Our first American!

After Thursday’s class, I began to think about the times in my life I’ve spent with Emerson. This mental trip began with an actual family vacation and ended with a rather nationalistic recollections of the ways Emerson, the Transcendentalists, and for that matter, the Romantics are all still alive and with us, especially in the realm of literary criticism.

When I was somewhere between thirteen and sixteen, (I mean come on, most summers blend together), my family went to the Northeast to sample the bounty of salt water taffy, sea food, and Bostonians that seem to be rather common in that part of the world. One of the days was devoted to Walden Pond, where Emerson’s bud Thoreau, lived (not that) far from civilization to write about the beauty and wonder and cleansing aspects of nature. While I was reading Emerson this week, I couldn’t help but think about that little shed that Transcendentalist disciples attach so much meaning to. Of course now, that little shack outside of Concord is more of a tourist trap than a place where anyone could, as Emerson said in his essay Nature, “become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am a part or a particle of God” (615). Mourning the loss of communing with nature seems to be a popular topic since the first publications of pastoral longings. However, let’s take a look at the rest of that sentence and more of Emerson’s ideas.

Just as Schleiermacher’s scheme and rules in Hermeneutics are still with us, the ideas in Emerson’s works are with us and thriving, even if at times only acting as platitudes. Poetry is honorable, for “the poet chanting was felt to be a divine man” (618).

At times, Emerson, like Coleridge, seems like a parrot of nineteenth century zeitgeists, Hegel and other Romantic thinkers bleed through like crazy. Emerson warns against authors whose text “becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant” (618), which quickly seems to be a verbatim Lord/Bondsman relationship. Then there’s the time when Emerson channels Kant and declares, “the soul active seems absolute truth and utters truth, or creates” (619). Okay Kant, thanks for trying on an American accent.

All that being said, I learned about Emerson in middle school, not Kant. I learned about Transcendentalists, not Hegel. Maybe it’s partially the part of education, but I also think there’s something to be said for being the first one, (or the most famous one) to introduce the masses to an idea. It turns you into the one that opens the lid of the jar holding the zeitgeist. It means that two hundred years later, your name is still in print, and if you’re lucky, you’re still relevant enough that people put you on greeting cards.