Nature

Sometimes I feel like it's almost necessary to get out of nature -- spend some time in a primarily urban environment -- to be able to appreciate how necessary it is to our peace of mind, and also to be able to appreciate the bits of nature that filter in to that urban setting and change our perceptions of the natural and the urban at the same time. Perhaps this idea is what creates for me a disconnect in my reading of Emerson and Thoreau. I love nature. Having spent a fairly ridiculous amount of my life in a tent on the back side of some mountain watching the rain wash away what's left of the evening's campfire, listening to the water hum to itself as it filters through the canopy of trees, I feel like there's a part of me that is insepparable from it. some of my favorite memories, often the images that I remember best and most clearly, are lakes and rivers in Glacier park and the way the sun strikes the water trickling down the sides of Going to the Sun road as the snow begins to melt.

The city, for me, makes these images so much more poignant. There's almost nothing like catching the till of birdsong in a break in traffic, noting the roots of trees pushing and prying at cracks in sidewalks, or watching the first snow fall and blanket the ground, covering everything in a coccoon of white and making it all, in some way, equal. These things, in nature, are not extraordinary. The closeness of society and the contrasts between civilization and the wilderness seem more important to me than simply immersing oneself in on or the other. Their connotations are more powerful when they are juxtaposed one with the other. While I've often wished to lose myself for months in the backwoods of Montana, I suspect those woods would take on the tenors of civilization for me, simply because I've been so steeped in them myself, and carry those ideas and expectations wrapped around my shoulders wherever I go, whether I'm in the city or not. That is to say, I feel that if I were to attempt exist for a time solely in the nature that I love, I already carry too much of what I want to leave behind with me to fully be able to experience that solitude. It is better for me, then, to more or less accept what's here and appreciate it more fully in the knowledge that the two -- the city and the wilderness -- somehow or another coexist.

It seems like this concept is a great deal more Emersonian than it seems on the surface. Emerson understands the need for man to seclude himself, to reach a sort of communion with nature in order to understand his own nature, but he also seems to understand the impossibility of such an ideal existence. Even Thoreau's experience suggests that distancing oneself from society in such an ideal way is difficult, if not impossible. Understanding this dichotomy may allow us to experience life to the fullest.

Henry David Thoreau -- A Little Idealism Never Hurt Anybody

Yeah, so I won't lie. I don't like Thoreau. I haven't since I read Walden the first time somewhere around junior high. Perhaps it's because I really didn't understand him the first time around, or just generally fall into the "there's no possible way this guy could have been that genuine" category because I'm a little too cynical, but I've just never been able to jive with his work. It isn't that I think he's wrong -- he's all too right about a ridiculous number of things.

I mostly just think he appreciated the sound of his own voice a little too much, and could probably have used a week or two on his own in the real wilderness with absolutely no human contact to properly build on the ideals that he touts so eloquently.

So maybe I'm a little too hard on the guy. But really, he says it himself -- he spent a good bit of time literally wandering around doing odd little jobs that didn't particularly need doing, and was pretty well incensed that the city didn't want to pay him to do what he wanted to do. So in a fit of transcendentalist angst he casts aside this prescribed life depending upon possession and status and advancement and secludes himself in "nature." I appreciate in particular that the area he picks out on Walden pond for his humble abode, he specifically points out, is a spot with great economic possibility.

I could probably rant for an hour on why I think Thoreau's overrated, but I'm sure there are better things I could be doing with my time. I also feel like it's equally possible to appreciate and utilize his philosophy without necessarily separating ourselves completely from the life that we're living -- perhaps this haphazard sort of existance helps us to appreciate the little things in nature and the beauty of that outside, solitary sort of life all the more.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have no clever titles, today.

First off I'd like to say that most of what I'm going to say in this blog is based on memory from my last reading of Emerson, which was probably.... four or five years ago. I've made it through "American Scholar" and parts of "Nature" (not gonna lie, it was mostly during class. for some reason Emerson keeps putting me to sleep), but I don't know that I'm quite comfortable enough with his ideology to be able to write about it with any confidence.

That said, I have a mixed sort of appreciation for Emerson. Having spent a great deal of my life outdoors and in the backwoods of Montana I can honestly understand a great deal of his attraction to nature (because while Emerson defines "nature" as being that outside of man -- the "not me" -- he does seem to make the point that nature is also that outside what is made by man) as a place for reflection and self-understanding. I don't necessarily ascribe to the same connection between man and nature, as Biblically speaking the oneness (or something to that effect) that Emerson describes doesn't seem to jive too well, but a great deal of what he claims seems to descend from a logical progression.

If we are able to separate ourselves from what distracts us (which seems to be in general that which is made by humankind, the works of our hands, etc.) into some place foreign and completely outside of ourselves, it might serve to allow us to better understand who we are, at the core of ourselves.

There is of course the possibility that I'm reading Emerson completely wrong (or not reading him much at all), and he's a bit more of a crackpot than my initial analysis perceives, but I do think I get for the most part where he's coming from and am glad to have gotten to spend more time with his writing.

Washington Irving -- What a Good Night's Rest Can Do for Your Country

I mean, seriously. Rip Van Winkle wanders off into the woods for some peace and quiet and maybe to shoot an innocent woodland creature or two, gets slammed with some ancient Dutchmen, and wakes up twenty years later to the advent of an entirely new nation. Go figure.

While Irving's short story relates especially to the development of a new American Literature, it also speaks to the relative speed with which the nation itself developed, as well as the mythology surrounding that development. I remember reading the story for the first time in its entirety as a sophomore in high school and for the most part disregarding it as nonsense: I was still a little too enamored by European Literature to be too impressed with what I considered a canon far less important to me in my literary discovery. It's strange how perspectives can change so greatly. While I'm still not as in love with Irving as I am with Chaucer or Boccacio or Dante (all deeply influential in the development of literature in Europe, and thereby influential in the development of an American literature by default) I can see his influence in the later literature of the Americas -- short stories, in particular -- and appreciate the form of his writing a great deal more.

His work also provides a commentary on personality and humanity as a whole. Rip Van Winkle, Irving's less-that-exemplary layabout protagonist, nevertheless personifies the development of an American literary tradition more or less outside of the umbrella of Europe and particularly Great Britain. He's well-liked despite his numerous flaws (we would certainly critique his family management and personal discipline, or complete lack thereof) and somehow manages to maintain a particular and fairly important role in his society. What that role says about the role of American literature is debatable -- Rip is essentially socially useless. But it does own to the fact that, despite his uselessness, he is cherished. Perhaps this is what Irving wished for his new nations developing literature.

Olaudah Equiano -- Other Perspectives

Equiano's narrative was and is fascinating to me for many reasons. It was especially interesting to read a slave narrative from such an early period -- I'd never read this particular exposition before, and in comparison with works from authors such as Douglass and Jacobs, who were writing much later, much of the information and descriptions were very new to me.

Equiano's descriptions of his relationships with the various men and women who came to be in possession of him were particularly interesting to me. Perhaps because he was enslaved in Europe for a longish period of time and not often limited to the shore when in the Americas his narrative displays a kinship with his captors that is decisively lacking in other slave narratives (at least, in those that I am familiar with). He certainly strikes me as a man cut from a much different cloth than Douglass. He was no stranger to adversity, but he met his slavery and in particular his bid for freedom from a much different perspective. Douglass's Narrative portrays an entirely self-made man, reliant for the most part not on outside help for his freedom (and those times he admits to help he refuses to name they who came to his aid on the idea that were he to name them they might meet adversity due to the Fugitive Slave law, etc.). Equiano, on the other hand, works on the side to make the proper amount of money to purchase his freedom from his master. Both are certainly self-made, but in a different manner quite probably due to outside forces as well as environment.

All things considered, Equiano seems to have had a much better time of the slave trade than the authors of any other slave narrative I've read. We do often hear about benevolent masters, but not as often from the perspective of the enslaved. Equiano's narrative, while not painting slavery in any sort of positive light does however manage to maintain the Enlightenment concepts of morality and the overall goodness of man -- a fact which is both inspiring and downright confusing, in light of the subject matter. I should very much like the read his narrative in its entirety, as I'm not exactly sure what to make of it from the excerpts that we read. It definitely begs a great deal more thought.