the meaning of life, and such
Bronson Alcott, father of one of my favorite authors (Louisa May Alcott) and close friend to my absolute favorite author (Henry David Thoreau), was an interesting character. He was a transcendentalist "groupie", hanging around with Emerson and Thoreau and Margaret Fuller and the rest of the new philosophers living around Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1840s and '50s.
In my favorite biography of Thoreau, The Days of Henry Thoreau by Walter Harding, a sort of recurring joke is Bronson Alcott's failed schemes. He was known for having an enormous amount of ideas but no practical-application skills whatsoever. He had the idea of helping Emerson build his summer home - which turned out so messily that it was dubbed "Tumbledown-Hall". More famous is Alcott's failed attempt at a utopian community called Fruitlands. Those who saw these communities fail saw that they failed because the inhabitants were very adept at sitting about all day musing over philosophical problems, but had no proclivity at all for hard work like planting fields or raising animals. (Fangirlish side note: I love Thoreau for being against utopian communities.)
In Louisa May Alcott's autobiographical Little Women, the mother is based on Louisa's mother, strong and independent yet nurturing and kind at the same time. The father, however, is a different man from Bronson Alcott. The father in Little Women is an intellectual, but his philosophical pursuits are more of a sideline to his real devotion for his family. Bronson Alcott, however, neglected his family because of his self-made identity as a philosopher. He would try out philosophical or psychological sorts of experiments on his children (Louisa and her three sisters) to see what would happen. The family experienced hard times financially because of Bronson's lack of work ethic.
I love Louisa May Alcott. She supported her family with the money she earned from writing and from editing a children's periodical. She seems to have been so strong and able, but still artistic as a writer.
I'm going somewhere relevant with this, though, I promise.
I tend to get quite philosophical quite often, and have in past slipped into such deep musing and questioning that I didn't do anything - didn't write, didn't create, just sort of stagnated for a bit. But now I see the terrible error of doing that.
I think that Louisa May Alcott might have thought something like, philosophizing is fine, but at the end of the day, come whatever questions about the meaning of life or nature of divinity, someone still has to do the washing and make dinner.
When I see suffering, in the newspaper, on television, in history books, I tend to stop, to stumble and fall, to feel like: how can I keep going about when there is the question of why God allows it? And sometimes when I am sitting there and start thinking about the origin of the universe and worrying that I do not know, I just feel like hiding somewhere to keep it all out.
But I am realizing now that the real thing to do is to live, to love, to create, to learn, to grow, to laugh crazily, to make things better for everyone else, to believe, to worship in my own way. It is good to think about philosophical things - it puts us in touch with the ever-elusive Something - but tangling ourselves up in existential crises doesn't get anything done and wastes time we could be using to live.
In my favorite biography of Thoreau, The Days of Henry Thoreau by Walter Harding, a sort of recurring joke is Bronson Alcott's failed schemes. He was known for having an enormous amount of ideas but no practical-application skills whatsoever. He had the idea of helping Emerson build his summer home - which turned out so messily that it was dubbed "Tumbledown-Hall". More famous is Alcott's failed attempt at a utopian community called Fruitlands. Those who saw these communities fail saw that they failed because the inhabitants were very adept at sitting about all day musing over philosophical problems, but had no proclivity at all for hard work like planting fields or raising animals. (Fangirlish side note: I love Thoreau for being against utopian communities.)
In Louisa May Alcott's autobiographical Little Women, the mother is based on Louisa's mother, strong and independent yet nurturing and kind at the same time. The father, however, is a different man from Bronson Alcott. The father in Little Women is an intellectual, but his philosophical pursuits are more of a sideline to his real devotion for his family. Bronson Alcott, however, neglected his family because of his self-made identity as a philosopher. He would try out philosophical or psychological sorts of experiments on his children (Louisa and her three sisters) to see what would happen. The family experienced hard times financially because of Bronson's lack of work ethic.
I love Louisa May Alcott. She supported her family with the money she earned from writing and from editing a children's periodical. She seems to have been so strong and able, but still artistic as a writer.
I'm going somewhere relevant with this, though, I promise.
I tend to get quite philosophical quite often, and have in past slipped into such deep musing and questioning that I didn't do anything - didn't write, didn't create, just sort of stagnated for a bit. But now I see the terrible error of doing that.
I think that Louisa May Alcott might have thought something like, philosophizing is fine, but at the end of the day, come whatever questions about the meaning of life or nature of divinity, someone still has to do the washing and make dinner.
When I see suffering, in the newspaper, on television, in history books, I tend to stop, to stumble and fall, to feel like: how can I keep going about when there is the question of why God allows it? And sometimes when I am sitting there and start thinking about the origin of the universe and worrying that I do not know, I just feel like hiding somewhere to keep it all out.
But I am realizing now that the real thing to do is to live, to love, to create, to learn, to grow, to laugh crazily, to make things better for everyone else, to believe, to worship in my own way. It is good to think about philosophical things - it puts us in touch with the ever-elusive Something - but tangling ourselves up in existential crises doesn't get anything done and wastes time we could be using to live.
posted by Laura at 1:45 PM
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