Articles Tagged with ''transcendentalism''

The Thoreau Society was founded in 1941 to stimulate interest in and foster education about Thoreau’s life, works, and legacy and his place in his world and ours; to encourage research on Thoreau’s life and writings; to act as a repository for Thoreauviana and material relevant to Thoreau; and to advocate for the preservation of Thoreau Country.

“Why Concord?” asks historian Robert A. Gross in the preface to his new book, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). One drizzly October afternoon I asked him the same question about his own choice to devote much of his career to examining this singular dot on the map of New England. 

“I came to study Concord not because I was interested in the local history,” he said. “I was interested in the local history as it helped to tell a national history. And I’ve come to love living here. I love the fact that I’m telling a large story with broad implications in one place, a place that is not a backwater, not on the margins.”

In the summer of 1842, Concord was like any other New England town. Sitting 18 miles west of Boston, the town of 2,000 souls was still very rural. The railroad wouldn’t come through for another two years, and there was no telegraph yet; only the daily stagecoach and the post office connected Concord to the rest of the world.  

On a cold February day John Kaag went for a jog down Lowell Street and had a heart attack. This was no case of an out of shape man pushing himself too hard. On the contrary, Kaag is a lifelong runner and a formidable racer. Running, for Kaag, was akin to an ascetic practice. He found inspiration in legendary mountain-climbing monks in Tibet who use physical discipline to reach beyond human limitation and embody a pure ideal.

In the wild places of Concord linger old Puritan superstitions and Transcendental possibilities. We begin in the year 1620 when, bearing sea-weary Puritan separatists, the Mayflower arrived off Cape Cod’s coast revealing what Pilgrim leader William Bradford noted as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts.”

To the Puritans, the Wilderness was the devil’s territory. Satan would not linger in the exposed coastal regions where the Puritans first settled and kept him at bay with devout prayer, but he was always there, in the wild forests, the swamps, the unexplored places, tempting them to leave the seaside settlements of early Massachusetts and stray from righteousness.

In the early spring of 1862, as the first buds began to appear, two men made their way along Main Street. Concord knew this pair well; over the last twenty years, these “knights of the umbrella and bundle”¹ had rambled together from the Walden Woods to Montreal, from Cape Cod to the Catskills.  

Henry Thoreau had been the more vigorous of the two, but today the poet Ellery Channing offered Henry an arm to lean on as he paused to catch his breath. His tuberculosis was growing worse, and his faithful friend Ellery had come to walk this familiar path with him for what might be the last time. 

The Marquis de Lafayette visited Portland, Maine during a grand tour of the United States in 1825. When Mary Moody Emerson—fifty years old at the time—was introduced to the aging hero of the American Revolution, she told him she was “‘in arms’ at the Concord Fight.”¹ 

It was a joke, but as always, her wit had an edge of truth. She was indeed present for the “shot heard ’round the world,” but the “arms” she was in were her those of her mother, clutching eight-month-old Mary as the battle raged 150 yards from her window at the Old Manse.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was not the originator of the romantic ideals known as Transcendentalism. Nor was his premier essay, Nature (1836), the first publication to set forth the philosophy. Emerson was, rather, the most successful public voice of New England Transcendentalism in the nineteenth century. Dissatisfied with his traditional ministry, Emerson embarked on an untried profession as a lecturer, essayist, and poet; gaining an international reputation. His eloquent and provocative prose resonated with a young American republic yearning to define itself against the time-honored past. Emerson turned his personal search for meaning into a national paean for a self-actualized identity. Nature was closely followed by his controversial “American Scholar,” “Divinity School Address,” and iconic “Self-Reliance.” 

In the mid-1830’s, a new word entered the American lexicon; Transcendentalism. It was a word that was vague and confusing, a word that seemed mystical, spiritual, and possibly even blasphemous. Even today, 170 years later, Transcendentalism is still misunderstood, and many people have a hard time explaining what it was and what it means. 

Lexico.com defines Transcendentalism as “an idealistic philosophical and social movement which developed in New England around 1836 in reaction to rationalism. Influenced by romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were central figures.” Simply put, it is the idea that God is present in all things, that we are surrounded by divinity. All of nature is divine, and therefore, since man is a part of nature, we have the capability to be divine as well.

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was a “feminist” before the word existed. 

Fuller’s father rigorously educated his eldest child as if she were a son, bestowing on her a formative belief in the gender-equality of the mind and spurring her own career as a teacher. In her thirties, Fuller’s erudite reputation preceded her as a leader in the emerging Transcendentalist movement, a philosophy that revitalized the role of the individual in society in the decades preceding the American Civil War. Along with Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Ripley, Abigail May Alcott, and Lidian Emerson, Fuller was among those women who actively shaped Transcendentalism and used its impetus to further social aims.