Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Outside
Here is an optional invitation to respond to the out-of-the-classroom exercise today. If you have a comment in general, please post what's on you mind. I am wondering specifically how "Nature" seemed to you out there, and in particular what your experience of solitude and quiet was. What came up in connection to Thoreau?
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I found the exercise to be particularly interesting. In my experience the exercise started with the contemplation of "Nature" and an attempt to take everything in and understand. But I soon realized, in the nature of Emerson (no pun intended), that my attempts to force "Nature" into my human intellect was futile. I hoped to turn into "the wise man" who "shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature" (Emerson 93). Ay the writing progressed I became more open to nature and allowed for what was there to exist without the need for interpretation or meaning to be forced upon it, and found more of the philosophical interpretation of what was going on around me. In that I was able to wonder at the grandeur and beauty of it, and I felt a bit childish in doing so. But by childish I mean in the most wondrous and observant sort of way. Thoreau was definitely in my thoughts, but could it have been the nature of the "Nature" to inspire these feelings?
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