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Pages from Jeremy’s
Journal
March 13, 2006
After visiting the Alcott’s place
Despite their shortcomings, it
shows what a family can be, in its individual but mutually supportive
personalities and interests. Full of paintings and wood burnings, the
most lasting forms of creativity, each containing memories and
reflections of the lives lived there; here a drawing of Louisa May as the
villain in boots, and there the boots themselves. It is really very
impressive how cultured the girls were, who knew Dickens and Shakespeare,
poetry and theater, art and music; far more knowledgeable than I was at
that age. It must have been a very entertaining and aesthetically
pleasing place to visit, and still is. More spacious then the other
places we have seen on this trip, more windows and sunlight; uplifting,
as Bronson Alcott intended it to be.
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“Fredrick Douglass and
Transcendentalism”
Douglass’s slave narrative
tells the story of a man who had to realize his own worth, his own equality
with other men, in the face of tremendous opposition. One of the most
striking parts is where he relates how he came to realize the immense
importance of literacy to freedom, and the steps that he was willing to
take to procure it, which should make one value one’s own much more
readily available opportunities for education. This is a great testimony
to Transcendentalist self-reliance. What makes it all the more impressive
is that Douglass attained his intellectual as well as personal freedom
without the luxuries available to his contemporaries, without the benefit
of a Transcendentalist Club with which to converse on profound subjects
and receive support for his convictions. Douglass had to grab every
opportunity available to him in order to assert his freedom. This
sometimes meant asserting his freedom through the bare and simple fact of
his superior physical strength, as in the case of his confrontation with
Mr. Covey. His story is a simple narrative of lived experience, unadorned
with speculation of the more conceptual variety, making it all the more
poignant and impressive when compared to some of the castles in the sky
being built at the time. He discovered and asserted his right to
freedom with an authentic self-reliance.
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“On Clarence King and
‘Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada’”
What is so attractive about Clarence
King’s descriptions of landscape in Mountaineering in the Sierra
Nevada is how he is able to combine his extensive knowledge of
geology and scientific vocabulary with a very colorful descriptive
ability and an artist’s attention to detail. His description of how
natural processes had over millennia created the mountains through
which he was wandering, through all the action of ages of glacial
freeze and volcanic inferno, have a dramatic force. Reading his work, I
picked up on the fact that he had an artistic background even before
finding out that he was part of a group of “American pre-Raphaelites”
while at Yale, because of how he is able to verbally paint a picture
with the same attention to matters of form and color that concern a
painter. By reading his description of the landscape, one can mentally
recreate the scene as it may have come out on a canvas. Here is some of
the colorful vocabulary one can find in Mountaineering…: “Brown
foot-hills…a broad arabesque surface of colors…miles of orange-colored
flowers, cloudings of green and white, reaches of violet…pale
bluish-pearl tones…belts of bright emerald green…a pale, beryl
sky…dusky foot-hills rose over the plain with a coppery gold tone…The
snow burned for a moment in the violet sky, and at last went out.”
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