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Cancel Save settings. Bestselling Series. Harry Potter. Books By Language. Books in Spanish. Filter your search Keyword. Only these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a few at a time, at long intervals, and it takes millenniums to make a Bible. These are a few of the books which the old and the later times have yielded us, which will reward the time spent on them.
In comparing the number of good books with the shortness of life, many might well be read by proxy, if we had good proxies; and it would be well for sincere young men to borrow a hint from the French Institute and the British Association, and as they divide the whole body into sections, each of which sits upon and reports of certain matters confided to it, so let each scholar associate himself to such persons as he can rely on, in a literary club, in which each shall undertake a single work or series for which he is qualified.
For example, how attractive is the whole literature of the Roman de la Rose, the Fabliaux, and the gaie science of the French Troubadours! Yet who in Boston has time for that? But one of our company shall undertake it, shall study and master it, and shall report on it as under oath; shall give us the sincere result as it lies in his mind, adding nothing, keeping nothing back.
Each shall give us his grains of gold, after the washing; and every other shall then decide whether this is a book indispensable to him also. Note 1. That the value which Mr.
Tarnovius on the Minor Prophets. Owen against the Arminians. English Annotations. Note 2. Enough that it amuses and exercises us. At least it leaves us where we were. It names things, but does not add things. These silent wise, these tractable prophets and singers, who now and then cast their moonlight illumination over solitude, weariness and fallen fortunes. Note 3. MichaelScott lived in the thirteenth century, and had great fame on the Continent as well as in Scotland.
He is mentioned by Dante. Note 4. Utterly miserable, self-accused amid sorrowful faces, with no outlook but to be the fettered master of slaves, I was wont to shun the world, with a gun for an apology. The church-bells across the river smote upon a heart discordant with them, at discord with itself. Nature had no meaning, life no promise and no aim. Listlessly turning to the printed page, one sentence caught my eye and held it; one sentence quoted from Emerson, which changed my world and me.
A sentence only! I do not repeat it: it might not bear to others what it bore to me: its searching, subtle revelation defies any analysis I can make of its words. All I know is that it was the touch of flame I needed. That day my gun was laid aside to resume no more. Boston: J. Gratz, Note 5. Note 6. When in Mr. I read for other people.
Note 7. He became professor of Belles-lettres at Leyden, and surpassed his father in erudition. In this capacity he brought to notice many valuable but neglected manuscripts, and he bequeathed to Florence the important library which he had collected. His noted work is the Dictionnaire historique et critique. Note 8. Professor Herman Grimm in his first letter to Mr. Note 9. Journal, Note This suggests the advice to the Artist in the quatrain of that name.
Shakspeare, Taming of the Shrew, Act I. These Eastern story-tellers whose oily tongues turn day into night and night into day, who lap their hearers in a sweet drunkenness of fancy, so that they forget the taste of meat! Read them largely and swiftly in translation to get their movement and flow; and then a little in the original every day. For the Greek is the fountain of language. The Latin has a definite shore-line, but the Greek is without bounds.
Emerson himself never enjoyed Aristophanes, but read the comedies for such light as they gave on the age and country. The rogue gets his dues. I remember I expected a revival in the churches to be caused by reading Jamblichus.
Here is an Atlantic strength which is everywhere equal to itself, and dares great attempts, because of the life with which it feels itself filled. Such a sense as dwells in these purple deeps of Proclus transforms every page into a slab of marble, and the book seems monumental.
They suggest what magnificent dreams and projects! They show what literature should be. Rarely, rarely does the Imagination awake. He may yet obtain gleams and glimpses of a more excellent illumination from their genius, outvaluing the most distinct information he owes to other books. For I hold that the grandeur of the impression the stars and heavenly bodies make on us, is surely more valuable than our exact perception of a tub or a table on the ground.
Thomas Taylor, the enthusiastic translator of the Neo-Platonists, was a remarkable character, a high-minded Greek Pagan in London. Charles J. I want to meet that man. For no man of self-conceit can go through Plato.
Jamblichus of Chalcis, the pupil of Porphyry, succeeded him as the head of the Neo-Platonic school of Syria in the fourth century B. His writings combine the religious philosophies of the Greeks and Orientals. He built a pyramid, and then enamelled it. By David Greene Haskins, D. A few incidents are sufficient, and are displayed with Oriental amplitude and leisure.
It is the Bible of love. Ralph Waldo Emerson ,. Peter Norberg Editor. Mary Oliver Introduction ,. Brooks Atkinson Editor. Joel Porte Editor. Alfred R. Ferguson Editor ,. Jean Ferguson Carr Editor ,. Alfred Kazin Introduction. Larzer Ziff Editor, Introduction by. Larzer Ziff Editor. William H. Gilman Editor ,. Charles R. The later two books— English Traits and The Conduct of Life —sold reasonably well for the time, but the earlier books, Nature and the two Essays , while hugely important intellectually and culturally, sold in tiny numbers.
This was partially because the publishing infrastructure in this country was not very advanced. His early audience is a small subset of American lovers of literature and heavy philosophical thought. Boston is the powerhouse of American intellectual life, at least during the first half of the 19th century. If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere as an intellectual and a writer.
But once Emerson set up his network with Carlyle and other British writers, his fame traveled to England fairly early. By the time he went for a second trip, he was a known figure. He would lecture in England as well. And, if anything, Emerson benefits Carlyle just as much if not more, because he helps Carlyle get published in America. He helped Carlyle enormously in America, yes. His deteriorating relationship with Carlyle is also funny and interesting.
Carlyle was very cranky to begin with, so as he got more cranky, well, you can only imagine. As Carlyle became more obstreperous and impossible, Emerson became more and more tranquil and impossible to ruffle.
Jane Carlyle—also a cranky person and very skilled at conveying it—found that infuriating. She hated the fact that he was now a tranquil, serene, smiling man who simply would not rise to the bait. Later, as his cognitive life began to deteriorate, that affect was kind of a mask as well, for not being able to engage anymore.
How did the relationship of Emerson and Carlyle deteriorate? Remember, Emerson was just discovering his own vocation as a writer. He met Carlyle during his first trip ever to Europe, after the trauma of his wife dying and leaving the Church. He went to meet him out in the country, and it was a lovefest. Carlyle saw Emerson as his American disciple—as this angelic, beautiful young man who responded to the tone of his voice and transposed it into a Yankee register. He acted as his agent, seeking publishers for his work and brokering deals.
I should say it can be procured as a free ebook. Their letters are great. They write in a very high register, a sardonic one, with a certain humor. Does an entirely different side to the man come across in private writing? Oh, absolutely. He came out of an age of compulsive journal-keepers. Many of them were Puritanical: you undertook a journal to keep track of your sins or lack thereof as a way of perpetual self-examination.
For Emerson, keeping a journal functioned in many different ways. The journals were, first of all, a laboratory for all of his mature writing, a place where he would try out things.
They were also a commonplace book. Last but not least, they were a window into an intimate side of Emerson that he would never, ever expose in his published writings. They function like commonplace books, but it also seems to me as if his impetus for writing things down is often an emotion, a highly intense feeling. He draws a picture of his face and glues a piece of paper over it. He also records some incredibly bizarre dreams. She was a very important and forceful voice in that conversation.
She stayed at his house at various points for weeks at a time. The interpersonal dynamics there are insane. She was always pushing Emerson for more intimacy in their relationship. But she wanted more from him. First of all, he was married.
There are these tremendous scenes with his wife Lidian, who was afflicted with various maladies and would frequently take to her bed. At the dinner table, Lidian would ask Margaret Fuller if she cared to go walking with her after dinner. What a scene! You would have me love you. What shall I love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you. What you have thought and said? I see no possibility of loving anything but what now is, and is becoming. Your courage, your enterprise, your budding affection, your opening thought, your prayer, I can love, but what else?
His journal is a laboratory for that, too: for the working out of his sometimes thorny interpersonal relations. This is his personality, with its ardent underside: intense currents of feeling beneath a very chilly exterior.
He himself was aware of it. Does he cultivate a sort of diffident exterior, not imbibing anything that comes near him? Maybe it was shaped by grief, by dealing with catastrophic bereavements very early in life. He was entirely aware of, and in some ways imprisoned by, his own diffidence. Tell me what you know. Is there a contradiction here, to some degree? Oh my god, he is the most contradictory person ever. And yet later he become quite a fiery abolitionist speaker.
While his line about quotations is clever, the fact is Emerson was constantly quoting, consciously and unconsciously. His level of immersion in all of this literature is so great that he unconsciously phrases around it. The cadences are in his head all the time. This goes back to what we were talking about before: utter fealty to his intellectual fathers, but also an Oedipal desire to slay them, to violently discard the baggage of his predecessors.
You mentioned his early racism. How does he go to become involved in the movement for abolition? Actually, it was his wife Lidian who was very involved in the anti-slavery society in Concord before Emerson was.
Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. What redeemed him, as I said before, is that he became a fierce advocate on behalf of abolition. By the time of the Civil War, he lent considerable intellectual prestige to the movement, once he found his feet. The drawback here—which is also the drawback of the Transcendental thinking he endorsed, shaped, and enunciated so beautifully—is that it presupposes an enormous revolution of consciousness, which consequently leads to very little patience for retail politics.
But of course that revolution of consciousness never happened. Real life intruded on a very idealistic way of thinking. At some point, Emerson realized that some actual political engagement would be necessary.
How should we read today the inevitable contradiction between the democratic quality of experience that Emerson writes that all men have access to, and the actual conditions of life for women and African Americans in this period?
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