Word: emersons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shame that Emerson had to harden into a monument, into mere required reading, or worse, the man superseded by Kurt Vonnegut on the course lists. Too many generations came to regard him as a chill, gnomic bore, the best of American aphorists, no doubt, but also the most relentless ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," "Traveling is a fool's paradise," "... fired the shot heard round the world," and even the 1960s' dreamy license, "Do your thing"). His fatally worthy subjects (Self-Reliance, Prudence, Friendship) have oppressed generations of eighth-grade English classes. People should...
...mild ex-Unitarian clairvoyant dead 100 years, Emerson is still capable of stirring surprising hostility. In a baccalaureate address to his senior class last year, Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti blamed Emerson for the ugliest tendency of the American character - "a worship of power." Emerson, he said, "freed our politics and our politicians from any sense of restraint by extolling self-generated, unaffiliated power as the best foot to place in the small of the back of the man in front of you." This is Emerson as the imperialist Rotarian. It is Emerson as Uncle Sam in a Nietzsche...
Earlier readers had a deeper problem with Emerson. His voice seemed too rarefied, ethereal to the point of disconnection with reality - and in any case demonstrably incomplete. He seemed almost bizarrely and willfully ignorant about the darker side of things. Henry James put his finger on it with an exquisite condescension: a "ripe unconsciousness of evil ... is one of the most beautiful signs by which we know him." The Candide of Concord...
...Emerson was the rhapsodist of beginnings. In the disintegration of Puritanism, he cut loose from the granite Thou Shalt Nots of his forebears, seven generations of New England clergy. The 20th century has apocalyptic fantasies about the end of things. The trajectory of our thoughts tends to be downward. We are transfixed by Auschwitz and Hiroshima and Cambodia and Bangladesh and lesser barbarisms. The 20th century has rarely felt transcendental. What does Emerson's optimism have to say to such a civilization...
...Emerson should not be understood too quickly. As William James explained, "Emerson could perceive the full squalor of the individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration." Emerson had wonderful lines about the fallen world: "It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs...