Was a fairly famous American thinker. Sharing a birthday with myself and Tucker Carlson (Bill O'Reilly's replacement on fox news), May 16th.
Here's one of his better set of quotes:
https://youtu.be/cQEiqksFc3E
He is generally considered a deep american thinker and a kind of stalwart of American respectability in academic circles. However generally he is not given tremendous consideration.
It's interesting to note I was going to post up a little harshly about the man about two or three weeks ago when I came across one of his giddily happy dissertations about religion. I'll see if I can find that again as I found it somewhat annoying and thought it might be interesting to post about it some few weeks ago.
Oh look, Wikipedia said he was born May 25th, maybe they're wrong, not sure about that....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson
Interestingly, he became friends with Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew when sojourning to Florida for the warmer weather for his health, didn't know that. Not surprising. Probably around the time Thomas Jefferson was president....
While in St. Augustine he made the acquaintance of Prince Achille Murat, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Murat was two years his senior; they became good friends and enjoyed each other's company. The two engaged in enlightening discussions of religion, society, philosophy, and government. Emerson considered Murat an important figure in his intellectual education.
Wow look at that the poor guy married his sweetheart after knowing her for two years, when she was eighteen, two years later she died. Didn't know that either...
Emerson met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, in Concord, New Hampshire, on Christmas Day, 1827, and married her when she was 18 two years later.[41] The couple moved to Boston, with Emerson's mother, Ruth, moving with them to help take care of Ellen, who was already ill with tuberculosis.[42] Less than two years after that, on February 8, 1831, Ellen died, at the age of 20, after uttering her last words: "I have not forgotten the peace and joy".[43] Emerson was heavily affected by her death and visited her grave in Roxbury daily.[44] In a journal entry dated March 29, 1832, he wrote, "I visited Ellen's tomb & opened the coffin".[45
Oh look he starts some club after becoming disillusioned with the christian church,
On September 1, 1837, women attended a meeting of the Transcendental Club for the first time. Emerson invited Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar, and Sarah Ripley for dinner at his home before the meeting to ensure that they would be present for the evening get-together.[78] Fuller would prove to be an important figure in transcendentalism.
I'm really only mentioning that because one lady goes by the surname of Hoar and I had that post earlier on this blog: Katie's not a Hoar! So there you go, Elizabeth in Ralph's transendental club WAS. A Hoar, just to be perfectly clear.
Emerson is so ensconced amongst famous writers and academics both of Europe and america at the time, he's invited to give a graduation speech at Harvard. America is so 'christian' of a certain kind, not only in the deep south and bible belt, wherever that is, but also in the northeast, his relatively moderate and educated words about Christianity cause him to be banned thirty years from Harvard. Today Harvard is almost anti christian compared to those days almost two hundred years ago:
On July 15, 1838,[93] Emerson was invited to Divinity Hall, Harvard Divinity School, to deliver the school's graduation address, which came to be known as the "Divinity School Address". Emerson discounted biblical miracles and proclaimed that, while Jesus was a great man, he was not God: historical Christianity, he said, had turned Jesus into a "demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo".[94] His comments outraged the establishment and the general Protestant community. He was denounced as an atheist[94] and a poisoner of young men's minds. Despite the roar of critics, he made no reply, leaving others to put forward a defense. He was not invited back to speak at Harvard for another thirty years.[95
Well what I was going to post up a couple of weeks ago was going to be a kind of criticism about Emerson's cheerful reflections on religion as had been listening to one of his books read out and it seemed overly cheerful to me at the time, but clearly he had experienced a lot of grief in his life. Folks in his day tended to die a lot more often from relatively harmless issues nowadays.
Was Emerson opportunistic/mercenary? Was the overly cheerful tone I detected earlier a result of him 'cashing in'? Here's an example, one of their literary circle members, Margaret Fuller dies. Do her surviving literary circle buddies 'cash in' in a mercenary way?....
In February 1852 Emerson and James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing edited an edition of the works and letters of Margaret Fuller, who had died in 1850.[123] Within a week of her death, her New York editor, Horace Greeley, suggested to Emerson that a biography of Fuller, to be called Margaret and Her Friends, be prepared quickly "before the interest excited by her sad decease has passed away".[124] Published under the title The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli,[125] Fuller's words were heavily censored or rewritten.[126] The three editors were not concerned about accuracy; they believed public interest in Fuller was temporary and that she would not survive as a historical figure.[127] Even so, it was the best-selling biography of the decade and went through thirteen editions before the end of the century.
