http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFEarBzelBs&feature=youtu.be
This is the original Steve Jobs “think different” ad in which he celebrates “being different” and changing the world. Of course, most of his examples were huge commercial successes, which some would say indicates that these folks merely struck a line of thought that resonated with a lot of people, but it’s worth looking at it just to see that first image of Jobs holding a real apple, both man and metaphor so young and full of potential, so ripe.
The url citation was in an article called “The Foul Reign of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance’” by Benjamin Anastas in which he lampoons himself and his private boys’ school as well as Emerson. I’d been thinking a lot about grandiose narcissism when I ran across this article that takes on Emerson. “I have my own stern claims and perfect circle,” Emerson writes. Hmmmm. A role model.
Of course, I relate more to Thoreau the Solitary and even Margaret Fuller the Romantic. Emerson sort of aggravated the Unitarians, partly because he said he got more out of watching snow fall outside the window from his seat in the pew than he did out of the sermon and partly because when he was the minister he refused to serve communion on the principle that it was not rational. (Eat your Gods? What are you thinking?) He just sounded balky to the locals, so he turned to a larger secular world where he was a huge success.
When I taught at Heart Butte a quarter of a century ago, I insisted on teaching out of college prep lit books, because the no-hope administrators didn’t expect any student there to go to college. (By now, many have, but not because of me. It was their own self-reliance linked with family support, tribal pride, and general good will.) I thought the kids should at least know that the works existed and were admired by educated people. But the only way to teach these canonized pieces was to paraphrase, interpret, and show movie versions of them. I sat down one evening to paraphrase “Self-Reliance.” The whole thing fell apart. In a society based on the whole-for-the-part, the importance of “tribe,” it seemed transparently a justification for selfishness.
Also, pompous, pretentious, self-important, and Jonesing for personal importance. Is there something wrong with that? It depends. If you don’t achieve what you are sure you deserve, it will frustrate you and make you very angry, which you may take out on those you consider lesser beings. You may blame and punish yourself for failure, failure, failure. Which is pretentious in itself. Even death is a kind of achievement. And behind every grandiose narcissist is someone demanding an impossible standard. That’s the person, maybe a parent, whose death can mean freedom. Maybe -- though ghosts wind their legs around one’s neck in an implacable embrace and ride their victims forever. Blackfeet knew that.
So did Emerson. He dearly loved his young wife, who died of tuberculosis (the AIDS of that generation). He had married her over the protests of her family who thought they could do a better job of keeping her safe and alive, so he was mostly justifying his own selfish love by denying their claims and maintaining his narcissistic belief in his own power to keep her alive. When she died, she was put into one of those little houses in cemeteries, a mausoleum. Emerson later went there and slid off the lid of her coffin to see if she were really dead. The fact that he inherited through her a good deal of money that underwrote the beginnings of his major career added gratitude and guilt to his emotional web. (He had to sue the family to get the money.) He remarried a capable woman who managed everything very well. Yet he wanted to claim he and he alone was the captain of his soul.
My family visited Walden Pond. It is deep enough to escape eutropification (stagnation) and is probably fed by deep springs. But the shore tends to erode and when I was working with the soil engineers at the City of Portland, reading all their professional magazines, I ran across an article about how that erosion was addressed, mostly a matter of embedding woven mats of organic material along the shore until new growth from brush and willows could take hold to hold soil in place.
I wrote about it on a listserv and was attacked by romantics who could not bear the thought that Walden Pond was not pristine, intact, original, self-sustaining, and altogether other-worldly. A self-reliant pond. There are people who think of marriage or even the United States as being like that. Permanent, immutable. Never needing advice or help. Yet when my family was there, one side of the pond had been equipped with a concrete platform for swimming and boats. My father took a photo of us perched there, framed to exclude the naked splashing kids. Not us kids, solemnly respectful. We were better (safer -- virtue is safety).
Likewise, the torrent of comments that followed this essay (a “riff” it is suggested) are indignant, attacking, defensive, mocking, praising, and offering long bibliographies. At least they know who Emerson is. I expect not many would have heard of Margaret Fuller.
Making fun of Transcendentalists is shooting carp in the rain barrel. They just had a big glorious idea and hadn’t worked out the details yet. Neither have we. Margaret Fuller Ossoli was the one who had the courage to go to Italy, join the revolution with Mazzini and have a son with Ossoli. She was educated as though she were a boy and used what she had learned to become a major feminist. A teacher and a journalist, Fuller was recruited by Emerson to edit The Dial, but he never got around to paying her annual salary of $200.
Margaret, her husband and their child died in a shipwreck off Fire Island. (No cracks. This is serious.) Only the body of the boy, Angelino, washed ashore. So what did Emerson do? He sent Thoreau to walk the beaches looking for the trunk with Margaret’s manuscripts in it. Lost, all lost. And he censored the facts about her two lovers, Ossoli and another, earlier. But Hawthorne used the self-reliant Margaret as the model for Hester Prynne in “The Scarlet Letter.”
Sometimes it seems as though that Concord community was a little too interdependent. Kind of like Heart Butte.
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