"Experience" and Melancholia

"Life is a train of moods like a string of beads"

       Ralph Waldo Emerson writes about the mystery of the experience or perception of Nature, rather than the mystery of Nature in "Experience". Although humans don't understand Nature, it doesn't mean that Nature is mysterious; instead, man's perception is limited. "Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue,and each shows only what lies in its focus" (Emerson 570). In other words, man is not limited to only see one thing, but he is limited to see whatever the focus is of his mood of perception. An example he gives is self-inflicted suffering for a hope of reality and truth. Through this mood, man learns one thing and finds one reality: that grief is shallow and it leads a person to nothingness except death if life-long. Then as man moves out of this stage, he approaches the next bead on the string or next mood-car on the train. The experience will teach him something new but won't be a perception/view of all colors (knowledge).

       Emerson describes moods "in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth" (Emerson 569). He writes that this mood is painted on by a person, meaning that it isn't his true feelings. It isn't true but superficial. The mood he describes is a close description of melancholia, which Edgar Allen Poe incorporates in "The Raven". In the poem, the man burdens himself with continuous grief because he feels guilty for falling asleep while trying to grieve the loss of his lady, Lenore. He brings the suffering upon himself, as Emerson describes in "Experience" in order to to find the reality of what he thinks should occur when someone loses his love, even though it teaches him nothing.

What does Emerson mean by writing, "all our days are so unprofitable while they pass" on page 568?

Reasonable Rebellion

       Yesterday in English class, we discussed whether man was reasonable or not and his relation to Nature on the reason totem pole. Henry Thoreau introduces his argument in "Resistance to Civil Government" with this discussion about the reason of man. He explains that for any man it's reasonable to rebel when your rights are being infringed upon. "I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but outs is the invading army" (Thoreau 855). He goes further to say that a group of people should fight the injustices within its same group of people, so that a change is brought about. He says voting against and signing petitions against injustice isn't enough; in reality, it's nothing. He uses Luke 9:24 as his example and stimulant to urge mainly Americans to act in issues, like racism, much more actively than signing a petition.

       Thoreau implored in this essay that Americans' not do the least possible to stir up trouble for themselves. "The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies" (Thoreau 854). Americans are like robots who know how to do and choose, yet they don't use their consciences when they fight for the country. This idea, as well as Thoreau's observation of a paradox of America's foundation, are also found in Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America. American's tend to be lazy instead of thinking for ourselves, so we act in whichever way we are told. This includes the way we treat others, especially regarding to race, since the country is founded on freedom, yet (according to Thoreau) one sixth of the population was still enslaved. Both authors address these problems in their writings, and even today America still deals with laziness and racial barriers.

Would Thoreau be considered a Christian Transcendentalist? And are those really possible without being heretical?

Evil's Connections with Poe

       Edgar Allen Poe wrote what is now a very famous American short story in 1843. "The Tell-Tale Heart", narrated by the main character, told the story of this man murdering an older man. He explained that he was not a madman, and he claimed to not have anything against the man, except his eye. "He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever" (Poe 1). The main character explained his strategies for watching the man, treating him kindly, and, later, murdering him. He stalked around proudly as police officers came to investigate the scream, but he finally confessed as he believed to hear the pounding of the old man's heart thudding throughout the house.  

       Poe connects the romantic ideas of nature with those of the supernatural similarly in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven". In "The Tell-Tale Heart", the man believed that the old man's eye was evil because it looked like that of a vulture and wasn't like other people's eyes. He gave himself the responsibility to destroy the evil living amongst him. This connection of bird-like things with supernatural evil is found in both; the raven presented a symbol of evil to the man in "The Raven", while the old man's vulture-like eye was seen as a source of evil to be removed from existence.

Do the police officers ever actually hear the heart beating, or is it just the man's conscience?

Romanticism and "The Raven"

       Edgar Allen Poe tells the story of a man's rekindled vivid sorrow in his poem, "The Raven". The man seemed to have lost his loved maiden, Lenore. He says, "Vainly I had tried to borrow/ From my books surcease of sorrow-- sorrow for the lost Lenore --/ For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore --/ Nameless here for evermore" (Poe 1). The man took to books and sleeping for distraction until he heard tapping on his door and window. He found that a raven was the source of the noise and contemplated the significance of the event. By the end of the poem, the man believed that the raven was sent by God or knew of his maiden, Lenore. He's angered and sorrowful because he asked if Lenore was in heaven, to which the raven answered, "Nevermore," and it continued to sit at his window and haunt him.

       Poe showed Romantic thought on nature and the supernatural's relation to each other in this poem. As the man contemplates the significance of the raven at his door in the fifteenth stanza, the air became denser, and he thought that it was due to some supernatural connection that the raven had. At first, he thought God and angels had sent the raven, but he veered later towards being sent by the devil. The man said of the bird, "Prophet!...thing of evil!.../ Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore" (Poe 3). This was a change from good to evil, yet the man doesn't question a relation between the bird and the supernatural. This is much like Romantic thought of nature, which was believed to point to an impersonal God and the supernatural world. The man never fully understood the purpose of the raven's coming to him, which counteracts Enlightenment thought, but he knew that a supernatural, which couldn't be fully known, existed.

Is there more significance to Lenore than just a name used in the poem?

"Rip Van Winkle" and Self-Incurred Tutelage

       Washington Irving wrote "Rip Van Winkle" during the early publishing period of his literary career. He writes the story saying that he found in the room of a man, Diedrich Knickerbocker, who had recently disappeared. This makes the short story satirical because it builds on the idea of a men who suddenly go missing. Before the Revolutionary War, Rip Van Winkle helped and cared for everyone in town, except his family. Rip Van Winkle's wife often drove him into such a state that he left the house. When his wife followed him to his asylum, he left to hunt in the woods. There he met a strange man with liquor, who took him nearby to a place where other strange people were playing nine pegs. Van Winkle began drinking the liquor, only to pass out and not wake up for eighteen years. The story ends with him returning to town and explaining who he is; he learns that his sleep lasted eighteen years and during that time his wife died and America is free from Britain's rule. Rip Van Winkle was now free to live and converse with townspeople as he pleased, instead of taking orders from his wife or from Britain.  

       The story and form of "Rip Van Winkle" remind me a lot of what Alexis de Toqueville wrote about in Democracy in America and Immanuel Kant's "What is Enlightenment?". Irving's short story is an example of bold, short American literature that presents social chaos, which Alexis de Toqueville told of American literature. The main character, Rip Van Winkle, portrays some self-incurred tutelage and later tries to force others into bonding themselves with his opinions. Rip Van Winkle faces social tutelage due to the way he treats his family and their response to it, especially Dame Van Winkle. He's forced to spend his time outside of the house, "the only side which, in truth, belongs to a henpecked husband" because he dislikes working his farm and caring for his family (Irving 939). His wife even drove him from conversing with friends outside of an inn. After sleeping for eighteen years, Rip was free of any social tutelage caused by his wife or the British. Instead of basking in freedom with the next generation, he tried to force them to believe his story verbatim and to believe what he knew about the strange, almost magical men that drugged him. Both Kant and Toqueville warn against using others' opinions verbatim instead of a person's own because the cycle of self-incurred tutelage then continues. 

Did Irving write as being Diedrich Knickerbocker in all or others of his works, or was it just in "Rip Van Winkle"?

The Contact Zone

Illegal Contact!

       Mary Louise Pratt writes about what she calls the contact zone in "The Arts of the Contact Zone." She gives the example of her son and him acquiring knowledge from the time spent with his baseball cards. The information he learned gave him a point of contact to have intelligible conversations with adults. Pratt defines contact zone as "the term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today." Her main example is the autoethnographic text written by Guaman Poma. European and Andean cultures clashed in multiple ways, including through language, societal ideas, and governmental ideas. She lastly explains how she brought the contact zone to college students who wrestled with cultural and historic events from all of their races of origin.

       The contact zones that Pratt describes are a lot like poetry. Pratt explains that contact zones have to be applicable to everyone and they inspire feelings of "rage, incomprehension, and pain," as well as understanding and awe. Aristotle's arguments in Poetics support this idea. He explains that poetry must be relatable to all people because this will cause a greater sense of emotion in those who feel connected to the ideas and story that the poet portrays in his art. Eliot's argument of tradition and good art in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" also supports this idea. Poetry is that which conveys truth in a way which hasn't been organized in such a way before but has a sense of timelessness. It forces a sense of emotion from the truth, or -- in Pratt's argument -- historic and cultural events, and not emotion from the poet, teacher, or any speaker of the truth.

Has there been any later research or historic findings that explain why Guaman Poma's letter never reached King Philip III?

Tradition!

Fiddler on the Roof- Tradition!

       T. S. Eliot writes in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that each poet ought to be unique in some way, but the best poets portray the traditions of poetry in their art. Instead of expressing their personality and the truth of the contemporary, they write what ought to be timeless and modern at the same time. This is tradition, not conforming to the the form that Aristotle may have written about years ago because "the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past." Eliot explains that poetry it is most important for poetry to express truth in a way that combines images, words, metaphors and such things into one idea. Through this, and not the author's personality, will emotion flow. Eliot explains it as, "emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet."

       Eliot's ideas are much like a combination of those of Shelley, in "A Defence of Poetry" and Wordsworth, in "Preface to Lyrical Ballads." Wordsworth gave his definition of good poetry, which is a "spontaneous overflow of power feelings" but on a topic which has been thought about very thoroughly. Shelley writes about the puzzle piecing of poetry, as well as the indefinite time of poetry. He writes, "a poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not." Eliot's argues what is a mixture of Shelley and Wordsworth's ideas. Traditional poets and poetry are found in those who convey truths in a way that is timeless, while good poetry also contains spontaneous feelings about a topic which has been on the mind of the poet for a great period of time. Once all the parts and pieces make sense in a particular order, the poet forms art through his poetry only if he expresses the truth in a way that no other artist has but still uses tradition.

How does Eliot's analogy of platinum, gases, and sulphurous acid work?