We imagine our lives so distant. Yet in his time Emerson and so many others were trying to come to grips with the notion that their experience – of spirituality, of the country and the nation, of experience itself – was somehow less immediate than that of their predecessors, who became as giants in comparison.

Kierkegaard once wrote that the problem with the Christian religion was 1800 years of Christianity. How to revive what should have been the defining mark of the Christian – that of conversion, of becoming somehow more alive in Christ – this isn’t just the predecessor to the Born Again world we live in here at the center of the American Empire. It is the problem of the modern – of modernism – how to both continue the modern routinization of knowledge and civilization, benefitting from that, and at the same time live more fully despite that routinization. It is the core of Romanticism – and of Transcendentalism. It is what propelled Jonathan Edwards across New England, and the Puritans – in their way – across the Atlantic.

It is easy to forget that there was a time when “he is an original” was a term of approbation. Here Emerson argues for originality not in thought alone but in the quality of our life and its relation to those things that allow us to transcend the banal. The postmodern has undermined the notion of ‘original’ as a corrective to the cult of the original genius fuelled by Modernism, but that doesn’t mean that the other pole is somehow dead forever. Quite the opposite. The real question is – is it possible to remember that all of ‘this’ could be otherwise, in so many ways, many of them so much more in keeping with what our best moments reveal to us?

Thanks Anne!
Rabbit in santa cruz