An audio recording by Doug Storm from Emerson’s Nature. (10:52) Introduction: Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should [...]
Tag Archives: emerson
from “Self-Reliance” by Emerson
An audio recording by Doug Storm of the below selection from “Self-Reliance.” (13:24) from Essays: First Series (1841) Ralph Waldo Emerson “Ne te quaesiveris extra.” “Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too [...]
The Place Where They Cried
Audio Recording by Douglas Storm of a Letter by Ralph Waldo Emerson to President Van Buren regarding the forced removal and relocation (1836 and 1839) of the Cherokee Nation from their lands in Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina to the Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma) in the Western United States, which resulted in the deaths [...]
Emerson on Education Reform
An audio recording of this excerpt from “New England Reformers” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1844) read by Douglas Storm. 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 [...]
The Lords of Limit
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 [5-year-old Waldo], now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, — no more. I [...]
Master-ful-less-ly Supercilious
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, — – and our first thought is rendered back [...]
Where Be Your Tygers?
Let this serve as a kind of literary addendum to yesterday’s post. And let us first mark out some territory. Perhaps there are two ways that humans MEAN as beings. 1. The animal that may become a god. 2. Animate matter that will decay. That’s broad, sure, and I know there are other ways to [...]
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 is a kind of Bartlett’s for “individualism.” Living having been usurped by business interests we are inundated with a sermonizing [...]
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 is the Emerson that counsels the soul yet succors the she-wolf of mammon and the passing, scornful Days. He is [...]
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 a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world [...]
Articles
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The Chaos of Monoculture
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The Custom House: Louis Agassiz with Christoph Irmscher
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The Errant Goes Audible: The Custom House on WFHB
