forgot to add this Hawthorne story regarding nature and a train

[Mark Kohut]

And there is the "famous" Hawthorne story---which I have never read!---yet-------
although I think I own a paperback titled after it, The Celestial Railroad
and Other Stories.........

Here is something about it online:
"
Clearly, Hawthorne does not possess the same optimism for America’s possible technological future as Emerson does. In Hawthorne’s opinion, the progress and convenience midwived by the new technological order would eventually shackle, rather than liberate, ordinary Americans. 
While Emerson argued that technology did not threaten to undermine the American imagination (so long as the people did not allow it), Hawthorne believed that technology would eventually dominate American society. He even indirectly criticizes Emerson as a figure of authority in the Celestial Railroad. On the train ride to the Celestial City, the narrator attempts to describe a giant of German descent, whose form, features and substance have never been described before, neither by the “miscreant” or anyone else. “The Giant Transcendentalist” Is of an “ill-proportioned figure,” observes the narrator, which resembles “a heap of fog and duskiness.” The giant “shouted...in so strange a phraseology,” his meaning remaining so unclear that it was not known “whether or not to be encouraged or affrighted,”11 Emerson believed that transcendentalism and machinery agreed with each other, both being powerful new forces that could counter stale
 conventions of thought and behavior. Transcendental philosophy romanticized republican virtue, and the use of such rhetoric may have been the kind of persuasion needed to civilized the machine; however, such a effort was ridiculed by Hawthorne. He suggests that transcendentalism, as a philosophy, presented only vague impressions. Not many could make sense of the philosophy, much less appropriate it into their value systems."

What can also be found online is Emerson's metaphor, from his essay Nature, of society as a 'giant eyeball"!.......which we all
will remember from early in AtD................

And, as is also all over the net, the observation that there is a "giant eyeball" on the back of the dollar bill.....

Emerson's optimism is part of the 'daylit fiction' the Chums inhabit, I would argue.......such optimism linked more to money in money-grubbing
America....."be positive in work and life".....than to any real world.....




----- Original Message ----
From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, November 9, 2007 8:36:18 AM
Subject: Re: forgot to add this Hawthorne story regarding nature and a train

This piece has got to be in the public domain, so it could reside
somewhere on the internets...

On Nov 8, 2007 5:21 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> There is a minorly famous Hawthorne story that I think of when
> I reflect on TRP and railroads.
>
> Hawthorne, while still a self-apprenticed writer, decided one fine day
> to go out into his Masschsetts woods and write...one thing he had decided,
> to overcome that 'what to write about' writer's block-thing, was to capture
> his own sensations and perceptions on paper as an exercise in right
> noticing, so
> to speak.
>
> He started doing that, capturing 'nature' when suddenly Nature was pierced
> by a train whistle....his journal entry became mostly about that sound as it
> hit him, grew, changed pitch and whistled, passed and faded.
>
> I would bet TRP knows the story/entry and I wonder if it was just a tiny
> morsel that has fed his vision....
>
> (and I thought of this story obliquely at the beginning of AtD when the
> Chums,
> descending, flush the fully-clother photographer and the naked woman......)
>
> MK
>
>
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