Sunday Transcendentalist Quote

Louisa May Alcott wasn't a Transcendentalist, but her father, Bronson Alcott, was. Her story "Eli's Education" is the way she imagined her father developed from farm boy to educated man. It was originally published in St Nicholas: a monthly magazine for boys and girls, which has been scanned by Google books.

The story begins with his self-education:

Many years ago, a boy of sixteen sat in a little room in an old farm-house up among the Connecticut hills, writing busily in a book made of odd bits of paper stitched together, with a cover formed of two thin boards. The lid of a blue chest was his desk, the end of a tallow candle stuck into a potato was his lamp, a mixture of soot and vinegar his ink, and a quill from the gray goose his pen. A Webster's Spelling-book, Dilivorth's New Guide to the English Tongue, Daboll's Arithmetic, and the American Preceptor, stood on the chimneypiece over his head, with the Assembly Catechism and New Testament in the place of honor. This was his library ; and now and then a borrowed Pilgrim's Progress, Fox's Book of Martyrs, or some stray volume, gladdened his heart; for he passionately loved books, and scoured the neighborhood for miles around to feed this steadily increasing hunger.

Young Eli goes through many trials and tribulations, but all ends well:

There his youth ends ; but after the years of teaching he began to preach at last, not in one pulpit, but in many all over the land, diffusing good thoughts now as he had peddled small wares when a boy ; still learning as he went, still loving books and studying mankind, still patient, pious, dutiful, and tender, a wise and beautiful old man, till at eighty, Eli's education ended.

Sunday Transcendentalist Quote

Have you seen the American Masters program about Louisa May Alcott on PBS? I was fascinated by the experience she had as a child at Fruitlands, a commune built on Transcendentalist ideals founded by her father, Bronson Alcott, and his friend, Charles Lane. Utopian communities are easy to make fun of, and this one is probably funnier than most. The only person who lived at Fruitlands and wrote extensively about the experience was Louisa. Her piece, written many years later as an adult, was a parody called Transcendental Wild Oats.

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote in his journal after a visit to Fruitlands, "I will not prejudge them successful. They look well in July. We shall see them in December." In fact, that statement proved prescient as the community broke up in January, unable to feed themselves, in part because the two founders spent the growing season traveling and lecturing rather than working the farm.

Another source of contention was a belief by Charles Lane that their community should be celibate like the Shakers. Mrs. Alcott did not share this vision and one assumes that she had intellectual and other means to persuade her husband to see her side of things.

However, in spite of all the fun to be had at the expense of Fruitlands, many of the ideals were admirable and some seem quite modern. I was startled at how much the following passage, from a published letter written by the Fruitlands founders, echoes things I have read in the last couple of years about eating locally, the inefficiency of cattle as a provider of meat or milk, and the merits of veganism.

Debauchery of both the earthly soil and the human body is the result of this cattle keeping. The land is scourged for crops to feed the animals, whose filthy ordures are used under the erroneous supposition of restoring lost fertility; disease is thus infused into the human body; stimulants and medicines are resorted to for relief, which end in a precipitation of the original evil to a more disastrous depth. These misfortunes which affect not only the body, but by reaction rise to the sphere of the soul would be avoided, at least in part, by the disuse of animal food. Our diet is therefore strictly of the pure and bloodless kind. No animal substances, neither flesh, butter, cheese, eggs nor milk, pollute our tables or corrupt our bodies, neither tea, coffee, molasses, nor rice, tempts us beyond the bounds of indigenous productions. Our sole beverage is pure fountain water. The native grains, fruits, herbs and roots, dressed with the utmost cleanliness, and regard to their purpose of edifying a healthful body, furnish the pleasantest refections and in the greatest variety requisite to the supply of the various organs. The field, the orchard, the garden, in their bounteous products of wheat, rye, barley, maize, oats, buckwheat; apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, currants, berries; potatoes, peas, beans, beets, carrots, melons, and other vines, yield an ample store for human nutrition, without dependence on foreign climes, or the degradations of shipping and trade. The almost inexhaustible variety which the several stages and sorts of vegetable growth, and the several modes of preparation afford, are a full answer to the question which is often put by those who have never ventured into the region of a pure and chaste diet: "If you give up flesh meat, upon what then can you live?"

Originally, this quote was from a letter published in the Herald of Freedom, September 8, 1843. I transcribed it from an appendix of Transcendental Wild Oats and Excerpts from the Fruitlands Diary by Louisa May Alcott, a 1981 printing by The Harvard Common Press.

Sunday Transcendentalist Quote

Students of Transcendentalism despair at arriving at a satisfactory definition of the movement, but I quite like this one by Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894), educator, bookstore owner, and publisher.

Transcendentalism belongs to no sect of religion, and no social party. It is the common ground to which all sects may rise, and be purified of their narrowness; for it consists in seeking the spiritual ground of all manifestations.

As quoted in A Journey into the Transcendentalists' New England by R. Todd Felton, pp. 5, 7.

Garden in December

We test drove Rick's new little camera at the Missouri Botanical Garden today. The Garden has half of their parking lot closed for renovation. With a crowd to go to the holiday train show, the parking lot was full. We parked on a side street. Other than the train show and the restaurant, the Garden was pretty quiet.

The camellias are starting to bloom in the Linnean House, so we want to go again soon.

Here I am in my wool coat, petting one of the new pair of lions along the path to the Chinese Garden.

And here's Rick in his new coat, next to the witch hazels he likes in the Chinese Garden because they have been pruned to look sculptural in the winter.

We were impressed with the winter showiness of the Heavenly Bamboo (Nandina domestica) -- red berries and green leaves in December!

More photos on my flickr page.

Happy St. Nicholas Day

Sunday Postcard Art chose St. Nicholas for today's theme, of course! So, I dusted off my rusty Photoshop skills.

St. Nicholas from Vintage Santa/Christmas Postcard scanned by Suzee Que and posted on flickr.

Everything else from a collaborative scrapbook kit called White Christmas by Ziggle Designs and Pixel Geek Designs.

Little Wishes

There are still lots of wonderful gifts to give to foster children in the St. Louis area available at the Little Wishes website. Check out the Activities -- you can, like I did, give a child the experience of visiting the City Museum!

The End of Overeating

It's been more than two months since I read The End of Overeating by David Kessler and I haven't had a candy bar, potato chip, or nugget of orange chicken since then. I have cut out commercially processed foods before, most aggressively after reading Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food, but this feels permanent. If I do slip again, I'll re-read The End of Overeating and expect to be reinvigorated in my conviction that abstinence is the only way for me to cope with an eating environment that caters to my worst instincts.

The book finally convinced me that what I'm experiencing in relation to doughnuts, bacon cheese burgers on toasted sourdough, and french onion dip is addiction. And that addiction has been carefully orchestrated by the food industry's ever new creative ways of inserting more fat, salt, and sugar into the foods they process as well as sophisticated marketing techniques that have conditioned me to think that I deserve a break and an edible treat is just the way to get it.

Getting angry at the food industry helped, mostly because it gave some energy to the idea that I need to set some rules for myself about eating. Normally, the notion of rules pulls out my inner teenage rebel and the whole endeavor goes down in fiery turmoil. But with anger at the food industry at the root of this, my inner rebel had a different way of looking at things. My rules help me subvert the conditioning of the food industry while asserting my will. My inner teenage rebel likes being subversive and independent.

The rules that made the biggest difference for me were "No eating in the car" and "No eating anything purchased from a drugstore or gas station." Kessler points out that each person reacts differently to the stimuli in our environment, so my rules may not help someone else overcome their conditioning by the food industry.

The End of Overeating made it clear that my environment was not supporting a healthy lifestyle. I am now carefully building an environment that does. For me, this new environment includes a constant influx of health books from the library, an almost daily presence on the forums at 3 Fat Chicks, and a commitment to eating food made from scratch in my own kitchen with very few exceptions.