Transparent Eyeball

The Transcendentalists lived in a bourgeois culture that was intoxicated by the possibilities of technology and the “improvements,” to use a popular word of the era, that would come with progress. The steam engine, the railway, the factory, scientific management – all these things would eliminate distance, facilitate trade, and generate wealth. Man was on the verge of conquering nature, of redeeming the howling wilderness by making it productive. [ . . .]

[. . .] [O]ver time the transcendentalists concluded that while technology might bring material gain, it would also threaten nature and man’s spiritual connection to nature. [. . .] Machines, wealth and money, they believed, interceded between people and the experiences that really matter. The transcendentalists concluded that most of their fellow Americans worked too hard and too slavishly. They were able to calculate and measure but often did not take the time to sense and feel. Their middle-class neighbors were too concerned with their standard of living and not concerned enough with their reason for living.

The transcendentalists experienced their most vivid and profound experiences in the woods. [ . . .]

-David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (71-72)

I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, and to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I've been thinking about the Transcendentalists.

For those of you that do not remember your American literature class, (ha ha) the Transcendentalists were a group of people in the mid-19th century that were a sub-set of the entire Romantic movement. Men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller (OK, she's not a man) led this movement by writing essays and holding meetings where they discussed spiritual things like the Oversoul, which is kind of like the Holy Spirit without its two buddies, and how to change the world. Thoreau's essay on that, "Civil Disobedience" guided both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I've been thinking about the Transcendentalists because I'm reading a book caled Bobos in Paradise and, not to sound repetitive, but it's a phenomenal book that I think everyone should read. Also, in having to describe what I'm doing with my life, I realized that I could compare myself to Thoreau. He spent time in retreat in a little hut on a pond called Walden. I'm spending time in retreat in a little trailer on an island called Orcas.

I wanted this blog entry to say something profound (what else is new?) but I haven't made any new conclusions. To have brought the subject out into the open to make it available to continue to think about will have to be enough.