Dear Unknown Friends:
The 1975 lecture by Eli Siegel that we are beginning to serialize is about one of the biggest situations, opportunities, and so often distresses, in the life of everyone. It is about the fact that the self—everyone’s self—is one and many, also within and without. We’re one person, just ourselves; yet we have to do, all the time, with the manyness of the world outside us. Here are eloquent sentences about that fact, from Eli Siegel’s Self and World:
So we are alone in our blood and our bones and our thoughts….
The untitled lecture we’re serializing is a magnificent study in the principle at the basis of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
Those two aspects of us—our being one person, with a self within, and our interacting constantly with other people—are opposites. The rift between them is felt so personally by people. In his lecture, Mr. Siegel speaks about that personal difficulty—yet he does so in relation to literature: to writers of 19th-century New England. Here, as in Aesthetic Realism itself, the most intimately personal and the cultural, the intellectual, the artistic, are inseparable. And so we can see ourselves and our turmoil as having a width we never imagined. We can begin to see ourselves truly, and with well-based hope.
Later in the lecture Mr. Siegel will show that these opposites of the self alone, individual, and as having to do with all people, are central to how a nation should be. But now I’ll say simply: Aesthetic Realism explains that no government will ever satisfy unless it is fair to each individual person and to all people at once. That is what the men and women of America and the world are demanding deeply.
There is fury on every continent that the wealth of a nation is going mostly to a few individuals while the vast number of people in the nation are struggling, even are hungry. Real justice is always aesthetics, the oneness of opposites, including one and many. That essentially is what hundreds of thousands of people in yellow vests went out on the streets of France for: a nation’s wealth owned justly, by all people and each individual person. And that’s what millions of Americans are demanding, as they are furious at ownership by what’s been called “the one percent.”
The Trouble, & Its Cause
In his lecture, Mr. Siegel shows richly how a person may emphasize either the self as alone or the self as social. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, and as he has made clear, every person is in some fashion both; and every person has trouble on the subject because these opposites can seem severed. The trouble has thousands of forms. For instance, a person can be ever so social, can be the life of the party, or the wit of the office breakroom, or the charmer of the holiday gathering—yet underneath feel deeply apart from everyone. This person can feel there is a self under her skin that she never shows; she feels hidden, even as she laughs and greets and charms.
What causes the trouble about these opposites? And what will make them one in us, make them beautiful? The big, constant fight in everyone, affecting everything we do, is, Aesthetic Realism makes clear, the fight between contempt for the world and respect for it. And contempt-or-respect is behind how we are both socially and to ourselves.
Mr. Siegel defined contempt as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” And we can use being with other people to have contempt. For instance, we can want to conquer others rather than understand them truly. We can use them in some fashion to glorify ourselves; use them to get ahead; to feel we’re superior to them—smarter, better-dressed, more sensitive. We can get in a sneering team with them against other persons and look down on the world together. In fact, all this is so frequent that people can see it as what social life is about.
We can use being alone to have contempt too: to feel the rest of the world is unworthy of us and the only company good enough is ourselves.
The other way is the aesthetic way, the respect way. I don’t want in any fashion to sum it up, because it is equivalent to all real intelligence, justice, kindness. Fundamentally, it is the feeling: “I can know who I am through knowing what’s different from me—through knowing other people. I express myself through trying to see them truly. Also—I want my thoughts to myself, my thoughts when I’m alone, to be fair to everything and to all people. I want to use both being in company and being alone to like honestly the world itself.” The state of mind I’m describing a bit is that which will make the self under our skin and the self that talks with others, feel and live as the same self.
A Classic
In this great lecture, Mr. Siegel speaks principally about Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) and James Russell Lowell (1819-91). He speaks briefly about various other writers too in relation to the self as social and alone. Yet his spoken prose is such, its rhythm is such, its choice and placement of words are such that, however brief he is about someone, the person seems alive.
Earlier, I quoted from Self and World. Now, from that book, I’ll quote some sentences in Eli Siegel’s narrative about the distressed young woman he calls Hilda Rawlins. The narrative takes up less than four pages. But the way he writes about Hilda’s “problem of unity and diversity” has made her a loved classic. Toward the end are these sentences:
Hilda was never able to see, just so, that her meeting of people, her listening to them, her reading of books, was the means of having herself as such. Hilda wanted to be Hilda and nothing less, or more; she also wanted to be popular, go out, experience things. She had never asked clearly: Is the Hilda that acts with people just the same Hilda that thinks to herself? Is the Hilda under her skin, so warm, so taking-care-of-herself, the same Hilda that laughs at another’s joke, pours tea for a strange young man, calls up a publisher on behalf of a good cause?…
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education
The Self Is One & Many
By Eli Siegel
The large problem of self can be illustrated this way: a person was alone; then she said, “I was lying face down on my bed and all kinds of thoughts went through me—hundreds of them.” We have there the matter of oneness and manyness, which is recurrent. It is present with everything that one can ever meet. A single person, for instance, knows many places, has many memories, has met quite a few people. Even a hermit, before becoming a hermit, knew a few people. And a person can think of all kinds of places and all kinds of people.
Then, he or she can use five thousand words and can understand fifteen thousand—those are the numbers that were once given to the literate American. So we have thousands of words in our minds, and the phrases we can make with them are just innumerable.
These illustrations of the self as one and many are a prelude to a discussion of what can be called a confrontation in literature, the literature of America in New England.
Lowell and Thoreau
In 1865 a noted essay, written by James Russell Lowell, appeared in the North American Review. Lowell is of New England—Cambridge, Massachusetts—and the person he wrote about is also of New England, not so far away: Henry David Thoreau. They are very different. James Russell Lowell is one of the busiest persons who ever wrote a poem. He was ambassador to Spain and also to England, took part in politics, and was one of the best-known Americans in terms of Europe, and somewhat of Asia even, let alone Africa. Thoreau is now considered more important literarily, but Thoreau is a laureate of profound loneliness and separation. It’s not that he didn’t meet people: he worked at making pencils, and he met quite a few people. But there is a certain trend, even though he liked to shake hands with people, smile at them, get smiles, ask about their grandniece or something.
The tendencies Lowell and Thoreau represent—gregariousness and separation—are opposites. We too like to be with our head on our knuckles or on our clasped hands, and every person in this room at some time couldn’t bear the sight of company, didn’t want to see anybody. Then, also, he or she was just hungering for a telephone call and to be invited somewhere. People even go out on the street in order to see people.
Lowell is important as to thought. And Thoreau, in terms of the critical impressions of these years, is even more important: he is seen as one of the ten most important American writers. And I’ll mention that the writers of that time fall into for loneliness or against loneliness.
Take Hawthorne, who is also exceedingly current. Though he was consul at Liverpool, he was given to being alone. Though his novels were popular, particularly The Scarlet Letter, in a way that Thoreau’s writings in his lifetime (1817-62) were not popular, Hawthorne too stands for the self alone. Emerson generally does. Whittier, who is also of New England, is alone, though he had much to do with the abolitionist movement, and so he is both.
There is Oliver Wendell Holmes, a doctor, the best-known doctor in American letters and an early student of disorders of mind—his novels The Guardian Angel and Elsie Venner are on that subject. He is seen as a precursor of latter-day psychiatry. And Holmes, though a doctor and seeing patients often alone, also taught medicine at Harvard. He’s one of the most gregarious persons ever. He wrote about the Saturday Club, and the graduates from Harvard in the year he graduated, and he was ever so social. His books show it: The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The Professor at the Breakfast Table, The Poet at the Breakfast Table. Some breakfast! Then, to show how gregarious he is, the last work of his is called Over the Teacups—a subject Thoreau could never write about. Holmes was very well known as a doctor and traveler; his books were known, and in the last years of his life he went to Europe and it seems everybody knew him.
So we have these New England writers in the field of being alone and also wanting company. Thoreau definitely represents the untainted self, not affected too much by other people. Hawthorne generally does too, and it gave him a great deal of pain. There’s the tendency in Whittier, though Whittier, as I said, took part in the abolition movement. But Emerson, with all his lecturing—he lectured all over the country—is in the field of the self alone. Longfellow, whom I didn’t mention before, belongs to the social category. So Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow are among the New England writers who are social. Whittier seems to combine both ways. Then there are Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, all saying important things about being alone, which is a great desire in everyone and may seize on somebody in a way he or she doesn’t know.
As a gregarious person among the New England writers, none went further than Lowell in terms of being internationally known. The essay of Lowell on Thoreau has been reprinted. Edmund Wilson reprinted it in The Shock of Recognition, and it should be studied. It doesn’t say everything, but the things that are said should be known. So I’m going to present Lowell and Thoreau: Lowell with all his fame and a good deal of riches; and Thoreau with some awareness of him by the American public but not so much, Thoreau with his desire to build a house in which only he and a woodchuck would live. He was very different from Lowell. I’ll read some passages from Lowell’s essay on him. Lowell is a lively prose writer.
There Was American Transcendentalism
Early, he deals with the Transcendental movement in America—which was the desire to make the unknown a part of oneself, the desire to have God in oneself, or at least the full meaning of reality, the unseen meaning of reality.
Margaret Fuller Ossoli was of Transcendentalism. As to the matter of social or alone, I would put her with the lonely people. She’s made fun of, by the way, in Lowell’s Fable for Critics, as Miranda. Horace Greeley admired her. If you study her life, which is worth doing, you see it’s tumultuous. And there is the way she died, in a shipwreck off Fire Island. But I would put her with Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau.
The well-known preacher Theodore Parker was somewhat of Transcendentalism. But the best-known person having to do with it is Emerson. There are quite a few others, including Cranch and Channing. Then, there were a few anarchists who sort of played around with Transcendentalism: that’s a little-known part of American intellectual history. But in a passage of Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience” it becomes important, because he differentiates himself from them. He says he’s not an anti-government man: that is, he can tolerate government if it’s fairly good; he doesn’t want to destroy it entirely. But a real anarchist wants no government whatsoever; he wants everything to be social and good will.
Well, Lowell deals with the Transcendental situation or movement in New England. Mind was very busy. And Lowell makes fun of this higher thought—it was called the Newness. One sentence making fun is this:
Every possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel.
I consider that sentence not laudatory—saying there was a feeling that if your stomach wasn’t doing so well, you wanted to get in touch with God. The next sentence is also in the jesting field; Lowell is punning on the word common:
Communities were established where everything was to be common but common-sense.
Well, it’s a lively sentence.
The Self Within & What’s Outside
Then we have a serious sentence of Lowell. Since he uses the word tradition I’ll mention two things that are outside of ourselves. The first is present in the essay I discussed a little while ago, T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—and we should be aware of the past. The second is the abstract, the nature of things. For example, if a person is interested in music, he’s interested in both. He’s interested in music in the most abstract way: just what is music? And then, he’s interested in the history of music from the Gregorian chant to Haydn to Ellington and so on. And both are outside oneself. Lowell has this useful sentence:
There is only one thing better than tradition, and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.
The Transcendentalists said that if you go deep enough into the nature of reality, you’ll come safely to a place under your skin. You see the whole world at its beginning, and you end up at the station called Self.
So there is the nature of an art, the nature of thought itself, the nature of science, the nature of feeling. Those are large ideas. The nature of reality perhaps is the largest. Then, one can think of the history of thought about reality (which is the history of philosophy), or the history of music, which would have in it Monteverdi, which would have in it Vivaldi, Rameau, in time Mendelssohn, and would get to Ravel and others.
There Was the Mexican War
Lowell in his early years was against the way certain things were in America. Lowell and Thoreau had this in common: they both opposed the Mexican War. The opposition is most clearly and powerfully to be seen in Thoreau’s famous essay “Civil Disobedience,” which later became the hippie’s breviary.
I may say at this point that Thoreau’s desire to be nothing but himself, I don’t think had a good effect on him. Technically, he died of tuberculosis at a fairly young age, at 45. Lowell lived longer, from 1819 to 1891, almost the same years as Whitman. I think Lowell’s trying to be neat and fashionable and liked by persons in high places in America and Europe didn’t do Lowell any good; because if you have a desire to be liked by people and to get ahead, you don’t go deep enough. Lowell did change too much his earlier wild notions, which his wife also had—Maria White. Meantime, he accomplished more against the Mexican War than Thoreau did, because Lowell’s Biglow Papers, the first series of which was against the Mexican War, had a large effect.
But I’m trying to have an interchange between the self as one and the self as many; also the self as within and the self as without. The self is all the opposites at once. [Note. In case there’s any doubt—what follows, concluding this section, was said jocularly:] The self is slow and the self is fast. That’s why people are nervous and depressed—in order to show that what music can do with being fast they can do by being nervous, and what music can do with being slow they can do by being depressed. This means that everybody is a walking self-organ.