Dear Reader,
How’s your week been?
Yesterday, I went to my first A's game at the Coliseum in Oakland to watch my home team, the Tigers.
I hope I get to see a few more games before the A’s leave for good at the end of the season. The Coliseum feels like one of those rare gems on the horizon of the American landscape.
There is one spot left in my course on Ralph Waldo Emerson: Philosophy and Solitude!
Enroll here.
I stumbled across Charles Darwin’s pro-con list about marriage this week, which he made at 29 when he was deciding whether or not to propose to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood.
The question: Marry or Not marry?
MARRY — Children (if it pleases God); Constant Companionship; Object to be beloved and played with; Someone to take care of the house; Charms of music and female chit-chat; These things are good for one’s health but a terrible loss of time; Better than a dog anyhow.
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.
NOT MARRY — Freedom to go where one likes; Choice of society and little of it; Conversations with clever men at clubs; Not forced to visit relatives and bend to every trifle; Expense and anxiety of children; perhaps quarreling; Loss of time; Cannot read in the evenings; Fatness and Idleness; Anxiety and responsibility; Less money for books; Perhaps my wife won’t like London.
In the end, they were married for 40 years and had 10 children.
Susanna Crossman published an excerpt from her new memoir, Home Is Where We Start, in The Guardian about being raised on a utopian commune in the south of France. She offers a glimpse into a world that rejected traditional family structures in pursuit of something greater—and the costs that came with it.
For your Sunday: William Butler Yeats reading his poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
Until soon,
Sam
September course: Ralph Waldo Emerson: Philosophy and Solitude
Enroll here.
Transcendence, Emerson wrote, is to move beyond the physical world of our senses into spiritual experience through free will and intuition. He believed that God could be known if we could only find a way to look into our soul and find a connection to nature. A father of American transcendentalism, Emerson turned readers away from looking at the world through concepts like time and space and instead turned toward the imagination. An influence on Friedrich Nietzsche, Emerson argued that we find ourselves in solitude, alone. Free from the influences of society and relations that shape our personalities. Can self-reliance grant us freedom? Is it possible to discover one’s true self? Can we learn to follow our own inner-voice, instead of the voice of another? What does it mean to “trust thyself”? What is the difference between self-reliance and individualism? What is the relationship between experience and authority? Between experience and self-authority?
In this course we will read the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, including his major essays on “Experience,” “Circles,” “Self-Reliance,” “Nature,” “The Divinity School Address,” “Education,” “The Over-Soul,” and “The Poet.” Readings will be paired with entries from Emerson’s journals, correspondence with Henry David Thoreau. Secondary readings might include Nietzsche, Thoreau, William James, Harold Bloom, and Stanley Cavell, among others. Throughout we will imagine what an ideal form of education might look like in our world today. We will ask how technology has altered our notions of individualism and community. Is it possible to find oneself in nature today? How did Romanticism influence Emerson’s vision of the self? And is it possible to think poetically in our world of digital reality?
October course: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism
Enroll here.
When Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 she set out to provide a political framework for understanding the phenomenal appearance of National Socialism in the world, and its terrifying consequences. Offering a historical account of imperialism, anti-Semitism, and the atomized individual, Arendt’s work remains one of the most profound attempts at understanding the underlying social, political, and economic conditions that enabled totalitarianism to emerge.
In this course, students will read the entirety of the text and consider Arendt’s accounts of modern antisemitism, the spread of imperialism, and the human rights crisis engendered by the normalization of the nation-state following the First World War. In what ways did the institution of racism, as a form of ideology that collapsed the private and public realms, create an “iron-band” of totalitarianism? How was the rise of totalitarianism linked to the nation-state and the dissolution of heterogeneous modes of living together? And what are the contemporary implications of Arendt’s critique in this new era of refugees and statelessness, wherein the living conditions of “mere life” remain horrifically common?
Sorry for the verbosity lately but I’m on a roll these days in many directions - thinking must never stop even though you know this stuff.
Island Escape, Rejection, Marriage - Yeats Reborn
Yeats Exhibition: The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats, Dublin, Irish National Museum, highlights manuscripts of Yeats’ most beloved poems including (audio) “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”(1888). When walking through the exhibit I was struck by the intensity of the poets lifelong desire to find himself in a city or on an island from childhood or some Celtic Twilight?
In 1899 he was rejected by Maud Gonne for what was the first of four marriage proposals. Yeats was later rejected in a marriage proposal by Maud’s daughter Iseult. Maude reportedly rejected him for not being Catholic but thought rejection would dispose the poet’s creativity by the feelings of unrequited love - loneliness? ( Dante and Beatrice reborn?).
Three weeks after his rejection by Iseult he married Georgiana in 1917 while still suffering the stings of rejection from Iseult with Ezra Pound in attendance. George ending up being his most inspirational muse in his poetic life and spiritual search ( not on an Island with natures beauty but with his wife and the spiritual euphoria of automatic writing).
Biographical criticism is the lowest form but the historian in me can’t resist. Mr.James Joyce and I have mixed emotions about Yeats yet “the centre cannot hold”.