Module 8: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topic: Friendship (Essay)
Sources: Encyclopedia
World Literature
www.essays.org
Objective: At the end of this module the students are expected to:
1. Identify and learn the unfamiliar words;
2. Relate the essay within themselves;
3. Write an essay about Friendship.
Author’s Background
Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher, moralist and poet was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 25, 1803 and died in Concord on April 27, 1882. Educated at Harvard, Emerson holds one of the highest positions among American authors and his influence is worldwide. As an essayist he ranks with Montaigne and Bacon. His essays are thought provoking, almost a layman’s sermons. He excelled in fixing his thoughts in pointed, epigrammatic sentences which have become proverbs. With Franklin, he is probably the most quotable of American writers.
Emerson followed his father’s career as a Boston Unitarian minister. With his wife’s tragic death in 1831 and his resignation from the ministry because of unsetting doubts, he sailed for Europe, and met some English romanticists. He returned to America imbued with the romantic idealism of German transcendental philosophy, and began his famous career as lecturer and essayist emphasizing religious values that set a characteristic moral tone to the new romanticism of American Transcendentalism. He was called the Father of American Transcendentalism.
Waldo Emerson is truly the center of the American transcendental movement, setting out most of its ideas and values in a little book, Nature, published in 1836, that represented at least ten years of intense study in philosophy, religion, and literature, and in his First Series of essays.
`Born in 1803 to a conservative Unitarian minister, from a long line of ministers, and a quietly devout mother, Waldo--who dropped the "Ralph" in college--was a middle son of whom relatively little was expected. His father died when he was eight, the first of many premature deaths which would shape his life--all three brothers, his first wife at 20, and his older son at 5. Perhaps the most powerful personal influence on him for years was his intellectual, eccentric, and death-obsessed Puritanical aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. Yet Emerson often confessed to an innate optimism, even occasional "silliness."
His undergraduate career at Harvard was not illustrious, and his studies at the Harvard Divinity School were truncated by vision problems, but he was ordained a minister of the Second Church in Boston, shortly before marrying Ellen Tucker in 1829. He resigned in 1832 after her death from tuberculosis, troubled by theological doctrines such as the Lord's Supper, and traveled extensively in Europe, returning to begin a career of lecturing. In 1835 he married Lydia Jackson; they lived in Concord and had four children while he settled into his life of conversations, reading and writing, and lecturing, which furnished a comfortable income.
The Emerson house was a busy one, with friends like Elizabeth Hoar, Margaret Fuller, and Henry Thoreau, staying for months to help out and talk. He, Bronson Alcott, and George Ripley decided to begin a magazine, The Dial, with Margaret Fuller editing, in 1840; Emerson would edited the final two years, ending in 1844. His Essays (first series) were published in 1841.
Meanwhile, tragedy struck with the sudden death of his five-year old son Waldo in 1842, soon after the death of John Thoreau from lockjaw, and a darker, tougher strain appears in Emerson's writing, beginning with his memorializing poem, "Threnody." But Emerson pulled himself together to give a series of lectures in New York and in 1844 he had a new volume of essays prepared. He began planning a series of lectures on great men and publication of his poems in 1846, while speaking out against the annexation of Texas and reading deeply in texts of Persian and Indic wisdom.
In 1845 he began extensive lecturing on "the uses of great men," a series that culminated with the 1850 publication of Representative Men; by that year he was giving as many as 80 lectures a year. Through a career of 40 years, he gave about 1500 public lectures, traveling as far as California and Canada but generally staying in Massachusetts. His audiences were captivated by his speaking style, even if they didn't always follow the subtleties of his arguments.
In 1847 Emerson travelled to England, noticing in particular the industrialization and the chasm between upper and lower classes. When he returned to Concord nine months later, he had a new approach to English culture, which he expressed in his lectures on the "Natural History of Intellect" and his 1856 book, English Traits.
In 1851 he began a series of lecture which would become The Conduct of Life, published in 1860. He was vigorous in middle age, traveling frequently, but was increasingly aware of his limits and failing energy. He had become quite famous, a major figure in the American literary landscape, a celebrity which brought both adultation and satire. He had been a profound inspiration for many writers, especially Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman. He continued his speeches against slavery, but never with the fire of Theodore Parker. In 1857 he wrote an essay on "Memory" but ironically, in his later years, his own memory would falter, especially after his beloved house burned in 1872. He died quietly of pneumonia in 1882.
Friendship
I do not wish to treat friendship daintily but with roughest courage.
When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experiences, what do we know of nature or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of man. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace which I draw from the alliance with my brother’s soul is the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is a house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier if he knows the solemnity of that relation and honors it as a law!
There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that we can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be named first. One is truth. A friend is a person reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle; but we can scarcely believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed and we so pure that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune…I much prefer the company of plowboys and tin peddlers to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by frivolous display…The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and holy that can be joined, more strict than any of which we have experienced. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages graceful gifts and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man’s life and embellish it by courage, wisdom, and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery…
Activity: Vocabulary. Supply the meaning of the following words. Some items are already given.
daintily
folly
sallies
trances
embellish
lucre- money
perfumed- the rich
frivolous- foolish
reiterated
Discussion:
1. What qualities do you look for a friend?
2. What is your concept of friendship?
3. What other elements of friendship can you add to those of Emerson’s? Why do you think they are needed?
4. do you honestly think one cannot survive in this world without having friends? Cite situation that will prove your claim.
5. Are there also risks in making friends? Why? What are these risks?
6. In the name of friendship, what is so far the best thing that happened to you? How about a negative experience? Relate it to the class.
7. Have you found a true friend? Why do you consider him/her to be a real friend?
Application: Write an essay about your dear friend.
Blogger Insight
Life is so short that we need someone to share our thoughts and feelings. Definitely, a thought would arise in our mind asking who it could be whom we can trust so closely. Answer might be who someone closes to you, but who? Parents, brother, sister…..! Apparently, it hardly comes to anyone’s mind a “true friend”. You are no nearer to true friendship than if you choose them for commercial reason. Besides who are you that you should be setting a price upon your friendship? It is enough for any man that he has the divine power of making friends, and he must leave it to that power of making friends. In this essay I will try to give my points of view toward friendship.
Friends are essential in our life just as food is essential for living. Moreover, it is essential to determine their friendship as we analyze the contents of the food before we eat. Friends and their friendship play a great role in everyone’s life. It is a gift that we offer because we must; to give it as the reward of virtue would be to set a price upon it, and those who do that have no friendship to give. We would meet a lot of people in our life, from those we choose friends and among those, we make our best friend.
0 comments:
Post a Comment