From "Prudence" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, stumbled across this morning after Emerson and comedy happened to pop up in one post, the previous post. It was just a haphazard sequence, not any connection between Emerson and comedy. So I went looking, on the theory that there was none.
August 29, 2021
"The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy."
"It is nature's joke.... Prudence does not go behind nature, and ask whence it is. It takes the laws of the world, whereby man's being is conditioned, as they are, and keeps these laws, that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity, growth, and death. There revolve to give bound and period to his being, on all sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies stubborn matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here is a planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws, and fenced and distributed externally with civil partitions and properties which impose new restraints on the young inhabitant. We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which blows around us, and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains; and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word, — these eat up the hours."
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8 comments:
Flowery sod...
Althouse writes, "It's was just a haphazard sequence, not any connection between Emerson and comedy. I just went looking, on the theory that there was none."
Come on, man... all the hipsters at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue know those Trancedentalists were party animals. Ralphie's digs in Concord, Mass was the Playboy Mansion of 19th-century New England with Freddie Douglass beltin' out hit tunes and Maggie Fuller going wild, dancing topless.
"Emerson: German philosophy that crossed the great water and took some on underway."--Karl Kraus
“The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.”
Emerson was -- and is -- thought to be a difficult writer. His individual sentences are striking and memorable, but finding a thought or line of argument that links them isn't always easy. And he contradicts himself. As one would expect from the man who wrote "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" (most often quoted as "of small minds" -- another inconsistency).
“The world of men show like a comedy without laughter: populations, interests, government, history; 't is all toy figures in a toyhouse.”
That was before politicians became comedians and comedians politicians. In Emerson's day, people believed that statesmen were, or at least should be, shrouded in pomp and dignity.
BTW, You can major in comedic arts at Emerson College. Would Ralph be amused?
Again, to my point about Linklater's movie project below, doesn't this rant sound like some Austin slacker on speed?
RWE was quite good on the incomparable Alexander von Humboldt, master scientist of the age.
His centennial address (1869) is easy to find, and I commend it.
“ Again, to my point about Linklater's movie project below, doesn't this rant sound like some Austin slacker on speed?”
Ha ha.. Yeah.
Spurious prudence has never been much of a thigh slapper in my estimation. I'm not really an Emerson kind of guy when it comes to humor....I'm not knowledgeable about Emerson and the Transcendentalists, but I get the sense that the movie version of the drama of their lives would not have much action or need for tasteful nudity.
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