By host Tom Ashbrook:
Long ago and not so far away, just a stroll from the opening landmarks of America’s revolution for independence, was born another revolution: the revolution in philosophy and literature of the transcendentalists.
In the middle of the 19th century, in a leafy corner of New England, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and more remade the country’s understanding of itself and its possibilities.
In “The Scarlett Letter” and “Walden,” brilliant essays and “Little Women,” they broke with the Puritans and Calvin and pointed to the divinity of humanity and nature. They were giants, and they were very human neighbors, friends, and lovers.
This hour On Point: Susan Cheever talks about the private lives of the transcendentalists.
Quotes from the Show:
I went down this path for two reasons. One was an accident — I was asked to write an introduction to “Little Women.” I thought I had read “Little Women.” I had read it a long time ago, I had seen the movie, and when I reread “Little Women,” I was just astonished. It is not a book for teenage girls. It is a book for the ages. … So then I turned to the biographies of Louisa May Alcott to find, according to one biographer, that Laurie in “Little Women” was based on Henry David Thoreau.” Susan Cheever
[The Transcendentalists] were originals and their voices were original. No one ever wrote like Thoreau before, no one ever wrote like Melville after or before, and no voice in literature can come close to the Delphic, unforced brilliance of Emerson. So this was the American voice at its inaugural moment.” Jack Beatty
“To my mind, these people came up with the kind of humanism and the kind of ability to get solace from nature that is very prevalent today. And they were the first people to have the relationship to nature and to animals that we’re just coming around to with Peter Singer and people like that.” Susan Cheever
Guests:
Susan Cheever, author of “American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work” and twelve other books
Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly
Good thing to break with the Puritannicos and the wampum of the varying instituted religions. ..but what was these people’s notion of “human divinity”? How do we interpret it, by and large? The term radiates a paradoxical, probably “have your cake and eat it” philosophy. ..Divinity taken down and placed in the chests and minds of people on earth unadulterated. .retaining its philosophical opacity, the Essentialism which claims God does exist but as a great Idea or force, maybe even a Being, in the supernatural mansions, apart and separate, uncreated by human imagination. .oimparting to us our values and our highest motives, and succoming us to ideas of His eternity to calm our souls. . .A Being with all the force and apocalypse of traditional nonsense. And we poor slaves can merely plug into Him. ..But rarely do do we see the old ones (or the nouveaus) as thinking people can create the ideas of “divine” things: that old God is a fat concept staggering to his doom, was back then, and still is now. Yes, man maybe has God inside, but does not create Him. . .Such you would think, anyway, by the degree to which any sort of atheist tradition mentions these greats, has brought their work down and called its truth out. We these days like to cover up the real truths, and the courage, these writers had. They faced the universe and its cloying civilization without disguise, propogating a traitorous philosophy they would have been drawn and quartered for in all but a handful of enlightened settings. Are we really getting this today?
Posted by James Dean Wyman, on April 27th, 2009 at 11:19 pm EDT