Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith - the Greater New England origins of successful modern Western spirituality and religion

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Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882 - Born in Boston and lived in Concord Massachusetts.

Joseph Smith 1805-1844 - Born in Vermont, raised in upstate New York.

I haven't blogged much about him, but I am - or was - something of an expert on Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle, especially Thoreau - having read... some hundreds of books? on the subject.

By contrast, I have only recently read about Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism); and it took me quite a while before I suddenly realized that they were almost exactly the same age and lived in the same region of Greater New England.

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Despite this, in most senses the two men were about as different as could be, and inhabited extremely different worlds.

Emerson was upper class, highly educated and widely read, literate and an extraordinarily powerful preacher/ lecturer; while JS was none of these.

Emerson's world was intensely cultivated and inhabited by famous intellectuals and artists; JS's world was raw, violent, in near turmoil - I was particularly struck by the continual, daily - almost hourly - possibility and actuality of unrestrained 'vigilante' mob violence.

(e.g. Shortly after he founded the Mormon Church, JS was severely beaten, tarred and feathered by a mob; and his castration was planned, he was stripped and tied to a board but at the last moment the doctor brought along for the purpose could not bring himself to do it. Emerson only encountered any such things in the pre-Civil War heights of anti-abolitionism.)

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Even in economic terms there was a stark contrast - Emerson's world was one of considerable security (by world historical standards) and for his early decades there was near zero poverty in Concord (Emerson was astonished by the poverty and depravity he saw in the much richer and more powerful cities of England); while Smith was himself poor, often hungry and lacking basic necessities; surrounded by poverty - families were continually uprooting and seeking subsistence, 'borrowing, begging etc.

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So much for the differences. Yet the similarities in terms of magnitude of international spiritual/ religious influence are striking.

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Emerson came from a Ministerial Calvinist (Puritan) background which moves through Unitarianism into Deist transcendentalism, and then a non-supernaturalist spiritualism focused on subjective sensations.

Thus Emerson, and his 'disciple' Thoreau, are spiritual and indeed lineal fathers of that vast modern phenomenon of Liberal New Age spirituality which dominate modern 'religious' seeking and expression

Emerson's spiritual influence was extremely large in scale, but diffuse in effect and tailing-off into mere entertainment and distraction.

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Joseph Smith has been hardly less successful in terms of influence, leaving the only Western form of Christianity that has retained its devoutness, grown rapidly in size by winning converts and above replacement fertility, and has thriven among the educated and successful.

However the nature of influence was very different in each instance.

Smith's influence was numerically much less than Emerson's; but was spiritually much more concentrated and powerful - objectively transforming the lives of his followers. 

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(As a side point, both Emerson and Smith had famous disciples: Henry David Thoreau and Brigham Young - who both provided a form of influence that was clearer and simpler and therefore more easily transmitted than the master's original doctrines.)

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The US has been, since the early 1800s, the creative centre for new movements in Western religion - and Emerson and Joseph Smith were perhaps the most important of enduring influences. The very difference between their legacies is remarkable: Emerson having been assimilated into the mainstream mass media expressions of 'mind, body and spirit', self-help and esteem boosting; while JS's remains focused, hard-edged, tough and private.

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So, what would each think of the other, and who would me most pleased with how things had turned-out?

I think Joseph Smith would have been satisfied, probably delighted, with his legacy church; while Emerson would have been utterly appalled at how transcendentalism had turned-out.

Transcendentalism turned-out exactly the way that Emerson's most vehement critics at Harvard and among the Calvinists and stricter Unitarians said that it would turn-out - except even worse: a chaos of irrationalist emotional subjectivity which justifies anything, or nothing.

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Emerson's legacy includes not just the shallow, selfish and self-indulgent spiritual seekers of today, but Nietzsche and his various spawn.

I suspect that if Emerson could have forseen how things would have turned-out; he would have recognized and repented his error, and returned to some orthodox form of Christianity (perhaps Roman Catholicism).

And what a difference that might have made - to have America's first and most influential literary-philosophical genius on the side of tradition instead of progressivism...

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Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith compared

Separated at birth? Perhaps not; but a certain nasal similarity evident...

*Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882 - Born in Boston and lived in Concord Massachusetts.

*Joseph Smith Jr. 1805-1844 - Born in Vermont, raised in upstate New York.

It is an interesting fact that author Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith were almost exactly the same age, and lived in the same region of Greater New England. Despite this, in most senses the two men were about as different as could be, and inhabited extremely different worlds.

Emerson was upper class, highly educated and widely read, literate and an extraordinarily powerful preacher/ lecturer; while JS was none of these.

RWE's world was intensely cultivated and inhabited by famous intellectuals and artists; JS's world was raw, violent, in near turmoil - I was particularly struck by the continual, daily - almost hourly - possibility and actuality of unrestrained 'vigilante' mob violence.

For instance, shortly after he founded the Mormon Church, JS was severely beaten, tarred and feathered by a mob; and his castration was planned, he was stripped and tied to a board but at the last moment the doctor brought along for the purpose could not bring himself to do it. Emerson only encountered any such things in the pre-Civil War heights of anti-abolitionism.

Even in economic terms there was a stark contrast - Emerson's world was one of considerable security (by world historical standards) and for his early decades there was near zero poverty in Concord (Emerson was astonished by the poverty and depravity he saw in the much richer and more powerful cities of England); while Smith was himself poor, often hungry and lacking basic necessities; surrounded by poverty - families were continually uprooting and seeking subsistence, 'borrowing, begging etc.

So much for the differences. Yet the similarities in terms of magnitude of international spiritual/ religious influence are striking. One was that both Emerson and Smith had more-famous disciples: Henry David Thoreau and Brigham Young - who both provided a form of influence that was clearer and simpler, and therefore more easily transmitted than the master's original doctrines.

Emerson came from a Ministerial Calvinist (Puritan) background which moves through Unitarianism into Deist transcendentalism, and then a non-supernaturalist spiritualism focused on subjective sensations.

Thus Emerson, and his 'disciple' Thoreau, are spiritual and indeed lineal fathers of that vast modern phenomenon of Liberal New Age spirituality which dominate modern 'religious' seeking and expression

Emerson's spiritual influence was extremely large in scale, but diffuse in effect and tailing-off into mere entertainment and distraction.

Joseph Smith has been hardly less successful in terms of influence, leaving the only Western form of Christianity that has retained its devoutness, grown rapidly in size by winning converts and above replacement fertility, and has thriven among the educated and successful.

However the nature of influence was very different in each instance.

Smith's influence was numerically much less than Emerson's; but was spiritually much more concentrated and powerful - objectively transforming the lives of his followers. 

The US has been, since the early 1800s, the creative centre for new movements in Western religion - and Emerson and Joseph Smith were perhaps the most important of enduring influences. The very difference between their legacies is remarkable: Emerson having been assimilated into the mainstream mass media expressions of 'mind, body and spirit', self-help and esteem boosting; while JS's remains focused, hard-edged, tough and private.

So, what would each think of the other, and who would me most pleased with how things had turned-out?

I think Joseph Smith would have been broadly satisfied with his legacy church, at least until recently when family size has dwindled towards replacement levels and conversions among Westerners have plateaued. But Emerson would have been utterly appalled at how transcendentalism had turned-out.

Transcendentalism turned-out exactly the way that Emerson's most vehement critics at Harvard and among the Calvinists and stricter Unitarians said that it would turn-out - except even worse: a chaos of irrationalist emotional subjectivity which justifies anything, or nothing.

Emerson's legacy includes not just the shallow, selfish and self-indulgent spiritual seekers of today, but Nietzsche and his various spawn.

I suspect that if Emerson could have foreseen how things would have turned-out; he would have recognized and repented his error, and returned to some orthodox form of Christianity (perhaps Roman Catholicism).

Or else, maybe RWE would have become a Romantic Christian. This was a brief phase he passed  through in early life, but maybe he would have stayed to work-on Christianity with the same genius that he applied to leaving Christianity. And maybe too, if Joseph Smith had not been prematurely killed, he might strengthened the radically different theology and the Romantic personal-experiential or 'mystical' aspects of his church.

Anyway; whatever is needful that Emerson and Smith did not do, we each may do for our-selves - if we give the matter our best attention.

Adapted and updated from a 2013 post.  

On re-reading Ralph Waldo Emerson - two comments, and some remarks on Joseph Smith

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From the middle 1990s for a decade, I was reading and re-reading Emerson with tremendous avidity - not only in a literary way, but as a guide for life.

Having not looked at him for several years, and not since I became a Christian, I have returned to re-read some favorite bits and pieces in the past couple of weeks - and was struck by two things.

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1. Emerson is a really good writer; I mean really good. The quality of his prose is unique and unsurpassed (that is, other writers are equally good, but in different ways) - I find it elating, intoxicating, almost too powerful to bear for any length of time.

2. Emerson's anti-Christian agenda is now blazingly clear and obvious to me, from almost everything he ever wrote and said; as is his staggering egotism/ pride, and these are linked. Emerson's work is a vast and unbounded, extended assertion of himself, his potential and his adequacy against anyone or any thing (including God) that tries to constrain or direct it.

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(Emerson was raised as a Unitarian and became a prominent Unitarian minister - and Unitarianism is already anti-Christian in its profoundest implications - although the first generation of Unitarians refused to acknowledge this, and generational inertia meant that the fundamental anti-Christanity of Unitarianism took a while to emerge. So, Emerson was never a Christian, although perhaps he supposed he was - but nonetheless he found the rebel sect of Unitarianism to be already stultifying, empty and spiritually dead: which was a just criticism since it amounted to merely a system of secular ethics and an ungrounded and unjustifiably exclusive usage of Christian scriptures and form loosely associated with an impersonal theistic God. Naturally this rapidly slid into exactly the kind of eclectic 'spirituality' - that we now term New Age - which Emerson pioneered with such glorious eloquence.) 

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I conclude that Emerson is, exactly has his contemporaries saw him, a terribly perilous writer! - precisely because he is such a great writer, and has so many stunning insights - yet ultimately these are put to the service of a doctrine of such extreme, such total self-centredness that I struggle to comprehend it.

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Perhaps Emerson's greatest and most valuable (and most often repeated) insight is that each person must appropriate the world for himself and in his own terms; a living religion (that is to say any true religion) simply cannot be just a following of rules and rituals.

To put it as Emerson did in an early work, to be properly alive, each individual must experience (again and again, day by day, indeed hour by hour) their own personal revelation - they must experience direct and divine communications of reality.

For Emerson this imperative was pretty-much the entire aim of life - so that the ideal life became in one sense that moment of revelation timelessly filling all; in another sense (because, experience seemed to show that these moments did come to an end) an incessant search for the next moment of revelation - life as a sequence of such moments.

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But Emerson's error, which led him into paradox and the evil advocacy - if not practice - of Pride as a principle of life - as indeed the only principle of life; was to reject the past, to reject the unity of humanity, to perceive himself (his soul) as the only thing that was really real - to argue for a subjectivism so extreme as to amount almost to solipsism. 

In his burning desire to shed the constraints of history and society, which seemed to be shackling his imagination, and focus all meaning on his own individual moments of revelation (the total affirmation of Me! Here! Now!); Emerson destroyed the basis of humanity, of sharing, shape and purpose - and consequently his influence (among those who actually read what he wrote and try to live by it) has been substantially pernicious.

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What was needed and what was necessary was to accept Emerson's assertion of the absolute necessity of personal revelation, albeit perilous, as an addition (or restoration) to Christianity.

This absolute and inflexible demand for modern, personal revelation, I perceive as the point of unity between Emerson and the other great long-term spiritual influence born in the United States at almost exactly the same time: Joseph Smith, the Mormon 'living prophet' of modern, latter day revelation.

Joseph Smith could have endorsed Emerson's cry by which he opened his first great published work Nature -

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism, The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?

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The religious difference between Emerson and Smith is essentially that Emerson took this demand to behold God face to face, and enjoy an original relation to the universe as his sole aim and principle, while Smith added it (and its products, such as the Book of Mormon and his other collected revelations) to existing Christianity.

Smith thus achieved what Emerson, in his scandalous 1838 address to Harvard Divinity School, had declared was impossible:

I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason, — to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder.  

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Even as Emerson wrote his speech, Joseph Smith had already built a new city (the first of three) as headquarters for the saints in Kirtland, Ohio; and the years since the above words were spoken, Smith's 'Cultus' - with its 'new rites and forms' added-to, modifying, re-interpreting existing modes of Christianity - was (contrary to Emerson's characterization of it as 'vain') indeed 'established'; and has continued to grow into a major world religion - and has been neither a dead religion of pasteboard and fillagree (rather, a tremendously motivating religion which sustains great devoutness and other-worldliness), nor has it ended in madness and murder.

But, on the other hand, a stripped-down New Age version of Emerson's spirituality of individualism and subjectivism has merged with mainstream secular Leftism, and grown and grown to become the dominant mode of thought in the West almost entirely discarding Emerson in the process.

(And quite naturally so, since Emerson was not necessary to the development of New Age spirituality - rather he was a prophet, herald or advance guard of it.).

But what a fascinating divergence from such close roots and similar demands are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith - both emerging in the North Eastern corner of the USA in the 1830s!

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Ralph Waldo Emerson - my changing evaluations

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Around 1995-1999 Ralph Waldo Emerson was probably my number one spiritual mentor  - the period culminated in a pilgrimage to Emerson's house in Concord, Massachusetts through which I wandered as if in a dream.

I never found him easy to read nor to understand, never found myself able to read much at a stretch; but I regarded Emerson as a great soul and an example of how to live - I consciously modelled my life on his.

As well as Emerson's essays, journals and letters; I read great quantities of biographies and memoirs - of which there are exceptional numbers in exceptionally high quality.

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The first biography which made a really big impact was Robert D Richardson's Emerson: the mind on fire (1995).

My memories of the under-employed summers of 1996 and 1997 are sitting in the back garden on a blanket under the tree, reading this book, again and again.

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Richardson provides a handy list of Emerson's key ideas (which did not change through his mature life). I would then have subscribed to all of these ideas, insofar as I understood them:

1. The days are gods. That is, everything is divine.
2. Creation is continuous. There is no other world; this one is all there is.
3. Every day is the day of judgment.
4. The purpose of life is individual self-cultivation, self-expression, and fulfillment.
5. Poetry liberates. Thought is also free.
6. The powers of the soul are commensurate with its needs; each new day challenges us with its adequacy and our own.
8. Fundamental perceptions are intuitive and inarguable; all important truths, whether of physics or ethics, must at last be self--evident.
9. Nothing great is ever accomplished without enthusiasm.
10. Life is an ecstasy; Thoreau has it right when he says, “Surely joy is the condition of life.”
11. Criticism and commentary, if they are not in the service of enthusiasm and ecstasy, are idle at best, destructive at worst. Your work, as Ruskin says, should be the praise of what you love.”


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Now I would regard them all - except perhaps number 11 - as wrong, profoundly wrong, dangerously wrong!


They were fine for Emerson himself, a good and gentle man who was brought up as a strict Calvinist then as a mild Unitarian - but lethal for elite consumption in a secular and materialist society - where indeed such ideas are more or less mainstream among people who have anything like a spirituality.


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Emerson was reacting against the harshness and legalism of Calvinism, and against the arid rationality of  Unitarianism - and these were, indeed, indefensible.


It is the old, old story of heresy piled upon heresy - each new heresy forged by a genius who achieves remarkable results, great things; but who is followed by generations of disciples that progressively reveal the dark side of the Master - the incoherence, nihilism, selfishness and pride (that above all) which lies beneath the superficially exciting and liberating message.


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I still read and enjoy Emerson, albeit in a bracketted and more selective way, and love to daydream of that brief decade or two of fresh, innocent New England Transcendentalism; but can never again let myself fall wholly under his intoxicating spell - or, at least, not for long.


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Ralph Waldo Emerson and the failure of Romanticism

I am listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays on an audiobook; and re-reading Carlos Baker's excellent group-biography Emerson among the Eccentrics (1986) - and I am struck by the great sadness that Emerson could have been exactly what Christianity needed, what The West needed - he had all the literary equipment, all the spiritual insights, and a sweet yet impressive nature...

Yet he incrementally turned against Christianity and instead was a precursor of the New Age movement. He pioneered the vacuity of Spiritual But Not Religious.

This was a tragedy, because Emerson was in the right place at the right time - and really nobody else of his stature has arisen that was able to do what Emerson could and should have done.

Why did he fail? well he started off in the wrong place - Unitarianism, which could not last. And he was seduced first by the sexual revolution (not in practice - but in spirit) and then by Leftist politics... the usual story. 

Ever since, the West has been stuck pretty exactly much where Emerson left us - between dwindling traditional Christianity and rampant secular Leftism; and has failed to move forward.

What a shame...

The promise of each morning: Days, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 

Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 

And marching single in an endless file, 

Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 

To each they offer gifts after his will, 

Bread, kingdoms, stars, or sky that holds them all. 

I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, 

Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 

Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 

Turned and departed silent. I, too late, 

Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

Days - by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I don't especially like Days as poetry (nor, indeed, any poetry of Emerson's) - but its "message", its cry, is one that returns frequently to my mind. 

It is (I think) about the promise felt by people such as Emerson and myself, at the start of a day - the promise of each day, its gifts, and what we might do with them - compared with the inevitable disillusionment of the day's end, when we have not done much, or anything at all.  

This sentiment contrasts with the youthful optimism for the sunny future expressed in many other places by Emerson, that sense that on just such a day as this, a man such as Shakespeare, wrote something like Hamlet... and, if him, then why not me? (In my own way, at at my own level.) 

The idea that nothing is stopping us, but our own narrowness of vision and triviality of ambition...

In truth, it is the mismatch between optimism and actuality that leads to the disillusionment. Emerson felt great powers in himself; and indeed achieved greatly - but realized that whatever he had achieved was in the past, and he was always concerned primarily by the potential of the present moment. 

Shakespeare looking back on having writt-en Hamlet was (no doubt) a very different, and probably sadder, creature than Shakespeare actually writ-ing Hamlet. 

This is the human condition; and apparently nobody has ever eluded it - except by the suppression or obliteration of awareness that it is true. 

And this is exactly why the only escape from wise pessimism - from that stoic attitude which is only divided from rational suicide by irrational (yet true) residual scruples - is to know our mortal lives to be a stage or phase of experience that is both contributing towards, and destined to transform into, resurrection and the reality of a fulfilled life to come. 

Eternal Heavenly life is not, therefore, a compensation for the deficits we now suffer. Neither is it a time of happiness nor of perfection (whatever they may be...). 

It is instead a life in which the limitations of infirmity of will, of death (entropy), and of evil in and around us - are left-behind; and we can then fulfil that "morning feeling" so valued, yet mourned, by Emerson. 

We are not supposed to look-forward to life beyond life, as if it was a holiday - wanting to shorten or hasten-through the intervening days before we can quit the "work" of this world forever, and live in (perpetual!) leisure.... 

But instead, we should think of Heaven as a situation where we can get on with our real work; without having it continually dismantled by the fading of memory and the hazards of this-world. And having prepared our-selves as best we may by the experiences of this-life; acknowledging the-reality-of, learning-from, and seeing-beyond, Emersonian disillusionment. 

Such disappointment with ourselves for wasted days is valid; but it is a lesson, not a conclusion. .  

Each day - some new failure. But...

Days - by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 
And marching single in an endless file, 
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 
To each they offer gifts after his will, 
Bread, kingdoms, stars, or sky that holds them all. 
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, 
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 
Turned and departed silent. I, too late, 
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. 

Each day has been, in recent weeks, probably less differentiated than any I can remember (because I can't remember being a baby). Yet there is no 'routine' - even if I were to want one.

Some days I think I have 'cracked it' and discovered the Key to this life; how to 'use my time well', how to improve my faults, how to live.

Sometimes at the end of the day I look back and think: That went pretty well. I just need to keep on doing that.

And I never can. Usually the very next day, the wheels come-off; and I have no-one to blame but myself. My motivation disappears, I'm irritable and sarcastic, I can't concentrate, my mind is just a buzzing confusion. My health collapses, and my spirits; or vice versa.


Ralph Waldo Emerson - all his life - felt that each day started with infinite promise (that early morning feeling!) - On such a day as this, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, or Beethoven his Third Symphony (or Emerson his essay Nature)... If him - then, why not me - now?

Each morning runs-down to an indulgent, bloating lunch and a turgid afternoon - and in the evening... well, we are lucky if we pick ourselves up from this stale slough,look at the stars and gird ourselves for the next day before lapsing gratefully into sleep - hoping to make a better fist of things tomorrow.

And we never do. 

Well... that was Emerson; who sought to live each moment as if it was infinite in scope; and was permanently disappointed. 


It is tempting to regard Life as a failure, and my life in particular; day by day, year by year, until death... But this is a profound error. Indeed, from my Christian perspective, it is a sinful error. 

The only thing wrong with the actual days of my actual life, is when I lack faith and abandon hope.

If I have faith I know that God loves me and is making my acctual life into something from which I can benefit, day by day, hour by hour. If I have hope in Heavenly life I know that all experience undertaken in the spirit of faith is building towards a life of everlasting and cumulative satisfaction.

My life is a great situation for learning, a terrible situation for steady progress. A great opportunity for spiritual development, but rubbish at making us better people.

My life only intermittently and temporarily provides me with what I want - here and now; but has done a great job at dishing up what could do me good. 

After that - it's up to me.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Dreaming

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Edited from the beginning of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Demonology.

The name Demonology covers dreams, omens, coincidences, luck, sortilege, magic and other experiences which shun rather than court inquiry, and deserve notice chiefly because every man has usually in a lifetime two or three hints in this kind which are specially impressive to him. They also shed light on our structure.

 

The witchcraft of sleep divides with truth the empire of our lives. This soft enchantress visits two children lying locked in each other’s arms, and carries them asunder by wide spaces of land and sea, and wide intervals of time.

 

’T is superfluous to think of the dreams of multitudes, the astonishment remains that one should dream; that we should resign so quietly this deifying Reason, and become the theatre of delirious shows, wherein time, space, persons, cities, animals, should dance before us in merry and mad confusion; a delicate creation outdoing the prime and flower of actual Nature, antic comedy alternating with horrid pictures.

 

Sometimes the forgotten companions of childhood reappear or we seem busied for hours and days in peregrinations over seas and lands, in earnest dialogues, strenuous actions for nothings and absurdities, cheated by spectral jokes and waking suddenly with ghastly laughter, to be rebuked by the cold, lonely, silent midnight, and to rake with confusion in memory among the gibbering nonsense to find the motive of this contemptible cachinnation.

 

Dreams are jealous of being remembered; they dissipate instantly and angrily if you try to hold them. When newly awaked from lively dreams, we are so near them, still agitated by them, still in their sphere,—give us one syllable, one feature, one hint, and we should repossess the whole; hours of this strange entertainment would come trooping back to us; but we cannot get our hand on the first link or fibre, and the whole is lost. There is a strange wilfulness in the speed with which it disperses and baffles our grasp.

 

A dislocation seems to be the foremost trait of dreams. A painful imperfection almost always attends them. The fairest forms, the most noble and excellent persons, are deformed by some pitiful and insane circumstance. The very landscape and scenery in a dream seem not to fit us, but like a coat or cloak of some other person to overlap and encumber the wearer; so is the ground, the road, the house, in dreams, too long or too short, and if it served no other purpose would show us how accurately Nature fits man awake.

 

There is one memory of waking and another of sleep. In our dreams the same scenes and fancies are many times associated, and that too, it would seem, for years. In sleep one shall travel certain roads in stage-coaches or gigs, which he recognizes as familiar, and has dreamed that ride a dozen times; or shall walk alone in familiar fields and meadows, which road or which meadow in waking hours he never looked upon.

 

This feature of dreams deserves the more attention from its singular resemblance to that obscure yet startling experience which almost every person confesses in daylight, that particular passages of conversation and action have occurred to him in the same order before, whether dreaming or waking; a suspicion that they have been with precisely these persons in precisely this room, and heard precisely this dialogue, at some former hour, they know not when.

 

http://www.bartleby.com/90/1001.html

 

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 Note - I only came across this essay a couple of days ago  - despite that I have been reading Emerson for about 40 years. It was bundled into the remarkably good value Delphi edition of the 'Complete' Emerson I bought for my Kindle reader. As a whole Demonology is incoherent and very variable in quality and subject matter - but the above beginning struck me as extremely astute in a typically Emersonian fashion - as well as being beautifully expressed.
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New England Transcendentalism

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The New England transcendentalists were a loose group of thinkers and writers gathered around Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord Massachusetts - the best known of the group is Henry David Thoreau who was some 13 years younger than Emerson and also lived in Concord.

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For quite a long time - especially from about the mid 1990s to mid 2000s - Emerson and Thoreau, and their extended group were the focus of my reading.

This was mainly a personal project, involving collecting books, and a pilgrimage to Concord in 1998. But I did complete a publishing project related to this:

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/preface-bettina.html

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Looking back on the New England Transcendentalists (NETs), I now perceive that they were the glorious beginnings of the slippery slope down to disintegration and nihilism. In other words, Emerson was exactly what his most vehement critics said he was.

Emerson, though, was a prime example of a familiar phenomenon among creative geniuses - he was brought-up as a very devout Christian, strongly influenced by a strictly puritan aunt - then he became a Unitarian minister which was strictly not a Christian, and finally he became a transcendentalist (although seldom using the name).

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What is, or was, a transcendentalist?

My understanding is that a transcendentalist believes in the reality of transcendent Good (or, at least, some aspects of transcendent Good) despite not believing in God - or, at least, not a personal god, not believing in salvation.

So Emerson believed in the reality of transcendent beauty, and chose to devote his life to this - but the choice was based on the fact that this made him happy, rather than that the choice was 'right'.

As for morality, although - like all humans - Emerson had much to say about moral issues - this seems to have been, ultimately, a personal matter - perhaps aesthetic above all.

As for truth - Emerson told the truth as he saw it, for the length of time it took to write the sentence; and then another, then another. There was no conception that these truths corresponded to a stable reality - the only 'reality' was the intense moment. (Which is itself an incoherent belief.)

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Yet Emerson was a man of great sweetness of nature: he had no reason to be Good, by his philosophy, yet he was Good - although his philosophy was, it turned out, pernicious.

So perhaps Emerson was a Good man who, by his lectures and writings (his 'job' was that of a travelling lecturer) probably did net Evil.

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As for Thoreau - compared with Emerson he was an even greater writer, but a much simpler thinker.

I have come to regard Thoreau's philosophy as an exercise in self-justification, especially a justification of self will - of selfishness - of getting the maximum pleasure with the minimum of work.

Thoreau saw life as a battle between the self and society - society wants the individual to expend huimself in socieatal goals - it was the hjob of the individual to do the minimum of these imposed duties compatible with his health and survival.

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Thoreau took hedonism to the level of an art form - his own hedonism took the form of contemplation of nature including scientific study, and writing.

For much of my life Thoreau was a hero, and I would not concede that his philosophy was one of near-solipsistic selfishness, yet it was.

Thoreau took Emersonian transcendentalism, and - less constrained by personality and less grounded in tough puritanism - and ran with it. In doing so he created a body of prose writings of the first rank - yet almost poisonous to modern man.

*

So I am now exceedingly ambivalent about the NETs. The allure of Emerson and Thoreau, as transitional-figures of genius remains powerful; their overall tendency and effect, I now regard as pernicious.

So I take the NETs much more selectively than in the past. I used to try and go deep into Transcendentalism, my approach was immersive (I can recall many immersive moments!) - convinced that it was the highest path if only I could understand and attain it.

Nowadays I see transcendentalism as incoherent, and unstable yet tending towards nihilism. It tries to believe in the reality of the transcendent - yet without belief in the reality of God (or gods) or divine revelation there is no reason to believe in the transcendent.

Emerson tried to argue that the transcendent could either be intuited, or become the subject of 'scientific' knowledge (e.g. his lectures on the 'natural history' of the intellect) - but this was not true, and disagreement cannot be resolved.

*

Without God the transcendent becomes merely a subjective assertion - backed up only by rhetoric or propaganda, temporary alliances - hence, in the face of the trend of modernity, transcendentalism is weak, unstable, pointing down a slope towards materialism and nihilism, and self-indulgent yet self-justifying hedonism.

...Held back for a few decades by Emerson's natural goodness and Thoreau's literary genius, but then descending unimpeded.

*

 

How could Christianity be Romanticised? What went wrong?

Romantic Christianity made a brilliant start with Novalis, William Blake and ST Coleridge - and then nothing-much for many decades until Rudolf Steiner became (strange sort of) Christian in about 1898; to be followed by Owen Barfield and William Arkle in later generations - and there is William Wildblood and myself among current writers. But there have never been many Romantic Christians...

Why so rare, and what went wrong with the intermediate generations? Of course there were plenty of Romantics - but among them hardly any Christians; indeed most of them were either atheists or spiritual anything-but Christians.

A pre-eminent example was Ralph Waldo Emerson; who was an arch-Romantic and who began as a Unitarian minister - Unitarians being, at that time, like Emerson, Christians on-the-way-out. He ended-up as a kind of deist, flavoured with what he had gathered of Hinduism and Sufism.

Emerson was known for his elevation of the intuitive, epiphanic, 'moment' of insight to the highest possible valuation; like most Romantics, he required that all knowledge be derived from direct personal experience. SO why did Emerson not do the same for Christianity as he did for everything else? Why did he not develop a Romantic Christianity built from the kind of direct intuitive insights that fuelled the rest of his wide-ranging creativity? This will be answered below.

My guess is that Emerson accepted the evaluation of most Churches that Christianity must be derived from external authority - or else it is not Christianity. Catholics demand that the individual conform to the teaching of the Church authorities, or the traditions of the lineally descended ancient Church. Protestants demand conformity to the canonical scriptures of the Bible.

But what unites all churches is the assumption that whatever Christianity is, it is located outside the individual. The insistence is that Christianity does not come from within - not from individual experience, not from personal intuition.

Ultimately the task for the individual is to conform to external authority. The church judges the individual. 

If this is true; then Romanticism and Christianity are incompatible. So, how did Novalis, Blake and Coleridge come to believe that they had developed a Christianity based on their inner knowledge? It is mostly a matter of their basic and ultimate assumptions, of metaphysical assumptions. These authors believed that the individual could have direct knowledge of Christianity without it being derived from any intermediary at all; not rooted in church authority, without canonical scripture, traditional, philosophical theology or anything else.

Or, at least, and in conformity to Romanticism; that this direct form of personal knowing should serve to evaluate all other knowledge claims. So the individual judges the church; and may (like Blake, Steiner and Arkle) dispense with all churches - although Coleridge and Barfield were both, in later life,' communicating' (communion-taking) members of the Church of England.

We can see, then, why Emerson did not remain a Christian - because he apparently accepted the assertion that a real Christian must be under the authority of a church. (The only dispute was about which church/es it was correct to regard as really Christian.) It seems that, for Emerson, anyone who claimed to be a Christian outside of a church, was not really a Christian.

But there may be more to it than this - because Emerson did not believe in the divinity of Jesus; therefore real Christians were in error. Emerson's idea of deity was abstract - 'The Over Soul' - and therefore infinitely different-from a Man. The only union of Man with deity, therefore, was for Man to surrender his self and 'melt-into' the infinitude of deity.

So Emerson was a hopeless case! Ultimately, he did not want what Jesus offered; and preferred what Eastern religions offered. And what applies to Emerson, also applies to many other Romantics since. Some Romantics are materialist; but among those who are spiritual - it has mostly been an Eastern spirituality; which ultimately regards the individual self and our mortal world as temporary illusions.

This is the source of the paradox by which Emerson valued the moment of insight above all; yet ultimately he regarded each epiphany as evanescent, soon to be lost in time - and therefore worthless.

Other Christians have had strong Romantic impulses, but retained the conviction that the individual judgement must be subordinated to church authority - GK Chesterton is an example. Chesterton regarded the 'catholic' church (at first the Anglo Catholic wing of the Church of England; then in his late middle age, the Roman Catholic church) as the source of knowledge, of truth. For Chesterton Romanticism was the proper attitude each individual ought to adopt towards this truth.

For Chesterton, therefore, the individual did not have direct and personal intuitive access to knowledge; except for the knowledge that the church was true. The only primary knowledge was that the church was the only source of knowledge. 

Something similar could be said for CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. They were Romantics and also Christians - but their Romanticism was secondary to their Christianity - and was at most understood to be a good and proper (perhaps even necessary) attitude towards their Christianity. The Romantic intuition was not, for them, a primary source of knowledge: that was revelation as communicated by  their churches.

This is why Romantic Christians - by a strict definition - have been so rare. Most Romantics were not Christians, but among those that were; Romanticism is regarded as an attitude but not as a source of knowledge.

It was the great contribution of Owen Barfield - posthumous disciple of Steiner, best friend of CS Lewis, and fellow Inkling with Tolkien - to clarify and emphasise this vital distinction.

Firkins on Emerson

*

From Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Oscar W Firkins, 1915

*

The secret of Emerson may be conveyed in one word, the superlative, even the superhuman, value which he found in the unit of experience, the direct, momentary, individual act of consciousness. This is the centre from which the man radiates; it begets all and explains all.

He may be defined as an experiment made by nature in the raising of the single perception or impression to a hitherto unimaginable value.

(...)

...the theory of the conduct of life is plain.

Life is a quest of thoughts, a pursuit of inspirations.

Beside these ends, land and goods and house and fame are nothing, and wife and child may count themselves lucky if they escape relegation to the class of baggage.

...for Emerson all values, even truth-values, are experimental; nothing counts that is not enjoyable, consumable, digestible; even knowledge is either nutriment or refuse.

(...)

Life is subjective, life is internal.

Receptiveness is the normal and happy state and conduct is instrumental to reception.

(...)

If the single experience is to be uniformly exalted, the universe must be cleared of evil; the grossest act or heaviest calamity must be viewed as the stammering of the divine power in its first untrained efforts to articulate.

Love, also, must be removed from individuals and concentrated on universal powers, if its riches are to be continuously available as the ornament and sustenance of life.

So, again, with the virtues. To give the moment its acme of exaltation, virtue must be viewed not in its special or partial aspect as justice, benevolence or fortitude, but in its supreme and pervasive aspect as the outcome and expression of the divine mind.

The whole philosophy contributes to the ascension and irradiation of the moment."

***


Comment.

Firkins' masterly compression of Emerson's masterly exposition of the philosophy of the moment is not - nowadays - distinctively Emersonian, but mainstream in the thought of the 'spiritual but not religious', New Age mode among the intellectual elites of the West.

This has been an expanding line of thought from the beginning of the industrial revolution and through the decline of Christianity among the elite (Emerson got it (selectively) from the Romantics and Transcendental philosophers - the difference being that for Emerson it was primary and primarily a matter of conduct).

For Emerson, the journal, a collection of such epiphanic moments, was the primary mode of literary production - from which all others (lectures, essays, poems) were derived.

*

To live consistently by the philosophy of the moment - which Emerson did only very intermittently, since he functioned as a respectable and industrious patriarch - would be the act of a conscienceless psychopath: a parasite at best and perhaps something much worse.

But that is mere name-calling - what is wrong with this philosophy is that it is self-refuting: a self-conscious celebration of un-self-conscious life: an intellectuals abstract reflection upon the unreflective animism of the child or tribesman.

The intellectual takes his best moments, his moments of animistic connection, of bliss; and constructs from them (or tries to construct) his life: these moments are (presumably) to be held in mind, in memory, and used as a background to the mundane - or at least as a holiday from the mundane.

But the act of identifying, collecting, reflecting upon these moments is itself a movement away from them; a movement into abstraction.

So that life is an oscillation; what is worse an oscillation in which the meaningless predominates.

*

But then, why continue to live?

If life is about the moment, best it is perhaps to die during the absolute moment - rather than trying (and mostly failing) to capture more such moments.

Indeed, if each moment - properly appreciated - is all; then why should we spend our efforts in trying to accumulate such pearls; why try to make life a continuous chain of pearls if a single pearl contains everything?

And yet life goes on.

*

Hence the Emersonian life contains meaning but no purpose; and its meaning is (or ought to be) once for all - except for the deficiencies of the human mind - of memory - or the limitations of circumstance.

So, even regarded strictly on its own terms (and leaving aside its incompatibility with Christian truth), the Emersonian life is impossible, paradoxical, un-liveable.

Yet at the same time it captures - magnificently, a partial truth: that every moment potentially contains eternity.

Humans glimpse this partial truth, but for creatures such as we are, living in time, this truth is properly subordinate.

*



 

Van Wyck Brooks - The Flowering of New England (1936)

*

From the section Emerson in Concord: 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON had lived in Concord 
since 1834. The former pastor of a Boston church 
and a son of the Reverend William Emerson, he had 
withdrawn from the ministry. Having a little income, he 
had bought a house on the Boston turnpike, surrounded 
with pine and fir-trees. There was a garden by the brook, 
filled with roses and tulips. In the western window of his 
study, he placed an Aeolian harp. It sang in the spring 
and summer breezes, mingling with the voices of the 
birds, fitfully bringing to mind the ballads that he loved, 
the wild, melodious notes of the old bards and minstrels. 
He had been writing essays and giving addresses that 
grieved and vexed most of his older hearers. Dozens, 
even hundreds of the younger people, thinking of him, 
thought of Burns's phrase, 

Wi' sic as he, where'er he be, 
May I be saved or damned. 

But, although he had his followers in Boston, he was 
anathema to the pundits there. Everett sneered at Emer- 
son's "conceited, laborious nonsense. " John Quincy 
Adams and Andrews Norton thought he was an atheist 
and worse. The Cambridge theologians reviled him: he 
was a pantheist and a German mystic, and his style was 
a kind of neo-Platonic moonshine. The Concord prophet 
smiled at these accusations. He had the temerity to think 

that the great Cambridge guns were merely popguns. 
There was nothing explosive in his own discourse. He 
was a flute-player, one who plucked his reeds in the Con- 
cord river. But when he began to play, one saw a beauti- 
ful portico, standing in a lovely scene of nature, covered 
with blossoms and vine-leaves ; and, at the strains of the 
flute, one felt impelled to enter the portico and explore 
the unknown region that lay beyond. It was an irresistible 
invitation. As for the smiling musician, he was a mystery 
still. One thought of him as the man in Plutarch's story 
who conversed with men one day only in the year and 
spent the rest of his days with the nymphs and demons. 

Everyone had heard of him in Boston, where he was 
giving lectures. His birthplace there was a kitestring's 
distance from the house where Franklin was born and the 
house where Edgar Allan Poe was born. But, although 
he belonged to one of the oldest scholarly families, with 
countless names in the college catalogues, most of the 
signs had been against him. Tall, excessively thin, so thin 
that, as Heine said of Wellington, his full face looked 
like a profile, pale, with a tomahawk nose, blond, with 
blue eyes and smiling, curved lips, he had none of the 
traits, aggressive or brilliant, that marked his brothers in 
various ways. At moments, on the platform, he spoke 
with a tranquil authority, but his usual demeanour was 
almost girlishly passive. He had not acquired the majes- 
tic air, as of a wise old eagle or Indian sachem, that 
marked his later years. He appeared to be easily discon- 
certed, for his self-reliance was a gradual conquest. He 
had drifted through many misfortunes, drifted into and 
out of tuberculosis, drifted into teaching and out of the 
Church, maturing very slowly. He had known dark hours, 
poverty, pain, fear, disease. His first wife had died; so 
had two of his brothers. The trouble with him was, his 
elders thought, that he seemed to like to drift. He had no 
sort of record as a student. At Harvard, even three gen

-erations later, when people spoke of Emerson's "educa- 
tion," they put the word in quotation-marks,* it was not 
that he did not know his Greek and Latin, but that he 
was never systematic. He had read, both then and later, 
for "lustres" mainly. He had drifted first to Florida and 
then to Europe, and finally settled at Concord, the home 
of his forbears, where he had often visited at the Manse. 
The minister there, Dr. Ezra Ripley, who was Emerson's 
step-grandfather and very fond of the young man, felt 
that he was obliged to warn the people against this leader 
of the Egomites, those who "sent themselves" on the 
Lord's errands, without any proper calling. As for the 
lectures that Emerson was giving in Boston, on great 
men, history, the present age, the famous lawyer, 
Jeremiah Mason, when he was asked if he could under- 
stand them, replied, "No, but my daughters can." 

To the outer eye, at least, Emerson's life was an aim- 
less jumble. He had ignored all the obvious chances, re- 
jected the palpable prizes, followed none of the rules of 
common sense. Was he pursuing some star of his own? 
No one else could see it. In later years, looking back, 
Emerson's friends, remembering him, thought of those 
quiet brown colts, unrecognized even by the trainers, that 
out-strip all the others on the race-course. He had had 
few doubts himself. He had edged along sideways 
towards everything that was good in his life, but he felt 
that he was born for victory. He had not chosen his 
course. It had sprung from a necessity of his nature, an 
inner logic that he scarcely questioned. 

*

The  above excerpt is one of my favourite passages in on of my favourite books of literary criticism - a book that was once famous (Pulitzer Prize, a year atop the Best Seller list) and highly prestigious; but is now neglected and deeply unfashionable.

Brooks wrote it (and the accompanying four volumes in the Makers and Finders series of the history of American Literature) by years of immersion in the primary texts (many of which he was the first to reread for many decades or centuries), and detailed note taking - then wrote the texts almost as a pastiche of the style of each author as he considered them - and without footnoting.

The vast primary scholarship was thus concealed, the style was made varied and vivid, and the book made accessible and appealing to a broad 'middlebrow' audience as well as to academics for whom this was, for a while, the only overview and the first point of reference to several authors.

*

About 15 years ago, the above passage was especially relevant for me - I found it intoxicating, a description of 'what life is about' - more Emersonian than Emerson himself, somehow.

It captures something of permanent value which Emerson brought to the West - that close-up Aeolian Harp sensitivity to the phenomena of the world.

Emerson broke away from Unitarianism, which was already a break from Christianity - and that was a terrible error; but I feel that if this Aeolian Harp sensitivity could be brought-back into Christianity - or rather, allowed to grow from the incompleteness of current mainstream Christian perspectives - it would be a wonderful thing!

*

What is the significance of unreasonable happiness?

*

Although a somewhat Eeyore-like and gloomy individual in many ways; I (thank Heavens) have been prone to outbreaks of unreasonable happiness through my life - those times various called, Peak Experiences (Maslow), Epiphanies (James Joyce), Joy or Sehnsucht (CS Lewis) and many other things - those feelings much loved by the Romantics such as Wordsworth and the New England Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau.

*

The mainstream secular modern view is that such moments have no deep significance - being caused by physiological change, or drugs, or a brainstorm... or something like that. The attitude is to enjoy them while they last, and then forget about them - because there is no special significance, nothing to be learned from them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson regarded these moments as significant - but cautioned against regarding them as evidence for optimism about future life. For Emerson they were not harbingers of anything, but to be valued in and of themselves - they were on the one hand the most important things in life, on the other hand utterly self-sufficient and free of general implications.

In practice, however, this remained little more than a bare literary assertion: meanwhile such moments came and went, the complications of life continued and then ended. Was Mankind any further forward after Emerson's explanations and Thoreau's experiments - were Emerson and Thoreau themselves any further forward? Seemingly not.  

*

Yet, as the secular, this-worldly, spirituality which Emerson pioneered began to gather strength, there emerged a view that such moments of unreasonable happiness were harbingers - of a possible 'evolutionary' future for Man: a future of Men developing a higher and much happier consciousness. Such was the theme of Colin Wilson, and his books from The Outsider onwards collected and analyzed many examples of this.

Indeed, some kind of fundamental change to the human mind, society, or some combination of the two (whether or not this change was called evolution) was necessary if unreasonable happiness was to be anything more than a glorious interlude.

*

Yet, even this has been subverted by Transhumanism - which purports to engineer and make permanent such moments in a scientific project dedicated to transforming human physiology using drugs, genetics and anything else necessary.

Even supposing this were possible; the implicit conviction is that unreasonable happiness is a delusional epiphenomenon - the hope is to make it a permanent delusion (and without the shadow of death to cloud perfect bliss, because death would be abolished too).

A project genetically and pharmacologically to engineer a state of permanent happy delusion in Mankind is itself perhaps the bleakest and most despairing philosophy of life which humans have yet devised.  

*

What of Christian views of such moments? There are many and diverse - from the pessimistic idea that moments of happiness are most likely to be demonic deceptions; to the optimistic and positive visionary theology of Thomas Traherne.

But my particular interest is the idea from CS Lewis, and less explicitly from Tolkien, that such moments of happiness are evidence for Christianity - the 'argument from desire'.

That such moments of happiness are actually a desire-for - and foretaste-of - something not-of-this-world (since nothing imaginable in this-world could be a fulfilment of this desire); and the fact that we have such other-worldly yearnings is evidence that that desired world is real (otherwise we would not have such feelings).

In a nutshell, we are unreasonably happy because of hope for Heaven - and that hope was implanted in us by God.

*

I personally find this a compelling argument (while being aware that others do not) - but as expressed in Lewis and Tolkien, it is somewhat incomplete. The reason it is incomplete is that this feeling is not only forward-looking and hopeful but (and Lewis says this very clearly) is also very powerfully nostalgic and backward-looking. Our state of unreasonable happiness is a yearning for what was, as well as what may-be.

Tolkien expresses this as a yearning for Eden - a real state of Paradise in which Man dwelt and from which he now is exiled. Tolkien seemingly regards this as a kind of inherited race-memory (indeed, the concept of hereditary memory is central for Tolkien's world view).

*

But I find the complete explanation for the unreasonable happiness of Joy, Sehnsucht, Peak Experiences in the doctrine of a pre-mortal spiritual and Heavenly existence.

This was also the implicit explanation of Wordsworth in his famous phrase: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: the soul that rises with us, our life's star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.

*

This I find to be a full and satisfying explanation for the phenomenology and function of these significant-seeming happy experiences: that the special quality of both backward nostalgic yearning and forward hopeful yearning, combine to locate my mortal life in-the-middle - between partial memories of a pre-mortal spirit-existence in Heaven before my birth and optimistic anticipations of a resurrected Heavenly life after my death.

*

Homes of famous writers - RW Emerson and CS Lewis - and the best reason for a pilgrimage to experience them

*
It is a strange thing to visit the home of a famous writer, and to be moved and inspired by the experience; because in many way, at many levels, the activity is clearly bogus.

To visit, decades or even centuries later, what is now a museum; a place mostly re-decorated, re-equipped and preserved rather than a working home... in a sense it shouldn't mean anything.

And of course, most of what it does mean is what we bring with us.

Most but not all.

*

The happy memorability of my visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's house in Concord, Massachusetts is something that has stayed with me. The trick of memory makes me suppose Emerson standing in his hallway wearing his 'gaberlunzie' (a large dressing gown) - and I recollect the simple Aeolian harp placed near an open window (silent, at the time I saw it).

Partly this was from was a touching sincerity about the staff - who seemed very decent people, and who referred to 'Mr Emerson' as if he might at any moment return from a walk in the woods.

*

Or, The Kilns - home of CS Lewis. Although this was very straightforward suburban house of not so long ago; I nonetheless walked around it - and the grounds - in a kind of daydream. 

What was touching was the amount of love and work which had been put into rescuing and restoring the place - the actual house had been, for example, very dirty when inhabited by Lewis: ceilings and walls and soft furnishings stained with tobacco, and the carpets permeated with ash  - Jack and Warnie Lewis apparently did not use ashtrays, due to some belief that ash was 'good for' carpets.

*

So most of what is experienced is brought, much is a recreation rather than a survival of the past - but is there something more?

Does the actual stone, brick and wood - the architectural shapes, and landscape layouts - preserve memories of the past?

Yes, very obviously so - I would have thought. If the houses had been demolished and the materials removed to the foundations, or the building utterly lost but rebuilt as an accurate replica somewhere else, then visited - this magic would have been lacking.

But the continuous existence of the actual place itself sometimes preserves some residue of the people who had lived there for for many years.

This works for houses, villages, towns cities and even nations - in different degrees. The continuation of their structure in situ typically preserves the past in arcane ways - ways that may be available for us to experience, and this fact certainly can 'make a difference'. 

And that is what we travel on pilgrimages to experience.

*

Living with a biography

*

It was not always thus - but in recent decades (since about the mid 1980s, perhaps) I have often 'lived with' a particular biography or autobiography for periods of weeks or months - dipping in frequently, and trying to get at the heart of the human subject of the book.

These books (which I am about to list) were not necessarily ones which I would (wearing a critical hat) regard as exceptionally well written books, nor would I necessarily recommend them, and sometimes I would regard them as rather disappointing (the subject was generally more important to me than the style)  nonetheless these are indeed biographies with which I spent a lot of time.

The following is incomplete - but in broadly chronological order, or rather the period of my life (some weeks or months) dominated by the book:

*

Lucky Poet by Hugh MacDiarmid

JRR Tolkien and The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter

MacDiarmid: a critical biography by Alan Bold

Robert Graves by Martin Seymour Smith

Genius: the life and science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Emerson: the Mind on Fire, by RD Richardson (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

The Flowering of New England by Van Wyck Brooks (group biography of early 19th century)

Robert Frost by Jay Parini

Joseph Campbell by Steven and Robin Larsen

Autobiography by John Cowper Powys

Charles Williams by Alice Mary Hadfield

Father Seraphim Rose by Heiromonk Damascene


*

For example, the Emerson biography by Robert D Richardson is associated with a long period around 1996-8 - I was continually going back and re-reading certain parts, until my copy was fallen into pieces. I then was more easily able to carry pieces of the book to read in bed, the garden or cafes (it is, intact, a very thick book).

My interest in this, as in others listed, was that Emerson seemed (at the time, not now) to have lived a kind of life (not specifically his life - but in some specific respects) which I wanted (in some way) to live - and I think I was trying to learn from this. In fact my motivations were not clear to me, now or since, but anyway I kept returning to the book and trying to puzzle-out something.

Or, and this would apply to the next book - The Flowering of New England, I returned to the parts of these books because they 'cast a spell' on me. VW Brooks prose is incantatory, and evokes a delicious (to me) idyllic quality.

There was, here and elsewhere, an element of day-dreaming, wish fulfillment and escape. The book was working as a technology, or a magical device, to create an alternative world in my mind.

*

Of course, most people get this from novels - which are, after all, designed to do it. But novels don't usually work for me; at least seldom since my late twenties (for example, the novels of Halldor Laxness did this for me, for a while circa 1999-2001, after visiting Iceland).

So biographies have been, for better or worse, a linking thread of life over the past 25 years.

It may have been for worse - in so far as they were a distraction (on the one hand) yet (on the other hand) apparently held out a (slender) promise of ultimate worldly gratification.

The idea that there had been satisfactory lives, and that these might perhaps be emulated - at least in their satisfactoriness - was a delusion, ultimately. 

*

NB: It is probably not relevant - but I have myself written a (very) mini-biography. A chapter length account of the life of writer/ painter Alasdair Gray - published in The Arts of Alasdair Gray, 1991 - and based on a few months of  proper archival research in diaries, letters etc.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on the price and function of slaves

*

Emerson's journal, 1857:

In the south a slave is bluntly but accurately valued at 500 to 1000 dollars, if a good working field hand; if a mechanic, as carpenter or smith, at 10, 15 or 20 hundred. 

A Mulatto girl, if beautiful, rises at once to high estimation. If beautiful & sprightly-witted, one who is a joy when present, a perpetual entertainment to the eye, &, when absent, a happy remembrance, $2500 and upwards of our money. 

*

This was brought to mind by Peter Frost's compilation of references on the White Slave Trade (Europe to North Africa) which was of broadly the same size as the Black Slave Trade - involving about 1.5 millions of people.

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2013/07/the-other-slave-trade.html

The White Slave Trade continued on a large scale until nearly 1800, and on a smaller scale for another hundred years - in other words, again, about the same duration as the Black Slave Trade.  

But the White Slave Trade was mostly of women, for sexual purposes.

*

The list of slave prices suggests that, by the time it ended, sex may have become the primary motivation for slavery in the United States - slavery existing mainly for sexual rather than economic benefits. At least, that is what Emerson apparently believed.

*

In this refulgent summer...

*

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.

The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay.

Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy.

The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation.

One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty of man! 

Ralph Waldo Emerson - 'Divinity School Address', Harvard, July 15 1838

**

Refulgent means something like sparkling with reflected light. 

Here in Newcastle upon Tyne for the past few weeks, we too have been enjoying a refulgent summer - and these words of Emerson's have come to mind more than once as I step outside.

(I try not to think of the fact that the rest of Emerson's address goes-on to advocate the most extreme, proto--Nietzschian and anti-Christian, subjectivism!) 

*

Art - Intuitively (or, What's Good for Me)

I was pretty much a 'culture vulture' as a young man; which entailed gobbling-up the books, music, art, philosophy etc. that was regarded as canonical - or else, at least, 'relevant' and 'important' to my high-status contemporaries.

Overall, it was not good for me, and was a corrupting experience.

Because, on engaging with some artefact - for example watching a movie, or reading a novel, viewing some architecture - I would often feel a strongly negative impression being made upon me. I did not like the author, I was averse by what was being said, or the way it was being said. I felt badness...


On the one hand there was an apparent consensus of scholars and critics saying that This Is Good Stuff (even 'essential') - and on the other hand there was this hard-to-express feeling that this was Not Good, that it was of malign intent or effect...

So far as I remember, this intuitive feeling was always correct, and the impressions I got were valid; and sooner-or-later I would regret having 'given-myself' (by attention, concentration, and openness) to such and such a play, poem, philosophy, movie, artwork or whatever it might be.

Sooner-or-later I would need to dis-engage and un-learn; in order to escape from the distortion and corruption that had been seeded in me.


Maybe this is the proper and underlying source of the 'modern' way of skating-across and sampling the deluge of 'information' that comes to us each day? Perhaps what we are supposed to do is develop consciousness of these (maybe subtle, maybe fleeting) feelings of aversion (and the rarer opposite ones of validation and attraction) - and thereby be able to disengage immediately, before much harm is done?


This reminds me of Ralph Waldo Emerson's self-described method of reading by skimming and homing-in on 'lustres. He warned against expending too much attention and effort on what we read; because most of it was not worth it; and also because the giving of oneself was stultifying to one's own creativity. Emerson said one ought to be reading mainly in order to 'start your own team' - that is: we should read (etc) in order to fuel our own creative activities.

Such practice leads-on-to a way of dealing with the mass media and the propaganda that cannot be avoided. Of course we should limit our exposure to it; but essentially media propaganda cannot nowadays be avoided - therefore perhaps we ought to engage with it in the skimming spirit recommended by Emerson?


And we should also develop our own awareness of these evaluative intuitions that so quickly (and reliably) arise from our true selves to tell us of the nature of what we are reading; tell us of its ultimate sources; tell us what side it is on?

This stance mostly works to unmask the foul intent behind fair words; but also may lead us to the (few) good people (i.e. people on the side of Good) who are nowadays seldom concentrated in any particular place; but who are thinly-distributed - and sometimes in unexpected places.

Proto-SJWs and virtue-signalling - The 'complex' characters in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Chronicles

I've been watching the 1982 BBC TV adaptation of volumes one and two of Anthony Trollope's Barchester Chronicles. These are set in a fictional idyllic English Cathedral city in the middle 1800s; and I found that I was expecting the characters to fit the usual stereotypes familiar from modern TV and movies.

But Trollope does something very interesting and unusual here. The story is about the activity of political radicals in Barchester who propose a variety of reforms to the church. The Church of England is depicted as staffed by idle, nepotistic and corrupt upper class men; who get large incomes for little or no work.

For example, the Warden gets 800 pounds income from a hospital for a dozen old men, a position that has no duties. The Canon of the Cathedral has been living the high life with his family in Italy for more than a decade.

As a result of the radicals activities, the hospital is doubled in size to include old women; and has a Sunday school added and regular church services. The Canon is made to return and work for his living.

This is exactly the kind of plot we are familiar with from countless dramas - corrupt conservatives versus idealistic leftists...

However, Trollope provides a rare - but realistic - twist; because the corrupt conservatives contain all the kindest, most sympathetic - most truly Christian characters. The Warden himself, Mr Harding, is almost a saint; the only person who is capable of loving self-sacrifice.

While by contrast the radicals are a mixed bunch of dislikable, or inconsistent, folk - as indicated by their Dickensian names. Dr Bold - a gullible idealist who betrays his wife's family to the rabble rousing London press; Mrs Proudie - the new Bishop's snobbish and tyrannical wife; and the Bishop himself - weak, vacillating, without principles. And the vastly odious Obidiah Slope - the Bishop's hypocritical and scheming Chaplain (played by Alan Rickman in his first big impact role).

The result is a state of complex ambiguity in which the 'cause' is separated from the nature of motivations of the people; in which apparently high ideals are shown to have adverse consequences, in which the pursuit of public good is a mask for a more cynical, and overall more damaging, form of corruption than that which it purports to address.

Mrs Proudie and Mr Bold can indeed be seen as proto-SJWs, engaging in early examples of what we currently term 'virtue signalling'!

In brief, Trollope succeeds in writing that rarest of stories - one in which the nice people are on the 'wrong' side, while those who hold all the 'right opinions' are shades of nasty. More importantly, Trollope has the ring of truth about it - and (broadly speaking) very probably represented the actual situation in that era.

As a real life example, reading Ralph Waldo Emerson in the pre US Civil War years, it is clear that the activist Abolitionists were a bunch of monomaniacal fanatics - either very boring, or psychopathically dangerous. The nice and kind people were nearly all on the side of the status quo. Indeed, Emerson had to overcome a strong personal repulsion against the Abolitionists before he could embrace the cause of anti-slavery. And, of course, the actual consequences of coercive abolition were, in many respects, extremely bad - not least the killing and maiming of a very high proportion of the population. Yet such realism has become intolerable to the modern mind - we must have our slavers as nasty, and our abolitionists as saints.

So we get the paradox that mainstream middlebrow Victoria story of small town, upper class life is more genuinely tough-minded and truthful than the grimy sordidness of modern productions. But then, modern people mock the up-front and principled Bowderlisations of Victorians (designed to protect the innocent), while dishonestly imposing their own censorship in favour of moral inversion and the corruption of children.

So it's all of a piece, really. 

 

The slimy Mr Slope - low churchman and bachelor and proponent of puritanical public morality, gets rather too flirty with a married lady...

Compensation

Compensation is the universal rule of life - as Ralph Waldo Emerson intuited.

When worldly fellowship is lacking, God will ensure that we do not lack for other-worldly fellowship.

(On condition of our choices and effort, of our repentance and self-correction.)

The rise of fantasy literature, and indeed the whole positive side of the arts, sciences, mass media and modern communications is a part of this: almost all technology, despite its being overall and in intention destructive, but makes it possible to find compensatory good. 

The modern situation that creates the problem will (or some adjacent aspect will) create new possibilities of solution that are sufficient to the problem. 

So - as the social nature of society is subverted and suppressed, and collapses around us; we have a multitude of new communications with fellows emerging - to some extent even in this mortal world, but also in the other and invisible world - the imagination.

(Which is, of course, a real place with real and valid content!)

RW Emerson's essay Compensation 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNFMsBLpl_g