Deconstructing the Boundary of Right/Wrong in Urban Black America

            Judgments seem to come quick and easy to most of us, especially when we look as outsiders onto a scene without regard for context or with only our own values and perceptions in mind. Marvella, the young, single, African American mother in Edward P. Jones’ short story, “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” is painfully aware of the judgments being passed upon her by white passersby as she disciplines her children. She knows that those passing judgment are not privy to the entire situation, and that simply seeing a black woman scolding her children is deemed as wrong when taken out of context. Like those white passersby, the readers of Lost in the City, a collection of short stories by Jones, and the viewers of Do the Right Thing, the classic Spike Lee film on racial tension, may be quick to pass judgment on the characters’ actions that can hastily be assessed as wrong. If we do so, however, then we, too, are taking the actions out of context and without consideration of alternative viewpoints. Jones and Lee both strive in their works to illustrate the entire situation in which their characters find themselves. Though the actions taken may never be considered right, the context in which they occur and the alternative perspectives with which they are included are shown to be extremely significant, and the boundaries between right and wrong are so blurred that attempting to render any judgment is made into a nearly impossible and certainly unreasonable endeavor.

            In “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,” one of the first stories in Lost in the City, Cassandra mercilessly berates Melanie for liking boys, or, in Cassandra’s words, for being “the leader of … girls [who] pull down their panties and give up the booty just cause some boy is cute” (48). She yells and swears at Melanie so much that Melanie eventually gets out of the car and begins to walk home in order to escape being subjected to this treatment by her friend any longer. Was Cassandra wrong to treat her friend this way? Did she go so far in her criticism of Melanie that her point can no longer be seen as right, but simply as harsh and cruel? The text seems to tell us otherwise. During the events leading up to this schism between friends, Cassandra (and the reader) see an endless parade of women whose hopes and dreams for their future lives had been broken by the realities of single parenthood. The entire car trip takes place due to a request by Gladys’ recently single mother, who Gladys holds up as cruelly wronged by her father. On their way to Anacostia, the girls meet with Pearl and Joyce, two pregnant teenagers who recently dropped out of high school and who are visibly distressed by their situation. Cassandra, who grew up in a broken home of her own, reacts strongly to these women’s predicaments. When her actions are seen with this context in mind, Cassandra seems merely to be reacting as per her usual principles to Melanie’s habitual flirtatiousness. Her admonishments are a form of tough love, meant to protect Melanie from a future that Cassandra sees as terrifying and hopeless. This may not make her methods right, but it certainly casts doubt on their being judged as wrong.

            In the next story, “Young Lions,” we meet a criminal named Caesar. Caesar turned to his life of crime as a teen and seems to feel little, if any, regret about his immoral and illegal actions. However, even this supposedly hardened criminal is shown in a light that many of us would generally never take the time to consider. Caesar is capable of showing a surprisingly sensitive side at times: he doesn’t like the sound of Manny’s voice because Manny always sounds “inappropriate” and “obscene” (56); when he breaks into his father’s house to retrieve his things, he lovingly touches and looks at family heirlooms and trinkets; he pays close attention to a tourist family’s interactions while visiting DC; he is conscious of the innocence and child-like wonder of the retarded people he watches; and he often thinks of his dead mother and is even moved by his cousin Angelo’s gesture of stealing flowers for her grave. None of this is enough to redeem Caesar’s shortcomings, but it does create a rounded portrait of a whole man rather than a flat stereotype of a tough criminal. Caesar is revealed to be lonely, scared, and unsure of himself—as when he is frightened by being shut out of the house by his father. This is a particularly important scene, as it portrays a transitional moment in his life both from childhood to adulthood and from innocence to crime: Caesar was kicked out by his father and taken in by a criminal, who then acted as a role model for him during an impressionable age and a transitional time in his life. Caesar is indeed a malicious and corrupt young man, but can we really step in and judge him instantly as being entirely bad? Is there ever a circumstance that could justify such behavior as his? Jones does not attempt to answer these questions, but he seems determined to raise enough complications to suspend any snap judgments on the reader’s part.

            Another young man whose course in life was forever altered by his father’s actions appears in “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day.” Sam Williams leaves his sister and aunt—the only family he knows—and begins acting violently (getting into bar fights) and using women as objects (hiring prostitutes). His choices could be considered questionable at best, depraved at worst. However, as with the other situations we have examined, we cannot judge Sam’s actions solely on their own grounds, without a bigger perspective. Sam was a young and impressionable ten-year-old boy when his father brutally murdered his mother and subsequently left the family (for prison). Even though he views his father as reprehensible, Sam has no other male figure from whom to learn. Therefore, his later actions in life can be seen as shaped at least in part by both a traumatic experience as a child and the lack of a suitable father figure as he grew up. Either of these alone would certainly be enough to make Sam’s choices understandable; put together, they make Sam a sympathetic character—and attempting to draw negative conclusions about him becomes an absurd pursuit.

            Sometimes the reasons for a character’s actions are not so clear at first glance. In the title story of Jones’ collection, Lydia—a wealthy lawyer—habitually lies about who she is to the men with whom she sleeps. When she is woken in the night, she actually resorts to leafing through her day planner in order to remember who is in her bed, and she does not know the name she used with the man until he calls her “Cynthia,” at which point she recalls the lines she had given him the night before: “My name is Cynthia and I come from Washington” (143). Is Lydia a bad person for treating men this way? Is lying to them wrong? Certainly some may come to Lydia’s defense simply because she is a woman, though the same people would think that a man acting that way toward women is undoubtedly blameworthy. However, even if we place Lydia on a level playing field with men, there are still signals within the rest of the text that point to a reasonable explanation for her behavior. Lydia is rich and lives in a nice gated community in the Southwest area of DC. Her mother had once told her that she “knew folks who lived in Southwest before they threw the colored out and made it for the wealthy” (147). This comment highlights the fact that Lydia is out of place where she lives. As the cab driver follows Lydia’s request to get her “lost in the city” (148), he drives deeper and deeper into the black neighborhoods with which Lydia is intimately familiar. Yet she is not at home here, either, and her wealth would make her out of place in the poor community in which she grew up. She realizes that she has no links to her past, that “in the world there was now no one from whom she could get that full medical history” or “write down her mother’s recipe for that wondrous beef stew” (148-149). In short, Lydia has no sense of personal identity, making it impossible for her to supply that identity to the men she picks up. Lydia cannot be judged for her failure to provide others with her true identity when she is not capable of supplying it even to herself.

            Two other women in Jones’ stories act out of feelings of frustrated expectations and lost hopes. In “Gospel,” Vivian proclaims herself a good Christian woman, yet she shows spiteful envy toward her best friend, Diane, for having a desirable lover. It would be easy to say that Vivian is wrong to be envious, but through her memories the reader learns that she has always held an ideal figure of a gentleman in her heart, and that her yearning for such a man has remained unfulfilled through five unsuccessful marriages. Seeing Diane achieve Vivian’s own lifelong dream is too much for her to bear, and her reaction to the situation becomes tolerable, if not particularly right. In a story about another, similarly disappointed woman, Marie finds herself battling the Social Security Administration for her SSI checks. At the end of her patience one day, she slaps the receptionist, Vernelle—obviously not a particularly good action to take. But it is only after this takes place that the reader slowly begins to learn Marie’s history. Marie had come to the city as a very young woman, with dreams handed down from her mother “that everything could be done in Washington, that a human bein could take all they troubles to Washington and things would be right” (241). When Marie moved there, her mother thought she “had managed to make it to heaven” (241). However, after a lifetime in the city, Marie is haunted by a “sense of loss” (240), and the city has turned out to be not heaven, but an endless supply of difficulties and frustrations. Slapping Vernelle was not so much a malicious act toward the woman, but a reaction to the dashing of a lifetime of hopes…and who are we to judge that?

            In Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, the entire film seems determined to set the viewer up for a conflict of sympathies. Each ethnic group portrayed in the film is shown in an unbiased light, and each of their concerns is played out as understandable—even the most heinous actions are ultimately seen as almost inevitable and hard to judge as either right or wrong, given the circumstances. For example, Buggin Out would have us believe that it is racist and wrong of Sal to not hang any pictures of African Americans on the wall of his restaurant. However, throughout the film we are reminded that Sal, an Italian American and private business owner, has as much right to be proud of his own heritage (and to show that pride within his own restaurant) as any African American has a right to be proud of his or her heritage. Should Sal be punished or condemned for showing pride in his ethnicity, when that is exactly what Buggin Out wants to do? Perhaps he is not entirely in the right by not showing appreciation for his customers, but he certainly cannot be considered wrong for showing appreciation for his culture.

            At the same time, it could be argued that Buggin Out is wrong for boycotting Sal’s because of the lack of black representation on the walls. Given the argument above, Buggin Out may be seen as a troublemaker for disturbing the peace and hindering a man’s business for what could be considered no good reason. Again, we see through other signs in the film that the answer is no quite so unambiguous. Buggin Out feels that the predominantly African American clientele of Sal’s is underappreciated, so he uses Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent protest techniques, which are generally viewed as commendable, to show his displeasure with the situation. He, like Sal, displays his feelings through his First Amendment right to freedom of speech. It would seem, in this case, that both men are in the right.

            Of course, the argument escalates and does not end in the relatively diplomatic and law-abiding way in which it began. Eventually, Radio confronts Sal in a more aggressive manner and Sal reacts by destroying Radio’s boom box. Surely Sal is wrong for reacting with such violent behavior in a situation that was, at the time, still nonviolent (if not exactly peaceful). Nevertheless, this action, too, is portrayed in moral shades of grey rather than clear black and white. It must be remembered that Sal is running a place of business and has every right to refuse service to a customer who is disrupting the peace and acting as belligerently as Radio was; in this case, Sal did try persuasion and threats before resorting to destruction of the boom box. Still, was destruction necessary? Obviously, Sal felt personally threatened by the powerful African American man before him (as demonstrated by camera angles that show Radio from below, making him look larger, and Sal from above, making him look small and vulnerable) and by the community that was rising up behind Radio and his cause (again, seen in the camera angles and rapid cuts between shots of Sal and the crowd). If we are to believe Malcolm X’s statement that violence as self-defense is acceptable, perhaps Sal’s actions at this point can be seen as acceptable as well.

            Even so, those actions do lead to more violence, and Radio ends up being killed by the police. The African American community takes this as an outrage, and they believe that the officers are completely and reprehensibly wrong. It would be very easy to agree with that sentiment, but Lee refrains from doing so. He is careful to show that the police officers were outnumbered by an angry mob on the brink of rioting, and that it took three of them just to subdue the extremely large and strong Radio. With racial tension high, the white officers undoubtedly felt threatened by the angry black crowd around them and were concentrating on keeping Radio from fighting and starting an actual riot. Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves: If Radio had been white, would they have held him so tightly or for so long? Perhaps not, and if this is the case, Radio’s death was due to his skin color—but it still occurred in an impossible situation and was obviously accidental. This does not excuse the officers or make Radio’s death right by any means, but it does confuse the issue enough to say that we cannot judge it as simply and clearly wrong, either.

            Finally, we reach the climax of the film and an action that poses possibly the most difficult question of right and wrong with which the viewer has to struggle: Mookie throwing the trash can through Sal’s restaurant window. Although the action is certainly not as serious as killing a man, the reasons and arguments for and against Mookie taking this action are so ambiguous that it is nearly impossible to decide whether it was the right thing to do—which is exactly the response Lee was aiming for. Throughout most of the film, Mookie tries following Dr. King’s admonition to maintain nonviolence; but at this point, after Radio was killed and Sal’s restaurant seemed to be the cause of his friend’s death, Mookie turns to Malcolm X’s claim that resorting to violence in self-defense is necessary and even vital. Mookie, like the police officers and so many others in Lee’s film and Jones’ stories, found himself in an impossible situation, torn between doing what he thought was the “right thing” by holding down a job for Sal despite his friends’ protests over Sal’s perceived racial discrimination, and doing what those friends thought was the “right thing” by showing Sal that he cannot expect to get away with racial discrimination in an ethnic neighborhood. When both of these tensions came to a head after Radio’s death, Mookie did what he felt was an act of self-defense on behalf of Radio and the black community by retaliating against the cause of Radio’s death. Whether his act was right or wrong is, once again, impossible to judge.

            Edward P. Jones and Spike Lee show us through their works that even ideals such as right and wrong, that may at first seem clearly black and white, are not so unambiguous after all. There is no right/wrong binary, but only various points on an infinite continuum of morality. Like the white onlookers in the train station, judging Marvella on her parenting techniques without any knowledge of the whole situation, many of us often find ourselves coming to conclusions for which we have no basis. We are encouraged by Jones and Lee to open our minds to other perspectives, to consider that there is always more to a situation than we can easily gauge, and to remember that right and wrong are as subjective as light and dark, warm and cool, or simple and complex.

 

Works Cited

Do the Right Thing. Dir. Spike Lee. Perf. Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Giancarlo Esposito, John

Turturro. 2001. DVD. 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, 1989.

Jones, Edward P. Lost in the City. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Social Criticism in "Midnight News"

            The beautifully crafted science fiction short story, Midnight News, by Lisa Goldstein, is not only an endlessly entertaining tale of invasion from outer space, it also offers a sharp criticism of modern American and Western culture.  In it, just below the surface of the tale, Goldstein satirizes everything from the power of the media to the ways in which seniors and women are treated, from violence on television to crime and war between nations.  Amid the seemingly outrageous circumstance of aliens threatening humankind’s very existence, Goldstein forces us to take a much harder look at that existence—and what we find isn’t always pretty.

            The story begins with the arrival of an alien force with massive powers of destruction, whose first order of business is not to go to the president or the military or any other obvious choice for the leaders of our world, but to the media.  After apparently observing the human race for a month, they call a meeting, “and only twenty reporters would be allowed on board” (Goldstein 820).  Already, we have a potent statement on the condition of our country: the highest status of authority and influence belongs not to the government, but to the press.  Whether or not this is a good thing depends entirely on the press itself, of course, but today’s mass media seems obsessed with sensationalism and pop culture—perhaps not always the best “news” for the public interest. 

            Next in the story, we are introduced to the aliens’ choice for humanity’s savior: eighty-four year old Helena Johnson.  Here, too, Goldstein subtly portrays the conditions to which we subject our elders.  Helena was found living alone and neglected “in a state-sponsored nursing home” (821) in Arizona, going without treatment for an ulcer on her leg and without diagnosis of her hearing loss.  We also learn, from Helena’s stories of her past, about the unsavory situations in which a woman in America is placed throughout her lifetime.  She speaks of circumstances still commonly occurring to this day, such as sexual harassment at her workplace and being left by her husband to raise her son alone.  She talks of the ingratitude of that son, who “left [her as] soon as he could get a job” (822), and of the difficulties of life “growing up during the Depression” (823). 

Perhaps even more telling than her anecdotes, however, is the reaction that she gets to these stories from the male reporters; that of disdain, impatience, scorn, and repulsion.  “She’s a horror” (823), one of the reporters says of Helena, and “She’s senile, on top of everything else” (819).  As an elderly woman, Helena recognizes that nobody honestly cares about her; she comments that “none of [the reporters] were interested” (827) in her, and that they only listened to her stories in order to placate her, in the hopes of gaining something from it.

            And listen they do.  The world seems to stop for Helena’s benefit: “newspapers stopped reporting crime and wars—crime and wars had, in fact, nearly disappeared” (821).  Goldstein attempts to prove the pointlessness of war and strife among nations by demonstrating that when working together for a common good, the countries of world no longer have the time or energy to spend warring with one another.  Crime comes to a standstill in the face of greater and more pressing needs; in this case, that of pleasing the old woman into making the choice they want.

            In the end, Helena is influenced by a question that the young female reporter, Gorce, had posed about her feelings on being forced into making the ultimate judgment on the fate of the world, on “the way [the aliens] want to make our decisions for us” (826).  She decides not to decide; she has learned from the mistakes of others, and she knows firsthand what it feels like to have someone else make the most important decisions of her life for her.  She says, “All my life, people have decided for me . . . but that’s all over with now” (828), and she refuses to provide an answer.

Sadly, despite everything he could have learned from this woman, the male reporter, Stevens, seems to have gleaned nothing from the experience, and he walks away from the entire situation treating his female coworker in exactly the same manner that Helena had been treated all her life, deciding not to go out with Gorce because she was “too bony, and her chin and forehead were too long” (828-829), while completely disregarding her intelligence and personality. 

All of this deeper meaning makes Goldstein’s story into so much more than a formulaic sci-fi tale of alien invasion—it makes us actually contemplate our own lives and lifestyles, in our own, current era, and perhaps it even has the power to influence a little change for the better. 

Work Cited

Goldstein, Lisa. “Midnight News.” The Norton Book of Science Fiction. Ed. Ursula K.

Leguin. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993. 819-829.

The Original American Scholar

            In1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson published an address called The American Scholar, in which he expressed his strong opinions of just who this American scholar should be.  In his address, he encompasses what the scholar’s ideal influences are and what his moral duties as a learned man include.  Seven years later, in 1845, Henry David Thoreau undertook a two year experiment of living by himself in a small cabin in the woods by Walden Pond.  Here, Thoreau lived the life of Emerson’s American Scholar, presumably without that particular intention in mind, and later wrote a detailed description of his time in the woods in his masterpiece, Walden.  Using only these two great authors’ own works as evidence, and measured against each point that Emerson makes in The American Scholar, Thoreau can be used as a perfect and obvious illustration of this model Man Thinking.

            Emerson asks us to “consider [the scholar] in reference to the main influences he receives” (515).  Among these influences are nature, books, and action, by which the scholar is to have obtained his education and is to continually expand his knowledge of the world around him.  In each of these methods, we find that Thoreau is inherently versed; as he expresses his personal opinions, principles, and actions in Walden, he is unwittingly symbolizing everything that Emerson wished to see in his own ideal scholar.

            Nature is considered by both Emerson and Thoreau to be the most essential influence that a man can ever have, one that stays with him throughout his entire life because of his relationship to and in nature.  As Emerson says, it is “the first in time and the first in importance. . . Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. . . . The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages” (515).  Thoreau, too, was completely convinced of the significance of nature in our lives, and of the link that nature provides us to our past and, therefore, to the primal soul of mankind.  Speaking of man’s basic need of shelter, Thoreau writes,

We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter.  Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. . . . It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. (615)

He goes on to lament the fact that most contemporary societies are moving away from their ancestral connection to the wilderness, and that consequently, “We know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think” (615).  His ideas in this respect are closely related to Emerson’s thoughts on the scholar’s relationship with nature, and how that relationship is of utmost importance.  Thoreau seemed to believe that modern man knows nothing about life in its most essential sense, because he has never truly experienced the life that occurs in nature.  He thought that reliance on new technologies and advancements was in fact detrimental to a scholar’s life, which should be spent in pursuit of higher meaning and higher gratification than that allowed by the lifetime of toil required to supply those luxuries: “For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors” (Thoreau 607). 

            Another significant connection to mankind’s history, and a second influence necessary for the American Scholar’s educational background, is to be found in books.  Emerson considers books to contain “the mind of the Past” (516), because the authors of ancient texts transformed the world around them into their own visions and then put these visions into manuscripts, which can be accessed even today as a glimpse into the past.  As Emerson himself so beautifully describes the process of an author’s labor, “[The world] came into him life; it went out from him truth.  It came to him shortlived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry” (516).  However, he also warns that the reader should not rely solely on books for his opinions on the ways and workings of the universe.  The scholar must always be careful to use books only for motivation and to formulate his own views and hypotheses instead of merely reciting others’ which he has read.  “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst . . . They are for nothing but to inspire” (Emerson 517). 

            Thoreau, also considering the impact of books, mourns the fact that the crumbling remains of the great architecture from ancient civilizations are more revered than the works of the brilliant minds that came from the same era. “It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta [sic] than all the ruins of the East!” (630)  It is apparent throughout all of Thoreau’s writings that he relies heavily upon his knowledge of the works of significant historic novelists, dramatists, scientists, and theologians.  In the true manner of Emerson’s American Scholar, though, these authors’ texts are invariably used only as an introduction for his own views and to exemplify his own ideas.

            The final influence that Emerson mentions is that of action.  He states that one cannot learn through books alone, and speaks about living life as directly related to understanding it, or even being the inspiration for us to strive for understanding. We cannot write well without having some knowledge of what we write about, and we cannot have that knowledge without experience, and through experience we gain character enough to write well.  As Emerson put it so succinctly, “Life is our dictionary” (519). All authors’ best—if not only—work originates from events in their lives, usually ones that affected them greatly and personally, and years of reflection upon those past experiences.  Emerson says of the scholar, “Without [action] he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth . . . Only so much do I know, as I have lived” (518); meaning that one cannot truly know that part of life which one has not experienced.  Thoreau almost repeats Emerson’s words exactly in his interpretation of the usefulness of action in a student’s life:

I mean that [students] should not play life, or study it merely . . . but earnestly live it from beginning to end.  How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? . . . Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month—the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted . . . or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile? (627-628)

Not to be so shallow as to speak such words and hold such views hypocritically, Thoreau undertook to prove this very idea when he lived his own “experiment” at Walden Pond.  In building his own home, growing his own food, and sustaining and supporting himself wholly, Thoreau was determined to prove that this was not just a theory by living the lifestyle which he know in his heart to be better.  The very fact that he did this epitomizes the ideal behavior an American Scholar should exhibit: “[Living] is a total act.  Thinking is a partial act” (Emerson 520).

            Emerson went on in his address on the American Scholar to comment on some of what he called the scholar’s “duties.”  These are qualities that the scholar should possess and traits that he should exhibit, which will prove to elevate him above the inconsistent character of society.  Above and throughout the scholar’s duties is that of self-trust: “It becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and only he knows the world . . . In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended” (Emerson 521).  Thoreau did not seem to have a problem with this particular virtue.  Some critics have gone so far as to call him arrogant, though the case is more likely that he was simply a brilliant man with an idea that he had supreme faith in and wished to share.  In one line he writes, “I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely” (Thoreau 638).  This one sentence encapsulates Thoreau’s convictions, his experiment at Walden Pond, and his subsequent writings on the same in a minimally basic yet impeccable manner.

            The first duty that Emerson lists as being an essential attribute of the American Scholar is the “slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation” (Emerson 520).  Emerson considers it the scholar’s responsibility to “guide men by showing them facts” (520), to give up a life of social interaction and companionship in favor of a life of learning, of examining, of cataloguing the world for the benefit of all humanity.  He could easily be describing Thoreau in his cabin at Walden Pond when he says,

                       

In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly . . . He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature . . . He is the world’s eye.  He is the world’s heart. (Emerson 521)

We can clearly see Thoreau in this passage, patiently and steadfastly cutting timber for his home, leveling the ground for its foundation, carting rocks from the pond for his chimney, clearing a field for planting, harvesting his crops, and baking his bread over an open fire in the rain.  Through it all, he was content to observe the natural world around him, and to compare the surrounding environment to that of civilization, which he renounced for over two years.  Thoreau was unceasingly fascinated by nature’s wonders: “So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind . . . For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms” (610), and he was appreciative of the close interrelationship between abstract science and tangible nature: “The same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours . . . The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! . . . Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions” (606).  Observation was a talent that Thoreau not only excelled at, but also thoroughly enjoyed.

            Finally, Emerson listed as a duty of the scholar the virtue of being both free and brave.  It was his opinion that “fear always springs from ignorance” (521), and therefore the scholar, by his very definition, should never be allowed to show fear or cowardice, as this would betray him as something less than scholarly.  Hence, the American Scholar must not run and hide from danger but face it head on and scrutinize it; “Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin . . . he will then find himself a perfect comprehension of its nature . . . and can henceforth defy it and pass on superior” (522).  Thoreau, again, obviously felt this same way.  He, too, believed that men fear what they do not understand, and that knowledge and understanding are the greatest tools a person can possess.  Speaking of the “lives of quiet desperation” (605) that he believed most of society to lead, Thoreau says, “The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of disease . . . When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis” (606-607).  He plainly believed that courage stems from comprehension, furthering Emerson’s supposition that a scholar, given his nature, should necessarily be brave.

            Thus, when compared with each of Emerson’s key concepts of the fundamental influences and duties of the American Scholar, Thoreau is the perfect embodiment of these ideals: his influences of nature, books, and action are portrayed again and again throughout Walden, as is his belief in the importance of self-trust, observation, and bravery as the essential duties of an intellectual mind.  If Emerson was looking for someone to fill the role that he laid out in The American Scholar, he need have looked no further than his own backyard to find Thoreau, the Man Thinking at Walden Pond.

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” The Harper Single Volume American

Literature. Eds. Donald McQuade, et al. New York: Longman, 1999. 514-525.

Thoreau, Henry David. “Walden.” The Harper Single Volume American Literature. Eds.

Donald McQuade, et al. New York: Longman, 1999. 602-696.

Walt Whitman, A Kosmos

Reading the poetry of Walt Whitman is a unique experience.  His poetry extends far above and beyond the reach of most other contemporary poets because of the vast scope that his work encompasses.  He not only writes about life, but he virtually lives life within his poems—they resonate with his very essence; they are overflowing with the powerful force of his life.  Whitman was so incredibly alive, and so incredibly aware of life, that life itself is imbedded in everything he wrote.

         

A particular favorite poem of mine that Whitman wrote is I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing.  This poem is beautiful in its simplicity and its undemanding tone, and yet it is simultaneously wonderfully complex.  First, it is a nature poem, which I adore; nature poetry is easily my favorite kind, and Whitman does an exquisite job with it in this particular piece.  The descriptive quality is absolutely perfect, and he paints a magnificent mental picture of a giant mossy oak standing alone in the swamplands of the South.  But the real miracle of this poem is how seamlessly Whitman transcends the basic descriptive nature poem and turns it into so much more—he ties this tree in to his own soul; he relates it to himself, and in it he sees his own qualities as well as others.  In anthropomorphizing the oak, he makes it both representative of himself and a contrast to his own needs and desires—he admires the tree for its sturdy stature, then proceeds to admire it for the differences it shows from him: that it stands alone, “solitary,” with no one near to keep it company, which he himself could never do.

Whitman marvelously turns this nature poem inward, forming something that is both descriptive and introspective at once.  This is a wholly amazing feat to accomplish, and yet he does it so flawlessly, so eloquently, so tantalizingly, and most of all, so beautifully. 

It is obvious throughout Whitman’s work how much he purely loved life and everything in it—people, nature, art, weather, buildings, animals—and how he seems to have found joy and beauty in everything he saw, felt, smelled, and heard, but I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing brings out another quality: his almost child-like wonder of the world, which is his most endearing trait of all.  It celebrates his connection and intimacy with nature and with his natural, “primal” self, both of which made him the irrepressible, irresistible man that was “Walt Whitman, a kosmos.”

Clashes and Commonalities in "The Man to Send Rain Clouds"

Although I have written about Leslie Marmon Silko’s brilliant work, The Man to Send Rain Clouds, at least once before, there is something I find simply irresistible about this story’s timeless and universal pull toward something greater, something just beyond perception.  Every time I reread the story, I feel as Father Paul does as he sprinkles the holy water over Teofilo’s red blanket – that an element of the experience seems almost familiar, that something about it is tugging at the back of my mind and yearning to be heard and understood.

While there is a striking “clash of cultures” presented in this story between the missionary Franciscans and the native Pueblos, I do not think that it would be truly accurate to describe the occurrence as a clash of values.  The story centers on these two vastly different cultures’ unique traditions involving burial of the dead, and we are able to perceive through Silko’s gentle and unassuming narrative that both the Priest and the old man’s family are primarily concerned about Teofilo’s well-being in the afterlife.  Indeed, they may have completely differing views of what that afterlife is like, but they both agree on the major leap of faith that it does exist, and that what they do to the body now will affect how the soul proceeds after burial.  Taken from a viewpoint of neither Christianity nor Native American mythology, these two clashing cultures seem to be in a near harmony of values – their major concern is the same, and the minor differences between their desires occur only in the actual undertaking of individual ceremonial rituals.

Given this understanding of the story, it takes on an almost entirely new meaning.  The heart of the story lies in its universal humanity; Silko is portraying what it is to be human, to care for each other, to deal with agonizing issues of life and death and who we are and where we may go.  Whatever force there is in the world that drives us to religion, she shows us, has driven every culture in the history of mankind.  We are not so different after all.  All cultures, no matter how far separated by time and space, have come to the same answers – that there is a force greater than us in the universe, and that we continue on in some form after death.  The Man to Send Rain Clouds presents for us not a story of conflicting values, but of universal ones; reading this work, we see that both the Pueblos and Father Paul are able to overcome their personal differences in the face of something higher than either of them.  They come together for the good of someone they have cared about in life, putting aside worldly disparities and focusing, just for the moment, on their mutual love and concern.  Ultimately, instead of telling a tale of strife, clashing cultures, differing values, conflict, or intolerance, Silko gives us a beautiful account of one thing we all share – our humanity.

The Inane Life of Walter Mitty

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” takes place in one short winter afternoon and shows us the fantasies of an unhappy man. The story begins with Mitty and his wife driving through slushy roads into town, as Mitty imagines he is the commander of a Navy hydroplane and his wife admonishes him to drive more slowly. From there we follow along on Mitty’s mini-adventures of the mind throughout his day of errands, as he becomes a famous surgeon, a defendant in a trial, a skilled dogfighter in Europe, and, at the last, a condemned man up against a firing squad—anything to escape his wife’s nagging and his own uneventful life.

           

With this story, what could have easily been a confusing or disconcerting work has instead proven itself to be involved and clever. It was very well written, with perfectly timed and flawless transitions between reality and fantasy; for example, soon after Mrs. Mitty mentions Dr. Renshaw, Mitty drives by a hospital, which invokes a fantasy about being a skilled physician.  Later, he hears a newsboy shouting out headlines about a current trial, and Mitty imagines he is involved in a major case as a rogue defendant.  And so on. The wordplay is always perfect, the details always tie in nicely to the rest of the story, and the unity is always impeccable.

           

Having said that, I didn’t care much for this story. I agree that it is indeed a well-crafted piece of work, and I am not, as some modern feminists seem to be, insulted or offended by reading it. I think that the story is timeless, which is why it is still widely read and included in anthologies, but it seemed a bit too commonplace to be really provocative. Other enduring subjects, such as love, hate, conflict, etc., are about the deepest emotions, which we can all relate to—the “human condition.” To me, the subject of husbands and wives nagging and/or ignoring each other, while entertaining to the rest of us, is not truly worthy of being called “great.”

           

Perhaps we could stretch our literary imaginations as far as Mitty does, and we could claim that this story is about a feeling of being trapped in our situations and not knowing how to change the world outside, instead resorting to altering our perceptions. It could also be about the duality within us all, and the inner conflict between our own personalities: our perceived selves versus our presented selves. However, I don’t believe this is what Thurber had in mind when he wrote “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” I think he wrote a story about a man who would rather be anywhere than with his nagging wife, and he did a perfect and humorous job—it simply didn’t strike me as being particularly moving, inspiring, or thought-provoking.