Getting Our Friends to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of
life"
By D. Richard Scannell, a student of literature and alchemy at Penn State
University. He can be reached here.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau put forth a good message from which all people can benefit. Yet when I first started to talk about their ideas to others, I was often met with resistance. I firmly believed it was beneficial for the people with whom I interacted to share this notion to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life" but I needed to figure out a way of posing alternatives to their way of living without self-righteousness or condescension.
I was introduced to this way of thinking in a class on American literature at Penn State. Upon my first reading of Nature and excerpts from Walden I fell in love with the joy that simplicity could bring. I kept copies of both works at my bedside and read from them in times of stress. Most of my class, though, reacted with enthusiastic resentment. They found these two writers audacious for trying to stop what my class saw as natural facts of life, industrialization and technology.
Shocked at this reaction and determined to help spread the message, I first took the literary approach and freely distributed copies of Walden and Nature to friends and relatives. The expense was marginal to me, thanks to used book stores, but after a few weeks and months I began to doubt if any of them had even opened the books. I considered, too, that perhaps Emerson's thick style required a preemptive enthusiasm to really enjoy, which my associates mostly lacked.
After mulling over several schemes I finally decided that perhaps I ought approach this problem like a transcendentalist simply. So I started buying plants for my friends as gifts on imaginary holidays. If I couldn't get my friends to read nineteenth century literature and give up their televisions, I could at least increase the emphasis on nature in their living spaces. Other than plastic bottles of soda their apartments and houses were devoid of anything green. Also, by inventing holidays such as "merry waxing moon day" and the unpredictable "happy first colored tree of autumn day" I hoped to de-emphasize the holidays of tradition and promote the enjoyment of the everyday.
So now when I visit my friends, I can at least drink coffee with them amidst a bit of greenery though we may sit four stories above a concrete sidewalk. Sometimes I even pretend to soliloquize at their hyacinths or jade plants and quote a clever line from a transcendentalist hoping that it will inspire them. I've not had any radical transformations, but I'm counting on the notion that all good things come with time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau put forth a good message from which all people can benefit. Yet when I first started to talk about their ideas to others, I was often met with resistance. I firmly believed it was beneficial for the people with whom I interacted to share this notion to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life" but I needed to figure out a way of posing alternatives to their way of living without self-righteousness or condescension.
Shocked at this reaction and determined to help spread the message, I first took the literary approach and freely distributed copies of Walden and Nature to friends and relatives. The expense was marginal to me, thanks to used book stores, but after a few weeks and months I began to doubt if any of them had even opened the books. I considered, too, that perhaps Emerson's thick style required a preemptive enthusiasm to really enjoy, which my associates mostly lacked.
So now when I visit my friends, I can at least drink coffee with them amidst a bit of greenery though we may sit four stories above a concrete sidewalk. Sometimes I even pretend to soliloquize at their hyacinths or jade plants and quote a clever line from a transcendentalist hoping that it will inspire them. I've not had any radical transformations, but I'm counting on the notion that all good things come with time.