Thich Nhat Hagn's "Fear"

[alice wellintown]

Holding up one end of that tightrope is Jackson, a man with reputation for
hacking his way from atop a warhorse through a Mob of democratic jingoism
held fast by anarchists and young American savages who filed their teeth
like cannibals. Holding up the other is the Devil  in Irving's tale, The
Devil & Tom Walker, he too rides a black horse, one that Jefferson and
Hamilton never, in their darkest American nightmares ever dreamed would
ride. Emerson, it is said, was the leader of the parade, but authors
beneath and above the renaissance, the giants of Song, Whitman, the mighty
ofthe so-called dark romantics, marched to a muted post horn, never were
moved by the gravity of Emerson's Rainbow. But his book was carried out
into America, a bible to Jacksonian Democracy.
On Wednesday, July 31, 2013, Markekohut wrote:

> Emerson was one of the few Nietzsche kept reading ...for these reasons, I
> guess. Perhaps saw him as Zaratustra-akin?
>
> In Perry Miller's Raven & The Whale, 1956 ( and probably dated,
> overturned, as intellectual history) , he has some fascinating stuff on how
> the aesthetic tastemakers of America in the 19th Century enshrined Romance
> as the American genre, so to speak, and/but used Emerson ( on Nature, in "
> Nature" and elsewhere) to try to define Romance as like a proper
> overarching view of
> Life, human nature in life.....?
> This was a very difficult Zarathustran tightrope to try to walk....perhaps
> ultimately self -contradictory..
>
> THEN, later in the Century and early the next, came the return of the
> repressed. Realism, gritty realism, naturalism.
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jul 31, 2013, at 7:35 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
> wrote:
>
>  "*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)
>
>
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1112&msg=160855&sort=date
>
> On 31.07.2013 12:30, alice wellintown wrote:
>
> “American Nietzsche” is a sober work of intellectual history, but as
> Nietzsche insisted, all scholarship reflects the temperament of its
> creator, and it’s clear that Ratner-Rosenhagen finds neither the
> poststructuralist nor the conservative Nietzsche at all satisfying. At
> the end of her consistently insightful book, she turns to Harold Bloom
> and the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who emphasized Nietzsche’s
> affinities with the man he himself regarded as “the most fertile
> author” of his century — Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, one can show
> that Emerson anticipated many of Nietzsche’s most famous utterances.
> There is a direct line from Emerson’s “oversoul” to the “overman.”
> Several decades before Nietzsche wrote, “What does not kill me makes
> me stronger,” Emerson wrote, “In general, every evil to which we do
> not succumb, is a benefactor.” More profoundly, Emerson foreshadowed
> Nietzsche’s concern with the ubiquity of flux and power, and the value
> of overcoming the past. “Life only avails,” Emerson once wrote, “not
> the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in
> the moment of transitions from a past to a new state.”
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/books/review/american-nietzsche-by-jennifer-ratner-rosenhagen-book-review.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
>
>
>
> On 7/31/13, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  The Tragic Sense of Life? Like, when did life get a tragic sense? Did
> the Greeks have this sense? Did Shakespeare? Is it a product of
> reason, the enlightenment? Or Romance? Or is it Modern? When did we
> get this Heart of Darkness? Did we construct it with Modern Life? Do
> all peoples suffer from it now? Do the Indians know Tragesy as we in
> the West know Tragedy? And what is a tragic sense?
>
> So, a good book that I know was on P's reading list is _The Tragic
> Sense of Life_, and a couple-few others are discussed in this easy to
> read paper
>
> PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE,
> Richard L. Rubens, Ph.D.
>
>
>
>
> http://www.columbia.edu/~rr322/Tragedy.html
>
>
> On 7/30/13, Rev'd Seventy-Six <revd.76 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  That's Kool and the gang. All I am saying is:  there is a nigh unto
> bottomless resevoir of negative experience in the arts & sciences. I
> would appreciate that balanced a tad, esp. in this tilted age. The
> Inferno wasn't a challenge to Dante: Paradise, however, exceeded his
> reach. I would prefer not to equate birth with a plummet into a sphere
> of profane dread & agony. In the arts we have come to confus
>
>
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