Thursday, March 1, 2012

Emerson and the ordinary

I was particularly struck by Emerson’s passage near the end of “The American Scholar” where he praises the ordinary. “Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized… The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride.” I agree with Emerson that this is “a great stride”. I believe that the importance of the ordinary was very much overlooked up until the time of Emerson and, though it preceded Emerson, the time of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. There is nothing particularly “special” (if you use special in a very narrow way meaning “out of the ordinary”) about walking or a woman baking bread or a child jumping but does that make them any less beautiful or important?

Emerson says, “this writing is blood warm”. This line was my one of my favorites (if not my singular favorite) from “The American Scholar”. We’ve all read much older, classic works that speak of awe-inspiring beauty (whether in a person or thing) or the power held by a ruler—these are great, grand, untouchable things. However, they seems far less warm, human or even passionate. One of the things this idea brought to mind is the question of whether we can ever feel passion for something if we are not intimately familiar with it. That is not to say we could all be intimately familiar with a boy running down the street after his mother or a particular man chopping wood in his yard, but we all have something “normal” or “ordinary” like that we can relate to, like a parent cooking dinner or your sister doing homework in the living room. Those are familiar things, things close enough to us that we can describe them inside out with feeling as well as observation. Could we ever truly describe something “far”, as Emerson calls it, with the same passion?

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