Re: NP -The Foul Reign of Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’

[alice wellintown]

In a prior post I mis-quoted Whitman and made his Emerson the leader
of the parade and not the beginner of the whole procession. Of course,
Whitman might have said parade or carnival even, the point is that
Pynchon is now, as James Wood sez, the inheritor of Melville's Broken
Estate, a marcher to that drummer of difference that so distinguished
the American writer from all others.

The peaking of American literary power just before the middle of the
nineteenth century still seems such a novel and remarkable event that
it remains the heartland for all discussion of American literature,
out of which arises any understanding of the originality of American
writing, any sense of a modern or modernist lineage. For Whitman it
all began with Emerson: "America of the future, in her long train of
poets and writers, while knowing more vehement and luxuriant ones,
will, I think, acknowledge nothing nearer this man, the actual
beginner of the whole procession..." ....

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng372/intro-h1.htm

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 6:10 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> Although Emerson's philosophical essays never reached me the way Thoreau's
> diaries do, I always hear a genuine American voice in them, which - the
> provided article is an indicator - still seems to be singing today. And no
> less a person than Friedrich Nietzsche was a steady and benevolent reader of
> Emerson. At the end of the essay "Schopenhauer als Erzieher" [1874]
> Nietzsche consentingly quotes Emerson with a long passage on the nature of
> the great (non-academic) thinker; with a motto from Emerson ("Dem Dichter
> und Weisen sind alle Dinge befreundet und geweiht, alle Erlebnisse nützlich,
> alle Tage heilig, alle Menschen göttlich") starts the first edition of "Die
> fröhliche Wissenschaft ('la gaya scienza')" from 1882; eventually, in
> "Götzen-Dämmerung" [1889], Nietzsche gives a characterization of Emerson as
> a philosophical writer. And though he mocks him a little there's much
> sympathy shining through:
>
> "Emerson. --- Much more enlightened, adventurous, multifarious, refined than
> Carlyle; above all, happier.... Such a man instinctively feeds on pure
> ambrosia and leaves alone the indigestible in things. Compared with Carlyle
> a man of taste. --- Carlyle, who had great affection for him, nevertheless
> said of him: 'He does not give us enough to bite on': which maybe truly said
> but not to the detriment of Emerson. --- Emerson possesses that good-natured
> and quick-witted cheerfulness that discourages all earnestness; he has
> absolutely no idea how old he is or how young he will be --- he could say of
> himself, in the words of Lope de Vega: 'yo me sucedo a mi mismo'. [*]. His
> spirit is always finding reasons for being contented and even grateful; and
> now and then he verges on the cheerful transcendence of that worthy
> gentleman who, returning from an amorous rendezvous tamquam re bene gesta,
> said gratefully: 'Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluptas'. [**]"
>
> ([*]: I am my own successor; [**] ... that worthy gentleman who, returning
> from an amorous rendezvous as if things had gone well, said gratefully:
> 'Though the power be lacking, the lust is praiseworthy'. 'Voluptas' replaces
> the usual 'voluntas' = will.)
>
> TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
> (chapter: Expeditions of an Untimely Man, # 13, translation: R.J.
> Hollingdale)
>
> In contrary to thinkers like Hegel or Heidegger, hardly anything gets lost
> in translation in the case of Crazy Fritz. Having Nietzsche's original
> aphorism here by my side, I can say that the translator did a pretty good
> job.
>
>
>
>
> On 05.12.2011 15:36, David Morris wrote:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/magazine/riff-ralph-waldo-emerson.html?_r=1
> The excessive love of individual liberty that debases our national
> politics? It found its original poet in Ralph Waldo. The plague of
> devices that keep us staring into the shallow puddle of our dopamine
> reactions, caressing our touch screens for another fix of our own
> importance? That’s right: it all started with Emerson’s
> “Self-Reliance.” Our fetish for the authentically homespun and the
> American affliction of ignoring volumes of evidence in favor of the
> flashes that meet the eye, the hunches that seize the gut? It’s
> Emerson again, skulking through Harvard Yard in his cravat and greasy
> undertaker’s waistcoat, while in his mind he’s trailing silken robes
> fit for Zoroaster and levitating on the grass.
>
>
>