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…
Posts tagged emerson
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…
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…
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…
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…
Anonymous Labor
To be read as postscript to “The Factory Store.” The Future (and Past) is Yours, Young Women! Brought to you by the Cook Group, owners of Bloomington, Indiana, and Ivy Tech, Cook’s publicly subsidized employee…
Off the Wall: Educating Tomorrow’s Paradigm Today
Today, while checking the jobs board at my local school district I noticed a new position (new to me). Here it is: Digital Learning Coach: Coach serves as part of multiple educational teams, providing job-imbedded…
Studied Corruption
For some weeks (months?) my mind has not been very focused. Rather, perhaps, I do not know how to speak of a right or a wrong when they are so plainly intermixed in our dailiness. …