Post #4

            We never finished the essay on nature, (hopefully that wasn't just me), so I decided to sit around outside for awhile and see what happened. I think the most obvious lesson I learned from this (sitting around on the beach for forty-five minutes, that is) was that I have an easily distracted mind. Like, really. Typical thought patterns went like this: "Yep, there's some waves… They're really wavy. I wonder how much I have to know about waves for the chem test… do I know anything about waves? At all..? The frig is amplitude..?" And so on. But during the time that I really was out there communing with nature, I felt actually pretty serene. It was cool. I felt like I really, really wanted to paint the waves, but remembered I can't paint, so I just settled on trying to fix the memory of the scene in my mind as best as I could. That was the point that I was able to really start focusing on the naturey aspect of the exercise. I dunno, it just felt very right and fitting to be sitting there on the beach looking at the water, like putting a book on a bookshelf that just fills the gap and completes the shelf. Truth be told, I'd planned to only be there for thirty minutes, but I found myself enjoying just being there so much that I stayed awhile longer (then I had to go to be picked up, sadly). The way I felt is nearly indescribable, but it was really nice. Staring transfixed at the waves and stuff allowed me to just stop thinking at all about things that worried me. For those twenty minutes or so that I really was focused, my entire mind consisted of the sand  was sitting on and the waves. True, in truth I was in the La Jolla, an offshoot of one of the largest and busiest cities in the world, sitting on a beach surrounded by tourists, but as I got into it my surroundings seemed to become simpler than that, and I along with them. I have always believed that the best thing in the world would be to be ignorant enough to not know whether you had things bad or good, such that you could just go with the flow and assume that that was the good life, and this experiment was sort of drawing near to that. As my frame of reference slipped away, I found myself simply not worrying anymore about the chem test or any of the stressful things in my life. Essentially, it was a very relaxing experience that I think could not be replicated in the absence of nature, and, unlike the ill-fated friendship experiment, it is something that I plan to do again.

Post #3

            Just the other day, I tried to live as an Emersonian friend, though admittedly the experiment lasted for less time than the full day I had planned due to the lousiness it caused for me. Perhaps I should have stuck to it for longer, but the point where being an Emersonian friend appears to be breaking friendships is the point where I feel it needs to stop. I agree with many of Emerson's ideas in his other essays, even the ones that are more "out there," so I trusted his judgment enough to design my friendship experiment around the following quote: "I knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered…" Perhaps I interpreted this wrong, but I took it to mean casting aside all of our "filters" and just being completely honest with people all the time, omitting nothing. In theory, this sounds like a terrific idea, but it didn't work out terribly well for me. Two specific instances stick out in my mind concerning this, one positive and one negative. Let's go positive first as I try to minimize embarrassment (ironically) by giving you the quote out of context: "You're very pretty." I didn't want to be romantically involved with the person I said this to, but I really did feel she was pretty and probably had not been straight out told this ever. Now stop. Imagine, if you will, a conversation beginning with "You're very pretty" and chances are you unless you are some sort of romance novelist you have a pretty accurate idea of how that worked out for me. Moving on, the negative instance occurred when I was tired and stressed somewhat, and someone who I find a bit agitating and exasperating approached me with a big smile on his face and a mouth full of words I wasn't in the mood to listen to. After letting him gab for a little, I decided it would be dishonest to pretend to be interested in what he was saying when I really, really was not, so I said "No offence *name*, but I'm a little too stressed to deal with you just now, can we talk about this later." Even this wording was not very Emersonian, as it assumed such niceties as "no offence" and "maybe we can talk later", but it certainly wasn't subtle either. The effect it has was to send him away grumbling and removing a metaphorical jenga-block from our friendship. Yeah, that wasn't a very good metaphor… Anyway, the effect of both of these honest opinions of people was far from positive. True, Emerson stipulates that the man he wrote about was NOT well-received at first, and that things got better for him, and perhaps I should have been making more meaningful insights, but I had neither the patience nor the intellect for these things, respectively. I cannot deal with the possibility that everything I say has a good chance of worsening a friendship and I'm not smart enough to go around producing helpful insights into people's personalities at every turn. Although some of Emerson's other thought's on friendship may be helpful, this one was simply not right for me.

Post #2

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think" -Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

This turned out to be a really popular quote in my class, so I almost didn't write about it for the blog (though I did for the original assignment), but in reflection there was stuff I wanted to say so let's roll, shall we? To paraphrase the above quote, "I only worry about what I have to do, not what people will think of me for doing it." The most obvious theory concerning the apparent popularity of this quote is that we're all a bunch of teenagers and so it's easy to apply it to our own lives, but I've chosen a slightly different route. Enough exposition, let's get to the good stuff.

Concerning this quote, I think this standard that Emerson holds himself to is evident throughout all of his work. He's always trying to do away with the idea of conformity in order to become self-reliant (see what I did there?). This, of course, explains why so many of his ideas initially set off our common sense alarms, then begin to make more sense when we actually stop to think about them. After all, in our culture it would be considered uncouth to, say, refuse to ever thank any one for things. I can almost guarantee that when you read the last clause of that sentence (unless you are already familiar with Emerson which, in all probability, you are) you thought to yourself, "That sounds really rude and selfish". In truth, however, by not thanking people, we remove a chance for them to qualify our gratefulness. We do not show either that we are only saying thank you to be polite, which would be meaningless, or we express too much emotion and flatter the do-gooder who has earned such gratitude. Moving away from the example and back to the main point, Emerson's unorthodox approach to matters comes from his creed of discovering things on his own. On a more basic note, writings that merely confirmed all the common ideas and thoughts on matters such as gift giving and friendship would hardly make for interesting reading. Instead, Emerson spurns the very idea of holding himself to such societal norms, going so far as to cite the aforementioned practice which, notably, is Buddhist in a predominantly Christian environment. Under such circumstances, writing that traditional values are wrong and being willing to look to other religions for guidance is admirable. The resolve to write thusly comes from his strong belief in his natural identity. He puts his personal feelings and beliefs even before common morality, going so far as to write that if "he is the devil's child, then [he] will live for the devil." That's commitment to an idea! To break it down a little more, I once read a book by Scott McCloud (who is a pretty cool guy) who referenced someone else's (can't remember whose, exactly) division of all thought into four basic groups that were something along the lines of Sensation, Emotion, Intellect, and Intuition. Whereas many writers, including myself at this very moment, largely utilize Intellect (which is based on knowledge) to dissect issues, Emerson is determined to rely solely on Intuition. This is, essentially, the crux to all of his writings and all of his beliefs. In the past, other philosophers have chosen to focus on one of the other two schools of thought to other conclusions (the Epicureanists and Sensation come to mind), but Emerson chooses Intuition as his guiding star, and it is this that allows him to ignore the opinions others have of him, to not rely on what we think of as "common sense", and to give such unexpected and useful insights on all topics throughout his writing. 

Post #1 (Gifts)

            According to Emerson, if we must give gifts, they should be things that we buy for others, but rather things that are a part of us, things that come from the giver, not the giver's money. After all, anybody can buy something, but a gift that is made or that truly is a piece of the giver's identity is always unique. This reminds me of the present that I recently purchased for my friend's birthday. Mind you, I didn't think this up on my own, rather he specifically requested it. But now that I've got you wondering what it is, allow me to delay with some exposition. I've been a doodler for my entire life. Chances are, if there is a pencil in my hand, regardless of the environment or circumstances, I am probably drawing something. Whenever I draw something I particularly like I file it away in my pencil box, which I have had since seventh grade and which, by my friend's birthday, was full of all sorts of loose papers. His gift, then, was a compilation of all of these doodles complete with various explanations provided as attempts to explain them (such is the nature of my drawings that more often than not such explanation us highly necessary). On the surface, the whole thing cost me nothing, and so one could say that the gift was of low value. However, if you think about it, this gift had a handful of things going for it that might have make Emerson proud. Firstly, I made the drawings. In his essay on gifts, Emerson specifically encourages this, writing, "…Therefore the poet brings his poem, the shepherd, his lamb, the farmer corn…" and the list of examples goes on, perhaps needlessly so, but maybe he knew a bunch of specific people with the listed occupations whom he wanted to give ideas to (though probably not). If we wanted to add my gift to the end of the list, it might go something like "the doodler, his doodles." Secondly, the pictures actually show some real growth/passing fixations (including a large series of gnome pictures, perplexingly). I'd feel pretentious to say that the collection is vaguely autobiographical but I'm feeling especially pretentious already going on about my amazing gift so why not?  This serves to make it more Emersonian, as he also writes, "The only gift is a portion of thyself". Thirdly and lastly, the items in the gift were originally created without any intention of ever giving them away. At first this might seem almost anti-giftish (if I may invent a word), because it suggests that the recipient was in know way a part of the process of creating it. But in this case, I'm going to suggest that it is the lack of thought that counts. I feel that giving away something you originally planned on keeping for yourself adds value to a gift. Instead of giving away something from a store, or something that you never got too attached to in the creation of, I was giving away something unique that I still wanted. Emerson himself comments that for a gift to be real, "thou must bleed for me". To put this all summarily, My friend (once again, I take no credit for coming up with the idea and even feared it was a pretty lame gift until reading Emerson) requested a gift that really was very Emersonian. The fact that he so enjoyed it serves to add proof to Emerson's claims. Especially now that we are approaching Christmas, we need to think about real, meaningful gifts, and this experience suggests that an Emersonian approach to the matter would certainly not be ill-advised.