Eating Dust

Linda Lou Burton posting from Little Rock, Arkansas –Let’s talk about something other than good or bad presidents today. Let’s talk about “ideas” in general. The “dust” stirred up by those people whose names hang out in phrases remembered (even when we don’t remember who, or why); or by books on the library shelf. “What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say,” is an oft-quoted line. Who said that? Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) seems to get credit. Emerson, or Waldo as he chose to be called, was born in Boston during the term of our third president Thomas Jefferson. During his lifetime there were 20 US Presidential elections. Chester Arthur was our twenty-first president when Waldo died in 1882. During his years of teaching and preaching and writing and lecturing, what comments did this well-remembered poet and essayist make about “presidents” I wondered. What ideas about governance, and responsibility?

I found this paragraph in his essay Compensation – “The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.”

From Emerson’s essay Character. “Morals imply freedom and will. All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power but the absence of power….He is immoral who is acting to any private end…whose aim or motive may become a universal rule, binding of all intelligent beings…the mercenary sacrifice of the public good to a private interest is the eternal stamp of vice.”

And in Emerson’s Journal of 1824. “I confess I am a little cynical on some topics, and when a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart. I have generally found the gravest and most useful citizens are not the easiest provoked to swell the noise, though they may be punctual at the polls.”

Our Current Expectations

For those who are upset or unhappy with the direction our country seems to be headed today, describing our daily existence as a “train wreck in the middle of happening,” the question is:

How would I like things to be? 

Is your answer simply that you want to be “living a good life”? So what are you doing about it? Are you addicted to the daily blurps that pop up incessantly (with ads) decrying this or that in murderous tones? Arrows of blame? He said She said They said? My suggestion is this: Take a deep breath. Turn off your cell phones and get some real books in your hand. Read things written a hundred years ago. Read about the past, as people experienced it in another day, and time. Absorb that as humans we are just human – we learn and love and change and cry and yet survive. Don’t be persuaded of doomsday by hype and hollering, by braggadocio and posturing, by hatred and blame.

Dust off some oldies and settle down to read.

Emerson’s Take On A Good Life

1. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
2. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
3. “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”
4. “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”
5. “The purpose of life is not to be happy, it is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

“To live well is to laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure its betrayal; To appreciate beauty; To find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

You go, Waldo.