Emerson and the Examined Life

Robert Pinsky, award-winning author and poet, Richard Geldard and David M. Robinson, Emerson scholars, celebrate the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson with a live reading from famous American essays including Self-Reliance, The Oversoul and The American Scholar. Ralph Waldo Emerson was an essayist, orator, poet and philosopher whose vibrant words and original insights were meant to be heard by an engaged audience. The Pinsky reading will serve as living tribute to "the sage of Concord" in his 200th year.
Robert Pinsky, poet laureate of the United States (1997-2000), is poetry editor of the online journal Slate and a contributor to The Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. His book, The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems (1965-1995) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and also received the Lenore Marshall Award, the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. His latest collection of poems is iJersey Rain/i; in November 1999 he published the anthology Americans' Favorite Poems, a collection of poems featured in Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project, and in June 2002 published Poems to Read: On Youth, Darkness, Passion and Other Subjects. His book Democracy, Culture and the Voice of the Public was published in September 2002.
For more information on upcoming Emerson events, please visit Faneuil Hall Forum.
"Emerson's mind still provides the model of a central American intellectual and spiritual quest. Even his occasional shimmery vague patches, as much as his noble flights, embody something essential and familiar. We recognize much in our high art and low entertainment, in our politics and our manners, in his way of moving into and around a subject: the Emersonian sentences moving in a way that is fluid, heuristic, soaring and faltering, shifting in a sometimes casual way between oratory and introspection, an enterprise perpetually making itself up as it goes along. Uniquely, Emerson's genius successfully embodies itself as the poet and the lecturer in a single gesture, dreamy yet hortatory. At the juncture of inward meditation and passionate public speech, somehow both civic and idiosyncratic, Emerson calls us toward the best in our national character in an intrepid, candid, morally ambitious voice we can hope to recognize as our heritage."
- Robert Pinsky

[@marcaskew61]

Thankyou...Emerson is so important to us all.

[@GrantLeeEdwards]

Robert Pinsky’s remarks begin at 26:40. He reads selections from Emerson’s writings beginning at 28:17 and ending at 53:45.
He begins at an abrupt moment of transition midway through the 1842 essay, "Experience” (ESSAYS, Second Series):
"It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist....”
And Pinsky's reading concludes with the final lines of that same remarkable essay:
"Never mind the ridicule. Never mind the defeat. “Up again, old heart!,’ it seems to say. There is victory yet for all justice. And the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.”

[@esmeraldacole7856]

Thank you !! For download this lecture on Emerson! Beautiful !!

[@uranusgemini3388]

Waldo Emerson is having more acquaintance with the world than ever before;-- and this trajectory shall not suffer decline as time proceeds; for his is a singular orchard of delectable and eternal sentiments.

[@uranusgemini3388]

Waldo Emerson is quite a dangerous read to persons that are still novices and yet to be inducted to the average doorways of letters.

[@kathleenbarrett9686]

must go back to two words..KNOW and TOOLS…

[@kathleenbarrett9686]

the good soul or the bad soul? common sense, tolerance and helping others as did the QUAKERS.

[@jefferyansani1923]

"It is alike in your interest, and mine, and all men's,... to live in truth."
That's why I have cut off all family an d friendship ties to conservatives in America today.
It's because I love them and wish the best for them. I must admit, I'm extremely harsh in my criticisms though. It's not that their truths are different than mine. They don't have any truths and they should be ashamed.

[@marymills3581]

It's not that their truths are different than mind. They don't have any truths... such a great way to put it, thank you.

[@tomfontana7670]

Emerson was a conservative, as were all those of his time who believed the absolute truth that slavery was and is wrong, and antithetical to the truth that all humans are created equal (as conservative Lincoln believed).

[@seanchadwick2879]

@@tomfontana7670 that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of both the term conservative and Emerson; the Transcendentalists were rabid social reformers-progressives who openly wrote about defying tradition. That is absolutely not what conservatives are about now or then. Hell, Thoreau was basically disparaged as a naive social justice warrior by certain contemporaries for his protest of the Mexican war and Indian removal. The Transcendentalists wanted abolition long before Lincoln seriously came around to the idea-and some would say by their influence.

[@Rzo139]

What is truth then?

[@ComeAlongKay]

If anything I feel that is why your side is wrong. Conservatives on average have been the ones trying to keep a dialogue going at some level, while the liberals have tried to shut it down. And my goodness do the liberals have a great deal to be ashamed of, from their total butchering of beloved franchise after another to burning down small business in cities all over American. Everywhere a liberal reigns so does hellfire. The radical left have been taught as a myth, but those they beat and steal from know now real they are. It is a myth with teeth and veracity, that steals the hopes of small business, that beats those they randomly deem as supremacists. Biden in his tower, the democrats guy, now lays ruin to the country as another leftist destroys Canada. All over they dwell in power and ingornance, rotting the culture like a cancer. Everywhere they touch moves to ruin. LA, San Fran, Chicago, even Memphis and Austin liberal run cities in conservative areas, slowly are becoming like any liberal city. Rampant with crime, poverty, homelessness, increasing housing costs, and increased criminality. Liberals can’t even stand the places they’ve made that’s why they’re flooding into Texas and elsewhere. But of course they can only blame others for their mistakes, liberals can’t imagine ever being wrong or culpable so they bring their politics and with it the eventual destruction of anywhere cursed with them. Liberals ruin what they touch wether it’s liberal studios butchering classic franchises or liberal social media censoring anyone with a conservative opinion. Liberals don’t see people as people they see them only as their group, they create division inherently in their perspective that they peddle in anyplace they can force it in. They don’t see group as one thing about someone but the only thing, they’re primitive and tribal in that way. All that matters is what you appear to be behind, just saying the right buzzwords to appease them. They don’t care about the truth and do everything they can to pretend to delegitimize it. The irony in your statements being that liberals subsist only on lies, they flourish on the division they pretend to fight, and believe only in a relative truth that allows for the loss of morality and a complete neutralization of virtuous values.

[@williamflamenco5059]

David Robinson looks terrible since he retired from the San Antonio spurs

[@chanbath8]

Loll

[@marcollano5917]

"...as a dog turns a spit": weird. Had to look this one up.
There are lots of commonplaces and proverbs of nineteenth century America that seem strange like this.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog#:~:text=The%20turnspit%20dog%20was%20a,under%20the%20name%20%22Turnespete%22.