September 30: I hate working

because now I can't give today's Emerson (King of Blowhards) essay the attention it deserves. I think I'll bullet-point my way through it. (One of these days I should live-blog one of these suckers -- it's hard to believe from my 1/8th-inch-thick analysis, but I actually do read these before starting to type.) OK:

• Emerson is to assertion what In-N-Out 100x100 is to lunch -- heavy on the overkill. For instance:

What fact more conspicuous in modern history, than the creation of the gentleman?

How about...the steam engine? But he's writing about "Manners" so manners is the most important and crucial thing that anyone could possibly imagine, and the proof of it is that he, Emerson, is writing about it.

The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.

Although he also said this, about the non-gentlemanly life, awhile back:

He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come to these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.

Truly this man was King of the Blowhards.

• It's also worth noting that, for an American scholar, he is quite into the natural aristocracy of everything. I'm a horrible elitist myself (that is, I believe in it, but I'm bad at it) so I don't disagree. In fact, I give him credit for recognizing that this elitism must be based in flux because the people you want in it might come from someplace completely un-obvious:

It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely that class who have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this hour, and, though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest and highest tone of human feeling, is as good as the whole society permits it to be.

Emphasis added there at the end, because I think that's right too -- nobody's forcing us to have stumblebums and airheads as our most powerful and admired people, that's just who we've anointed, though they are mighty far for purity or the gladdest tone of human feeling. In fact, their next human feeling with be their first, it seems like.

• And dig, if you will, this passage:

Fine manners show themselves formidable to the uncultivated man. They are a subtler science of defence to parry and intimidate; but once matched by the skill of the other party, they drop the point of the sword,—points and fences disappear, and the youth finds himself in a more transparent atmosphere, wherein life is a less troublesome game, and not a misunderstanding rises between the players.

Doesn't it seem like they should be making out? And this:

Know you before all heaven and earth, that this is Andrew, and this is Gergory;—they look each other in the eye; that grasp each other’s hand, to identify and signalize each other. It is a great satisfaction.

Mm-hmm. No wonder he doesn't talk about women in this excerpt.

• Finally, here's the meat:

September 9: The Worst Day Fishing Is Better Than The Best Day Philosophizing

So yesterday I was reading a Dial M post about the above ad, from 1965, and the Chrysler ad copy cited in this passage:

What this demonstrates is what Thomas Frank shows us in The Conquest of Cool -- the modern style of advertising (funny, self-deprecatory, low-key, wise to the minutiae of pop culture) was not a "co-optation" of hip culture, but one of its principal creations. Compare the style of this ad with another 1965 ad for the Chrysler Imperial. (Nice car!) Note the bombastic appeal to the highest of high technology and the finest of fine materials:

The claro Walnut used within an Imperial is found only in Northwestern United States, and Eastern Kashmir.

Flitches [huh?] of the walnut (thin slices to be used as inlays) [oh] are examined for color, consistency, and directional grain.

Out of every 52 1/2 pounds of harvested fine-grain claro walnut, only eight ounces are fit for the Imperial.

The 52 1/2 pounds was a nice touch. It's science! And I also like the idea that extravagant waste is a necessary part of making such a fine automobile. ("We then shoot the remaining 52 pounds of claro walnut into high earth orbit, where it will remain for 4426 years, finally being immolated as plunges back to earth, its fiery trajectory through the starry firmament a fitting memorial to the Imperial's custom styling.")

reminds me of this passage:

The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles.

Yes, it's Emerson, king of blowhards, again, and on the greatest blowhard subject of all, Nature (capital N). I guess it reminds me of the Chrysler ad because the Chrysler ad is one of the very last, diminished returns of this kind of He-Man writing style. The hipsters are urban, and, yes, Emerson hates them too:

My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river; and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight... I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces.... He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come to these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.

Personally, as a city boy, I rebel against this thinking. There seems to be a kind of expansive misanthropy in this essay -- what are we, compared to a pine cone? "Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man." It is left to the reader, I guess, to work out just how this thermometer works.

As always in my encounters with Emerson, I instantly cringe at the bombast but also pick out something to like -- here, it's his observation that Americans can't just go into the woods to admire it, they have to have a practical excuse:

A susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind, without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling piece, or a fishing-rod.

But -- and this is what makes Emerson so American to me -- he thinks this is actually a good thing: "I suppose this shame must have a good reason." For a guy who made his living writing and talking, Emerson sure had it in for the arts & sciences.

August 31: Emerson hates you

Nerd cake. Don't let Emerson see you eat it.

Do you like to read? Do you like to find out what great minds have thought, or are thinking, about the issues which concern us all, or escape into the world of a great story well-told? If so, Ralph Waldo Emerson would, with reservations, like to kick you in the groin:

Hence, instead of Man Thinking we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class who value books as such.... Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees....Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When we can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.

It's "The American Scholar," delivered to a bunch of pantywaists 181 years ago today, and as such the foundation document of Rocky Todd-ism (something I realize I have referenced twice before in relation to Emerson).

Not that Emerson is against reading -- in certain situations, he's for it. Actually what he seems to be for is misreading, in the Harold Bloom sense of the word (note that I have never read any Bloom, I'm just picking it up from the street) -- i.e., strongly and strenuously and bravely and manfully imposing your own brawny American powerful hairy reading on the nerd whose writing happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when it met you:

One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion...The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part,—only the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s and Shakespeare’s.

The discerning (almost literally, the illuminati) get to decide what authentic is. The rest of you can just go back to your sherry.

Also, get a job:

Years are well spent in country labors; in town, in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art,—to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions...This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the workyard made.

Maybe it's appropriate to the Genius of this country that one of our founding intellectual documents should be so anti-intellectual.

July 29: So Emerson and Carlyle walk into Stonehenge

It is important to enjoy the obvious.

Although I'm actually not that interested in Stone'enge -- it's cool and all, but it doesn't have the hold on me that it does on, say, Nigel Tufnel. What does have a hold on me is what you could do there that you could never, never do now:

We walked round the stones, and clambered over them, to wont ourselves with their strange aspect and groupings, and found a nook sheltered from the wind among them, where C. lighted his cigar.

Clambered over them. Is the visitor allowed to clamber now, much less light up a smoke? I've never been; maybe you are allowed to get a good Druidical clamber.

So, even though this piece of Emerson is from English Traits, what's more germane is (and perhaps of course) Emerson on America. First of all, he gets all Thoreauvian:

My friends asked whether there were any Americans?—any with an American idea,—any theory of the right future of that country? Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of caucuses nor congress, neither of presidents nor of cabinet-ministers, nor of such as would make of America another Europe. I thought only of the simplest and purest minds; I said, “Certainly yes;—but those who hold it are fanatics of a dream which I should hardly care to relate to your English ears, to which it might be only ridiculous,—and yet it is the only true.”

So I opened the dogma of no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, it is true that I have never seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this truth, and yet it is plain to me that no less valor than this can command my respect. I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar musketworship,—though great men be musket-worshippers;—and ’tis certain, as God liveth, the gun that does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution.

Well, the revolution will not be essayed; five years later the Civil War started, and there was plenty of musketworship to be had, and ever after; though the valor of the peacenik is still with us too -- one can only imagine that the damage might have been worse without these dissenters.

Then there's this:

...my friends asked many questions respecting American landscape, forests, houses,—my house, for example. It is not easy to answer these queries well. There I thought, in America, lies nature sleeping, overgrowing, almost conscious, too much by half for man in the picture, and so giving a certain tristesse, like the rank vegetation of swamps and forests seen at night, steeped in dews and rains, which it loves; and on it man seems not able to make much impression.

Too much nature for man gives way to tristesse? I think the tristesse is all the other way these days:


Hey, it's our own Stonehenge! Only in our case it's a burial ground of equity.

May 25: We could be heroes -- if our writing were more organized

I am single-dading it this weekend, so I am not going to give Emerson's "Heroism" the treatment I'd like to...unless single-dading it for a weekend makes me a hero!

Nah, I don't think so either. Anyway, even though I can hardly HTML format straight, let me start this kind of this-n-that post with some bracing Emersonian prose:

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary.

Oh shit. Well, I deny it; I think there's still plenty of mileage left for me to get out of my high school Latin medal, no matter what Emerson says.

This project has softened me on Emerson. I mean, he's still a blowhard, and there's a lot of the Rocky Todd in him, and yet I can't help nodding my head from time to time. It's probably because I'm becoming a blowhard, but, whereas I always hated having him shoved down my throat, now that school is over I can appreciate him for what he is. It's kind of like the way I feel about disco.

In this essay he started to win me over when he talked about hospitality as a characteristic of the large-souled hero:

Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon narrowly the loss of time and the unusual display: the soul of a better quality thrusts back the unseasonable economy into the vaults of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire he will provide.

My wife is like this; she loves to feed and water people who wander by, but without the Emersonian touch of acknowledging that she is thrusting back unseasonable economies into the vaults of life. She just likes conversation.

The Emersonian way seems to be to shove five pounds of potatoes into a ten-pound sack, and then spray paint the sack gold:

Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude of his behavior.

"Let him hear in season..." The whole construction is ornate, but I love the "in season" -- it's such an extra dipsy-doodle, it's like tailfins on a Cadillac. Ditto "dancing in the weeds of peace." The executive summary is "Always do right."

Aside: one of the things about reading a variety of authors, as this project requires you to do, is that you start to realize that there are only so many stances one can take about human affairs -- pretty much everyone is in favor of "rectitude in behavior," always has been -- and that originality consists of providing new frosting on the age-old cake.

And yet the truth is that frosting is delicious. The dailyness of our lives can be a little dull, and it's nice to think, when I am driving the kids to their various lessons, that "the unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure duties is hardening the character to that temper which will work with honor, if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold."

Apr 27: Emerson, king of blowhards

Sometimes I'll be doing my reading and I'll wonder, "Why again did the Daily Reading Guide tell me this would be good for me?" So today, with Emerson's On Beauty. I couldn't remember what attitude I was supposed to take towards it, so I went back to the Daily Reading Guide and found this: "The Puritan world feared Beauty. Emerson, great American essayist and philosopher, declared that the world was made for beauty, and openly worshiped at beauty's shrine."

Not before declaring war on science first, though. Emerson has this problem with facts, which is that they are factual:

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary.

But that is to want things to be different from what they are. I mean, we should go to ornithologist with a new feeling, if he would give us a solid-gold Cadillac when we did so. But that's not what ornithologists do. And, of course, they probably do know a lot more about what the social birds are saying these days, which shows you that Emerson was impatient in addition to having his head up his ass.

I mean, read this passage:

Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power,—that was in the right direction.

One hardly finds enough pro-alchemy arguments these days! (Outside of the National Review, presumably.)

So then, after wishing away science and its stupid dull invention of smallpox vaccinations, etc., we're now ready to tackle something really important -- what is Beauty? Well, I'm confident the Old Alchemist is ready to settle this once and for all:

I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt a definition of Beauty. I will rather enumerate a few of its qualities.

Good job, Ralph. Depending on how much he got paid for this by the Atlantic, he really found a way to transmute shit into gold. And, to show you what kind of readership Emerson was expecting in his day, here's a choice passage:

The felicities of design in art, or in works of Nature, are shadows or forerunners of that beauty which reaches its ...height in woman. ...A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, and eloquence, in all whom she approaches. ...Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she [Which "she"? Nature? Woman? Someone Emerson hit on at an ice-cream social?] often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, “Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold.”

Or maybe the expression seems to say, "Do you ever shut up?" But you'll agree this is hardly a passage that could end with, "Am I right, ladies?"

Finally, in getting around to talking about how appeal to the imagination is Beauty's highest quality, Emerson betrays the source of his dislike of Science:

The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of every thing into every other thing. Facts which had never before left their stark common sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations. ...What! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom! I cry you mercy, good shoe-box! I did not know you were a jewel-case.

The problem with science is that it's not more like the "Be Our Guest" number from Disney's "Beauty and the Beast," apparently.

Try the Transcendentalism, it's delicious!
Don't believe me? Ask the dishes!

Oh, brother.

I guess I wouldn't mind it so much except Emerson has that "we" tick, like towards the end:

Wherever we begin, thither our steps tend: an ascent from the joy of a horse in his trappings, up to the perception of Newton, that the globe on which we ride is only a larger apple falling from a larger tree; up to the perception of Plato...

What do you mean "we," white man?

Mar 11: I over-Compensate

So today is part of Emerson's On Compensation, and I was kind of dreading it. As a comedy writer, I have sworn on the altar of God to mock anyone who writes

It seemed to me also that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of the Soul of this world...

-- and my impression is that's basically what Emerson is all about. And then I went to a wedding one time where Emerson was the reading. Yes, at least it's not "Let me not to the marriage of true minds," but nothing makes the mind wander like Emerson read by one of your college friends -- and not the friend who tried to become an actor, either.

So, two strikes, but I actually wound up liking it. It started slow, of course, with that line about the Soul. (The literal start, though, is great -- "Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation" -- what fun around the schoolyard!) And there's a whole bunch of throat-clearing to the effect of, "I, Ralph Waldo Emerson, am smarter than my preacher." But then he gets down to brass tacks, which is good, because we've gone a couple pages without having a clue as to what we're talking about when we talk about Compensation:

POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature....Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels... An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman...

And I thought, holy shit, this is my wedding! For the Mrs. and I had this passage of Wallace Stevens read (again, by a non-actor):

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.

Nice, huh? Plus an open bar -- the perfect wedding. So now I'm on Emerson's side, especially as he goes into a paragraph that could be summed up as, Mo Money Mo Problems:

If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner.

But then I think he takes it too far. First of all Emerson indulges in a little Rocky Todd-ism:

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff;

And then what sets me off more is that he makes it too perfect:

Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. [Greek]. The dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.

This, I think, is obviously untrue. Every crime is punished? I think his rhetoric is leading him astray. Look at this:

Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Pretty writing, but I get the impression that, because Emerson can make his sentences balance, he thinks the universe must balance also. Plus also, too, as well, the metaphors don't jibe. Punishment is the end of pleasure-- its goal (as the fruit is the goal of the seed)? Really? I didn't even know eating desserts had a goal, much less that it's, I don't know, cavities.

(Unless, of course, we resort to dime-store psychology. Take Spitzer and the hookers. He started using them after he screwed up the beginning of his governorship -- maybe this was just a sexy way to get out of being governor. In that sense the punishment truly was the end of the pleasure. Seems pretty crackpot, though.)

But I don't want to grouse too much. I found this reading teeth-sinking good, even if, in this excerpt, it comes down to taking the bitter with the sweet. That's what this project is all about too.