24 October 2014
In his essay “Natural History of Intellect,” Ralph Waldo
Emerson argues for the priority of the truth-seeking of the individual over the
truth-known of the prophet. Emerson says that the trained mind-that which has undertaken
a course on philosophy, (and I recognize the idealist dismissal of the body
here)-”will need no priest. And
if he finds at first with some alarm how impossible it is to accept many things
which the hot or the mild sectarian may insist on his believing, he will be
armed by his insight and brave to meet all inconvenience and all resistance it
may cost him.” Arguing for the primacy of the power of the individual-on self-reliance and on thought-Emerson disparages the
self-aggrandizement and obfuscations that derive from the rhetorics of so-called
scholars. He asks, “ . . . was there ever a prophet burdened with a message to
the people who did not cloud our gratitude by a strange confounding in his own
mind of private folly with his public wisdom.” By which I think Emerson wonders whether within the prophets words doesn’t
there always lie some confusion between an idiosyncratic moment with a public
movement. That is, doesn’t the philosopher/prophet in order to justify his own position
turn the exception into his rule; or
doesn’t the prophet confuse his own private thought with that which the public
must accept as knowledge.
Now, Emerson doesn’t contrast “this
besetting sin of sedentary men” to the wisdom of a public. Indeed, though in
the public sphere the “overweening self-conceit” is suppressed, in that former
arena only the popular is acceptable “for the entertainment of all . . . Great
is the dazzle but the gain is small.” As in all of the comment and analysis on
the news channels, and despite the thousands of words in critical commentary in
the newspapers and journals, “ . . . here they play the game of conversation,
as they play billiards, for pastime and credit.”
How well he seems to define the
current practices of discourse in the United States.
I am led to Sanhedrin 89a and the Rabbis’ discussion of I Kings: 2-38. Ahab, the King of Israel, has asked the prophets to
foretell whether he should go into battle and be triumphant, and in response four
hundred prophets answer in the affirmative. Except for Michaiah, whom Ahab
detests “because he never prophesies anything good for me, but only
misfortune.” True to form, Michaiah does foretell defeat and Zedekiah, one of
the majority prophets, slaps Michaiah and scolds him for assuming authority as
true prophet despite the words of the other four hundred! And Ahab sends
Michaiah to prison. Alas, Michaiah was correct and Ahab is killed in battle.
Now the Rabbis wonder: how can
anyone fault Zedekiah when he had himself been deceived by the spirit of Naboth
whom Ahab had had executed so that he might acquire his coveted vineyard. And
Rabbi Johanan says that Zedekiah “should have scrutinized (the forecasts of the
assembled prophets), even as R. Isaac said, “The same communication is revealed
to many prophets, yet no two prophets prophecy in the identical phraseology.”
It is argued that Zedekiah should have been suspicious that every prophet used
exactly the same words, but a Rabbi suggests that maybe Zedekiah didn’t know of
this criterion regarding difference. Alas, King Jehosophat (the very same one
who jumps) seemed to be so aware: the Rabbis attribute to him this warning, “I
have a tradition from my grandfather’s house that the same communication is
revealed to many prophets, but no two prophesy in the identical phraseology.”
Thus it must be that truth is never
contained in the words, and therefore, we must keep talking and never to assume
ownership of truth. No two prophets prophesy in the same words! Emerson, too,
warns against false prophets. “Yes, it is a great vice in all countries, the
sacrifice of scholars to be courtiers and diners-out, to talk for the amusement
of those who wish to be amused, though the stars of heaven must be plucked down
and packed into rockets to this end!” And hence proceeds the
anti-intellectualism in American society in the denigration of study. It is not
action alone but action informed that concerns. “Yet, what we really want,”
declares Emerson, “is not a haste to act, but a certain piety toward the source
of action and knowledge.” Study as prayer.
20 October 2014
Winter
I gaze out of the oversized patio window door. The trees in
the rear of the house lining the properties edge are bare, and behind them,
perhaps one hundred yards distance, the brilliant color of the leaves has faded
and display lingering shades of brown. My burning bush has lost its brilliant
red leaves. The late afternoon cloudless sky is a very pale blue, almost white
in shade, the high grass has fallen and the low grass has ceased to grow and
begun to yellow. The Jewish Holy Days are completed, and Fall turns not slowly
into winter.
The first
year I lived in the mid-West an enormous snowstorm blanketed the area on
Halloween and remained on the ground until late April. That approximate length
of months is about the extent of winter here. There was a time when I felt that
I could tolerate the cold: during the winter months only temperatures below -20
degrees kept me from the roads and I wore overcoats and remained hatless. Today
I have taken from storage my winter coat purchased from LL Bean that kept me
somewhat warm last winter and that always adds ten pounds to my weight when I
put it on, these days at earlier moments and (relatively) higher temperatures.
I have at least two hats, several scarves and insulated gloves. Nevertheless, I
do not think I will blow much snow this winter.
This late
afternoon I do yet not smell snow in the air; indeed, the temperature is rather
warm, but the air itself feels temporary, and seems to suggest, “Wear a sweater
anyway!” Or it is me recognizing the time? Mostly, I remain indoors, and make
only occasional forays out of the house. It is said that Thoreau would walk
about for four hours per day, but in fact, the day contains twenty-four hours.
He must have remained indoors for much of that time, then, writing and reading.
“This only is reading, and in a high sense but what we have to stand on tip-toe
to read, and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.” Hence, he must have
spent a good deal of time sitting and reading. “I find it wholesome to be alone
the greater part of the time,” he states, somewhat proudly I think. And yet, a
whole chapter in Walden explores
Society: I love society as much as the next! Winter invites society in.
18 October 2014
I Love You, Mrs. Dalloway
I’ve returned to University, again. Well, in reality I have
never quite left it: after my own college education (1965-69), I began a
master’s program and then a doctoral program, finishing finally in 1990. During
that time I also taught high school English, the subject I was studying at the
University. I adored reading and studying literature. It was always myself I
sought in the books, and in that search I often came across great beauty.
Indeed, I taught myself (I learned) to know the beautiful.
And so when my beautiful daughters
went off to University and studied literature, I chose to read the books along
with them. I have mentioned this occasionally here and more recently in the
final chapter, “Of Cabins, Pequods, and Classrooms,” of my new book, The Classroom: Encounter and Engagement. And
over these past six and seven years I
have experienced great delight in returning to many of the texts I had studied
myself during these past forty-five years: how my readings have changed! How I
have changed is marked often in my markings in the readings. I have had the
opportunity to discuss books and ideas with my daughters but also with the
twenty year old as I now commented within the texts to the comments entered
upon the texts those many years ago by he who first had read those books at
University.
And so I have been rereading
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. And
there is one passage (of many, actually) that struck me as particularly
beautiful and poignant. (I wonder now: to what extent poignancy is integral to
beauty!) Richard Dalloway has purchased roses for his wife, Clarissa, well, to
tell her “in so many words’ that the loved her.” And he was happy.
Theirs is a complex, adult
relationship (I know, I know, I should define those words but I won’t here,
this is not a literary analysis of Mrs.
Dalloway), and Clarissa loved her roses. More than the events of the day (was
it the Armenians or the Albanians who were massacred?), Clarissa loved her
roses. “What she liked was the simple life.” And it is for the sake of the
simple life that Clarissa throws her parties. “They are an offering . . . an
offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift.” Clarissa
is a simple woman: “Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not
think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success;
hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense; and to this day ask
her what the Equator was, and she did not know.” Dear Clarissa, so simple and
complex.
And then Clarissa reflects on the
beauty of the simplicity: “All the same, that one day should follow another;
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning;
see the sky; walk in the park, meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came
Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that how unbelievable death was--that it must end; and no
one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how every instant .
. .” Yes, privileged, rich, physically comfortable is Clarissa Dalloway, but
how happy in the beauty she enjoys in the diurnal. And how that feeling of
happiness dissolves the reality of death and makes it well, unbelievable. It is
not that Clarissa is oblivious, nor even that she is not touched by sorrow and
doubt. But at this moment, with her roses, and just hours before her party, she
loved it all . . . every instant!
07 October 2014
Bull Frogs
There is a wonderful passage in Walden in the chapter “Sounds.” It is late in the evening and Thoreau
hears the sounds that come to him as he sits in his cabin¾though I suspect he sits for
the most part out of doors in his single chair reserved for solitude. Devoting
at least half of the chapter to the thoughts inspired by the sound of the
railroad¾of it
he says, “it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it”¾he comes eventually to the
natural sounds about his abode in the woods. It is a lovely and beautifully
noisy chapter.
And one sound that Thoreau hears is
“trump of bull-frogs.” And he likens these creatures and their sounds to “the
study spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying
to sing a catch in their Stygian lake . . .
who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though
their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the
wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and
sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere
saturation and waterloggedness and distention.” On the one hand, I suspect
Thoreau refers here to the senior magistrates of the town whose function has
become mere ceremony and that serves little purpose, but whose position tenures
them to meaningless and empty existences. Their liquor is not sweet enough to
cause the past to disappear even for a short time, and they drink embittered in
the memory of their unfulfilled lives. “The most aldermanic, with his chin upon
a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this
northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passed
round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk,
tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straitway comes over the water from some
distance cove the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth
has gulped down to his mark . . .” Thoreau’s
is a rather amusing portrayal of a bunch of overweight bureaucrats that reminds
me not a little of James Joyce’s portrayal in the story “Ivy Day in the
Committee Room” of minor town bureaucrats gathered on election day discussing
politics, awaiting their pay-offs and
sharing the ample supply of liquor.
But to me the description offers
some insight into Thoreau’s capacity for humor, a trait not often associated
with the Concord hermit. His portrait of the drunken fest bespeaks a certain
amusement in the conduct of the participants. Thoreau in this passage appears
far from humorless. And of course, to describe so carefully and amusedly the drunken
scene might suggest that at some time Thoreau might himself have engaged in an excess of spirits in the
company of society and belched forth his own belched tr-r-r-oonk.
I am discovering a more nuanced
Thoreau in this reading of Walden.