American Scholar

I have to say I really enjoyed this essay by Emerson, maybe this is even Emerson at his best, though I am not an Emerson scholar. He presented his thoughts clearly and cleverly and they really resonated with my own thinking. I'm sure this was Emerson's point all along, to help me uncover my own enlightenment through his, though I don't think he would consider himself the true Scholar or Poet. Anyways, I have many thoughts about this essay, so I think I might post a few times on this one.

Emerson brings up the issue that we were to ruminate on for class, namely whether or not poetry can save the world. He writes, "Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?" This is a huge, multi-layered issue to tackle. It seems easy to jump to a conclusion of "yes" or "no" with arguments that, of course, poetry has endured through the centuries and it is beautiful, or that poetry is too idealistic and just a bunch of lines on paper. How could it possibly save the world?! But then I think "poetry" is deeper than these two opposites. If this poetry that Emerson talks about is a way of thinking, a way of searching for the Truth through processed art or whatever you want to call it, then that means poetry might be significant to everyone, not just the pretentious English scholars sitting in a isolated classroom talking elevated talk, and that people may try to attain it, and in doing so, make the world better. Are you buying this?

I'd like to think like Emerson, but I can't do it. I keep reading his work with all these different lenses that make me me, and the one I think about now is my Christian lense. I want to say that poetry can't save the world because the world is unsaveable, at least until the Second Coming. We will never see peace and unified enlightenment because all humans are sinners. We are flawed by nature. Where Emerson writes that "out of an unknown antiquity" conveys an "unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men," I see only one God shaking His head in disappointment when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. We are flawed because it is in our nature, our inherent being. Emerson hints that there is an innate scholar in all of us, that we can all comprehend the mysteries of the universe, but you know, I'm not sure how that all pans out.

I like Emerson's description of the unity of Man. He writes that for a man to "possess himself," he "must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers." Truly, we are all human and there has to be something that connects us all, but then Emerson so eloquently points out the problem with this unity when he writes, "the state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, -- a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man." Oh, I do love his descriptions. But what he says holds true. He talks of the mechanic only being likened to a machine and the sailor to a rope on the ship. Though I believe in Original Sin and the fact that we are all natural sinners, I also believe we were meant for more and we can try to attain that "more" in our lives. I agree with Emerson when he says that we are spiritual beings as well as earthly ones. It is the spiritual, or the divine, that we must seek in our lives because that is the aspect that is not so apparent or easy to come by in our day-to-day living. Yet we know that we do, in fact, have a spiritual side to ourselves and that when we engage it, we will be fulfilled to some degree, more of life will be revealed to us.

Emerson calls this possession of the self "Man Thinking." But he says this possession has become a "victim of society." The Man Thinking "tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking." Man Thinking is a person who is active. He is not a philosopher pondering the intricacies of life in a cave or someone who cannot think his own thoughts. He is intentional about living. That is the key word, I think. Intentional.

I hesitate to use Emerson's words about his society for our society because I feel like he wouldnt want that and I dont think he intended for his work to be timeless, but hey, I'll do it anyways. How can I not? So I think maybe our society in general is not intentional about thinking in this way that Emerson describes. We are too caught up in the material, in this world, in our day-to-day lives, though Emerson later writes in his essay that he is able to find beauty in the ordinary and plain. Maybe my thoughts are far-fetched, but I really don't think that we are Man Thinking and Woman Thinking. If we truly personified this to the point of enlightenment, thenwe surely would have had a Poet or Scholar by now to help us uncover our own truth and beauty and then we would be unified as one and the world would be sunshine and rainbows, right?

No, I think thinking and ruminating and meditating are the stuff of idealized Platos and Buddhist monks. I mean, do we really have time to find enlightenment when we are so in this world. Like, I'm thinking about things at this moment but it is for a class assignment. I am not truly free in this thinking. And then when I'm not thinking like this (which is basically the rest of my day) I'm doing trivial things like thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch or searching profiles on Facebook. Awww, will I ever be able to grasp the infinite mysteries of life? Will any of us? What does that mean anyways?