View From a Height

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As part of my new What Do I Do With All This Free Time Liberal Arts Self-Education Program (WDIDWATFT LASEP), I've been working through the Teaching Company's Classics of American Literature. You see, in order to get anything out of the course, you actually have to read the books, which presented a problem up until recently.

The second author in the series is Ralph "Don't Ask Where's?" Waldo Emerson. Emerson was a deeply subversive writer, but the lecturer points out that very intelligent, well-educated people often walked out of his lectures not quite sure what he had been talking about. As with certain recent President candidates, this may be more an assumption of intelligence than an actual reflection thereof.

Still, some individual quotes are quite striking:

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things?

Heh. Newton thought of the calculus, which he called "fluxions," while he was trying to solve the problem of calculating the flow of a river around a bend. I have no idea if Emerson was aware of this, but I don't see any reason to assume he wasn't.

Thus architecture is called "frozen music" by De Stael and Goethe. Vitrivius thought an architect should be a musician.

There's an overused quote, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." If the quote really is older than a 1983 interview with Elvis Costello - and there's no a priori reason we should credit him with this original thought - then it probably means something other than the way he used it, that writing about music was absurd. I have my own ideas, but the floor is open for interpretations.

And then, from "The American Scholar," one I like the best.

Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close (emphasis added -ed.)

Remember, Emerson was writing only a few years after de Toqueville, when the country was still slightly bewildering to a European for its attention to business and its restlessness. He wasn't arguing that business was bad, only that the country also needed scholarship.

And he certainly wasn't arguing for bookishness. Instead, he was hoping for a peculiarly American type of literature, poetry, and scholarship, informed by but not dependent on (or overly reverent of) our European heritage

That's a hope that one of our main political parties appears to have abandoned.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Substitute Ward Churchill, Catherine McKinnon, and Cornell West, and you'd get a fair sense of academia today. Leaving aside the rather dramatic dropoff in the quality of thought, it doesn't appear that academia's defense of its orthodoxies is any different now from then. But if I had to have my child brainwashed, I'd rather it were by Cicero, Locke, and Bacon.