Everybody Poops and Everybody Aphorizes: Emerson, Thoreau, and James Richardson

“Mother Nature is a serial killer. No one’s better.”  That's from the movie World War Z. The speaker is a brilliant young Harvard M.D., who might seem a more likely savior of humanity than Brad Pitt.  

Lake Michigan, a Little West of Mackinaw Bridge

From www.dictionary.reference.com and www.thefreedictionary.com . . .   

Aphorism:

A pithy observation that contains a general truth. A concise statement of a scientific principle, typically by an ancient classical author.

1. A tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion; adage                 2. A brief statement of a principle.

Synonyms: maxim, saying, adage, precept, proverb, moral Amish Buggy, E. of Sault Ste Marie, Ont.

From http://literary-devices.com/:   “An aphorism is a concise statement that is made in a matter of fact tone to state a principle or an opinion that is generally understood to be a universal truth. Aphorisms are often adages, wise sayings and maxims aimed at imparting sense and wisdom. It is to be noted that aphorisms are usually witty and curt and often have an underlying tone of authority to them.”

Blind River, Ontario

  Banjo Reasons for resisting or hating aphorisms:

  1.     I don’t trust certainty.  Basic info is one thing: today is a Wednesday in July of 2013. Okay.    But if someone says he knows the gods, the gods are friends of his, and they want us to eat cotton candy today . . .  because “Wednesday” sounds like “wedding” and we must overeat sugar at weddings . . . when someone starts adding inferred or symbolic meanings, from the clouds or the Academy, our red-flag antennae should start to hum.  

  2.     Almost by definition, aphorisms are condescending. How much should I listen to anyone  speaking from on high to me, at me?  

  3.     Aphorisms are, or sound like, oversimplifications of complex ambiguities.

Rush Hour, I-75, South of Mackinaw Bridge, Northern Michigan

  4.     A bugaboo of our times is our demand for speed; aphorisms pretend to offer high-speed truth, bumper-sticker truth, fortune-cookie truth, although a moment’s thought reveals that most truths worth having do not come in nutshells. 

        Perhaps I'm just aphorizing about aphorisms. Like most people, I think, I sometimes find myself trying to reduce the universe and human experience to my own aphorisms, which might be like trying to write my own Bible.

However, the poet and Princeton professor, James Richardson, in his book Vectors (2001), has made me aware of how un-final, open-ended, subtle, and poetically pregnant aphorisms can be. Here are just two of the briefer examples:

#4.  Despair says I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says I do not have to. 

#6.  Our avocations bring us the purest joys. Praise my salads or my softball, and I am deified for a day. But tell me I am a great teacher or a great writer and you force me to tell myself the truth.

Does any of the above explain my caution—maybe it’s a love-hate response—toward Emerson and Thoreau? They play Daddy to my Child, even when they tell the truth. Yet they knock my brain’s socks off rather often.  

Here’s Emerson (1803 – 1882) at age 61 in a journal entry (an entry that also instructs us about the importance of commas, for his opening word, "Within," is a crucial pause):  

“Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth.”

In 1845, “. . . the best part, I repeat, of every mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers . . . .”   

Hovering

I like the possibility of ending the sentence there, on the hummingbird note of “hovers,” but Emerson goes on, “that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing, unpossessed, before him.” That’s pretty good too.

What did we all write in our journals today?

Emerson, Thoreau, Georgian Bay

Northern Rim of Lake Huron, Blind River, Ontario

 

Ten days ago I returned from a four-day, thousand-mile drive along the east side of Georgian Bay in Ontario, then back down I-75 from Sault Ste Marie to Detroit. If you can’t picture Georgian Bay, it’s fair to think of it as a sixth Great Lake, attached to the east side of Lake Huron. 

In the car I listened off and on to Professor Arnold Weinstein lecturing on the transcendalists, Emerson and Thoreau, whose love of nature suited the drive through rural Ontario. I’ve been trying to find a way to write about that landscape and those writers for more than a week, with no luck, so I’m turning it over to reader input: what is your most or least favorite idea or quotation from Emerson or Thoreau?  

Transcendentalists

The one I remembered from college was Thoreau's line, “I’d rather sit alone on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” I guess my aversion to cities and conspicuous consumption had already kicked in at age 20. 

On the other hand, I've learned to take some advantage of what cities can offer, and I consume more than is necessary:  life without central air and a reliable TV clicker is not worth living. 

From Emerson’s “Circles” here’s a short passage I find fascinating from a thinker who usually seems determined to get beyond surfaces into transcendence and essences:  “Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. . . . We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them."  The "true art of life" is not to penetrate into areas more lofty or more mystical than surfaces, but only to skate well on those surfaces. I wonder what Wordsworth would have said.

I’m also struck by those lines' play against our expectations. If life is not “intellectual or critical,” then what is it? Air-headed? Moronic? Stolid? Superficial? Obnoxious? Republican?  

No . . . .  It’s . . . “Sturdy?” 

Sturdy! How the hell is sturdiness the counterpart or antithesis to the intellectual or the critical?  Sturdy like a boulder? Sturdy like a cow? Sturdy like a linebacker? Maybe it begins to make sense after all. Then I begin to imagine cow, rock, and linebacker ice skating . . . . 

For cooler, sturdy skaters

I've imagined a conversation at Jeremy's Country Restaurant and Convenience Store. Someone has just referred to himself as an intellectual, to which I’ve applied an Emersonian response:  “Intellectual? You, Sir, are no intellectual!  You, Sir, are . . . sturdy!  I knew an intellectual once. An intellectual was a friend of mine, and you, Sir, are no intellectual. You, Sir, are _________ !"

Sturdy?

Or is this the sturdy, skillful skater?

Well, I’m charmed and fascinated by all that, but for me, here is the primo study question for me:  Do I, and should I, live in a way that would pass muster with Emerson or Thoreau? How? Why? And so what? 

Also remember the original question:  what is your most or least favorite idea or line from either of those two 19^th century American icons, who hoped for an American literature free from European shackles? Was it just a teen rebellion against authority, or was it meaningful, or was it both? 

If you’ve left your copies of Emerson and Thoreau at Danny’s Donuts—again!—or at Jeremy's Country Restaurant, you can look for quotable quotes here, but I hope you're ashamed:

Emerson:   http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/ralph_waldo_emerson.html

Thoreau: 

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/henry_david_thoreau.html

It’s wrong to reduce important and thorough--if troublesome and sometimes snotty--thinkers to a few of their aphorisms, but there’s only so much time and space here. Also, these two writers are so fond of the aphorism, the quick-hitter, the bumper sticker, the cookie’s fortune, that I feel permitted to begin there, but it’s only for starters.