The following poem by Emerson sits as introduction to his essay “Experience.” This is the piece of writing in which he shockingly says, Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son…
Browsing Category Literature
Examining the Beats
For Eric and the forthcoming teacher-student collaborative blog: “The Monkey-Rope.” From The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) The novel ends in a figuration that is so well-known that I thought it would interesting…
Listening to Literature, or Hearing Hard Words
I believe I’ve said somewhere else that I really only discovered a “fecundity” of thinking in myself* when I started listening to audiobooks while walking. You know how you need to justify reading to yourself…
Thou Vain Toy
For Bobby C., underlinings from an essay by Morse Peckham, “Man’s Use of Nature,” offering powder and ball to my NO! in thunder. And, perhaps as expected, Ahab will have the last word. *** An…
The Monkey Rope, Or Our Common Umbilical
We live in a kind of false paradigm of “self-reliance.” I don’t need to blame Waldo for this but perhaps he does bear a good bit of the burden for at the very least his…
Power Agent in Repose
The previous post offers a kind of temperamental and philosophical comparison between two our most fecund writers and thinkers. The section out of Emerson is representative of both his power and his risible ambivalence. This…
The Dart’s the Thing: Melville on Emerson
“All men live enveloped in whale line.” Self-Reliance (Waldo) 1841 Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to…
The Jesus-Prop–The State at War and the Lie of Humanitarianism
You’ve read rant upon rant about the topics in the title of this post if you’ve stopped here for any length of time or visited now and then over the months. One runs down. But…
What Advance in Happiness?
The following is from Chapter 18 of Melville’s Typee. The character Marnoo is a “tabu” person who can travel relatively freely among all the tribes without eliciting historical animosities due to his “exceptional” qualities (one…
Born of Whale Oil and Witches
[T]his remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness, a receptacle for Lions, Wolves, Bears, Foxes, Rockoones, Bags, Bevers, Otters, and all kind of wild creatures, a place never afforded the Natives better than the flesh of…