Word: emerson
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...Emerson asked: "Why drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory?" Why haul around the dead past, a sackful of traumas? One answer is that sometimes it is not dead at all. Sometimes there are debts to be paid, or monsters to be exorcized. If they are not, you live in a haunted house...
Students would be free to do anything they very well please. Some could choose to lounge on the steps of Widener and debate the finer points of Emerson or discuss the migratory patterns of the North American ibis. Others might choose to take a contemplative stroll along the Charles or play frisbee with blockmates. Maybe we could even take some of the Undergraduate Council's $40,000 and build a fort-thingy in the middle of the Yard...
...starters, if you equate nature with beauty--as Emerson and other transcendentalists tended to--then there is a kind of beauty in the unfolding of technology. It is a process of natural evolution, and may deserve the tribute that Darwin paid to organic evolution: "There is grandeur in this view of life...
...than a phone call is? And if so, why am I letting e-mail crowd out my phone calls?) There is indeed the sense sometimes that, like neurons, we subordinate ourselves to the efficiency of the larger whole--that technology wins in the end, that culture trumps biology. As Emerson put it, "There are two laws discrete, Not reconciled,--Law for man, and law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth the man unking...
...free to use the technology however we want, even if it takes real effort, inspired by a touch of resentment toward our would-be technological master. We can in theory follow Emerson's advice: "Let man serve law for man; Live for friendship, live for love." Maybe all along it was the destiny of our species to be enmeshed in a web that would give us the option to exercise either amity or enmity over unprecedented distance, with unprecedented power. There are worse fates than to have a choice like that...