Early in my relationship with Jennie, I used a metaphor for our relationship. It was a "birdhouse," that we had constructed and was now complete, a project, assembled and painted.
This surprised and confused and disturbed Jennie, who didn't feel that way at all. The context was that Jennie desired to spend more quality time on our relationship.
One of the deep understandings that I've come to in the past two years is that relationships need continuous attention. It's not a done thing. The Gottman Institute (and their Marriage Minute emails) have been a constant reminder and teacher of that. And like Marilynne Robinson says about democracy... it's an achievement that we need to value and that it's a "made thing" that needs to be remade every day.
I went for a walk yesterday with Charlotte. She seems content with meeting once every couple weeks to walk and catching up on school, work, gardening. Of course that's not a real relationship. Yesterday I had the thought that it's not like I can just "tell" her that her idea of a relationship is distorted (after all, I was 49 when I thought that intimate relationships were "like a birdhouse"). I can't point to healthy relationships that we both know of (not her brother's, not her moms).
And so my challenge is how do I teacher her this? How do I encourage her to value it?
Since Jennie and I were writing our vows, I've been looking for this quotation about democracy that I remember reading years ago and writing in my journal. I found the quotation yesterday finally. Marilynne Robinson and Barack Obama talk about democracy and books and small town values in this NYRB discussion from 2012 posted on Soundcloud.
While discussing how the political weather has become negative and toxic, Robinson talks about how we've come to forget that democracy itself was a momentous invention and that it's precious. Two passages are especially poignant. The first is about how we collectively do not hold democracy itself in enough esteem any more.
I think that in our earlier history.... there was the conscious sense that democracy was achievement.... It was something that people collectively made and they held it together by valuing it. (6:20)
I love the phrasing that democracy was "an achievement" rather than just a description of a form of government. And I love the idea that it's a temporary "event" that is constantly held together... like doing the hoola hoop, but with many people. (Or doing "the wave" at a sporting event?). It's something that a community must do and speaks to why community is important, and why the fraying of community can cause the fraying of democracy.
Why is this important?
We cannot take it for granted. It's a made thing that we remake continuously. (7:40)
There is phrasing in our vows that says something similar... we value our love and commit to remaking it every day.
What's important in what Robinson says include: 1. it is a made thing; it's not natural; we should value it for it's rarity/temporariness; 2. it's like a "song" or "dance" in that it's made in the doing, 3. we make it continuously
Billy Collins, in his poem "Monday," writes that there are regular places for all workers to be - fishermen, barbers, clerks, miners - and that the right place for poets is at their windows looking out.
"What window it hardly seems to matter / though many have a favorite. // for there is always something to see -- / a bird grasping a thin branch, / the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner, / those two boys in wool caps angling across the street. "
The poet's job is to notice things. The poet's job is "attention" to specific things. And the world, filled with action and stuff, is always 'here' for the poet's noticing.
In another poem, "Aimless Love," Collins addresses the KIND of attention he has for things he notices. He has a kind of omnidirectional curiosity (love?) towards many, many things.
"This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, / I fell in love with a wren / and later in the day with a mouse / the cat had dropped under the dining room table. // In the shadows of an autumn evening, / I feel for a seamstress / still at her machine in the tailer's window, / and later for a bowl of broth. / steam rising like smoke from a naval battle. // This is the best kind of love, I thought, / without recompense, without gifts, / or unkind words, without suspicion, / or silence on the telephone. // The love of the chestnut, the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel. // No lust, no slam of the door -- / the love of the miniature orange tree, / the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower, / the highway that cuts across Florida."
In these two poems, he identifies a couple aspects of "right living": attention and love.
In other poems, I seem to catch a glimpse of other parts of Collins' vision of right living.
In his poem "Velocity,"a kind of momento mori he recognizes the "speed lines" that should be seen on all things because we're racing towards death. And in "Istanbul," (among other poems where he seems to be loafing and happy) he celebrates taking pleasure and in being grateful, filled up with gratitude like a cloud fills with rain.
In these poems, he identifies a couple different aspects: gratitude and (realizing) temporariness (and so preciousness). All of these things remind me of things I'm learning from Buddhism and meditation teachers.
Billy Collins' poem "Velocity."
"We must look at things / from the point of view of eternity // the college theologians used to insist, // from which, I imagine, we would all / appear to have speed lines trailing behind us / as we rush along the road of the world, // as we rush down the along tunnel of time-- / the biker, of course, drunk on the wind, / but also the man reading by a fire, // speed lines coming off his shoulders and his book, / and the woman standing on a beach / studying the curve of the horizon, / even the child asleep on a summer night"
I watched half a of really pretentious and boring documentary about Thich Nhat Hanh. One thing sticks with me. As a worker in brown robes was talking to a young woman across a table (checking her in for a weekend retreat?) soft bells began to chime. Not a gong or meditation bell, but something like from grandma Lange's house that does a little soft tune every quarter hour. In the background, you see other people take notice... like at the beginning of the sound of a fire drill (is this a test? am I supposed to do something?). A hush and attention occurs. The worker says, "do you know about the bells?" The woman nods in semi-agreement. The worker says: "When we hear the bells we stop what we're doing and listen. It's to remind us to be mindful through the day." Those weren't the exact words, but it was simple and unaffected. When the bells chime on the quarter hour, and they're not fancy bells, it means stop what you're doing for a few seconds and pay attention to the currently unfolding world.
"Zero" by Wendell Berry The river steams in the cold. Aboe it the streams impend, lcok like iron in the frozen hollows. The cold reaches of the sky have leapt onto the ground. But the wren's at home in the cubic acre of his song. House and shed and barn stand up around their lives like songs. And I have a persistent music in me, like water flowing under ice, that says the warmer days will come, blossom and leaf return again. I live in that, a flimsy enclosure, but the song's for singing, not to dread the end. The end, anyhow, is always here. It is the climate we sing in. A man may ease off into it any time, like a settler, tired of farming, starting out silently into the woods. On a day like this we have the end in sight. This is zero, the elemental poverty of all that was ever born, in which nothing lives by chance but only by choosing to and by knowing how -- and by the excess of desire that rises above the mind, surrounding and hovering like a song.
from Walden - "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in me.
The goal is to continue awakening, like mindfulness, bringing us back to the moment
David: I David, take you, Jennie, to be my wife, my constant friend and partner, and my love. I will work to nurture a bond of honesty, openness, respect, and trust; one that, with intention and care, will grow along with us. I vow to honor and respect you for all that you are and will become. I promise to challenge you and to accept challenges from you. I promise to never take our love, partnership, and friendship for granted; that these will be remade each of our days together. I will join with you to create a world where we all want to live, where love and friendship will be recognized and celebrated in all of their many forms. Our home will be a sanctuary and a respite for us and for those whom we cherish. Above all, I will give you my love freely and unconditionally. I pledge this to you from my heart, for all the days of our lives
from "The Country of Marriage" by Wendell Berry 2 This comes after silence. Was it something I said that bound me to you, some mere promise or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death? A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood still and said nothing. And then there rose in me, like the earth's emopwerin gbrew rising in root and branch, the words of a dream of you I did not know I had dreamed. I was aa wandereer who feels the solace of his native land under his feet again and moving in his blood. I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss that lay before me, but only the level ground. 4 How many times have I come into you out of my head with joy, if ever a man was, for to approach you I have given up the light and all directions. I come to you lost, wholly trusting, as a man who goes into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend slowly earhward out of the air. I rest in peace in you, when I arrive at last 5 Our bond is not little economy based on the exchange of my love and work for yours, so much for so much of an expendable fund. We don't know what its limits are -- that puts it in the dark. We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering we are more together than we thought? You are the known way leading always to the unknown, and you are the know place to which the unknown is always leading me back. More blessed in you than I know, I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing not belittled by my saying that I possess it. Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light enough to live, and then accepts the dark, passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I have fallen time and gain from the greath strength of my desire, helpless, into your arms.
From Beethoven by Laura Turnbridge
70 - Eroica - Symphony no. 3 in E flat major, op. 55. Beethoven began sketching a 'grand symphony' in the summer of 1802, which would use as its finale a piece he ahad already composed, the Variations and Fugue for Piano in E flat major, op. 35. ... for the Eroica, he seemed less interested in making references across movements than in shifting the weight of the music towards its ending, which has encouraged listeners to think of narratives of victory or apotheosis.
73 - Beethoven used a funeral march (marcia funebre sulla mort d'un eroe... in the third movement of the A flat major piano sonata, op 26 (1800)
91 In 1808, at the Theater an der Wien, Beethoven held his long-anticipated third, academy, which, unusually, was dedicated entirely to his own music.... The programme began with the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, entitled "A recollection of Country Life' (which came to be known as the 'Pastoral'). It was follwed by the conert aria for solo soprano and orchestra, "ah! Perfido', the Gloria from the Mass in C, and then the recently published Fourth Piano Concerto, with Beethoven as soloist. After an interval came the premier of a symphoy in C minor, the Fifth, the Sanctus from the Masss in C, and a Fantasia improvised by Beethoven at the piano. For a finale, Beethoven had composed a Choral Fantasy that brought together all the musicians: vocal soloists, chorus, solio piano and orchestra.
158 - After completing the Fidelio revisions, Beethoven had composed the Piano Sonata, Op. 90, which some scholars like to hear as him retreating to the comfort of more familar musical domains. Yet, for the first time, Beethoven did not use the conventional Italian tempo markings, but instaed provied expression markings in German.
167 - The Piano Trio, Op. 1, no. 3 was converted into a stiring quartet, op. 104.
173 - Hammarklavier Sonata.... On the surface, it seems fairly conventional. Beehtoven reverted to the standard four-movement layout for a piano sonaa he had abandoned since Op. 31, no 3, in 1802. Its first three movements -- Allegro, Scherzo, Adagio sostenuto -- are each self- contained and in classical forms. It is , however, far longer than any other sonata by Beethoven or indeed, any of his contemporaries... The finale, a huge fugue with introduction, marks the start of a preoccupation with counterpoint... [that he] would explore further in subsequent works such as the Missa solemnis and the 'Grosse Fuge'... with regard to register, this is extreme music. It depends on stark contrasts. AT the end of the Scherzo, the final two chords that punctuate the main theme start to take over, alternating between being high, loud and on a B flat and being lower, softer and on a B natural. ... the B natural is far removed from the home key and threatens to take over as it is repeated and accelerates, becomesing even louder. ... the meloic and harmoic structure of the hwole sonata is governed by a falling third. The two last notes of the opening, fanfare like motto are a falling third; the Scherzo's first theme constanatly hops down by thirds; the adagio's main melody sinks by thirds; finally, the moments whne the scurrying fugal theme stops aare drops of a third.
179 - late period... Despite acclaim with which Beehtoven was heralded by his associates, teh works that he produced from 1818 onwards general were greeted with bafflement, if they were encountered at all.
180 - Beethoven had declared that he was embarking on a 'new path' in 1803, which has been taken to represent the start of his 'heroic' or 'middle' period; [Eroica, second symphony, three violin sonatas, op. 30; the three piano sonatas, op 31, ad the opp. 34 and 35 piano variations] the Hammerklavier recognized by the composer as so challening it would take decades for performers to master it, then marks the start of his 'late' period.
190 - Beethoven's routien continued much as usual: he rose early, had his coffee, then composed allmorning before lunch at midday. A long walk, sketchbook to hand, took most of the afternoon, after which he might visit a tavern or coffeehouse to read the newspaper. he would have a simple supper at home and be in bed by 10 p.m.
219 - focus on String Quartet Op. 130. The 'Grosse Fuge' for string quartet was published as op. 133. The version for four-hand piano as op. 134. His next string quartets were Op. 131 and op. 135.
From Beethoven by Laura Turnbridge
Musical culture in the early-nineteenth-century Vienna readily mixed what would now be thought of as high art and more lowly forms of entertainment. For example, there was a fashion, in the years prior to hte revision of Fidelio, for presenting tableaux vivants at venues such as the Kartnertortheater. These were 'living pictures', paintings or scenes re-created on stage with real people replacing the original figures. Poses were held either in between or for the duration of muiscal performances or dramatic readings. Thus the Viennese premier of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto by Carl Czerny took place on the same programme as three tableaux vivants based on paintings by Raphael, Nicholas Poussin and Franz de Troes. Movements from the Second, Third and Fourth symphonies were used on other occassions. Such tableaux were more than just opportunities for dressing up (although that was admittedly a large part of their appeal for particiapnts, as they often featured men in military attire assisting swooing women in fetching costumes). By adding iimages to Beehoven's music they guided listeners...
Opera, also, made use of tableaux; indeed, it was a common feature of French revolutionary operas. Cherubini in particular was prone to extend choral conclusions that froze the cast in suspeneded animation. The action then became musical. There are several such moments in Fidelio, the libretto of which, commentators have often pointed out, makes repeated referenc to the word 'moment' (Augenblick). Pizarro relishes the thoughts of Florestan's demise with the aria "ha! Wlech" ein Augenblick!" ("Ha! What a moment!") whichs that Leonrore echoes and subverts as she is given permission to release Florestan from his chains (O Gott! Welch' ein Augenblick!) The other characdters and the chorus pick up the same phrasee and convert it into a musical and dramatic tableaux.
In this video, Hockney pulls open a sketchbook of his circa 2019 and wordlessly pages through it, revealing the range of things that captured his eye in those moments: Domestic interior scenes, urban exteriors, landscapes ranging from recognizable to fanciful; still lifes, Rembrandt-esque human forms, half-timbered structures in Germany or Austria, random street scenes with details so minimal yet gesturally accurate that you can tell the pickup is an older Ford F-150. Black-and-white, sepia, full color, Hockney filled the pages using whatever tools he had on hand at the moment.
Bill Moyers' special on Jon Kabat-Zinn and his program (mid 1980s) (link). The story follows one 8-week class of mindfulness stress reduction with Zinn. All patients are referred to Zinn from other doctors in the hospital because of pain they have. The class includes both yoga and meditation. It expects 40 minutes of meditation per day as homework. The practice starts with eating a raisin mindfully. I think the idea is that the everyday can be experienced differently than it currently is. But we need to pay attention and slow down.
The next practice moves on to noticing the breath and watching the brain. Many patients note how hard it is to follow the breath, maddening. Kabat-Zinn asks them if that's a realization for them, they say yes. So, one of the first lessons is how our brains are filled with these thoughts and how challenging it is to even temporarily get relief from them. He tells Moyers that it's these thoughts that "condition" us constantly. Those seems like two more big ideas of meditation.
Many patients relate stories about how the practice improves their lives... each is different, none of them are specifically about a reduction of pain. It's about appreciating kids in the midst of being annoyed by them, it's about seeing a shadow of the self and feeling compassion, it's about realizing "that I always say no." (Jennie noted that the sessions of yoga that leave patients in pain, Kabat-Zinn's techniques ("ride the pain" "breath with the pain") remind her of lamaze classes.)
One general benefit was a change in overall demeanor. You can actually see the changed people -- more smiles, more ease of movement -- as the segment moves through the 8 classes.
Another general benefit was the appreciation and gratefulness of little things in life. One line stuck out especially to me. Kabat-Zinn says, "One thing that I'd like you to take from this is that little things are not little. They are life." The realization that we are missing life when we are so much "in our head" (mindless).
Being mindless is a double whammy... it keeps us from appreciating the present moment AND unknowingly conditions us.
"The Forest Unseen," by David George Haskell. This is the last chapter. Haskell reflects on the meaning of the year's watch. There are several things that I like about this section. First, rhetorically, the series of ideas/paragraphs, each succeeding one starts with a "despite" a "but," a "yet." Subordinating his ideas to get to the very specific thing that he wants to communicate. Second, the clarity of the line about "I am unnecessary here" and "there is loneliness in this realization, poignancy in my irrelevance." Third, despite his "unnecessary"ness, the sense of "parallel worlds" that are running together. The combination of the last two seems like real wisdom, deep understanding
Silence returns to the mandala. I sink into the moment, feeling a familiar sense of arrival. The practice of returning to the mandala and sitting in silence for hundreds of hours has peeled back some of the barriers between the forest and my senses, intellect, and emotions. I can be present in a way that I had not known existed.
Despite this feeling of belonging, my relationship to this place is not straightforward. I simultaneously feel profound closeness and unutterable distance. As I have come to know the mandala, I have more clearly seen my ecological and evolutionary kinship with the forest. This knowledge feels woven into my body, remaking me or, more precisely, waking in me the ability to see how I was made all along.
At the same time, an equally powerful sense of otherness has grown. As I have watched, a realization of the enormity of the my ignorance has pressed on me. Even simple enumeration and naming of the mandala's inhabitants lie far beyond my reach. As understanding of their lives and relationships in anything but a fragmentary way is quite impossible. The longer I watch, the more alienated I become from any hope of comprehending the mandala, of grasping its more basic nature.
Yet the separation that I feel is more than a heightened awareness of my ignorance. I have understood in some deep place that I am unnecessary here, as is all humanity. There is loneliness in this realization, poignancy in my irrelevance.
But I also feel an ineffable but strong sense of joy in the independence of the mandala's life. This was brought home to me several weeks ago as I walked into the forest. A hairy woodpecker lighted on a tree trunk and lobbed out its call. I was struck hard by the otherness of this bird. Here was a creature whose kind has chattered woodpecker calls for millions of years before humans came to be. Its daily existence was filled with bark flakes, hidden beetles, and the sounds of its woodpecker neighbors: another world, running parallel to my own. Millions of such parallel worlds exist in one mandala.
David George Haskell's "A Forest Unseen"
In the chapter titled "October 5th -- Alarm Waves," Haskell recounts a time when a deer wanders close to him as he sits silently in the mandala. The deer becomes alarmed, "just a foot or two behind me," and snorts an alarm call into the forest.
The snorts immediately set three squirrels chattering and whining. Eight chipmunks join in, shooting off rapid chips. The wave moves out from the mandala. A wood thrush downslope starts calling, whippa-whippo-whop, its head feather hackled up as it hurls out the call. Distant chipmunks pick up the staccato chorus, carrying it to the edge of earshot.
Haskell reflects on this alarm wave.
The mandala's birds and mammals live embedded in an acoustic network, each individual connected to others through sound. The forest's news ripples through this network, carrying the latest information about the location and activities of troublemakers. It takes some effort for us urbanized humans to become aware of these traveling signals. We are accustomed to ignoring "background noise," instead taking our cues from the interior noise of our minds. Most of my time sitting or walking in the woods is spent riding waves inside my head, thinking of past or future. I suspect that this is a common experience. Only a repeated act of the will can bring us back to the present, back to our senses.
Our own alienation from this world makes it hard to understand. Haskell's hundreds of hours of silent watching have provided him a dynamic picture of how it works.
When we arrive in the acoustic now, we discover that the forest's newsroom is focused on -- surprise! -- us. We're large, noisy, and fast. And many animals have seen us in our more predatory modes. Those that haven't had personal experience of our guns, traps, and saws quickly learn from their more experience peers: it is in an animal's interest to pay attention to what alarms others. We are like the hawks, owls, and foxes that seldom get to observe the forest network without triggering noisy news bulletins. Sitting low, staying still, and biding one's time is the only way to slip in. Then we experience the alternating calm and clatter of the news wires. Hikers, for example, are preceded by bow waves that arrive minutes before their chatter and laughter. More minor disturbances, such as a branch falling or the overflight of a crow, send quieter and more short-lived pulses through the network. The deer's alarm at stumbling upon me was, on the other hand, a surge, a bold headline.
As the young bird grows inside the egg it pulls calcium out of the shell, gradually etching away at the walls of its home, and turns the calcium into bone. These bones may fly to South America and be deposited in the soil of the rain forest, or the calcium may return to the sea in a migrant-killing autumn storm. Or, the bones may fly back to these forests next spring and, when the bird lays her eggs, the calcium may again be used in an eggshell whose remains may be grazed on by snails, returning the calcium to the mandala. These journeys will weave in and out of other lives, knitting together the multidimensional cloth of life. My blood may join the nsil's shell in a young bird that eats or is bitten by a passing mosquito, or we may meet later, in millenia, at the bottom of the ocean in a crab's claw or the gut of a worm.
In another moment of tracing this inter-relatedness, he focuses on the repercussions of our love for seeing birds in the backyard.Winds of human technology blow at this cloth, billowing it in unpredictable directions. Atoms of sulfur that were locked into fossil plants when they died in ancient swamps are now tossed into the atmosphere when we burn coal to fuel our culture. The sulfur turns to sulfuric acid, rains down on the mandala, and acidifies the soil. This acidic fossil rain tips the chemical balance against the snails, reducing their abundance. Mother birds have a harder time bingeing on calcium and so breed less successfully, or not at all. Perhaps fewer birds will mean less blood for mosquitoes, or fewer predatory beaks? Viruses like West Nile that thrive in wild birds may, in turn, be touched by the changed bird populations. This ripple in the cloth floats across the forest, perhaps finding a hem at which to end, perhaps floating on forever, drifting through the mosquitoes, viruses, humans, ever outward.
Sharp-skinned hawks in Tennessee do not migrate, but they are oinged by sharp-shinned hawks retreating from winter farther north. This autumnal flow of southbound sharp-shinned hawks has dwindled in recent years. Scientists first suspected that pollution or habitat loss was causing the falling numbers of migrating hawks. But this is appraently not the case. Instead, more sharp-shinned hawks are choosing to stay in the frozen northern forests rather than head south for the winter. These lingering hawks survive by litering around human settlements, making use of a remarkable new arrangement in the ecology of North America: the backyard bird feeder.
Our love of birds has created a new migration. This novelty is a west-to-east migration of plants, not a north-to-south migration of birds. The productivity of thousands of acres of former prairie land is shipped eastward, locked in millions of tons of sunflower seeds. These dense stores of energy are trickled from wooden boxes and glass tubes, adding a steady, stationary source of food to the otherwise unpredictably shifting winter food suppply of songbirds in the eastern forest. Sharp-shinned hawks are therefore provided with a dependable meat locker, turning the forest into a home for the winter. Bird feeders not only augment the forest's larder but, more importantly, they gather songbirds into clusters that make convenient feeding stations for hawks.
The expression of our yearning for the beauty of birds sets off waves that circle outward, washing over prairies and forests, lapping onto the mandala.
After hypothesizing about what fewer migrant hawks might mean in the longer term in his Tennessee forest, Haskell says:
We cannot move without vibrating the waters, sending into the world the consequences of our desires. The hawk embodies these spreading waves, and the marvel of its flight startles us into paying attention. Our embeddedness is given a magnificent, tangible form: here is our evolutionary kinship splayed out in the fanning wing; here is a solid, physical link to the north woods and the prairies; here is the brutality and elegance of the food web sailing across the forest.
"A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall" by Wendell Berry Somehow it has all added up to song -- earth, air, rain and light, the labor and the heat, the mortality of the young. I will go free of other singing, I will go into the silence of my songs, to hear this song clearly.
I love how the first lines create an image of the interconnectedness of things.... and how it "ends" in song.
And I love at the end, a commitment to pay attention to this bird song (the simple sparrow!)
"The Wild Geese" by Wendell Berry Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer's end. In time's maze over the fall fields, we name names that went west from here, names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise, pale, in the seed's marrow. Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.
The lines "What we need is here" is my main attraction to this poem.
It reminds me of the Marie Howe poem about her brother.
Also, the mindfulness notion of HOW we get to that place of apprecation:
Abandon, / as in love or sleep, holds/ them to their way.
Here are 111 short videos of an interview with Donald Hall, including his relationship with Jane Kenyon. Here's Donald talking about Jane's poetry when they lived in New Hampshire.
Here is a Bill Moyer's Journal episode of the two poets life together.
One of the major influences on Emerson was the writings of Mme. de Stael. He read her systematically. Robert Richardson writes. "Emerson came back to de Stael over and over. She is one of his early constant reference points, one of the people he read and reread, turning the books a little each time like a kaleidoscope, so that a new pattern could emerge from the familiar elements."
Mme. de Stael thought that nothing great could be accomplished without enthusiasm. Etymologically, it means "god in us." In her work on Germany life and literature she writes that Enthusiasm is "the quality which really distinguishes the German nation," the quality responsible for its great achievements in literature, religion, and philosophy. This is a topic that Emerson would take up afterwards throughout his writings.
"Enthusiasm" seems to be pretty closely related to the state of being that I've written about before - being aware of the possibilities of life, engagement, etc.!
de Stael also thought that religion was too important to be restricted to Sunday morning. "Religion is nothing," she says, "if it is not everything, if existence is not filled with it, if we do not incessantly maintain in the soul this belief in the invisible, this self-devotion, this elevation of desire." Her ideal was that the whole of life should be "naturally and without effort, an act of worship at every moment."
This, too, feels related to Buddhist ideas of being mindfully aware of the present, in a state of openness, greatfulness, curiosity.
In his biography of Emerson, Robert Richardson notes that the first couple years after graduation, as Emerson "dreamed of being a poet, an orator, a minister" he was always dissatisfied.
Except for the presence of his brothers and his correspondence with Aunt Mary, Emerson was intellectually isolated during these early years out of college, living -- in a phrase he got from Charles Lamb -- in a "solitude of unshared energies."
"this world
is full of needles and thorns...
yet lotus blooms..."
― Issa Kobayashi (tr. Gabi Greve)
"On Hydrangeas dew drops gather the morning sun" Chiyo-ni
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