The groves were God's first temples. ~William Cullen Bryant, "A Forest Hymn"
Hello, class.
Today we have plenty to catch up on. First, a short quiz on "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Then, with any luck, we'll get to "A White Heron" and other assigned stories and poems, such as "Tintern Abbey. " And last, we'll begin the film Into the Wild. It is based on the true story of a young man, just graduated from college, with honors, who runs away from home and family and other obligations to explore the "wild" in search of a more authentic life/self, against all he considers false in humanity and society.
At the following URL is an excellent essay by one well known American best writer on the human-animal relationship in historical and cultural perspective. Animals, Lewis Lapham writes, elude our attempts to define them, even as we push so many to the brink in our "conquest" of the natural world:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lewis-lapham/the-conquest-of-nature_b_2859691.html
In the short video found at the following URL, you can see the power of imagination exemplified in William Blake's lines beginning "To see a world in a grain of sand" magnified by application of modern technology : https://www.ted.com/talks/louie_schwartzberg_hidden_miracles_of_the_natural_world
from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Self-Reliance
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.
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