Archive for the 'Harper’s Magazine' Category

Once in a while I will choose an author or poet to read about in some detail, typically because I am being called to them or because their name crosses my desk a few times within a short period of time.

This week, Ralph Waldo Emerson is that poet. I first stumbled upon his name while investigating a doctorate in Transpersonal Psychology and he was quoted on numerous occasions, mainly because he was part of the transcendental movement which began in the mid-nineteenth century. Transcendalism is at the core of transpersonal psychology which is orientated towards many streams of thought and experience—philosophy, religion and psychology. In fact, Abraham Maslow, who played a key role in the emergence of this new psychology, studied Emerson and viewed him as a self-actualizing person. Both Maslow and Emerson rejected organized religion and believed in the transcendent forms of love, goodness, justice and beauty, in a similar way that Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman did.

Speaking of Whitman, I just finished the wonderful book Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass by Matt Miller where I learned about the poignant relationship between Whitman and Emerson. Emerson wrote Whitman one of the most famous letters written to an aspiring writer which gave Whitman the confidence to forge ahead with his work. You can view the letter on this website:

http://www.classroomelectric.org/volume1/belasco/whitman-emerson.htm

Just after finishing this book, I heard from a good friend that he had recently written an essay for Harper’s Magazine on Emerson called, “Between Insanity and Fat Dullness: How I became an Emersonian.” (January 2011). For a few months prior to writing the essay, Phillip Lopate submerged himself in Emerson’s recently published journals. Lopate’s poignant essay intrigued me on many levels, and I am grateful for his writing, since I do not believe I will be able to carve out the time to read the 1,900 pages of Emerson’s journals.

Lopate says Emerson began keeping his journals “as a dreamy would-be-poet.” He goes on to say that “the journals give us, in full, Emerson’s thinking about his life.” Lopate confesses that he was truly taken by Emerson’s life and how he has become a model for him on how to overcome anxiety and despair, while at the same time making resilience eloquent.

As a journal-keeper myself, I liked that Lopate pointed to the idea that Emerson’s journals revealed his most vulnerable side. I ask you, if you cannot be vulnerable while writing in a journal, then where can you be?
Emerson began keeping journals at the age of sixteen and he filled more than 182 volumes which until now, remained unpublished. Lopate eloquently declares that Emerson was “indeed the weatherman of his own consciousness, charting his moods just as he observed on walks the changing aspects of nature and sky.” He continues, “What I respond to most in Emerson is his even keeled preoccupation with daily life, the daily mental round, and with that his resistance to the bullying closures of the apocalyptic imagination.”

Lopate also discusses Emerson’s social side and how he tried to stretch himself to accommodate others and become larger soled and more responsive, a sentiment at the core of transpersonal psychology. He also revealed that Emerson oscillated between being enchanted and annoyed by his friend’s eccentricities. Interestingly, he worried that Thoreau’s going to jail was ‘one step to suicide’ and that his retreat to the woods might end in ‘want and madness.’ I also learned that Emerson was the one who inspired Thoreau to keep a journal.

I surmise that these wise men who studied transcendentalism were simply seeking spiritual guides who could lead them into their own personal futures. In the end, they decided that the spiritual guide or God (or whatever term you prefer) is within each of us and does not represent any external entity. I could not agree more profoundly.