Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sage of the Way.

Will O' The Wisps

Those—dying then,
Knew where they went—
They went to God’s Right Hand—
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found—

The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small—
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all—

~Emily Dickinson

Spirits In The Material World

There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution

We are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world

Our so-called leaders speak
With words they try to jail you
They subjugate the meek
But it's the rhetoric of failure

We are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world

Where does the answer lie?
Living from day to day
If it's something we can't buy
There must be another way

We are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world

Songwriter: Gordon Sumner
Spirits in the Material World lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Transcendentalism 2017

The Fountain-Light Of All Our Day

Where the sun rises in the West.

The Dervish In Ecstasy

A crisp Autumn night, hot apple cider with cinnamon and cloves, Mendelssohn's piano trio no. 1 in D minor, op. 49, on the stereo, a volume of Emerson in his lap, his faithful dog curled up at his side.

The madness of governments shall not penetrate this sweetness.

The dervish knows, however, that such tranquility cannot last. He lives, even as ibn al-waqt, on borrowed time.

The Empire does not sleep, its criminality rampant.

The genius of Concord has been appropriated according to the needs of the moment but otherwise cast aside.

Piano, violin, and cello are little more than a luxury this evening.

The dervish sighs: How long have I rested? A day or part of a day? Tomorrow comes soon enough. Let us enjoy these stolen moments while we can...

The Emerson Most Worth Preserving

The most striking qualities of Emerson's work often tend to get lost when we yield too quickly to the temptation of casting him as epitomizing the values of nation or regional tribe, instead of conceiving him in tension between such a role and a more cosmopolitan sense of how a writer-intellectual should think and be. Emerson is almost always at his most interesting when striving to free his mind from parochial entanglements of whatever sort. Not that he always succeeded in doing so. Sometimes the effort just led him back to stereotypes again, into programmatic tributes to the greatness of the self-sufficient individual. At best, however, he opened up the prospect of a much more profound sense of the nature, challenge, and promise of mental emancipation, whatever one's race, sex, or nation might be. That is the Emerson most worth preserving.

~Lawrence Buell, Emerson, 4-5.

Read Emerson

Not uncritically, but not selectively either. Read him in full for the vigor of his prose: prose powered by erudite conviction. Erudite, but not academic.

Read him devotionally, as Nietzsche read him.

Read him for a map to the road not taken.



Read him and recognize in his poems, essays, and journals what Rilke recognized as he gazed at an archaic torso of Apollo.

Read Emerson and stop imagining that anybody buys your alibis.

Nietzsche On Emerson

Nietzsche to Overbeck, December 22, 1884

"...I am having translated into German...a longish essay by Emerson, which gives some clarity about his development...I do not know how much I would give if only I could bring it about, ex post facto, that such a glorious, great nature, rich in soul and spirit, might have gone through some strict discipline, a really scientific education. As it is, in Emerson we have lost a philosopher...."

Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, 440-441.

Emerson died in 1882.



We have to ask: Is the loss of a philosopher so great a thing? Glorious, great natures, rich in soul and spirit are not exactly a dime a dozen.

A Genre Unto Himself

If you are attracted to a kind of creative writing given over to pondering how life should be led; if you relish virtuoso displays of mental energy and "inspired" thinking that doesn't try to fill in all the blanks; if you find yourself vexed by the spectacle of unused or wasted resources in yourself or others--if such things matter to you, then Emerson's writing probably will too.

~Lawrence Buell, Emerson, 3.

Ceci N'Est Pas Une Vie

More here.

"He Who Knows Himself Knows His Lord"

What "gnostic" declaration could be more Emersonian than that?

Pyrrhonist, Pilgrim, Stranger

"Skepticism...is a part of the history of religious thought."
~Paul L. Heck, Skepticism in Classical Islam, p. 11.

A Religious Demonstration

First Wave Transcendentalism consisted, as Perry Miller observed, of "young Unitarians who between 1830 and 1840 revolted against Unitarianism (even those who came from non-Unitarian backgrounds, like Alcott and Brownson, had to move through a Unitarian stage in order thereafter to become Transcendentalists by rejecting it!)...The protest of these few troubled spirits against what their society had confidently assumed was the crowning triumph of progress and enlightenment is therefore a portent for America, all the more because their protest was the result of no organized indoctrination, but was entirely spontaneous and instinctive...The Transcendentalists did not need to be unified upon any one creed or platform because they were already united in the community of the heart; they had all grown miserable and disgusted within what Emerson called 'the corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College.' This was the ethos of their youth; their ultimate condemnation of this ethos, after an agony of soul-searching and fumbling, is nothing less than the first of a succession of revolts by the youth of America against American Philistinism. Which is to imply...that the Transcendental movement is most accurately to be defined as a religious demonstration...Unless [Transcendentalist] literature be read as fundamentally an expression of a religious radicalism in revolt against a rational conservatism, it will not be understood; if it is so interpreted, then the deeper undertone can be heard. Once it is heard, the literature becomes, even in its more fatuous reaches, a protest of the human spirit against emotional starvation."

~Miller, The Transcendentalists, 7-8.

First Wave Transcendentalism

The "Transcendental episode...was a struggle with ideas, a struggle in earnest under devastating handicaps. In the final reckoning, what counts is not what the people did, but what the ideas meant. They broached these ideas, and so gave them to the American tradition...Granted that their service to the ideas was hindered by their shortcomings, by their lack of scholarship and sophistication, by their ignorance of history and logic, and most of all by their precommitment to making literature a substitute for religion, and religion a substitute for philosophy--still, the Transcendental movement was the most energetic and extensive upsurge of the mind and spirit enacted in America until the intellectual crisis of the 1920's."

~Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists (1950), pp. 14-15.

Dweller On The Threshold