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Transcendentalism Lessons

Page history last edited by Mrs. K. 11 years, 11 months ago

Some song links you might try if you are struggling:

Civil Disobedience:

http://folkmusic.about.com/od/toptens/tp/Top10Protest.htm

http://www.balladtree.com/folk101/a_60s2a.htm

http://www.ehow.com/list_7366460_protest-songs-60s.html

Nature:

http://www.grinningplanet.com/6001/environmental-songs.htm

 

 

Trans-grid.xlsx

Works Cited links:

Emerson--Self-Reliance:  http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm

Emerson--Nature, SectionVI:  http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature2.htm

Emerson--Essays, First Series:  http://www.emersoncentral.com/essays1.htm

Emerson--Essays, Second Series:  http://www.emersoncentral.com/essays2.htm

Thoreau--Civil Disobedience, Part 1:  http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil1.html

Thoreau--Civil Disobedience, Part 2:  http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil2.html

Thoreau--Walden Index  http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html

 

Help Understanding:

Self-Reliance in "translated"

 

Transition Assistance:

https://www.myaccess.com/myaccess/help_resources/TransientTransitions.pdf

https://www.myaccess.com/myaccess/help_resources/FromQuartertoFiftyDollarTransitions.pdf

 

Lesson 1 Nature-Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Read the following passages from Ralph Waldo Emmerson's piece called Nature.  It is kind of thick reading, but try not to focus so much on every word, rather on what he is trying to say overall.  What message is he trying to get across? 

     After finishing the reading, FIRST answer the following questions (beneath the reading) on your own as best you can, SECOND get together in groups of 3 to share your answers and come up with a group answer for each question that you can THIRD share with the rest of the class.

 

Essay VI Nature
There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of the Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.

These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother, when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled traveller rushes for safety, -- and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think, if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.

 

Questions:

  1. What different moods does Emerson note in the excerpt?
  2. How is nature connected to these moods?
  3. In what ways does Emerson connect nature, humankind, and God?
  4. In what way does Nature serve as a teacher?
  5. How is nature portrayed as noble? As a source of comfort?
  6. How are human beings represented as part of nature?
  7. What can human beings learn from nature? How does this learning affect the individual's spirituality?

 

After your class discussion, identify key quotations from the excerpt that reveal Emerson's thinking about the relationship between humans and nature and record your observations in the following chart (nature section only) to help you prepare for your transcendentalism paper. http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson320/chart.pdf

 

Lesson 2 Self-Reliance-Ralph Waldo Emmerson

Understanding Self-Reliance

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till...

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being...

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — "But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it...

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude...

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlour. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs...

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them...

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

 

Return to the ideas gathered in the previous sessions and summarize what you've discovered about transcendentalism to this point. 

  • Introduce Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" as another text that demonstrates transcendental thought. 
  • Read and discuss the excerpt you've chosen from Emerson's "Self-Reliance" with the students, using the following questions to guide your exploration of the text.

  1. What does Emerson mean when he says that "envy is ignorance and imitation is suicide"? 
  2. What does he want each individual to recognize about him/herself? What does he say about "power" and "work"? 
  3. How is trust a part of being self-reliant? 
  4. Why does Emerson see society as the enemy of individuality? 
  5. What is the role of nonconformity? What did that word mean to Emerson? 
  6. What is a "foolish consistency"? How does it get in the way of genius?

 

  • Ask students to identify the key elements of self-reliance as defined by Emerson in their readings. These elements should be generated by the responses to the questions. 

  • To summarize the characteristics of transcendental thought covered so far in the lesson, have students fill in theExamples of Transcendental Thought interactive or handout. If time is short, this work can be completed as homework. 

  • Collect and review the graphic organizer to check students' understanding to this point.

 

Henry David Thoreau

Civil Disobedience

Walden

Thoreau Quotes

 

Things do not change; we change - Henry David Thoreau

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher - William Wordsworth

 

 

 

 

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