Word: waldo
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...tends to override its memories. The best life lies ahead, like a highway heading west. There are American ghosts, of course, haunted rooms, secrets in the attic. But the virtue of the New World has always been its newness. "Why drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory?" Ralph Waldo Emerson asked. Henry Ford never looked back. "History," he said, "is more or less bunk...
EVEN BEFORE page one, the Harvard-centric nature of The Class is apparent, as Segal quotes William James on the joy of being a "son of Harvard," and notes that James received his M.D. (Harvard, of course) in 1869. Later, he also cites John Updike '54, Ralph Waldo Emerson '21 (1821, that is), e.e. cummings '15, ad nauseum. Most irritating, though, is his choice of members of the Class...
...Ralph Waldo Emerson, upon meeting Mary Ann Evans in 1848, said she possessed "a calm, serious soul." Twenty years later a young American visitor to London encountered Mary Ann, now famous as George Eliot. "Behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking," Henry James wrote to his father. "A mingled sagacity and sweetness--a broad hint of a great underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride and power." Two years before her death in 1880, Ivan Turgenev raised his glass at a party in an English country house and proposed a toast to Eliot: "The greatest living...
...declaring that she will no longer attend church. Speaking of the Scriptures, she pronounces, "I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction." There is no arguing with her; Eliot knows as much about theology as the clergymen affronted by her heresy. Even the Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson is impressed when she informs him that Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions is the first book to "awaken her to deep reflection...
...from descendant history. Running away from the past, into the future. Or away from the bad past anyway, the recent, misbegotten past, and into a better past, all mythy and sweetly vigorous, into that America where the future was full of endless possibility. Into an America where, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The only sin is limitation...