>More attention should be paid to New England-style everything, in my
>humble, regionally chauvinistic (being a Massachusetts native)
>opinion ;-) I just watched a C-span discussion on Emerson and
>Thoreau (part of a new series on American authors) and was struck
>again by how fresh, vigorous and accessible their thinking was and
>is.
>
>America's cult of the individual has today devolved into a
>retrograde celebration of selfishness. But I believe that the New
>England Transcendentalist tradition, in which E and T were so
>prominent, offers a way to tap into the appeal of individualism yet
>avoid the constrictive narcissism that characterizes so much of US
>society today. Renewed attention to Transcendentalism could, I
>think, help to replenish a sense of basic community and even help to
>re-legitimize the concept of socialism as a worthy aim.
Huh? Emerson was all about self-reliance. He was a case study in narcissism - I almost wrote a dissertation on that, in fact. "Are they my poor?," he asked someone soliciting contributions. He did pay Thoreau's tax bill, so the sylvan solitary didn't have to go to jail. I must dig out the excellent parody of them in Melville's Confidence-Man, which shows them as weird, icy isolates.
Doug