Word: emerson
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During the first week of school, I had just been trying to picture our large double as army barracks when under our door was slid the official Harvard list: "Occupants of Hollis 5." As we scanned the list we noticed three names: first, that of Ralph Waldo Emerson '21 (that's 1821), who lived in our room in 1818-19. Then, three pages down the list were printed our names: Flora Ting-ting Kao and Susannah Barton Tobin, Class of 2000. After the initial thrill of "living in Ralph's room," my next response was straight out of "Wayne...
Even the gate we enter from the Science Center with its quote from Emerson's September 13, 1836, journal entry is a description of Harvard men stretching back to eternity...
...before breakfast at Annenberg can provide the sustenance to invigorate the crimson cells and platelets. For others it is possibly greatest when going to class in subjects that have been shaped by the men who have become these ghosts. Think of government: Adams, Adams, Roosevelt, Roosevelt and Kennedy; philosophy: Emerson, Santayana, William James; the sciences: Agassiz, Bowdich and all those Nobel laureates; and literature: from John Harvard himself, who hailed from the same town as Shakespeare, to Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot...
...find that middle ground between valuing these ghosts too much and ignoring them as best we can in the interest of our own sanity and independence. My own solution--and this more a guideline than a rule--has come from using the wisdom of my ghostly Hollis roommate, R.W. Emerson himself. We know how he favored independence and how he wasn't afraid to be creatively inconsistent. As he said (probably around fall term?), "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...
...little inconsistent when I want to treasure the past and simultaneously find a space in Harvard's history for myself and my classmates right now. I believe that we who have no trouble appreciating the achievements of the past can avoid being awestruck to the point of inactivity. Emerson provides the answer in his journal, a copy of which he evidently left in our room, like a snowflake from the antler of Blitzen or one of Santa's whiskers. It is the last part of the same entry on the wall of the Science Center gate...