Transcendentalism A brief overview... From 1840-1855, literature in America experienced a rebirth called the New England Renaissance. Through their poetry, short stories, novels, and other works, writers during this period established a clear American voice. No longer did they see their work as less influential than that of European authors. Transcendentalism was a part of this flowering of American literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were important voices in this philosophical movement that sought to have individuals transcend to a higher spiritual level. To achieve this goal, the individual had to seek spiritual, not material, greatness and the essential truths of life through intuition. For transcendentalists, real truth lay outside the experience of the senses, residing instead in the Over-Soul. The Over-Soul is at the heart of transcendentalist belief. The belief holds that all forms of being - God, nature, and humanity - are united through a shared universal soul, or Over-Soul. The Over-Soul is also known as the Ideal or Supreme Mind. In order to comprehend the divine, God, and the universe, one must "transcend" (go beyond) the physical and emotional descriptions of normal human thought. Transcendentalist writers believed... all people are inherently good. humans can transcend to a higher spiritual plane. one "transcends" through intuition not reason. one "transcends" by learning from and living in harmony with nature. one "transcends" as an individual. every human being is capable of "transcending." after "transcending" one will want to do the right and moral thing and work toward a better society Conceptualizing transcendentalism Transcendentalists based their writing on the following concepts: Non-conformity Self-reliance Free thought Confidence Importance of nature
PART I: READ & ANNOTATE In this packet, you will find excerpts from three prominent transcendental works. Please read and annotate these documents to reflect phrases or passages that speak to transcendentalist themes. The readings and your annotations will be collected and turned with the other components of your project. Attached documents: Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson Walden by Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau PART II: PROJECT OPTIONS You will complete a project using the concepts of Transcendentalism. Each person will present their project to the class on The product, or what you create, will depend on which of the following options you choose to pursue: Option 1: Song Analysis Directions: Find a song that addresses one or more of the transcendentalist themes (nonconformity, self-reliance, free thought, confidence, importance of nature). Your song can be from any time period, but MUST be school appropriate. Be CREATIVE with your choices avoid obvious/very popular songs (see Do Not Play List below). You will need to bring a portion of the song (1:30-2:00 minutes) and a creative representation of the lyrics to class. Product: 1. Write an explanation (2-3 pages double spaced) of how the lyrics to this song represent transcendentalist themes. Attach a copy of the lyrics to your paper with the presentation portion highlighted. 2. Create a visual way to display the lyrics to the class during your presentation (just the section of the song you plan to play). The lyrics MUST be large and readable to the entire class WHILE the song is playing. Options include, but are not limited to PowerPoint/ Prezi, video, poster, etc. 3. You MAY use a music device ONLY to play the song (NO CELL PHONES ALLOWED), but you will need to have the song cued up before you begin your presentation. Check compatibility of your device to the speakers available in class AHEAD of the due date. 4. All other technology (PowerPoint, video, etc.) MUST be on a flash drive. Presentation: Choose part of the song to play for the class (1:30-2:00 minutes). The lyrics must be displayed in a visual way while the song is playing. Provide a brief summary of how this portion of the song represents Transcendentalist themes. Do NOT just read your paper to the class. **DO NOT PLAY LIST** NO Disney music (Colors of the Wind, Frozen, etc.) NO It s My Life by Jon Bon Jovi NO We re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister NO I Believe I Can Fly by R. Kelly
Option 2: Nature Journal Directions: This option will require you to spend at least 1 hour total outdoors in a natural habitat (forest preserve, lake, park, etc. will work best). You will be required to incorporate photo evidence of your experience within your journal. You may also choose to sketch what you observe (but photographs are required). Using your photographs, observations, and sketches, you will create a journal with at least 5 pages: Page 1: Record your location and time. You should spend 15 minutes at this location. Observe a natural inanimate object (tree, flower, spider web, rock, etc.). Take notes on every detail you can see, hear, feel or smell. Take a photograph(s) of your object and/or surrounding areas for use in your journal. You may also choose to sketch what you observe (but photographs are required). Page 2: Move on to a new location and choose a different object to observe for 15 minutes. Record your location and time and repeat the process for Page 1. Page 3: Record your location and time. Observe an animal, bird, or insect for 15 minutes (if possible). Take notes on appearance, movement, sound, etc. **If it is impossible to find an animal, observe something else that moves in the wind (ex. tree branch, tall grass, water, etc). Take a photograph(s) of your animal and/or surrounding areas for use in your journal. You may also choose to sketch what you observe (but photographs are required). Page 4: Record your location and time. Find something very small (an acorn, leaf, berry) and describe it and its location. Take a photograph(s) of your object and/or surrounding areas for use in your journal. You may also choose to sketch what you observe (but photographs are required). Page 5: When you are back at home, read over your notes. Compose a poem, story or song based on your observations. There is no length requirement to your composition, but what you create should convey a high level of thought and creativity (ex. a single Haiku is not acceptable, but a series might be check with me if you are unsure!). Product: You will turn in your observation journal and your composition. You are strongly encouraged to be creative with the presentation of your journal (ex. cover, binding, page presentation, etc.) Presentation: You will share your observations, photographs and illustrations with the class. Do NOT just read your journal to us, but explain a few highlights of each of your 15 minute observations. You will then share your composition with the class (it IS ok to just read this to us).
Option 3: Collage Directions: 1. Using newspapers and magazines (NO computer images or drawings see me if you need materials ), find images that relate to any or all of the themes of transcendentalism. 2. Create a collage with these images. Your collage should be at least 8X11 (the size of a standard sheet of paper) but must include at least 10 images. You are HIGHLY encouraged to be creative with the presentation of your collage (a.k.a. a single piece of computer paper is not very creative!). Make your collage larger, three dimensional, interactive, etc. to add intrigue! 3. Create a typed key for your collage that explains how 10 of the images relate to the themes of transcendentalism. You may make your collage larger, or include more images, but you only need to write about 10. Each item on your key should be typed and between 3-4 sentences in length. Product: You will turn in both your collage and your key. Your project will be graded on composition, creativity, neatness, and relevance of information. Presentation: You will present your collage to the class and explain at least 10 of the images you have chosen in terms of their relationship to the themes of transcendentalism. Sample Rubric 4 3 2 1 Presentation Student give an exceptional presentation of all required components in a clear, concise manner Student presents most required components, but has difficulty explaining the relevancy Student presents some of the required components Student is missing most of the required components. Creativity Student demonstrates an exceptional degree of creativity Student demonstrates a quality degree of creativity Student demonstrates some degree of creativity Student demonstrates no degree of creativity Relevance Student gives an excellent explanation of how every element relates to the theme Student gives a reasonable explanation of how most element relates to the theme Student gives a fairly reasonable explanation of how some elements relate to the theme Student s explanations are weak and illustrate difficulty understanding how to relate elements to the theme Components All parts of the project are complete and student has followed directions Most parts of the project are complete and student has followed most directions Some parts of the project are complete and student has followed some directions Many parts of the project are incomplete and student has not followed directions Overall Quality Student has done an exceptional job in presentation, product, & explanation Student has done a quality job in presentation, product, & explanation Student has done an average job in presentation, product, & explanation Student has done an insufficient job in presentation, product, & explanation
An Excerpt from Self-Reliance By Ralph Waldo Emerson I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without pre-established harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Selfreliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Excerpts fromwalden Where I Lived, and What I lived For By Henry David Thoreau Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of creation where I had squatted, Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching Thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
Civil Disobedience By Henry David Thoreau 1. I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,-- "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which the will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. 3. But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at one no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. 16. Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels? 21. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,--if ten honest men only,--ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that we say is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man. If my esteemed neighbor, the State's ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question of human rights in the Council Chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts, that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister,--though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her,--the Legislature would not wholly waive the subject of the following winter. 22. Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,--the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.