Margaret Fuller Quotes

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” ― Margaret Fuller

If you have knowledge , let others light their candles in it.

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.

There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.

I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.

There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes.

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself

Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts.

What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind.

What a difference it makes to come home to a child!

Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day's performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman... Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved. As far as an amiable disposition and powers of entertainment make you so, it is a happiness; but if there is one grain of plausibility, it is poison.

Over time, I came to realize that this was the point of reading Emerson and, for that matter, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller and all the rest of them. The reason to read the American Transcendentalists wasn’t to hang on to their every word, but to be inspired by them. This early American philosophy was about inspiration, about moving beyond the inert and deadening ways of the past. *

All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.

...above all things; to remember that hypocrisy is the most hopeless as well as the meanest of crimes...

But her eye, that torch or the soul, is untamed, and in the intensity of her reading, we see a soul invincibly young in faith and hope.

Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural.

We have waited here long in the dust; we are tired and hungry; but the triumphal procession must appear at last.

Accursed be he who willingly saddens an immortal spirit---doomed to infamy in later, wiser ages, doomed in future stages of his own being to deadly penance, only short of death.

But the intellect, cold, is ever more masculine than feminine; warmed by emotion, it rushes towards mother earth, and puts on the forms of beauty.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. Very early I knew that the only objective in life was to grow

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.

Yet, by men in this country, as by the Jews, when Moses was leading them to the promised land, everything has been done that inherited depravity could do, to hinder the promise of Heaven from its fulfilment. The cross, here as elsewhere, has been planted only to be blasphemed by cruelty and fraud.

Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants.

I’ll never forget that Depression Easter Sunday. Our son was four years old. I bought ten or fifteen cents’ worth of eggs. You didn’t get too many eggs for that. But we were down. Margaret said, ‘Why he’ll find those in five minutes.’ I had a couple in the piano and all around. Tommy got his little Easter basket, and as he would find the eggs, I’d steal ’em out of the basket and re-hide them. The kid had more fun that Easter than he ever had. He hunted Easter eggs for three hours and he never knew the difference. (Laughs.) “My son is now thirty-nine years old. And I bore him to death every Easter with the story. He never even noticed his bag full of Easter eggs never got any fuller. . . .

Here, as elsewhere, the gain of creation consists always in the growth of individual minds, which live and aspire, as flowers bloom and birds sing, in the midst of morasses; and in the continual development of that thought, the thought of human destiny, which is given to eternity adequately to express, and which ages of failure only seemingly impede.

Margaret Fuller Slack I WOULD have been as great as George Eliot But for an untoward fate. For look at the photograph of me made by Penniwit, Chin resting on hand, and deep—set eyes— Gray, too, and far-searching. But there was the old, old problem: Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity? Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me, Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel, And I married him, giving birth to eight children, And had no time to write. It was all over with me, anyway, When I ran the needle in my hand While washing the baby’s things, And died from lock—jaw, an ironical death. Hear me, ambitious souls, Sex is the curse of life.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader اليوم قارئ وغدًا قائد

Why do women love bad men? Margaret had asked the question herself, and answered it, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The belief that men have “stronger passions,” Margaret theorized, has been “inculcated” in women for centuries, and “the preference often shown by women for bad men arises . . . from a confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, acquainted with regions which women are forbidden to explore.

Margaret Fuller, the leading antebellum female intellectual, even went so far as to suggest that the anti-slavery party ought to plead for women’s rights, too—because, like slaves, women were kept in bondage by civil law, custom, and patriarchal abuse.68 It was an emboldening insight. Elizabeth Cady, daughter of a prominent New York lawyer, had had fantasies when she was eleven years old of leading a life of scholarship and self-reliance.

and fueled their mutual passion for the great Romantic texts—Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Novalis’s Hymns to the Night—which featured protagonists suffering in equal measure from lost loves and undirected ambition.

This book began with the assertion that Margaret Fuller's life was her most remarkable creation. It is just possible, however, that her most wonderful creations may still lie in the future. Fuller's most precious gift to us may reside in the ideas and the works, still yet to be imagined, of women and men who follow her example. We may decide that, despite all that Margaret Fuller endured and suffered in order to become exceptional, her life, or rather her lives, well deserve imitating.

Margaret described an oppressive awareness that “I have no real hold on life,—no real, permanent connection with any soul.” She felt disembodied, like “a wandering Intelligence, driven from spot to spot.” Perhaps her fate was this: to live alone, to “learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of knowledge,” but never to experience full communion with another being. The prospect “envelopes me as a cold atmosphere. I do not see how I shall go through this destiny. I can, if it is mine; but I do not feel that I can.

Here in Rome, “men live for something else beside money and systems, the voice of noble sentiment is understood.” She had found in Italy “a sphere much more natural to me than what the old puritans or the modern bankers have made” in America, the now stagnant and degraded “new” world.

At Chicago I read again 'Philip Van Artevelde,' and certain passages in it will always be in my mind associated with the deep sound of the lake, as heard in the night. I used to read a short time at night, and then open the blind to look out. The moon would be full upon the lake, and the calm breath, pure light, and the deep voice, harmonized well with the thought of the Flemish hero. When will this country have such a man ? It is what she needs — no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens while his feet step firmly on the ground and his hands are strong and dextrous in the use of human instruments. A man, religious, virtuous and — sagacious; a man of universal sympathies, but self-possessed; a man who knows the region of emotion, though he is not its slave; a man to whom this world is no mere spectacle or fleeting shadow, but a great, solemn game, to be played with good heed, for its stakes are of eternal value, yet who, if his own play be true, heeds not what he loses by the falsehood of others. A man who lives from the past, yet knows that its honey can but moderately avail him; whose comprehensive eye scans the present, neither infatuated by its golden lures nor chilled by its many ventures; who possesses prescience, as the wise man must, but not so far as to be driven mad to-day by the gift which discerns to-morrow. When there is such a man for America, the thought which urges her on will be expressed.

At thirty-six, Margaret believed her “mind and character” were already “too much formed” through “a liberal communion with the woful struggling crowd of fellow men.” She had instead worked for a living and reaped the “fruits of spiritual knowledge” these past ten years, seeking common cause with the laborer, the immigrant, the prostitute.

He became so gloomy that she asked him, at last, if he was worried about anything. He assured her, instantly, that he was the happiest man in the world. And he was. At times he was almost bewildered by his own bliss in being there, with Tony, so terribly dear, beside him; really his own for the rest of his life. It was not her fault if the insatiable sorrows of an unequal love tormented him, the hungry demand for more, for a fuller return, for a feeling which it was not in her nature to give. As she leaned forward, absorbed in the passions staged beneath her, he felt suddenly that their box contained just himself and a wraith, a ghost; as if the real Antonia, whom he loved, was an imagined woman living only in his sad fancy.

She had made the observation several years before to a startled Waldo Emerson that “women are Slaves.” Married women in particular—and that meant most American women—were, in countless legal and emotional respects, the property of their husbands. Their liberation, however, was not to be found in a political movement, Margaret believed, but in reform of themselves as individuals,

Nathaniel Hawthorne, a friend of Margaret Fuller’s in Concord who followed her path to the Continent several years after her death, undertook an experiment in fictional form when he put aside writing stories in favor of longer narratives. He preferred to call his books “Romances,” not novels. “When a writer calls his work a Romance,” Hawthorne explained in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, “he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.” The novelist, in Hawthorne’s terms, aims to achieve “a very minute fidelity” to experience, whereas the author of a romance may “bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture” while still maintaining strict allegiance to “the truth of the human heart.

Margaret Fuller wondered whether she was "fitted to be loved" -- a word choice both curious and tragic: not "worthy," bespeaking an inherent endowment, but "fitted," as if she could fit herself for love by strain and discipline. With Caroline, with Sam, and now with Waldo, she had pushed and pushed to earn the affection she longed for -- a push that eventually repelled each of its objects. But she could hardly have compartmentalized her nature -- the very nature by which she had reached the stratospheric heights of her achievement. Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life -- the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd's song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria.

Yet “Platonic affection” can only seem “sublimated and idealized to the more experienced.” It was a painful message for Margaret, an unmarried woman with no romantic prospects but with a deep need for connection with men. Yet there it was: there could be no turning back to the Platonic after a “thorough” experience of passion. Worse, her quest for Platonic affection, for connections or covenants that dwelled only in “the higher emotions,” marked her as “undeveloped”—a notion that Margaret, with her credo of self-expansion, could scarcely tolerate.

And there was a fourth, “highest grade” of marriage, which included the best features of the others, “home sympathies” and “intellectual communion,” but added to these a “religious” dimension, “expressed as a pilgrimage towards a common shrine.” Margaret was careful to specify that by “religion” she meant “the thirst for truth and good, not the love of sect and dogma.” She also had in mind a particular style of devotion: a “reverent love,” a sense that one’s partner is the “only true” companion, the only other one “of all human beings” who can “understand and interpret . . . my inner and outer being.

Margaret’s unfocused striving and rankling frustration over family obligations found answering chords in Goethe’s Romanticism. She began, and hoped to publish, a translation of his play Torquato Tasso, based on the life of an Italian Renaissance poet whose close confidante, an unmarried, intellectually gifted princess, complains of feeling stifled in her gilded cage. Margaret was captivated as well by his novel Elective Affinities, which put into fictional play Goethe’s view, borrowed from new science, that romantic attractions resulted from unalterable chemical “affinities” and should be obeyed regardless of marital ties.

It was not just her unusual intellect and outsized personality that made Margaret seem to Waldo more manly than feminine, but also her anomalous position as a woman “of the bread-winning tribe” who earned her keep as a writer and public speaker, her rate of pay approaching his own. Margaret was Waldo’s female double, not his feminine muse, as Cary was now. Margaret felt this too; it was why she thought she would make a better man than he. And why she rarely looked at men “with common womanly eyes,” as she once wrote to George Davis, but rather with an eye to friendship—yet on her own more womanly terms. If Waldo wished she would befriend him as a brother, she willed him to befriend her as a sister. The disjunction perplexed and saddened them both.

Even more distasteful to him was the way he saw Margaret and other women conversing with each other as they gathered in his parlor: no sooner had the “stricken soul” confessed her woes than her companion “in return . . . disburdens into her ear the story of her misery, as deep & hopeless as her own.” Such an exchange was about as far from the ideal of friendship Waldo espoused as could be imagined, yet it was what Margaret sought from him—a connection through mutual understanding and sympathy—and that, at times, unwilling as he was to admit it, Waldo coveted for himself. For Margaret knew Waldo suffered too, though he presented a “cold pedantic self” to his parlor guests or argued for a Dial “measuring no hours but those of sunshine.” After age thirty, “a man wakes up sad every morning,” he had written in his journal, for no one else to read; but Margaret sensed his melancholy.

CAST: Barry Fitzgerald as Judge Bernard Fitz of the Vincent County District Court. Bill Green as Sheriff McGrath, “Vincent County’s own little Hitler,” a frequent antagonist of the kind-hearted judge. Barbara Fuller as Susan, the judge’s lovely young niece. Leo Cleary as the bailiff. Dawn Bender as little Mary Margaret McAllister. WRITER-PRODUCER-DIRECTOR: Carlton E. Morse. ANNOUNCER: Frank Martin. ORCHESTRA: Opie Cates. This show bore many of the trademarks that writer Carlton E. Morse had established on One Man’s Family: stories containing-the breath of life, realistic conflicts, and a character who, as Time put it, was “surefire for cornfed philosophizing.” Before his election to the bench, Judge Fitz had been the barber of a small (pop. 3,543) community in the county. At times, when his legal career tried his patience, he longed again for that simpler life. He was staunchly Irish (what else, with Barry Fitzgerald in the lead?) and could be painfully sentimental. One reviewer noted that “he criticizes the law as much as he enforces it, and slyly finds a loophole when he thinks a culprit needs a helping of simple kindness.” The sheriff, on the other hand, had a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” mentality.

Power comes not from knowledge kept,’ said Gates, ‘but from knowledge shared.’ But don’t sit around waiting for your boss – if your company isn’t doing this already, don’t wait, start it up for them. Sharing your knowledge creates synergy: you’ll get more out than you put in. ‘If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.’ Margaret Fuller   Feeling competitive rather than collaborative?  Meet some of history’s great creative rivals here.

The man who leveled jealous accusations at his wife on the basis of one dream brushed aside his daughter’s recurring nightmares as nonsense—“never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night” by keeping her up long past any normal child’s bedtime for late-night recitations, by forcing her through Virgil’s lurid battle scenes, by inciting a rivalry between his “pair of Ms.” Finally, to everyone’s relief, Timothy sent Margaret to school.

The expansion of their dyad to include the “young people” gave both Margaret and Waldo hope of more: “of being often & often shined on & rained on by these influences of being steeped in this light & so ripened to power whereof I yet dreamed not,” Waldo rhapsodized, “suddenly uplifted” by the notion, foreign to him since Ellen’s death, that “nobleness is loving, & delights in sharing itself.” He “dared” to entertain “unlimited hopes” of “the four persons who seemed to offer me love at the same time and draw to me & draw me to them.” Of the intimate conclave at Concord, Waldo wrote to Margaret, “I have lived one day.” She had won him to her side.

in our present state of society woman possesses not; she is under possession,” referring to laws that barred married women from owning or inheriting property. From girlhood, “woman is educated with the tacit understanding, that she is only half a being, and an appendage.” Once married, she “spends life in conforming to” her husband’s wishes “instead of moulding herself to her own ideal. Thus she loses her individuality, and never gains his respect.” After becoming a mother, “she is only the upper nurse,” whereas the father is “the oracle. His wish is law, hers only the unavailing sigh uttered in secret.” Through it all, “she looks out into life, finds nothing there but confusion, and congratulates herself that it is man’s business, not hers.

Woman, self-centred, would never be absorbed by any relation.” The “excessive devotion” that results when women live “so entirely for men,” when a woman makes marriage “her whole existence”—or, as Sophia Hawthorne had phrased it, her “true destiny”—Margaret argued, has “cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other.” Woman “must be able to stand alone.” Marriage should be to woman, as it is to man, “only an experience.” While women sometimes wished to be men in order to partake of their freedoms and opportunities, “men never,” Margaret observed, “in any extreme of despair, wished to be women.

long as man “has the physical power, as well as the conventional” to treat a woman “like a play-thing or a slave,” she’d written portentously to Sophia, “woman must wait until the lion shall lie down with the lamb, before she can hope to be the friend and companion of man.

But she worried about how the older students, who were required to leave the school at age twelve, would find work. Many of these “show[ed] by their unformed features and mechanical movements” the ill effects of having been “treated by wholesale”; they were not accorded the respect that engenders “self-respect.

there are . . . in every age a few in whose lot the meaning of that age is concentrated”? “I feel that I am one of those persons in my age and sex,” she told him. “I feel chosen among women.” Margaret would preserve her right to fill an apostolic station, if called.

Margaret expected her friends to “be capable of seeking something.” She cared little what that something was, only that her friends “should not be satisfied with the common routine of life,—that they should aspire to something higher, better, holier, than they had now attained.

She wanted to leave her noisy questing “self” behind in that pool—not by tumbling in, like Narcissus, but by rising up. The answer came to her: “I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly . . . that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine.

It was in Horace Greeley that Margaret recognized a “go-ahead, fearless adroitness” that was simply “American.” Waldo’s deprecatory assessment that Greeley was “no scholar,” but rather a “mother of men . . . an abettor,” captured the very reasons Margaret quickly warmed to the tall, unkempt newspaperman, whose thick wire-rimmed glasses, settled unsteadily on his ruddy baby face, were the only hint of erudition in a carelessly rustic ensemble that usually included an old white coat of Irish linen, heavy boots, and baggy black trousers.

am caught in such a net of ties here.” Again she almost revealed her secret: “if ever you know of my life here, I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself.” But she would not. “Meanwhile, love me all you can; let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp.

A man’s idea of God corresponds to his ideal of himself. The nobler he is, the more exalted his God.

hypocritical laws that made a woman pay for a man’s crime. Why should women “receive the punishment due to the vices of so large a portion of the rest”?

Today’s Children, The Woman in White, and The Guiding Light crossed over and interchanged in respective storylines.) June 2, 1947–June 29, 1956, CBS. 15m weekdays at 1:45. Procter & Gamble’s Duz Detergent. CAST: 1937 to mid-1940s: Arthur Peterson as the Rev. John Ruthledge of Five Points, the serial’s first protagonist. Mercedes McCambridge as Mary Ruthledge, his daughter; Sarajane Wells later as Mary. Ed Prentiss as Ned Holden, who was abandoned by his mother as a child and taken in by the Ruthledges; Ned LeFevre and John Hodiak also as Ned. Ruth Bailey as Rose Kransky; Charlotte Manson also as Rose. Mignon Schrieber as Mrs. Kransky. Seymour Young as Jacob Kransky, Rose’s brother. Sam Wanamaker as Ellis Smith, the enigmatic “Nobody from Nowhere”; Phil Dakin and Raymond Edward Johnson also as Ellis. Henrietta Tedro as Ellen, the housekeeper. Margaret Fuller and Muriel Bremner as Fredrika Lang. Gladys Heen as Torchy Reynolds. Bill Bouchey as Charles Cunningham. Lesley Woods and Carolyn McKay as Celeste, his wife. Laurette Fillbrandt as Nancy Stewart. Frank Behrens as the Rev. Tom Bannion, Ruthledge’s assistant. The Greenman family, early characters: Eloise Kummer as Norma; Reese Taylor and Ken Griffin as Ed; Norma Jean Ross as Ronnie, their daughter. Transition from clergy to medical background, mid-1940s: John Barclay as Dr. Richard Gaylord. Jane Webb as Peggy Gaylord. Hugh Studebaker as Dr. Charles Matthews. Willard Waterman as Roger Barton (alias Ray Brandon). Betty Lou Gerson as Charlotte Wilson. Ned LeFevre as Ned Holden. Tom Holland as Eddie Bingham. Mary Lansing as Julie Collins. 1950s: Jone Allison as Meta Bauer. Lyle Sudrow as Bill Bauer. Charita Bauer as Bert, Bill’s wife, a role she would carry into television and play for three decades. Laurette Fillbrandt as Trudy Bauer. Glenn Walken as little Michael. Theo Goetz as Papa Bauer. James Lipton as Dr. Dick Grant. Lynn Rogers as Marie Wallace, the artist.

Margaret Fuller, America’s first female public intellectual and a contemporary of Beecher, was her antithesis. In 1840, Fuller became editor of the era’s premier highbrow magazine, The Dial. She was then thirty years old.

All truth is comprised in music and mathematics.

Margaret was fortunate that the impulses of Romanticism had brought her together with James Clarke; the literature they explored was suffused with emotionality, suffering, and struggle. By their own example, Goethe, Schiller, and the others gave their male readers permission to be more expressive of their feelings and so to understand and accept a woman’s emotions more readily. Although they were not lovers, Margaret and James could still offer each other small gestures of physical comfort. On one occasion, “her kind pressure of my hand when I was in as miserable a mood” had “rejoiced” James, and he offered her the same one day when she had come to him “with tears glistening in her eyes

Inevitably they favored the “brilliant” de Staël, who in Margaret’s words operated “on the grand scale, on liberalizing, regenerating principles.” They were captivated as much by the author’s role as intellectual diva in Revolutionary France as they were by her writing. De Staël—whose De l’Allemagne brought the fervid idealism of German Romantic philosophy to the rest of Europe, and whose Paris salon attracted political refugees and international luminaries alike—was the model both young women needed, even as her example must have seemed impossible to match in parochial New England of the 1820s.

But Margaret shared Bronson Alcott’s inclination to form collegial relations with his students and had instinctively developed a teaching style that featured the give-and-take of conversation rather than the conventional memorize-and-recite method. Even if she didn’t fully agree with Alcott that her students already possessed profound knowledge, she preferred to cultivate in them—particularly the girls—the ability to express what they learned from her, to ask questions and find the answers.

Then Waldo had written again, injecting Aristotle’s bleak formulation “O my friends, there is no friend” with even darker meaning: “O my friends, there are no friends.

she was losing her powers of clairvoyance. The girl had told Margaret to stop reading or she would never recover her health; Margaret had come to a similar conclusion on her own. “It is no longer in my power to write or study much,” she wrote to her mother. “I cannot bear it and do not attempt it.” The stress of “serving two masters” had become too much. She read and worked for her own purposes only “a little” each day now and attempted to reconcile herself to the possibility that “Heaven, I believe, had no will that I should accomplish any-thing great or beautiful.” Instead she took on a class of ten adults in German, six of them men. She needed the income.

inspiration, free self-expression, and freely expressed emotion—impulses that had already begun to stir a new century of democratic revolution in Europe.

No longer Byronized, Margaret read Schiller, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter, and above all Goethe. “It seems to me as if the mind of Goethe had embraced the universe,” she wrote to James. “He

the immortality of the human soul. It was a system bound to appeal to Margaret, who so far had little practical experience in a classroom, even more powerfully than it had to Elizabeth Peabody, who had been running her own schools for more than a decade before joining forces with Alcott.

owed, Bronson’s wife, Abigail, had opened a packet of Mary’s letters to Elizabeth and found out their true opinions. Elizabeth, outraged at the violation of her privacy and frightened by Abigail Alcott’s spiteful accusations of disloyalty, packed and left the house—with its brood of three small daughters, Anna, Louisa May, and the baby Elizabeth, named for Peabody as another form of payment in kind—and the city of Boston to live with her family twenty miles north in the old port town of Salem.

did need a second teacher in his school: he simply didn’t know enough

together, these radical notions dismantled the Holy Trinity, leaving Unitarians to believe in the one God residing in the human heart.

As Emerson would confide to Elizabeth Peabody when he decided to further distance himself from the institution of the church by putting an end to his supply preaching two years later, “Whoever would preach Christ in these times must say nothing about him!

the country; at Harvard, Waldo’s message of “self-trust” turned less despairing and more visionary. For those who were ready for it, his “American Scholar” speech would mark a new era: “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close,” they heard. He challenged his listeners to become intellectually “free and brave,” to cultivate “heroic” minds, and more: the scholar must rise from his desk—“Life is our dictionary”—and become a man of action. “The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul,” he exhorted. “The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man.

from the robust thirty of the year before. The spacious classroom on the second floor of Boston’s towering new Masonic temple, with busts of Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare, and Walter Scott arrayed in its four corners, was beginning to look empty in the weak winter sunlight that filtered through its single enormous Palladian window. The disaster that Elizabeth Peabody predicted hit fast. After volume two of Conversations appeared in February, “Pope” Andrews Norton blasted it as “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene,” and assailed its author as “an ignorant and presuming charlatan,” either “insane or half-witted.” The book was “more indecent and obscene,” a second reviewer charged, “than any other we ever saw exposed for sale on a bookseller’s counter.

Even Margaret’s beloved Wordsworth fell short on the issue; for him, she quoted ruefully, the ideal woman should not be “Too bright and good / For Human nature’s daily food.” Margaret drew on examples from ancient myth, wherein “the idea of female perfection is as fully presented as that of male,” to show that women had been accorded greater respect in earlier times. In Egyptian mythology, “Isis is even more powerful than Osiris,” and “the Hindoo goddesses reign on the highest peaks of sanctification.” In Greek myth, “not only Beauty, Health and the Soul are represented under feminine attributes, but the Muses, the inspirers of all genius,” and “Wisdom itself . . . are feminine.” Margaret’s dream was to bring the dispirited “individual man” together with the disempowered woman—unite the two sides of the Great Hall’s classroom—and create, by merging the best attributes of each, “fully” perfected souls. Then, a nation of men and women will for the first time exist, she might have said, amending Waldo Emerson’s visionary claim.

prefer tending his garden to cultivating friendship? He had already written that he favored communing with his own thoughts in private over communicating with others: “persons except they be of commanding excellence will not work on heads as old as mine like thoughts.” Waldo Emerson was hardly old—only thirty-five. Still, experience had aged him, with the death of his young first wife seven years before and the sad loss of two beloved brothers to tuberculosis since then. “Persons provoke you to efforts at acquaintance at sympathy which now hit, now miss, but lucky or unlucky exhaust you at last,” he temporized. “Thoughts bring their own proper motion with them & communicate it to you not borrow yours.

young nation, not to be matched for another forty years, was under way.

We must think as well as study, and talk as well as recite,

that this is a man who just wants others to think. He’s not against learning, not at all. He’s against blind adherence. Ralph Waldo Emerson wants others to study, but also to search for meaning. To read for more than recitation and rote memorization. To think, to dream, and to act.

Women need not be only sentimental, governed solely by feelings. Told that they are the docile and tender helpers of the men in their spheres. Women can think. Why, a woman has a right to judge. Each one of you in here has a right to consult not only your heart, but your mind, as well.

How, then, can we ever claim that to be passive and meek is the right path for a woman?

I would like to meet the man who is meant to be my husband. I would like to find the man who sees and knows my soul. It’s not that I wish to marry simply to be married; it’s that I wish to find a love so overpowering that there’s no choice but to join myself with this other person. Until that happens, I can’t see any reason to become a wife.

 ‘Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth; of all the mighty world.’ 

Vous ne pouvez pas le croire, vous les hommes, mais la seule raison pour laquelle les femmes assument ce qui vous convient le plus, c'est que vous les empêchez de découvrir ce qui leur convient à elles. Si elles avaient la liberté, si elles avaient la sagesse de pleinement développer leur force et leur beauté de femmes, elles ne souhaiteraient jamais être des hommes ou semblables à des hommes.

Playboy: ¿Está realmente en nuestras manos? O, como parece que aboga por la utilización de los ordenadores para manipular el futuro de culturas enteras, ¿no está realmente alentando al hombre a que renuncie al control de su destino? McLuhan: Antes que todo —y me sabe mal tener que insistir en este descargo de responsabilidad—, yo no abogo por nada; sólo sondeo y preveo tendencias. Aunque me opusiera a ellas o pensara que son catastróficas, no podría pararlas; así pues, ¿por qué tendría que perder mi tiempo lamentándome? Cuando la escritora Margaret Fuller comentó «acepto el universo», Carlyle dijo de ella: «más le vale». No veo ninguna posibilidad de una rebelión ludita global que destruya la maquinaria, así que podemos sentarnos cómodamente, ver qué pasa y contemplar lo que nos pasará en un mundo cibernético. Estar resentidos con una nueva tecnología no detendrá el proceso de ésta. Lo importante que debemos recordar es que en cualquier momento que utilizamos o percibimos una ampliación tecnológica de nosotros mismos, inevitablemente la acogemos. Siempre que vemos una pantalla de televisión o leemos un libro, estamos asimilando esas ampliaciones de nosotros mismos dentro de nuestro sistema individual y experimentando un «cierre» automático o desplazamiento de la percepción; no podemos huir de esta acogida perpetua de nuestra tecnología cotidiana a no ser que escapemos de la tecnología misma y huyamos a la cueva de un ermitaño. Al acoger de forma consistente todas estas tecnologías, inevitablemente nos relacionamos con ellas como servomecanismos. Así, para poder utilizarlas todas, primero debemos servirles como si fueran dioses. El esquimal es un servomecanismo de su kayak, el vaquero de su caballo, el hombre de negocios de su reloj, el cibernético —y pronto el mundo entero— de su ordenador. Por decirlo de otra forma, a los despojos pertenece el ganador. Esta modificación continua del hombre por parte de su propia tecnología lo alienta a encontrar medios constantes para modificarla; el hombre se convierte, pues, en los órganos sexuales del mundo de las máquinas, como lo es la abeja en relación al mundo botánico, permitiéndole reproducirse y evolucionar hacia formas más elevadas. El mundo de las maquinas corresponde la devoción del hombre premiándole con bienes, servicios y recompensa. La relación entre el hombre y su maquinaría es, pues, intrínsecamente simbiótica. Siempre ha sido así; el hombre cuenta con la oportunidad de reconocer su unión con su propia tecnología sólo en la era eléctrica. La tecnología eléctrica es una extensión cualitativa de la relación hombre/máquina; la relación del hombre del siglo xx con el ordenador no es, por naturaleza muy distinta a la relación que mantenía el hombre prehistórico con su barco o su rueda —con la importante diferencia que todas las tecnologías o extensiones del hombre previas eran parciales y fragmentarias, mientras que la eléctrica es total e inclusiva—. Ahora el hombre está empezando a llevar puesto su cerebro fuera del cráneo y sus nervios fuera de su piel; la nueva tecnología cría un nuevo hombre. Una viñeta reciente mostraba un niño que le decía a su madre desconcertada: «De mayor seré un ordenador». El humor es a menudo profético.

... beings, likely to be left alone, need to be fortified and furnished within themselves, and educationand thought have tended more and more to regard these beings as related to absolute being ...

Silence is the cruelest means of rejection, even if it only masks confusion or regret. The

As Margaret would later write, Europe had come to seem "my America," an unsettled territory where liberty was at hand, while the New World she had left behind had grown "stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war," the imperialist conflict with Mexico over the annexation of Texas.

Could she have known that it was her own image that, Waldo wrote, “rose before me at times into heroical & godlike regions, and I could remember no superior women”? Indeed, to Waldo, who had once unkindly disrupted her Conversations on classical myth, Margaret was best compared to “Ceres, Minerva, Proserpine, and the august ideal forms of the Foreworld.” He had not told her this, but perhaps somehow she knew.

Observation is a great joy.” To write one’s observations, record such wonderings, the greatest joy of all.

Genius will live and thrive without training. —MARGARET FULLER