Emerson's 'History' and the Study of Literature (Patreon)

This will be one of our most important discussions to date.

We are using Emerson's essay on 'History' as a scaffold for a vivid tapestry of literary, historical, and philosophical theory.

Why must we read history? Indeed, how must we read history? Where does History meet Literature? 

Are we doomed to repeat history? And if history is a nightmare, how do we awake from it?

Where to read Emerson's 'History':

This lecture does not require you to have read Emerson's essay, as we are working through it together, but you may wish to procure a copy for yourself anyway.

I'm working from a well-loved secondhand edition of the collected essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson from Library of America. But his essays are also freely available and downloadable from online literary havens like Gutenberg.

• Library of America
• Dover Thrift Edition
• Gutenberg

Mentioned in the show:

• Poets & Playwrights: Shakespeare, Tennyson, Rimbaud, Hart Crane, Hölderlin, Spenser, Pindar, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Miller.
• Thinkers: Ernst Robert Curtius, Henri Bergson, Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Freud, Giambattista Vico, Arnold Toynbee, Erich Auerbach, Dr Samuel Johnson
• Novelists: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Cervantes, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy.

Audio Timestamps:

• 0:00 why read history? Or fiction?’
• 1:30 the fiction-making function
• 2:00 the Hugoic dance between fact and fiction
• 2:40 why the historian must be a poet
• 3:50 Homer vs the Bible
• 4:30 dreams, symbolism, and the cyclicality of history
• 5:30 how to escape a nightmare
• 6:30 Plato and Hermann Hesse
• 7:45 fiction, history, and forecasting
• 8:18 Emerson as Eastern sage
• 9:00 history existing in our personal development
• 10:30 the measurement units of history
• 11:30 cultural destiny and free-will (and the individual)
• 13:20 the hours of our life and centuries of time
• 14:30 “every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind”
• 15:20 Emerson’s poetics, and the key to reading his essays
• 16:45 Emerson and Shakespeare’s high tragedies of state
• 17:30 how to read King Lear
• 18:00 how to look into the mirror of history
• 19:00 “our too great nearness to ourselves”
• 19:30 Eliot, Tolstoy, and egotistical characters
• 20:00 how does art enlarge our sympathies?
• 20:30 relating to Shakespeare’s strange kings
• 22:22 “the blow was struck for us”
• 23:00 Marcus Aurelius and the “unattained but attainable self”
• 24:00 how to read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
• 27:00 Proust and the visual arts
• 28:00 your life as text, and books as commentary
• 28:50 the power of belief/faith (“nothing will come of nothing”)
• 30:00 reading history actively vs passively
• 31:00 living history in our own person (“he is the court”)
• 32:50 a reading of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’
• 34:00 “all experience is an arch”
• 36:00 when the French Revolution finally make sense
• 38:27 “all history becomes subjective”
• 38:38 “there is no history, only biography”
• 39:30 would Les Misérables work as a straight history?
• 40:00 what it does not live it will not know
• 40:50 examine the laws the state enacts (exercise)
• 42:00 the Salem witch hunts (Arthur Miller’s The Crucible)
• 42:30 is history doomed to repeat itself?
• 43:00 Emerson using the essay form as his poetry
• 44:00 analysing buildings and locales in literature
• 44:50 Emerson, Kant, and Schopenhauer (and “will”)
• 45:30 “the poet makes twenty fables with one moral”
• 48:00 civil history, literature, sculpture, architecture
• 48:30 art as gateway to civilisation and ourselves
• 49:00 the intimacy of literature vs music and art
• 51:00 the chessboard of great literature
• 51:45 art as selective mirror of ideal nature
• 53:00 entering into the nature of the subject
• 54:00 literature as self-growth
• 55:00 how to collaborate with authors
• 56:00 visiting the theatre with Proust
• 57:00 Nietzsche and words long dead in our hearts
• 57:30 “the true poem is the poet’s mind”
• 58:00 why Victor Hugo resisted anthologising
• 58:40 Emerson’s microcosms and synecdoches
• 59:20 ships on Joseph Conrad’s seas
• 59:45 how to find art’s origin in nature
• 1:01:00 gothic church homework assignment
• 1:02:00 “all public facts are to be individualised” (self-work assignment)
• 1:03:20 reading Wallace Stevens’ ’Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’
• 1:04:00 marking the four epochs of western culture within ourselves
• 1:05:00 when a thought of Plato becomes our own
• 1:06:00 how we fall in love with great writers (connecting with the departed)
• 1:07:00 how to channel the spirits of great writers
• 1:07:50 “Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people”
• 1:09:00 finding your own “secret biography”
• 1:11:33 “you shall make me feel what periods you have lived”

Ideas to ponder upon:

1) 'All public facts are to be individualised, all private facts are to be generalised. Then at once History becomes fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime.'

2) 'The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder.'

3) 'We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.'

Happy historicising, everybody!