I have not taken the time to blog in a couple of weeks…remiss of me, I know. But today I can’t help but ponder life…perhaps it is because of the darkness of the storm (a literal rainstorm outside) or the bulk of life pressing down on me today. This week I am teaching my wayward summer class (American Literature) about Transcendentalism. I’m not sure they catch the drift of it at all. Today American society is so filled with need…with things…with entitlement. And, at least here in Virginia, this new generation does not do much reading so simple words like superfluous, suffrage, integrity, and posterity do not hold any meaning.

When the words are already holding difficulty and stretching brains to their full capacity it becomes even more difficult to get across the idea of universality. In this instance it is the universality of the themes that resound in Transcendental ideals. Over 150 years ago these men supported and spread the ideas of simplification, maintaining our environment for posterity, of finding divinity in nature and not at the hands of mankind, and of protecting and bettering American government. Emerson and Thoreau focused on the lighter end of the spectrum and have influenced free-thinkers the world over. It occurs to me that they would be shocked at the complex and harried machinery that pushes this country and our everyday lives forward through a morass of pitfalls and modern day societal judgments. While the darker of these men, like Poe and Hawthorne, had already predicted that left alone the average human, and therefore society, would fall into a pit of corruption and consistency from which it would be unable to extricate itself.

Can we free ourselves from an everyday complacency?

Coffee House

At coffee houses once
the intellectuals of society gathered.
The forefathers of liberty merged
treatise and discourse with coffee
and croissants. Now they bustle with people
by the hundreds. Their cacophony of
orders are shouted across counters strewn
with clutter. People blurt only fragments-
Latte. Espresso. Mocha. Non-fat soy.-
with hardly any pause for civility. In
the ‘land of liberty’ people no longer deliberate
at coffee shops. They rush from
gas guzzling cars to high priced caffeine
like lemmings over a cliff they refuse to see.

P.S. I promise my next blog will be full of frivolity and entertainment as opposed to recent darkly political themes…one should never take one’s self too seriously!