Posts Tagged ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson’
“Photography helps people to see”*…
Your correspondent was in New York last week and ducked into Grand Central Station (or more formally, Grand Central Terminal)… to find it transformed. Sarah Cascone has the backstory…
For the first time possibly ever, there is not a single ad to be seen in Grand Central Terminal. “Humans of New York,” Brandon Stanton‘s popular social media art series of photographs of people he’s interviewed on the city’s streets, has taken over each and every one of the 150 video billboards in the grand concourse, as well as the subway ads below in Grand Central Station for “Dear New York.”
“This beautiful art installation transforms the terminal into a photographic display of New Yorkers telling their stories from all walks of life—serving as a powerful reminder of our shared humanity,” MTA director of commercial ventures Mary John said in a statement. “It is the first time an artist has unified digital displays in both the terminal and subway station below, and the MTA coordinated across many corners of our organization to make this happen.”
It’s New York’s largest public art installation in 20 years, since The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, a magical pathway of saffron-colored fabric in Central Park. And it’s all the more impressive in that Stanton paid for it all out of pocket, as a gift to the city.
“If it provides even the slightest amount of joy, solace, beauty, or connection to the 750,000 people who pass through Grand Central every day—we have achieved our goal,” he wrote on Facebook.
The original plan was to use the proceeds from his new book, Dear New York, but Stanton ended up having to dip into his life savings to cover the total cost, which included space rental and covering the station’s lost ad revenue. The artist and journalist, who wrote the best-selling book Humans of New York, declined to provide an exact figure, but told the New York Times that “I no longer have any stocks.”
Stanton has shot portraits of 10,000 people across the five boroughs and beyond since beginning “Humans of New York” in 2010, creating a kind of photographic census of the city. (He has since expanded the project’s scope internationally, to 40 countries and counting.)…
More– and more photos– at: “‘Humans of New York’ Transforms Grand Central Into a Monumental Photo Show.” The remarkable show is up through tomorrow…
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As we see, we might spare a thought for a photographer with a different– but also crucially-important– focus, Edwin Way Teale; he died on this date in 1980. A naturalist, photographer, and writer, his works serve as primary source material documenting environmental conditions across North America from 1930–1980. He is perhaps best known for his series The American Seasons, four books documenting over 75,000 miles of automobile travel across North America following the changing seasons.
Teale’s Hampton, CT home, “Trail Wood” (chronicled in his A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm and further described in A Walk through the Year) is now managed as a nature preserve by the Connecticut Audubon Society. His papers, housed in the University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections, take up 238 feet of shelf space and include field notes and drafts for each of his books, early childhood writings, professional writings for magazines, newspapers and book reviews, correspondence- both personal and professional, personal and family documents, scrapbooks, and memorabilia, as well as his photographs (prints, negatives, and transparencies) and his personal library. But he bequeathed to the Concord (MA) Free Public Library his collection of Henry David Thoreau books, letters, correspondence, mementos and any other material dealing with Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and other material relating to Concord, Massachusetts– 12 containers and 108 printed books and pamphlets.
“Morning, boys, how’s the water?”*…
Dan Bouk (whom I knew primarily for his fascinating book on the census) on the challenge of fielding a carefully-grounded critique of power. He begins with Emerson on Napoleon…
I imagine Ralph Waldo Emerson (Waldo, to this friends) entering a lecture hall in the mid-nineteenth century. His listeners packed tightly against one another, the better to fend off the winter cold. The old sat alongside the young, “bald heads and flowing transcendental locks” abutting “misanthropists and lovers.” This would have been the sixth day and the sixth lecture on this leg of a five-year-long tour for Emerson. Those in the audience who had stuck it out this far would have already heard the great man Emerson explain PHILOSOPHY by explaining Plato, and MYSTICISM with the (now forgotten) Emanuel Swedenborg, and SKEPTICISM through Montaigne, and POETRY via Shakespeare. The critic Andrew Delbanco reports the crowds were “rapt and grateful,” and so we can presume that most in fact stuck it out to the end. Recall that there was no internet to distract them. And so on the final day of the lecture series, Emerson turned his audiences’ attention to the “man of the world,” the practical man, the person who could GET THINGS DONE. His subject was Napoleon Bonaparte, a subject he had every reason to believe would fascinate the entire auditorium…
… Emerson, in the late 1840s, could presume that his audience already knew a lot about Napoleon, that they were likely among the “million readers of anecdotes or memoirs or lives” of the great man. People in the mid-nineteenth century US read about Napoleon for many reasons, and yet it seems that many treated him as a hero. The great social thinker, activist, and feminist of the turn of the twentieth century, Jane Addams, also studied Napoleon’s life. According to her biographer, Louise Knight, Addams spent much of her childhood reading from her father’s library. He paid her a nickel for every book she read and discussed with him. According to Knight, “Great men such as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Cromwell, and Napoleon were heavily featured.” Napoleon sat alongside the American founders. These were the lives that Addams would later try to emulate. When she founded the settlement project Hull House in Chicago, she was seeking a way to overcome the limits society put on her because of her sex. She too could get things done. Knight says that the biographies of great men taught Addams that “her gender was irrelevant to heroic dreams.”
Emerson’s or Addams’ contemporaries read about the life of Napoleon the way that people today read biographies of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, and, well,…Napoleon, I guess…
[Bouk then provides a close reading of Emerson’s account of the Le Petit Caporal…]
… I have, over the last fourteen years, assigned this lecture to students many times. I give it to them because it is fascinating, and also because it is confounding. As I seek to get them to think about how and why an author might lead an audience in a strange or unexpected direction, there is no better text, nor a more frustrating one. Because the reader sticks with Emerson for 30 pages; we are pummeled by story upon story and assertion atop assertion of Napoleon’s greatness; then, in the last five pages, Emerson takes it all away from us, and makes the sudden forceful case for the opposite of everything we’ve just been reading.
Early in the lecture, Emerson explained that Napoleon “wrought, in common with that great class he represented, for power and wealth.” His advantage was always that he cared nothing for feelings or morals: “all the sentiments which embarrass men’s pursuit of these objects, he set aside.” And yet, it is still shocking when Emerson turns on Napoleon with full force and asks us to sit with exactly what it meant to be untroubled by sentiment:
His doctrine of immortality is simply fame.
He was thoroughly unscrupulous.
He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown and poison, as his interest dictated.
For thirty pages, Napoleon surpassed all in his abilities and powers.
For the final five pages, he is revealed to surpass all in sociopathy.
What does it all mean?
Here is a recapitulation of the entire lecture: an accounting of unbelievable effects, and then somehow the assertion that NONE OF IT MATTERED…
[Bouk analyzes similar trajectories in Robert Caro’s account of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, and in Jack London’s fictional account of a similar character, Burning Daylight, observing that in each case, as with Napoleon, the vivacity of the portrayal of the subjects actions can overshadow the summary critique…]
… This is the fundamental problem of a well-constructed critical expose. The act of exposure can attract at the same time that it condemns. (See also, every book or film about Wall Street. I’m thinking especially of Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, which asserted the emptiness of investment banking and still drove masses of its readers to seek out jobs on the street.)
When we swim in the sea, who is prepared to condemn the water?
The dilemma of critique is that it requires using the values of a society to win and keep the attention of readers. But having used those values, what effect can the exposure of their limits really have?…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Oceans of Power and a Tincture of Reproof,” from Bouk’s terrific newsletter Shrouded and Cloaked.
[Image above: source]
* “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” -David Foster Wallace (source)
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As we draw conclusions, we might that it was on this date in 1815 that Napoleon boarded the “Bellerophon” and was officially informed that he was being deported to St. Helena.
… At 10.30 am, Admiral Lord Keith, accompanied by Sir Henry Bunbury, Under Secretary of State for War, boarded “Bellerophon” and asked to be received by the one which the English refuse to address as “Emperor” and that they refer to simply as “General Bonaparte”. Without preamble, the Admiral, with the help of General Bertrand, the Grand Marshal of the Palace who acted as interpreter, communicated the decision by the British government to deport him to the island of St Helena so as, he said, “not to allow him the opportunity again to disturb the peace of Europe.” Lord Keith added that the “General” could be accompanied by the three French officers who had accompanied him aboard “Bellerophon,”, as well as a surgeon and ten servants. He concluded by stating that the departure would take place in a few days.
Lord Keith, at the request of the French, then provided some details on the conditions under which the proscribed transportation to the place of their future residence would take place. Since “Bellerophon” was unfit to accomplish such a trip, the French would board “Northumberland” [a few days later]…
Napoleon, indignant, reminded them that he had boarded “Bellerophon” voluntarily; he was the host and not the prisoner of England; that that nation would be covered with opprobrium if it performed such action against him and in violation of its own laws. Both Englishmen remained unmoved. When Napoleon finally stopped talking, they simply replied that they would transmit this protest to the Prince Regent and insisted that “the General” swiftly make known to them the names of his future companions in exile.”
“The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability”*…
Zito Madu‘s lovely meditation on– and appreciation of– the hummingbird…
… Hummingbirds are wondrous creatures. As Katherine Rundell wrote in her 2022 essay “Consider the Hummingbird”:
There is nothing I admire more than evolution. But it’s difficult, more than with any other living thing, to imagine hummingbirds beginning as archaebacteria among primordial murk, painstakingly working over millions of years to grow bright wings. They seem as if they were made in an instant, a spark of genius from an extravagant god.
They are the smallest living birds in the world. There are 366 known species of hummingbirds, with the smallest being the bee hummingbird that measures at two inches, and the largest being the giant hummingbird, which is 9.1 inches long. Most live in the tropics, largely in Central and South America, but there are around seventeen species in the United States. They have long needle-like beaks, can fly forward, backward, up, down, and in zigzags. They flap their wings faster than any other bird, up to fifty times per second, they have the largest heart-to-body-size rate in an animal, and that heart has typically 500 to 1200 beats per minute, according to The Hummingbird Handbook (2021) by John Shewey. When in a state of deep rest, and to conserve energy, the hummingbird can slow down its heart rate to only fifty beats per minute, and drop its metabolism by 95 percent.
In 2022, a study was published by Yale scientists on the range of colors in the plumage of hummingbirds, which “exceeds the known diversity of colors found in the plumages of all other bird species combined, increasing the total of known bird-visible plumage colors by 56 percent.”…
“Hummingbirds are Wondrous,” from @_Zeets in @Plough.
* Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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As we appreciate abundance, we might send bucolic birthday greetings to Ralph Waldo Emerson; he was born on this date in 1803. An essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet, he articulated the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay “Nature.”
A mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow Transcendentalist, and remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement.
“In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends”*…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stands tall in the cultural pantheon for his poetry. It’s less well known that in his own lifetime, and in the decades following his death, this canonical poet had an equal reputation as a philosopher. His published works containing much of his philosophical prose span from The Statesman’s Manual (1816), which set out his theory of imagination and symbolism; Biographia Literaria (1817), one of the great and founding works of literary criticism; The Friend (1818), which includes his philosophical ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’; Aids to Reflection(1825), where he expounds his religious philosophy of transcendence; and On the Constitution of the Church and the State (1829), which presents his political philosophy.
The effect of those last two books was so impressive that John Stuart Mill named Coleridge as one of the two great British philosophers of the age – the other being Jeremy Bentham, Coleridge’s polar opposite. His thinking was also at the root of the Broad Church Anglican movement, a major influence on F D Maurice’s Christian socialism, and the main source for American Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Coleridge in 1832, and John Dewey, the leading pragmatist philosopher, called Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection ‘my first Bible’.
Yet philosophical fortunes change. The almost-total eclipse of British idealism by the rise of analytic philosophy saw a general decline in Coleridge’s philosophical stock. His philosophy languished while his verse rose. Coleridge’s poetry resonated with the psychedelia of the 1960s and a general cultural shift that emphasised the value of the imagination and a more holistic view of the human place within nature. Today, Coleridge is far more often remembered as a poet than a philosopher. But his philosophy was spectacular in its originality and syntheses…
Though largely remembered only as a poet, Coleridge’s theory of ideas was spectacular in its originality and bold reach; Peter Cheyne explains: “Coleridge the philosopher.”
For other literary philosophers, see “On Exploring Philosophy in Fiction and Autobiography: A Reading List.”
[image above: source]
* Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection
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As we muse on meaning, we might spare a thought for one of Coleridge’s philosophical beneficiaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson; he died on this date in 1882. The essayist (“Nature,” “Self-Reliance,” et al.), lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, he was one of the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and friend and mentor to Henry David Thoreau.
“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition”*…
One quibbles with Jacques Barzun, the author of this post’s title quote, at one’s peril. Still, as Lapham’s Quarterly points out, disrespect, even disdain for formal education has a long history. In this season of school’s end, LQ reaches back to the 17th Century for an example: an excerpt from Nicholas Breton’s The Court and Country, in which the then-popular author argues that on-the-job training, in the fields where husbands know their wives and farmers know their cattle, is all the learning anyone needs:
Now for learning, what your neede is thereof I know not, but with us, this is all we goe to schoole for: to read common Prayers at Church and set downe common prices at Markets; write a Letter and make a Bond; set downe the day of our Births, our Marriage Day, and make our Wills when we are sicke for the disposing of our goods when we are dead. These are the chiefe matters that wemeddle with, and we find enough to trouble our heads withal. For if the fathers knowe their owne children, wives their owne husbands from other men, maydens keep their by-your-leaves from subtle batchelors, Farmers know their cattle by the heads, and Sheepheards know their sheepe by the brand, what more learning have we need of but that experience will teach us without booke? We can learne to plough and harrow, sow and reape, plant and prune, thrash and fanne, winnow and grinde, brue and bake, and all without booke; and these are our chiefe businesses in the Country, except we be Jury men to hang a theefe, or speake truth in a man’s right, which conscience & experience will teach us with a little learning. Then what should we study for, except it were to talke with the man in the Moone about the course of the Starres?
* Jacques Barzun
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As we celebrate the onset of summer, we might send back-to-nature birthday greetings to Ralph Waldo Emerson; he was born on this date in 1803. The essayist (“Nature,” “Self-Reliance,” et al.), lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, he was one of the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and friend and mentor to Henry David Thoreau.
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