Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

We have gotten to Emerson and I won't be able to do too much justice to Thoreau tonight. Although for those who have been coming know that I will do a second series. There are many Americans who had to be left out just because of lack of space. So we will incorporate Thoreau in the next series on American Spiritual Classics which will run yet this year. It will be the last quarter of this year which will include George Washington and Frank Lloyd Wright Mark Twain Wallace Stevens and I will add Thoreau to the Thoreau to the list. That's how I wanted it pronounced. Thoreau New England Emerson is a rare orchid blossom which is almost unexpected anywhere much less in the United States in the 1820s and 30s when he first came to us. Until one takes a look at the United States as we have been doing from a spiritual insight stance and then it is little wonder that the harmonious free insight of an Emerson should have blossomed in our country. And not only Emerson but Thoreau concurrently with him and in fact very very quickly within that generation born while Jefferson was still president or Madison and or Monroe were presidents the quality of human character exemplified by Americans in that period was such that one great writer named Lewis Mumford who would become famous later on in his life as an architectural critic as the author of many many fine books on American civilization.

One of his earliest books was called The Golden Day. And in The Golden Day he wrote all the important thinkers who shared in this large experience that is the American experience were born between 1800 and 1820. Their best work was done by the time the Civil War came if not beyond the reach of its hurt. They at all events could not be completely overthrown or warped by it. The leader of these minds the central figure of them all was Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the first American philosopher with a fresh doctrine. He was the first American poet with a fresh theme. He was the first American prose writer to escape by way of the Elizabethan dramatists in the 17th century preachers from the smooth prose of Addison or the stilted periods of Johnson. He was an original in the sense that he was a source. He was the glacier that became the White Mountain torrential stream of Thoreau and expanded into the serene ample blossomed lake of Whitman. He loses a little by this icy centrality but he must be climbed and there is so much of him that people become satisfied with just a brief glimpse and forget that they have not reached the summit which dominates the lower peaks and platforms. And so wrote Lewis Mumford in The Golden Day. It's very very difficult to approach someone who is seminal like Emerson because he is a source and there have been dozens of biographies of Emerson but none of them really present the man although many of them have within their title the word portrait.

And perhaps the most large ambitious work is one done by Gay Wilson Allen just a few years ago the man who wrote the great biography of Walt Whitman called The Solitary Singer. He also wrote a biography of William James who we will talk about later on in this series. His biography is entitled Waldo Emerson because Emerson did not like the name Ralph. He went by Waldo very often or signed his name R. Waldo Emerson. And even though it's filled with a lot of factual information that you cannot find elsewhere readily it still doesn't present the flavor of the character of the man the central man. Wallace Stevens once wrote in a poem that there is still the impossible philosopher's man the central globe composed as it would seem of a million diamonds whose responsive voice seems to finally sum us all up. And Emerson was that he is the epitome of his age and he comes on the tail end of an age which had titanic geniuses galore that age the age of Revolution included. Our great forefathers Franklin and Jefferson. It included in Europe personages like Napoleon or Goethe writers like Shelley or Blake a protean age. And Emerson was the inheritor of that tremendous pinnacle of human achievement and energy. And he seemed in his own right to encase it and sum it up so that very often from a distance Emerson seems like a bland individual very much like the portraits one sees in normal frontispieces he looks like the good minister the individual whose opinions will never harm you or if you quoted them in public anywhere in the world they would draw pleasant nods of acquiescence.

This was not the case at all. Emerson was tremendously controversial all through his life. He was in fact many times asked to not lecture because comments that he might make were inopportune at the time. He was once skittishly put aside and then brought up to a lecture hall in England when he was going to lecture in 1848 because there was a revolution going on in Paris at that time and Emerson had been welcomed by the French revolutionary people at the time was given a little tour. As a matter of fact he was a fearless kind of an individual who was at home almost everywhere that he went. So it's difficult to see Emerson now. He was born in 1803 which means that he was again born while Jefferson was president. He was born in Boston of an old family. They had been there for generations. And he was in fact related to almost all of the families the old New England families one way or another. But it was a characteristic of that age the early 19th century in New England that tuberculosis as a disease was epidemic. So many people died during this period of time from tuberculosis.

Thoreau died from it. Emerson's brothers. His young sister. Many persons. So that the complications of life and death and relatedness were not the normal kind of social pattern. In fact Emerson's father who was a quite a famous man in his community died when Emerson was still fairly young. Waldo himself was sent to Harvard University. He was fairly young at the time and he spent four years there. Harvard had at one time as a matter of fact been located in Concord where Emerson would live for most of his life. He had many relatives there and he went to Harvard. He was about 14 years old spent four years there. His education was fairly well versed but he did not bring himself to bear on his studies as much as he might. He dabbled a little bit at reading all kinds of literature. By the age of 19 for instance he had already been introduced into some of the Indian Hindu classics. So he had a wide ranging kind of a private reading education. He also wrote some poetry at that time. And when he graduated in 1821 he decided just like almost everyone in his family had done that he would go to divinity school and become a minister. Thus far Emerson seemed to fit the general pattern of a young New England man of that age but already he was beginning to keep a journal which was a lifelong ambition with him.

And into this journal we began very early on to see that Emerson had grave doubts about not only himself as a minister but about Christianity as a religion about the place of sacramental rituals in a religious institution. And in fact it would work on him until he reached the point where when he was a minister the second church in Boston it occurred to him that communion was not a bland repetitious habitual motion to be gone through every Sunday that it was a particular special transformational ritual that should be done only in exceptional circumstances. And he refused in a letter to administer communion in his church. And of course this did not sit well with the congregation or the church elders. It wouldn't today. This was back in the 1830 era 150 years ago. So that Emerson began to find in himself in face of the circumstances of his life a feeling tone that there was a special quality of what he called self-reliance which was indispensable for the nurturing of human character and that without this feeling that one could truly and honestly go back onto one's own reserves that you had nothing but sham to stand on nothing but masks to hold up and nothing but lies to keep infiltrating until one would become rather spongy donut surrounding nothing so that Emerson's self-reliance began to express itself foremost in the structure of that work known as his journals his private journals.

And he kept them detailed and except for a few months of travail in various periods of his life they are continuous all the way through now. Emerson's journals have only recently been published. There was a ten volume selection published in 1903 during the Emerson centenary but and there was a one volume condensation of them published by Bliss Perry back around the mid 1920s. But it's only recently that Harvard University Press through a great grant has published all the Emerson journals and we still don't have very many people who have read through them all. Many passages were purposely deleted. and one can see why Emerson was very very outspoken. This journal was his savings bank of truth of impressions and images of responses especially of experience which was his that he could come back to and return to and compare how he stood for instance in 1850 versus 1833 on a certain issue and knowing that he had kept his integrity intact all the time had kept his honesty and expression alive all the time. Emerson had in his journals a trustworthy companion all through his life. And of course this idea of a journal being an honest conscientious guide who is made up out of one's own basic experience became a characteristic of Emerson's American Renaissance. And in fact those individuals who were closest to him who understood this aspect of the journal began to keep journals themselves. Thoreau for instance has an enormous journal. It runs to 20 volumes when published in its total. And one finds in there the incredible vista of the man who turned himself one time. The only post that he wanted in humanity was to be the surveyor of snowstorms since no one had filled the position. He awarded it to himself. Emerson is the granddaddy of this use of the journal not simply to log down the events as they happen but to become a honest linked repository of actual experience all the way through. And later on when he would published his books the journals were the tapestry the background against which he would embroidery each and every one of his books. In the second series of essays one of them is on experience. I'll just give you a quotation from the essay called experience. Just to bring this home he wrote. This was 1844. It appears many times in his journals beforehand. This is the formal tying of it together into a bow of expression. You know an individual like Emerson has to come upon something 3 or 4 times before he allows himself to notice it. And maybe on the 15th or 16th time he'll begin to analyze it. That is he lets experience occur to him again and again and again and doesn't react to it in a normal puppet fashion but lets the accrual of incidents of like kind create a structure of sympathy to which he slowly notices that he is tuning to and then regards that with the penetrative eye of inner calm to see what it was that he was in harmony with.

And so even though this was written in 1844 there are indications at least 15 years ahead in the journal that this is what he thought about experience. He wrote in the essay and this is the very first paragraph very short.

Where do we find ourselves Where do we find ourselves In a series of which we do not know the extremes and believe that it has none In other words we find ourselves immediately at any present moment of questioning. Where are we in a continuum of which there is no end on either side either direction he wrote. We wake and find ourselves on a stair. There are stairs below us which we seem to have ascended. There are stairs above us. Many a one which go upward and out of sight. But the genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter into this life and gives us the Lethe to drink. Lethe is forgetfulness that is when we commend to the life. The old adage is that at the door of the portal of life we are given a drink of Lethe to make us forget. He says the Lethe to drink that we may tell no tales makes the cup too strongly and we cannot shake off the lethargy. Now even at noon day sleep lingers all our lifetime.

About our eyes. As night hovers all day. In the boughs of the fir trees. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghost like we glide through nature and should not know our place again. Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature That she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle And though we have health and reason yet we have no superfluidity of our spirit for new creation. And so he writes of experience and he goes on in this one sentence here the secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor. We love to have some place to firmly position ourselves. Our Cartesian moment. But the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us. And then he gives a little quotation in Italian movie which Galileo seems to have uttered after he agreed with the Inquisition that he. Yes he was wrong. And then getting up from his knees he said Paris. Still it moves. I've seen it. And a little further on in experience this illusoriness of nature. He says dream delivers us to dream. And there is no end two. Illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads and as we pass through them they proved to be many colored lenses which paint the world of their own hue and each shows only what lies in its focus.

So that Emerson quite extraordinarily has this notion very early in life which he took to heart and lived consistently by with great tenacity that the only thing that we can count on is our indelible honesty and self-reliance from moment to moment to moment and to hold ourselves well within this cycle and all the time. Not to lash out too much one way or another at life. Now many people coming upon Emerson for the first time hear some of his quotations or read some of his writings and they think of a kind of a pleasant Sunday afternoon limbo which he encourages us to get into and that that is the gentlemanly thing to do. It has nothing to do with that whatsoever. As you're beginning to see and understand his is a very clear minded sharp eyed assessment of what we can actually count upon day after day year after year. No matter how hard we look or what depth and perspective we bring to bear upon it. Now Emerson after he graduated from divinity school at Harvard became a pastor of a church fell in love with a young woman Ellen Tucker married her. This woman died within a couple of years. About a year and six months. And Emerson just noted in his journal today Ellen Tucker Emerson died.

But then you notice maybe two weeks down the line that he's recording all kinds of envisioning things and odd feelings. Another month or so and Emerson is stewing and within 2 or 3 months it becomes apparent that the death of this beautiful young woman didn't sit well with his assessment of the justice of the universe. That something was awry. Something did not balance out. And so Emerson resigned. He could no longer stay at the church. And it was then that he decided that he needed a long trip to Europe. And he left for Europe in the fall in September of 1832. He was going to just take himself. Someone drew a caricature of him once of Emerson as just a large eye and long legs with a three piece suit on and just this guy walking around. And he was searching for what we would call today a guru or a master someone that he could listen to. He was ready to listen. But everywhere he went in Europe rather like Socrates he found that there were no real wise men. There was no one to whom he could apprentice himself. And again and again he would meet the renowned and not so renowned and the closest he came to someone whose integrity that he admired was Thomas Carlyle who was just then starting out in his publishing career and who would form a lifelong friendship with Emerson. It had its rocky moments they would argue from time to time over things.

Emerson once brought up the notion that Europe was old and tired and that only Americans would create the future. And Carlyle slammed his fist down at the dinner table and drew a line and said sir we will never meet. This line goes down to the pit. Carlyle was incidentally a real recluse. He lived way out in Scotland days from any accessible place and Emerson had to make his way there through many days and finally walking quite a distance. It was Emerson who made Carlyle's reputation in the United States incidentally. Sartor Resartus French Revolution heroes and hero worship. All of these were introduced by Emerson to the reading populace of New England and he arranged for the printing of his books and so forth and Carlyle did the same. One thing that united these two men Emerson read German fluently and so did Carlyle. In fact I read through once the whole catalog of Emerson's library just to see what was in there. Several thousand volumes. But I began to notice again and again books by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. And finally I made a count for myself. I thought there must be a lot. Emerson owned over 130 books by or about Goethe so that you know the great sage the genius of guarantor of German culture was very much in play with both Carlyle and Emerson. And there's a whole volume of correspondence between the two men published by Columbia The Letters of Carlyle and Emerson and many of them concerned the way in which culture could be seen by the great man of the age.

In fact when Emerson wrote Representative Men the last man in there who was the representative man for the writer for all time was granted. And I'll read some of that a little later as a description but Emerson came back to the United States empty handed. There was no one to whom he could honestly apprentice himself. There was no one to whom he felt particularly indebted. He had no job. He had no future. He had no ambitions. He had done all the things that were expected of him and it had ended into a dead end. And so he found himself free in a very primordial way. And we begin to notice a sea change in the man in his journals about the time he came back about 1833 or so. Emerson began to take very long walks. He later on in life of course would own Walden Pond and the land around it. And it was on his land that Thoreau built his cabin. It was Emerson's ax that he used to build the cabin. Emerson had in fact gathered some friends to help raise the rafters of Thoreau's hut at Walden Pond but Emerson began taking long walks and began to think in his mind of a central synthesising idea that he had run across in the writings of Swedenborg.

Emanuel Swedenborg mystical writer religious writer had come up with what was called the doctrine of correspondences. That is to say that physical nature in reality has a correspondence on the spiritual level that every single physical manifestation has its correspondence on a spiritual matrix so that nature instead of being a dumb dead end deaf to all. Further meaning literally represents accurately a true state of affairs but that one must see nature as the book to be read to get the meaning behind it. And in Emerson's Journals we find him learning from the trees learning from the clouds learning what learning to position himself not just intellectually but spiritually in such a regard. A way of regarding the world. That these moments of clustering of impressions and perceptions would begin to shape into a reverberation called forth naturally out of himself so that his experience could rise and begin to penetrate through the illusion the illusoriness of the succession of moods that usually baffle the everyday being. In all this of course he was reading voraciously. Everywhere he read the Chinese classics and translation. He read Persian poetry especially Hafiz and Saadi in translation. He read a little bit of Italian so he read Dante. He was especially interested in the Greek mind. And so he read not only Plato who he admired enormously and Aristotle but especially those very difficult people Plotinus and Proclus. In fact he once wrote in his journal he said Proclus is amazing.

He said I read 2 or 3 sentences of Proclus and all day my heart is singing. I feel that my spirit has been raised to the level of song. And anything that I would say or write would be like the lyric itself. And in this reading in this walking in this reading of the correspondence of nature and spirit Emerson began to rise almost like a metaphysical rose in himself to a new level of capacity. This capacity was noted by several people at the time but especially it was experienced by a woman whose name was Lidian Jackson who became Emerson's next wife. His second wife Lidian Jackson was a very well educated woman. She read several foreign languages. Her father had been a very rich merchant. He had in the Boston area. She was I think 8 or 9 months older than Emerson. So she was not a young woman. She was in her early 30s but she heard Emerson lecture. He was doing a few lectures at that time filling in. Various church ministers would be ill and he would give the sermon on the Sunday or he would go to various places and give a lecture. He wasn't yet doing lecture series but the odd lecture here and there. She heard a lecture by Emerson and when she arrived home she seemed to have an experience of Emerson coming into her room and smiling at her and then walking away. She thought this very very strange.

Then a little while later several months later she had the experience of meeting Emerson again and when she came home she went upstairs in her house and was going to take a nap then decided against it and was coming down the stairs when all of a sudden she looked up and coming down the stairs she had a vision of herself in a wedding dress and Emerson coming down the stairs and it was almost so real that she went down and she lay down trying to bring herself together on the couch in her living room and was wondering about this severely. And several hours later her maid brought in a letter from Waldo Emerson who out of the blue had asked her to be his wife to love him forever more that he had had in a deep meditation a vision that this was the true thing to do. And so against all social normalcy he was writing this direct letter to her which she accepts. You betcha. You can't turn away from these moments. So they were married and as they were married and brought together on that day. Lidian like many women I will not say all take her time getting ready and so forth. And she was a little late for the ceremony so Emerson came up the stairs to fetch her to come down to the wedding and she came out at the same time. And so they went down the stairs together.

And that's when she realized that it was just her vision of them at that moment coming down the stairs. That was what she had seen. They moved to Concord and Emerson there had many dear friends. Doctor Ripley. Ezra Ripley owned a house called the Old Manse where later on Hawthorne would live and would write his tales from the Old Manse. But Emerson bought a fine old two story house that was very very near to the bridge where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. In fact Emerson from his study window could look out and see the bridge and see the little river there. And it brought him great pride. And very soon after he moved in there was the 200th anniversary of the founding of Concord, Massachusetts. So Emerson was chosen to give this address and he brought in all the history of the United States up to that time. And for those who came here to the first lecture you realize that you remember King Philip's War the war many of its battles were fought around the Concord area so that Emerson had a lot of images and ammunition and he brought back into play all of this incredible synchronicity we would call it today settled around Concord, Massachusetts. And then of course his own delivery of that lecture on that particular day and those circumstances was alluded to. And Emerson very quickly then began to be seen in exotic ways. Many people did not like him suspected him of being more than unusual esoteric.

Others began to latch on to a phrase that he had mentioned in one lecture transcendentalist. List transcendentalism and they began to wonder whether this was all on the up and up. In fact when Emerson would go to lecture out of New England to New York or other places he was billed as Emerson the Transcendentalist as if this was a real weird kook and one should go and see this phenomenon. He at this time began to seriously consider publishing and in 1836 just a few years later he brought out his first little book called Nature. Small book and in it of course was this tremendous revelation about nature not being just the pleasant mundane background that everyone supposed it was but that it was actually the experiential instruction book on ways to develop our inner reality to the point where we could through a correspondence with natural motions construct an architecture of the spirit for ourselves to engender a sense of presence which would penetrate through the illusoriness of nature so that we had about the time that Andrew Jackson was in the White House the phenomenon of an American philosopher penetrating in thought to the depth of the Bhagavad Gita in natural terms. This was of course only 100 years from the time when Franklin was first setting up some of his experiments. So this was quite something at this time. Emerson was asked to deliver an address the Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard University.

And this address he entitled The American Scholar and it's been reprinted many many times. It's sort of the classic address for that transcendentalist motion. He began to make friends around this time with Henry Thoreau. Thoreau's mother was one of these compulsive talkers. She went on and on and on. And Thoreau being a rather quiet young man as you might imagine long to find himself in some circumstance where he could have a little more decent solitude. And so Thoreau began to accompany Emerson on his walks. And of course this is a real telling point because for Emerson it wasn't just taking his daily constitutional. This was a metaphysical exercise in practical spirit building which he was doing. And so with Thoreau going along on his walks he began to see that there were possibilities for companionship for the interchange between other peoples. And so at this time Emerson began thinking in terms of widening out. And he began to open his home to many many visitors who would come and spend several days or or some weeks or others like Thoreau would live for several years at a time in his home. He began to become the editor of a periodical The Dial and out of this group of persons around The Dial like Margaret Fuller especially began to and Caroline Sturgis began to be a group of like minded people.

Now many of these persons were convinced that in order to develop themselves they had to physically and socially extricate themselves from normal society that the distractions the habituation was so thick and ingrown that they had to remove themselves physically and socially from society so that many of these persons got together and decided to found a utopian commune called Brook Farm. And many people subscribed to this. Emerson and his journal records a great reluctance to at first go along and yet the idea was appealing to him. So in his journal he leaves it open. Let them convince me with ideas with reason. I will listen. And the months went by and Emerson never went. He never joined the Brook Farm community. Eventually incidentally the Brook Farm community did not pan out. Many of the individuals who were involved were financially ruined and ended their days in disparate areas of the United States. Some even went to Europe. Some of the young ladies like Caroline Sturgis and Margaret Fuller of course were interested in carrying on the experimentation into a little more intimate realms with Emerson but they misunderstood his experiential basis. And after a few years these attempts at trying to involve him in more complicated structures were given up. Margaret Fuller incidentally eventually went to New York became an editor there. Got involved in the women's rights movement. Wrote the first book on women's rights in the United States which made her famous in Europe. She went to England. Learned of all of the revolutionary happenings in Rome at the time. Went to Italy. Participated in politics at quite a high level there was forced to flee during the Italian revolutions.

Her husband who was quite wealthy tried to take a lot of marble back to the United States. They loaded up this tremendous ship full of marble. And just before it reached Fire Island, New York caught in a terrible storm because of the weight of the marble and everything the ship was wrecked and almost all aboard were killed. Ironical development and incident. But for Emerson he could not bring himself to take himself away from society. In fact he began to go the other way. He began to take a stance that in fact there were moments when an individual's voice could be heard. And one of the most outstanding moments I think there was a time when what is referred to as the Trail of Tears. I don't know whether you you know of this or not but the Cherokee Indian nation very sophisticated Indian nation had had several individuals break away from the tribal council and had gone on their own recognizance and made a treaty with the officials of the United States. The Cherokees lived in Georgia and later on when gold was discovered on the reservation the United States began to enforce technically the terms of the treaty. And of course since the Cherokee Nation had not made this agreement they rose up in arms and the United States armed forces were sent in and not only were they sent in to quell the uprising of the Cherokee Nation but the Cherokee Nation was put into chains and marched off across Georgia across Alabama across Mississippi and across the Mississippi River and plunked down into the wilderness of Oklahoma.

And of course this is called the Trail of Tears in the Cherokee Indian tradition because many women and children especially died on this forced march. And Emerson of course ferocious wrote a letter to the President of the United States. And we have a quotation here. He wrote

It now appears that the government of the United States chose to hold the Cherokees to this sham treaty and the American president and the cabinet the Senate and the House of Representatives neither hear these men the Cherokee delegation nor see them and are contracting to put this act of nation into carts and boats and drag them over mountains and rivers to a wilderness at a vast distance beyond the Mississippi. In the name of God sir we ask you if this be so. Does this government think that the people of the United States have become savage and mad from their mind. Are the sentiments of love and good nature wiped clean out the soul of men. The justice the mercy that is in the heart's heart in all men from Maine to Georgia abhors this business.

And of course the letter was sent and a reply never came to Emerson as the reply never came to the Cherokee Nation. But it was from this moment that Emerson began to take more of an active voice. And after we have a break I will lead up to a time when during the beginnings of the savagery of the Civil War Emerson visited Lincoln and in quite an interesting interchange some of the future of the United States was seen in some.

Well let's take a little break. And there's coffee and cookies over here. Some tea.

The progression of regard for nature in this country had started with the wilderness had developed into the small enclave and the vast primal forest beyond. Had developed by the time of Jefferson into a potential of a new land. In Cooper's perception it had become the primal forest. And with Emerson and Thoreau it had become the woods. So that the basic background the context which we had lightened from an indefinite nightmarish tangle 200 years before into a mellowed possibility of a place within which to stroll to experiment with perceptions of reality. In between that of course there had been a whole other current. And that is that the land was there for the taking. It was a usable commodity that it would be a sin to pass up. That man was made to go and get it. These crosscurrents of course quite at odds with each other profoundly at odds with each other began to produce structures of antagonism and anxiety that went deeper than just the conscience of any individual or any groups of individuals and finally began to constrict the entire country.

And almost as if by some unerring design the American mind put its finger on exactly the issue where one could decide quite easily was nature a property to be developed and bartered and sold and had or was it a quality to be raised to new levels of expressive amplitude And that question was slavery. Can you own a man Can another human being own some other human being. And this became the central issue that began to surface more and more. It took a long time between the 1830s and the 1860s for all the various ploys social and political and economic to have their days of feint and push and pull and pros and cons until finally it became clearer and clearer that the issue in a nutshell was could you own a man. Could you own another human being Is a man property And as that issue began to clarify itself Emerson the forest seer the New England sage found himself more and more drawn to the razor's edge of having to make public statements of having to make public decisions. And then in a series of peculiar events because the far western states as they were coming in the issue was were they going to be slave states or free states And finally when it came Kansas’ turn a group of individuals under the leadership of a man named John Brown decided they couldn't take the immorality anymore.

And so they grabbed a group of individuals. And in Virginia they went into the Harpers Ferry Harpers Ferry Arsenal federal arsenal and took out weapons to go and arm the slaves to encourage them to to fight for their own freedom and dignity. And of course the John Brown people were captured almost too easily almost as if Brown wanted to be martyred over the issue. And it's curious that one of his closest friends in New England was Emerson. That was Emerson's house that Brown had been to several times. It was even Emerson's house that he was at just a few months before the raid on Harpers Ferry and that one of the escaped men from Brown's group showed up a week later battered and torn by having gone the back roads at Emerson's house half deranged with the madness of pursuit and Emerson tactfully and quietly took Thoreau aside told him some of the circumstance and Thoreau put the man on a buggy and drove him to an out of the way train station where he could get a train for Canada and be safe. All of these things began to work on Emerson and other individuals who were alive at the time and began to produce in them a real sea change in character. I think perhaps the individual who personifies the agony of the travail most is Whitman and the individual who personifies the the need of keeping some equilibrium some centrality of dignity alert and alive some place is Emerson. And it's curious because Whitman and Emerson had had their little meetings. In fact Emerson had been sent a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass when it came out in 1855. Emerson was by that time of course a very famous lecturer. He was lecturing as far away at that time as Saint Louis and Wisconsin and city of Cincinnati. He had lectured all over Europe by that time. So young Walt Whitman Walter Whitman as he called himself at that time sent him a copy of Leaves of Grass and Emerson sat down with it was overcome as most people are if they actually do get to Leaves of Grass and we'll get to it in this series. He wrote a letter to Whitman dated Concord the 21st of July 1855. He had gotten Leaves of Grass around the 4th of July. It's a reoccurring date in our history. I guess you know that Jefferson and Adams both died on the 4th of July 1826 50 days from the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And President Monroe died on the 4th of July five years later. So the 4th of July keeps cropping up in our history again and again. This 4th of July it was Leaves of Grass that arrived at Emerson's house.

So he finally wrote to Whitman. He said

Dear Sir I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. And very happy in reading it as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature as if too much handiwork are too much lymph in the temperament were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us and which large perception can only inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career which must have had yet a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion but the solid sense of the book is a solid certainty. It has the best merits namely a fortifying and encouraging.

And of course as the national travail came to pass in the Civil War slowly became the great entanglement. Emerson kept his lecturing schedule kept his house open kept the fluid interchange of free ideas available and open. And as we'll see later on Whitman absolutely torn by the desecration of American soil by blood shed by brothers and cousins and so forth took himself to the wounded fields where all the wounded soldiers lay outside of Washington D.C. and self-appointed himself as a spiritual counselor for the tens of thousands of bloodied men lying literally out in the open.

And as we get to Whitman later on in the series we'll see what torrential passion Whitman shaped at that site. And of course later on was just absolutely adamant when he wrote Democratic Vistas that everyone understand what the country was so that this would not happen again. But Emerson kept alive this schedule which he had finally rounded out for himself. He would devise lecture series that would be maybe 7 to 10 lectures in a row and he took seriously the idea of education as an awakening of the human spirit that it wasn't instruction in how to do something or other. It wasn't parading information in front of people so that they would think that they had heard something of interest merely or entertaining although that was there. But he was an awakener. He was a clarion call that all of the qualities that he had found discovered embody in himself were in every individual man or woman any place that they would be and that in fact it was the American populace that was most likely in history to wake up to these tremendous possibilities of human nature. And he got of course money from these lecture series. Someone asked how he made his living when his first wife had died.

She eventually left him about $22,000. The interest of which was about $1,200 a year. He got 50 to $60 a lecture usually whenever he would lecture. He drew his biggest lecture fees incidentally. And I'm thinking about this in Saint Louis. I don't know why that would be. He came to California once in 1871 went to San Francisco and Sacramento. He went to Yosemite. He was in Yosemite at the same time John Muir was there. And John Muir looked up to Emerson all his life and they got along really well together. And when the sun went down they ushered the old Emerson. He's in his late 60s into the cabin. And Muir records in one of his journals that it was the loneliest night of his life laying in under the stars alone knowing that Emerson at last was there but had to sleep inside he was too old to sleep out. Emerson's influence and his reverberation throughout the country had awakened a whole generation of people to themselves. The self-reliance of the American was really built by Emerson. The idea and it's conspicuous when you see ourselves against any other context in the world. We don't go to ask permission when we see something that needs to be done. We usually figure out how's the best way to go and get this done. It's by now a national trend. And just as he wrote a book on English traits he created American traits which was you don't have to ask permission to live.

Go and do it and find some good way to to effectively get it done. He also had begun to influence people to think in terms of the largest structures possible. That when one woke up from habituation which we all suffer from but we all have the capacity to wake up from and when we wake up from a habituated life pattern what occurs to us is this sense of elation and joy that my God it's true it's all true and everything that we have heard about it is thus and so. So that when his poems came out in 1847 we find not so much the 19th century pleasant lyric in his poems but rather the kind of quality that only Shelley seems to have had in his poetry beforehand. This kind of dignified yet wild elegance in being an oracle for the world. And here's a from whit notes in his Collected Poems he wrote

Heed the old oracles ponder my spells. Song wakes in my pinnacles. When the wind swells soundeth the prophetic wind. The shadows shake from the rock behind. And the countless leaves of the pine are strings tuned to the lay. The wood God sings. Hearken hearken if thou wouldst know. The mystic song chanted when the sphere was young.

And so this appeal that our primordial experience penetrates back of any particular epoch any particular country any particular personage to some primordial gestalt still in motion.

And further that that primordiality is the same that was discovered and uncovered by anyone who ever did this at any time that there was in fact in back of all of nature what he called the Oversoul the central spirituality which could ever and always be approached only through the individual and only through definite honesty. And in his lecture on the oversoul in his essays in the first series he wrote

But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages of the individual's experience it also reveals truth. And here we should seek to reinforce ourselves by its very presence and to speak with a worthier loftier strain of that advent. For the soul's communication of truth is the highest event in nature since it then does not give somewhat from itself but it gives itself or passes into and becomes that man whom it enlightens or in proportion to that truth he receives.

And it takes him to itself so that this term and he goes on to say that the term used for this is revelation. That revelation is always attended with a feeling of the sublime and that this joyousness is the calling card mark of the spirit at any time and that there is this great brotherhood of man throughout countless ages which can be confirmed at any time by someone penetrating to this realization and that the sublime brings it through. Coupled with this of course is the notion that the only way in which to affect this is to do it yourself and in self-reliance.

Another essay is a very famous sentence which I must give to you. He wrote A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds adored by little statesmen little philosophers and divines with consistency. A great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now. And hard words. And to morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words. Again though it contradict everything you said today. Ah so you shall be sure to be misunderstood. Well then is it so bad to be misunderstood Pythagoras was misunderstood and Socrates and Jesus et cetera et cetera. To be great perhaps is to be misunderstood. And he goes on to say no man should violate his own nature. And as long as that code of self-reliance and insistence on the method of correspondence of reading nature penetratingly a right that this builds and of course the best way in which to see. I think the reverberation of Emerson's incredible capacity to give this out and give this to others is in this poem of Thoreau one of Thoreau's earliest poems and the only source of education that he had at this time really practically were his walks with Emerson. This is what comes out of Thoreau very early in his life from being with Emerson in these ways expressed as clearly as possible.

The title of the poem is called Within the Circuit of this Plodding Life which is the first line

Within the circuit of this plodding life their inner moments of an azure hue untarnished fair as is the violet or anemone. When the spring strews them by some meandering rivulet which makes the best philosophy untrue that aims but to console man for his grievances. I have remembered when the winter came high in my chamber. On the frosty nights. When the still light of the cheerful moon. On every twig and rail and jutting spout the icy spears were adding to their length against the arrows of the coming sun. How in the shimmering noon of summer passed some unrecorded beam slanted across the upland pastures where the johnswort grew or heard amid the verdure of my mind. The bees long smothered hum on the blue flag loitering amidst the mead or busy rill which now throughout all its course stands still and dumb its own memorial purling at its play along the slopes and through the meadows next until its youthful sound was hushed at last in the staid current of the lowland stream or seen the furrows shine but late upturned where the field fair followed in the rear. When all the fields around lay bound in white beneath the thick integument of snow. So by God's cheap economy made rich to go upon my winter's task again. And what was that task to be And to know that you are to be there to be the surveyor of the snowstorm.

So as Emerson discovered his capacity to transmit this not in electrifying audiences so much by his lecture style because he really played down the rhetoric. Although he was one of the great lecturers of his day his capacity was to manifest the quality of presence that he had and to let that be there suspended. And by talking about all the different qualities that were attended to it experience the oversoul friendship love whatever it was that he would make accessible entrances to that experience which they could see for themselves and then could later in their own lives manifest for themselves. And so Emerson's books as they would come out would be like these great big presents of all the themes of his lectures brought together so that almost like every decade he was putting out a book which would somehow summarize the works that he had. So we had the essays first series in 1841. Then we had Representative Men in 1850. Which I'll come back to for a second. 1860 The Conduct of Life. 1870 Society and Solitude. And he had a book on Letters and Social Aims in 1875. And then he died 1882. Just to focus for a minute on Representative Men. He wanted to bring together individuals that were characteristic of certain qualities of human manifestation. And his point was later on in his journals he said why did I take just famous men I should have taken people that nobody had ever heard of because they could have exemplified these things just as well because I could have expressed these qualities given people the insight.

But he chose famous men. He chose Plato. He chose Swedenborg and Napoleon Montaigne Goethe in Representative Men especially with Plato. He had this he said

but the biography of Plato the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the supreme elevation of this man in the intellectual history of our race. How it happens that in proportion to the culture of men they became his scholars. That as our Bible has implanted itself in the table-talk and household life of every man and woman in the European and American nations so the writings of Plato have preoccupied every school of learning every lover of thought every church every poet making it impossible to think on certain levels except through him. He stands between the truth and every man's mind and has almost impressed language in the primary forms of thought with his name and seal. I am struck in reading him with the extreme modernness of his style and spirit. Here is the germ. The mind of Plato. And Plato of course is singled out as the first quality of man and the first representative man the philosopher. Many of you realize that the Philosophic Research Society the philosopher the inquirer for the real the mind is urged

wrote Emerson of Plato as a representative man in 1850.

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects then for the cause of that and again the cause driving still into the profound self assured that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient one a one that shall be all.

And then he quotes

in the midst of the sun is the light and in the midst of the light is the truth. And in the midst of truth is the imperishable being.

And that's what's carved on the back of our Egyptian statue facing the San Gabriels. It's from the Vedas. And Emerson got it from there. And Mr. Hall got it from there and put it on the statue so it could be seen. When this came out in 1850 of course this was unheard of. They weren't talking about the Vedas in Europe then. It was the Americans who introduced Asia to the rest of the world. He says he writes that modern science. This is still on Plato.

Modern science by the extent of its generalization has learned to indemnify the student of man for the defects of individuals by tracing growth and ascent in races and by the simple expedient of lighting up the vast background generates a feeling of complacency and hope. The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear his arts and sciences. The easy issue of his brain looked glorious when prospectively beheld from the distant brain of ock's crocodile and fish. It seems as if nature in regarding the geologic night behind her. When in 5 or 6 millenniums she turned out 5 or 6 men as Homer Phidias Maynard Columbus and in no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.

And he goes on with this in this life. The point for us is that Emerson was summarizing the qualities of the individual in terms of what he himself had come to view as the cultural experiment. Now when he finally began to involve himself with the social issues and his lecturing series made him of course prominent in those places. He brought he brought himself finally to a moment where his journal records the following his first meeting with Abraham Lincoln. February 1862. They've been in Washington D.C. since January 31st. He writes at

Washington January 31st February 1st second and third. I saw Sumner who on the second carried me to Mr. Chase Mr. Seward and then finally to President Lincoln. The president impressed me more favorably than I had hoped. A frank sincere Sir. Well-meaning man with a lawyer's habit of mind. Good. Clear statement of his fact. Correct enough. Not vulgar as described but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness or that kind of sincerity and jolly good meaning that our class meetings and commencement days show in telling our old stories over again. When he has made his remark he looks up at you with great satisfaction and shows all his white teeth and laughs. When I was introduced to him he said oh Mr. Emerson I once heard you say in a lecture that a Kentuckian seems to say by his air and manners here I am. If you don't like me the worse for you.

Which is of course understanding Emerson's self-reliant individuality to a tee. And it was Lincoln's shorthand way of saying yeah I know what you're saying and I'm here too. And this country will be also. That was in February 1862 which if you know a little bit about our history it was a pretty tough time in the White House. Very very tough time. Emerson began to take seriously the idea that his lecture series were a form of education which could perhaps be centered in some localities and that portions of that center could then be taken on traveling routes. And these were called Chautauqua centers. Chautauqua was the location of the first of one of these kinds of people's colleges people's universities if you like. And out of these educational centers they would take the show on the road with lantern slides and lectures and artifacts and so forth and they would go to all the rural communities of the United States. All the little towns would be hit on these circuits not just the major cities and they would have lecturers who would talk about the ancient world or talk about just almost anything under the sun.

And these lectures would be attended to by the farm communities by the working individuals by the kids with their parents and their grandparents so that this family oriented education that Emerson really loved seemed to finally penetrate and obtain in the country. And in fact it obtained until the early 20th century when this became an old fashioned kind of a concern and was let go. And our country is poorer for it. I would think that someday we'll have to revive the Chautauqua cycles. This kind of education really is the basic primal core of uniting a people and that is to take it out into the little communities and not have them have to feed into the larger ones simply in that. And Emerson really is the guiding light. And his home in Concord really is the basic primal template upon which this kind of educational activity would be founded. I have lots of other quotations and I was going to give you a quotation from Manly Hall that sounds exactly like Emerson but I think I would like to perhaps close with something in here from Emerson's poems. And then I would invite you all. I was going to take us in the second half of this lecture down to the library. I like every so often for us to go down and take our take our learning our education down and put it there in the library. Jacob Bronowski once said that learning has to be in the living room of the person otherwise it isn't real.

And that's our living room belongs to all of us. And I'd like to take us down. But they were just too many of us tonight. So you're free to go down to the library. I'll be down there for a while and maybe we can just look around for a little bit. This is a poem by Emerson called The House. And it's fitting because it describes his true aspiration In terms of a house and one can see the house in Concord. One can see later on the natural house of Frank Lloyd Wright. One can see of course through the natural form to the correspondence and beyond to the reverberation. This is The House.

There is no architect can build as the muse can. She is skillful to select materials for her plan. Slow and wary to choose. Rafters of immortal. Pine or cedar. Incorruptible. Worthy her design. She threads dark alpine forests or valleys by the sea. And many lands with painful steps ere she can find a tree. She ransacks mines and ledges and quarries every rock to hew the famous adamant from each eternal block. She lays her beams in music and music every one to the cadence of the whirling world. Which dances round the sun. That so they shall not be displaced or lapsed or by wars. But for the love of happy souls outlive the newest stars.

The little portrait of Emerson. Next week we'll look at a giant. Herman Melville. But for the rest of the night I invite you to your own living room.