, but nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment. She will not remain orbed in a thought, but rushes into persons; and when each person, inflamed to a fury of personality, would conquer all things to his poor crotchet, she raises up against him another person, and by many persons incarnates again a sort of whole. She will have all. Nick Bottom cannot play all the parts, work it how he may: there will be somebody else, and the world will be round. Everything must have its flower or effort at the beautiful, coarser or finer according to its stuff. They relieve and recommend each other, and the sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities. She punishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an induction which is rare and casual. We like to come to a height of land and see the landscape, just as we value a general remark in conversation. But it is not the intention of nature that we should live by general views. We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment. If we were not thus infatuated, if we saw the real from hour to hour, we should not be here to write and to read, but should have been burned or frozen long ago. She would never get anything done, if she suffered admirable Crichtons, and universal geniuses. She loves better a wheelwright who dreams all night of wheels, and a groom who is part of his horse: for she is full of work, and these are her hands. As the frugal farmer takes care that his cattle shall eat down the rowan, and swine shall eat the waste of his house, and poultry shall pick the crumbs, so our economical mother despatches a new genius and habit of mind into every district and condition of existence, plants an eye wherever a new ray of light can fall, and gathering up into some man every property in the universe, establishes thousandfold occult mutual attractions among her offspring, that all this wash and waste of power may be imparted and exchanged.
Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this incarnation and distribution of the godhead, and hence nature has her maligners, as if she were Circe; and Alphonso of Castille fancied he could have given useful advice. But she does not go unprovided; she has hellebore at the bottom of the cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of despots. The recluse thinks of men as having his manner, or as not having his manner; and as having degrees of it, more and less. But when he comes into a public assembly, he sees that men have very different manners from his own, and in their way admirable. In his childhood and youth, he has had many checks and censures, and thinks modestly enough of his own endowment. When afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitious circumstance, it seems the only talent: he is delighted with his success, and accounts himself already the fellow of the great. But he goes into a mob, into a banking-house, into a mechanic's shop, into a mill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each new place he is no better than an idiot: other talents take place, and rule the hour. The rotation which whirls every leaf and pebble to the meridian, reaches to every gift of man, and we all take turns at the top.
For nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what one has done before, than to do a new thing, that there is a perpetual tendency to a set mode. In every conversation, even the highest, there is a certain trick, which may be soon learned by an acute person, and then that particular style continued indefinitely. Each man, too, is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power. Hence the immense benefit of party in politics, as it reveals faults of character in a chief, which the intellectual force of the persons, with ordinary opportunity, and not hurled into aphelion by hatred, could not have seen. Since we are all so stupid, what benefit that there should be two stupidities! It is like that brute advantage so essential to astronomy, of having the diameter of the earth's orbit for a base of its triangles. Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation of all men into a few men. If John was perfect, why are you and I alive? As long as any man exists, there is some need of him; let him fight for his own. A new poet has appeared; a new character approached us; why should we refuse to eat bread, until we have found his regiment and section in our old army-files? Why not a new man? Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of Skeneateles, of Northampton: why so impatient to baptise them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or Shakers, or by any known and effete name? Let it be a new way of living. Why have only two or three ways of life, and not thousands? Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much. We came this time for condiments, not for corn. We want the great genius only for joy; for one star more in our constellation, for one tree more in our grove. But he thinks we wish to belong to him, as he wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes us. I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though it were only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.
"Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!"
To embroil the confusion, and make it impossible to arrive at any general statement, when we have insisted on the imperfection of individuals, our affections and our experience urge that every individual is entitled to honor, and a very generous treatment is sure to be repaid. A recluse sees only two or three persons, and allows them all their room; they spread themselves at large. The man of state looks at many, and compares the few habitually with others, and these look less. Yet are they not entitled to this generosity of reception? and is not munificence the means of insight? For though gamesters say, that the cards beat all the players, though they were never so skilful, yet in the contest we are now considering, the players are also the game, and share the power of the cards. If you criticise a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your own caricature of him. For there is somewhat spheral and infinite in every man, especially in every genius, which, if you can come very near him, sports with all your limitations. For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminating my own soul. After taxing Goethe as a courtier, artificial, unbelieving, worldly, — I took up this book of Helena, and found him an Indian of the wilderness, a piece of pure nature like an apple or an oak, large as morning or night, and virtuous as a briar-rose.
But care is taken that the whole tune shall be played. If we were not kept among surfaces, every thing would be large and universal: now the excluded attributes burst in on us with the more brightness, that they have been excluded. "Your turn now, my turn next," is the rule of the game. The universality being hindered in its primary form, comes in the secondary form of all sides: the points come in succession to the meridian, and by the speed of rotation, a new whole is formed. Nature keeps herself whole, and her representation complete in the experience of each mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. It is the secret of the world that all things subsist, and do not die, but only retire a little from sight, and afterwards return again. Whatever does not concern us, is concealed from us. As soon as a person is no longer related to our present well-being, he is concealed, or dies, as we say. Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our nature, they act on us not at once, but in succession, and we are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we have known, are here present, and many more than we see; the world is full. As the ancient said, the world is a plenum or solid; and if we saw all things that really surround us, we should be imprisoned and unable to move. For, though nothing is impassable to the soul, but all things are pervious to it, and like highways, yet this is only whilst the soul does not see them. As soon as the soul sees any object, it stops before that object. Therefore, the divine Providence, which keeps the universe open in every direction to the soul, conceals all the furniture and all the persons that do not concern a particular soul, from the senses of that individual. Through solidest eternal things, the man finds his road, as if they did not subsist, and does not once suspect their being. As soon as he needs a new object, suddenly he beholds it, and no longer attempts to pass through it, but takes another way. When he has exhausted for the time the nourishment to be drawn from any one person or thing, that object is withdrawn from his observation, and though still in his immediate neighborhood, he does not suspect its presence.
Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead: he is very well alive: nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names under which they go.
If we cannot make voluntary and conscious steps in the admirable science of universals, let us see the parts wisely, and infer the genius of nature from the best particulars with a becoming charity. What is best in each kind is an index of what should be the average of that thing. Love shows me the opulence of nature, by disclosing to me in my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal depth of good in every other direction. It is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.
The end and the means, the gamester and the game, — life is made up of the intermixture and reaction of these two amicable powers, whose marriage appears beforehand monstrous, as each denies and tends to abolish the other. We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie; Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech; — All things are in contact; every atom has a sphere of repulsion; — Things are, and are not, at the same time; — and the like. All the universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly, therefore, I assert, that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and science; and now further assert, that, each man's genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as his nature is found to be immense; and now I add, that every man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field, goes through every point of pumpkin history. The rabid democrat, as soon as he is senator and rich man, has ripened beyond possibility of sincere radicalism, and unless he can resist the sun, he must be conservative the remainder of his days. Lord Eldon said in his old age, "that, if he were to begin life again, he would be damned but he would begin as agitator."
We hide this universality, if we can, but it appears at all points. We are as ungrateful as children. There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us, but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses; then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful, by the energy and heart with which she does them, and seeing this, we admire and love her and them, and say, "Lo! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated, or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care!" insinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others.
If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and join the crusade, could have any certificate that tomorrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony! But the Truth sits veiled there on the Bench, and never interposes an adamantine syllable; and the most sincere and revolutionary doctrine, put as if the ark of God were carried forward some furlongs, and planted there for the succor of the world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside by the same speaker, as morbid; "I thought I was right, but I was not," — and the same immeasurable credulity demanded for new audacities. If we were not of all opinions! if we did not in any moment shift the platform on which we stand, and look and speak from another! if there could be any regulation, any 'one-hour-rule,' that a man should never leave his point of view, without sound of trumpet. I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.
How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words! My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption. Is it that every man believes every other to be an incurable partialist, and himself an universalist? I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers: I endeavored to show my good men that I love everything by turns, and nothing long; that I loved the centre, but doated on the superficies; that I loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats; that I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan world stood its ground, and died hard; that I was glad of men of every gift and nobility, but would not live in their arms. Could they but once understand, that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them Godspeed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, it would be a great satisfaction.

Advanced American Literature

Monday, March 12, 2007

HUCK FINN ESSAY QUESTIONS

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Huck Finn Project

Huck Finn Project

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

EMILY DICKINSON

Thursday, January 25, 2007

SAMPLE ESSAY #1

SAMPLE ESSAY #2

SAMPLE ESSAY #3

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

"Self-Reliance" Assignments

ANALYSIS OF EMERSON'S "SELF-RELIANCE"

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Emerson's "The New-England Reformers"

Emerson's "Nominalists and Realists"

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