In this book, Ralph Waldo Emerson's influence on the United States of America is seen through ten different lenses. The essays are lumped together under four general headings: Emerson and Poetry, Emerson and Social Criticism, Emerson and Intellectualism, and Emerson and Art. Essays link Emerson to Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, John Holt, Randolph Bourne, Frank Lloyd Wright, and John Cassavetes. Emerson is also linked to modern dance, used as a counterargument to political dualism and rampant technological progression, and interrogated for the social deficiencies of his philosophy. All in all, the work is an attempt to revitalize a great American thinker, and to show how those who have followed his example and his words continue to make this country great today.

The Only Sin is Limitation

Essays on R.W. Emerson's multi-faceted influence on America

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 James Aguilar
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-1969-3

Contents

Introduction Yoram Lubling..................................................................................................................iiiPreface Nick Sharrer........................................................................................................................viiWaldo Gone Wild Anthony Weston..............................................................................................................3Emerson and the Beats: Thinkers Let Loose Jonathan Bolding..................................................................................7Emersonian Influences in Walt Whitman's Poetry Lauren Finn..................................................................................19Political Dualism: An Emersonian Critique of America's Two-Party System James Aguilar.......................................................35Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, and John Holt: An Education as Broad as Man Kevin O'Sullivan...............................................55Emerson on Technology and its Influences on American Identity Joshua Lurie..................................................................69American Scholar: the Convoluted Relationship between Randolph Bourne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Dewey Nick Sharrer.....................85The Infinitude of the Private Man: Emerson's Social Deficiencies Kelly Flannery.............................................................109Emersonian Influences in Frank Lloyd Wright's Architecture Joseph Schmissrauter.............................................................129Emerson and Modern Dance Anne Hellweg.......................................................................................................141A Sacred Emblem: Emerson and Cassavetes Jensen Suther.......................................................................................151Notes........................................................................................................................................163

Chapter One

Waldo Gone Wild

* * *

Anthony Weston

R. W. mocks the sturdy New England banker who builds his Exchange

Of the solidest Quincy granite but nonetheless must found it

"Upon a mass of unknown materials or solidity,

Red-hot or white-hot perhaps at the core ...

Spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it, at the rate of thousands of miles the hour,

He knows not whither-a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling,

Through a small pit of space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness."

Actually that's only the beginning.

Even that spinning planet on the verge of the pit seems sturdy and reliable compared to the whirligig of galaxies we now see, hundreds of billions of them probably

(And that's galaxies, my friends, each with hundreds of millions of stars, and presumably planets, of their own. It's not exactly a pit of emptiness ...)

While right here on Earth we have learned that everything moves, even the very rocks.

That Quincy granite itself slides around on molten layers of magma,

So much so that "tectonic" is now a metaphor for massive change generally

Like: the "tectonic" housing market collapse, which seriously unsettles bankers

And the climate itself, also shifting tectonically, despite the skeptics

Clinging to the same kind of illusion as that Quincy bourgeois, that at least the weather is stable,

Oddly enough, as if climate, like everything else, were not always changing anyway.

As if global industrialism could have no consequences

And dumping a few billion tons of detritus into the air each year for a few centuries would make no difference.

Even the Grandest Piece of Granite on the Planet is on the move-Everest is rising four millimeters a year-

While apparently, in another kind of tectonic shift, it is also getting its Tibetan name back: Chomolungma.

Three thousand people, more or less, have climbed up and back down since the first confirmed ascent in 1953.

The frozen corpses of some who have failed are visible from the standard climbing routes

Along with discarded oxygen tanks now piling up.

China even routed its 2008 Olympic torch route over the peak,

Which by the way also shelters a previously unknown species of jumping spider

That feeds on flash-frozen insects lofted to the peak by the constant gale-force winds.

But now new Everests arise: over three hundred known "extra-solar planets" for example,

And that's just those discovered in the last three or four years, mostly by detecting minute gravitational shifts in the accompanying stars,

The planets themselves are way too small to see.

Five hundred of us have already gone into "space", almost all come back alive, a better return rate than Everest's would-be conquerers,

While soon enough certain feet may leave this Earth never intending to return.

Finally erecting their own banks of unknown stone under unknown skies

Or maybe, like modern banks, at their core purely virtual creations, no stone at all, whirligigs of a different sort.

Or waxing rhapsodic, but with fewer, or anyway different, illusions.

Why shouldn't transcendentalists go to space? Enough with the ex-fighter pilots-we want poets!

And for the next worlds-let's make a go of it without banks entirely.

Back here at home, meantime, the moving Earth still awaits our embrace.

Since the whole San Andreas strip is migrating up the West Coast toward Alaska (33 millimeters a year, on average, but fitfully, if you know what I mean),

How can we build as if LA's or San Francisco's foundations are rock-solid either?

Chomolungma's spiders, the human spirit, bacteria, everything that's here still awaits (for another thing) our celebrating

And everything that's here no longer. Mourn the Dusk Seaside Sparrow, to name just one,

Knowingly driven to extinction by the construction of Cape Canaveral, the very gateway to "space".

This on a planet, still, 99% of whose species (we're told) are already extinct, no credit to us.

Breathe deep. We live in Earth, not on it, anyway: at the bottom of a vast sea of air.

And below our feet there's more: more life (bacteria mostly) below Earth's crust than on top of it

And equally likely on, or rather in, other planets, by the way: it doesn't need (in fact can't stand) air.

Life itself probably migrates through space (bacteria can live practically with the magma, can survive fifty thousand or more years in deep freeze, and grow even on the control rods in nuclear power plants-why not in meteorites?)

Which implies among other things that life in the universe may all be related

And if there's life on Mars we're probably cousins

Or that maybe we're really Martians, since Mars seems to have been hospitable to life before Earth was (it's smaller and settled down quicker).

Monarch butterflies, of all things, migrate over three thousand miles to mate in one or two sites in Mexico

Currently being decimated for "development"

And this very afternoon, in the time it took to make love on an Outer Banks beach

And then sleep if off, half a sand dune migrated into our tent.

Chapter Two

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