Sunday, March 4, 2012

contradiction and confusion


First I want to apologize for posting this late, I totally forgot that you asked us to post it by 5 until I looked at my agenda notebook (obviously after the fact).
As we have mentioned in class the last few times we talked Emerson in class, he often writes in all topic sentences.  This technique of often jumping form idea to idea (all in one paragraph) is what I believe makes it harder for me to understand his work.  An example of this would be in the second paragraph.  Emerson starts by talking about life and who we think we know what will happen in our life.  He then moves on to talk about about the moon and finishes with romantic ships in the horizon.  Paragraph’s written like this are very common for Emerson, but usually they flow a little more smoothly.  When reading this, I was completely caught off guard and didn’t really know what to make of it.  Mostly I felt this way because it was the second paragraph to the essay and I had not really established the points that Emerson  would be mentioning.  
Another thing that Emerson did in this essay was, on numerous accounts, contradict what he previously mentioned about books in The American Scholar.  An example of this would on the bottom of the 9th page: “I think I will never read any but the commonest books, -- the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton”.  This is a contradiction because he previously mentioned in Experience that man should not rely on the information of one but read as many as possible.  That relates to his idea from The American Scholar because Emerson talks about the importance of creating different books for different generations--but if you only read a handful you are not getting the variety of each generation.  Another sentence in which he contradicted himself was on page 8 where he write “Life in not intellectual or critical, but sturdy”.  This may be the case with experiences with life but it made me want to ask “if life is not intellectual then why did you write an entire essay on being a scholar”?

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