I joined a transcendental reading group on Facebook, and I don't know how much I'll read along with the group, but to prepare myself I'm reading American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever.
I posted the book to the Transcendental group and they went wild! Supposedly it's historical fiction, or really inaccurate history. Someone contacted Cheever, and she blamed it on research assistants. They wondered how much of it would be corrected in later editions, but nobody knew. So I read this book with a grain of salt!
She says they were "seduced by the false authority" of John Brown, so I read a lot of the John Brown. He can be a saint or you can see him as the first person executed for treason in America.
There was a reference to a song about him, and that got me onto the song "Battle Hymn of the Republic" I feel like I'm doing some elementary history class, but I didn't really pay attention in history, or social studies, as they called it when I was in school, and now global history.
My son has told me about how he has studied racial injustices and cases in American history, stuff I'd never heard of, that was fascinating. I have hope for the evolution of education in America.
I read Sigrid Nunez's book on the Marmoset of Bloomsbury and how that saved their lives in Germany before WW2, and it inevitably talked a little about Bloomsbury and I'm struggling through The Waves.
But this Facebook group came along springing out of the Shakespeare 2020 group. I didn't read Shakespeare with them, because I'd just a few left to read, but I reread Henry the 6th and Richard the 3rd because I took a liking to the histories. I was hoping to consolidate all my literary reading into this blog, but I seem to need a Shakespeare Blog and a Buddhist Blog. Bloviating graphomania maybe.
It's fascinating literary history of America. Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. They all lived around each other, had love triangles, and whatnot. Melville stops by too. Henry James in in there too. Emily Dickinson is mentioned, but I thought she just stayed in Amherst.
It seems as though Cheever was not enamored by Alcott's veganism before the term was even coined, nor Thoreau's nature genius, he saw them all as moochers, and Emerson as the sugar daddy. She saw love triangles everywhere.
There seems to be a flurry of books, they wrote biographies of each other. Alcott on Emerson, Henry James on Hawthorne. I'd like to read L. Alcott's memoir Transcendental Wild Oats. I can't find any reference to Ann Page, who Cheever claims is a poet. The Wikipedia article on Fruitlands says she was the other woman on the farm and ended up doing a lot of work along with Abby Alcott, but that she was kicked out for eating some fish. Cheever doesn't explicitly say A.B. Alcott was vegan, but his Wikipedia page says he was, before the term was coined. I can't find any information beyond that about her, and I can't find any poetry by her.
Cheever thinks we pay more lip service to Thoreau than actually believe what he says or read his books, and that his anti-materialism has contrasted more with today's society than the one he wrote in. He sold 300 of his thousand book on his river trip with his brother, and didn't make any money on Walden. She begrudgingly says he created the memoir and nature writing. Not sure if that's even true.
One thing that makes me think is that you might not be appreciated in this life. These writers were no successful or wealthy.
Cheever thinks John Brown is a murder, no matter he was fighting against slavery. He did murder some people in his efforts to keep slavery out of Kansas. I'm against murder of all kinds, but in the past we can't change that, and his confrontation got the USA into the Civil War. Now even more people died there, so you can blame the bloody civil war in part on him. Abraham Lincoln was just for keeping the country together, and would have done that with slavery, but with John Brown's violent confrontations, the south left the union and thus the civil war was started. She seemed to think it was hypocritical of Thoreau a vegetarian and Bronson Alcott was a vegan, for them to be against slavery and support John Brown. I don't really see that, people were treated as less than human.
Obviously I would love slavery to have ended peacefully. But do we need these violent idealists to enforce an idea, so that later we can move forward in a non-violent way? I think we do. Fighting violence with non-violence can work in some dramatic examples, but it's hard to see how America doesn't resolve this conflict with the south seceding from the union, without violence. Maybe we could have phased it out, but yikes how long would that take. Dread Scott was on free soil and he was still seen as not a human allowed to bring a suit, he was still property. Nobody gives up property without a fight. There are dramatic instances where violent people turned non-violent, but they just stopped conquesting, they didn't give up what they won.
There was an Indian king who saw the horror of what war had brought, and converted to Buddhism and today you can see his pillars with Buddhist quotes on them. But until his conversion he was rampaging around India. I was talking to an Indian guy at Amazon when I worked overnight, and he said he had friends that though Ashoka shouldn't have stopped conquering, he could have conquered more. Yikes.
I can't help but see that speech of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, "You can't handle the truth." The purely non-violent means of power won't ever work. That is why you have some of the outrageous activist stuff that vegan do, where they show people videos in public places, and save animals going to the slaughterhouse, and bring cameras into slaughter houses, so people can see what is really going on.
Links:
Transcendentalism on Wikipedia: Major figures in the transcendentalist movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Amos Bronson Alcott. Some other prominent transcendentalists included Louisa May Alcott, Charles Timothy Brooks, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, John Sullivan Dwight, Convers Francis, William Henry Furness, Frederic Henry Hedge, Sylvester Judd, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, George Ripley, Thomas Treadwell Stone, Jones Very, Christopher McCandless and Walt Whitman.
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