no house and no housekeeper
I’ve been laid low for the last week and a half because of a cold. It stinks. The weather is changing to that wet cold of Berlin winters, unpleasant to say the least. I’m reading Walden for my American Renaissance course and am intrigued by the connections between modern agricultural/foodcultural movements and the work of the transcendentalists. There’s an unavoidable hierarchy between humans and nature/civilised vs. savage that I find distracting, but some of their words are compelling:
As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern.
(Emerson, “The Transcendentalist”)
The moralizing of Emerson and Thoreau is perhaps the most distracting element for the modern reader, it is, should we say, a sign of their times. I’m thinking about it a lot as I’m reading, wondering if modern environmental writing has had to claim the term ‘ethical’ over religiously connotative term ‘moral’ because religion seems to be removed from the discourse.
That’s all I have the energy for now…
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