)(( hannah mello ))(

== The Fog of Travel in an Age of Need. ==

I downloaded Ralph Waldo Emerson's Podcast essay on 'Self-Reliance Part 1 & 2' for free on iTunes, and this weekend, when on an oh-so-comfy train to Prato in Tuscany, I started listening to Part 2 of it all (having heard Part 1 about a month ago).

I was SO MOVED that I couldn't help but start penning word for word what he was saying. I had my left thumb on the pause-play iPod button while my right hand worked hard to scrawl every word (of the most impacting bits) in my journal.

I have been wanting to pen a post about some of the themes of being an American living abroad, but since this quotation is SO LONG and SO intense, I'll start the theme with only the quotation and will blog some thoughts afterward.

I really hope you can grab a cup of coffee and 15 minutes to really chew on the below lines. I was so inspired to mediate on the themes of:

Self-becoming and being +
Travel and the philosophical/symbolic idea of 'going abroad'+
True art/expression +
The kind of leadership that our generation needs (in response to the reality sung about by Mayer in his 'Waiting on the World to Change' song).

I give you Emerson. (Scrawled in my journal from the Podcast, and now transferred here. :)...)

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"But now, we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean. But it goes abroad to beg a cup of water from the urns of other men. We must go alone.

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction 'society', he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seems to be drawn out-- and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We're afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who will renovate life in our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent-- cannot satisfy their own wants, having ambition out of all proportion to their practical force and do lean and beg day and night continually. ... We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate where strength is born.

Tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves. That with the exercise of self-trust, a new power will appear. That a man is the Word made flesh-- born to shed healing to the nations. ... That the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries and customs out the window, we pity him no more but thank and revere him and that teacher share restore the life of man to splendor and make his name dear to all history.

Everywhere I am hindered in meeting God in my brother because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brothers or his brothers' brothers' God. ... The luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built.

It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of traveling, whose idols are Italy, England, Greece, Egypt, retain its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made Italy or England or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place.

The soul is no traveller. A wise man stays at home. And when his necessities, his duties, call him from his house or in foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by the expression of the countenance that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet. ... He who travels to be amused or to get something which he does not carry, travels away from himself and grows old, even in youth, among old things. ... He carries ruins to ruins. ... Our first journey is to discover to us the indifference of places.

At home, I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples and there beside me is the stern fact that the sad self, unrelenting and identical that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces, I effect to be intoxicated with sites and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. But ... traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action.

The intellect is a vagabond and our system of education fosters restlessness.

Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate. And what is imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste, our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments. Our opinions, our tastes, our faculties lean and follow the past and the distant.

The soul creative of the arts wherever they are flourished was within his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was in application of his own thought the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any. ...

Insist on yourself. Never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation. But of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous half-possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, til that person has exhibited it. Where's the Master that could've taught Shakespeare?-- Where's the Master that could've instructed Franklin or Washington or Bacon or Newton? Every great man is unique. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There's at this moment an utterance brave and grand as that of Thiddeus... or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these. ... But if you can hear what these Patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice. For the ear and the tongue are two organs of the same nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life. Obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce the fore world again."

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posted by )(( hannah mello ))( @ 2:37 AM