Word: emerson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...century: the hundred-year collapse of America's "communal ties." And he knows who did it. For undermining "the authenticating offices of the family and society" and putting a wobble in America's "sense of direction since the mid-nineteenth century," Wanted, Dead or Alive: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry James...
...Emerson masterminded the "beginning of the dissolution of society." With him, "society was not spurned; it was judged irrelevant." As the ultimate Protestant, Emerson liked to boast that "a great man should occupy the whole space between...
...Emerson was in love with the vibrations of his soul, says Anderson. Whitman was even more narrowly self-concerned: he was in love with the smell of his armpits. Whitman swallowed cities, rivers, people in a sort of king-cannibal self. The firmament existed only to serve as his drum...
...foot and the common cold on the scale of national perils-is that we don't understand the deeper implications of the disease. In his classic essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell pointed out what should be obvious -that sloppy language makes for sloppy thought. Emerson went so far as to suggest that bad rhetoric meant bad men. Semantic aphasia, both men recognized, kills after all. "And the Lord said: 'Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.' " Is there a more...
...were all a little mad that winter," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, recalling the emotional excitement of 1840. "Not a man of us that did not have a plan for some new Utopia in his pocket." As common as a handkerchief and as casually displayed. Today, pockets seem to be empty of anything so inspiring. People are doubtless as distressed about social conditions as they were in 1840, but what has happened to Utopia? Those once myriad visions of ideal societies have all but disappeared, or have been transmogrified into the demonic dreams of science-fiction. Gone are the blessed isles...