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American
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Pages from Jeremy's Journal
March 13, 2006
After visiting the Alcott’s place
Despite their shortcomings, it shows what a
family can be, in its individual but mutually supportive
personalities and interests. Full of paintings and wood
burnings, the most lasting forms of creativity, each
containing memories and reflections of the lives lived there;
here a drawing of Louisa May as the villain in boots, and
there the boots themselves. It is really very impressive how
cultured the girls were, who knew Dickens and Shakespeare,
poetry and theater, art and music; far more knowledgeable than
I was at that age. It must have been a very entertaining and
aesthetically pleasing place to visit, and still is. More
spacious then the other places we have seen on this trip, more
windows and sunlight; uplifting, as Bronson Alcott intended it
to be. |
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"Fredrick Douglass and Transcendentalism"
Douglass’s slave narrative tells the story of a man who had
to realize his own worth, his own equality with other men, in the face of
tremendous opposition. One of the most striking parts is where he relates
how he came to realize the immense importance of literacy to freedom, and
the steps that he was willing to take to procure it, which should make one
value one’s own much more readily available opportunities for education.
This is a great testimony to Transcendentalist self-reliance. What makes
it all the more impressive is that Douglass attained his intellectual as
well as personal freedom without the luxuries available to his
contemporaries, without the benefit of a Transcendentalist Club with which
to converse on profound subjects and receive support for his convictions.
Douglass had to grab every opportunity available to him in order to assert
his freedom. This sometimes meant asserting his freedom through the bare
and simple fact of his superior physical strength, as in the case of his
confrontation with Mr. Covey. His story is a simple narrative of lived
experience, unadorned with speculation of the more conceptual variety,
making it all the more poignant and impressive when compared to some of
the castles in the sky being built at the time. He discovered and
asserted his right to freedom with an authentic self-reliance. |
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"On Clarence King and 'Mountaineering in the Sierra
Nevada'"
What is so attractive about Clarence King’s descriptions of
landscape in Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada is how he is able
to combine his extensive knowledge of geology and scientific vocabulary
with a very colorful descriptive ability and an artist’s attention to
detail. His description of how natural processes had over millennia
created the mountains through which he was wandering, through all the
action of ages of glacial freeze and volcanic inferno, have a dramatic
force. Reading his work, I picked up on the fact that he had an artistic
background even before finding out that he was part of a group of
“American pre-Raphaelites” while at Yale, because of how he is able to
verbally paint a picture with the same attention to matters of form and
color that concern a painter. By reading his description of the landscape,
one can mentally recreate the scene as it may have come out on a canvas.
Here is some of the colorful vocabulary one can find in Mountaineering…:
“Brown foot-hills…a broad arabesque surface of colors…miles of
orange-colored flowers, cloudings of green and white, reaches of
violet…pale bluish-pearl tones…belts of bright emerald green…a pale, beryl
sky…dusky foot-hills rose over the plain with a coppery gold tone…The snow
burned for a moment in the violet sky, and at last went out.” |
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