Transcending Summer Session

After several weeks of concentrated work, summer session is over. The professor liked the papers I wrote about the Transcendentalists, so I'm optimistic about my grade. More importantly, I learned how these American poet-philosophers fit into the development of both the American character and of philosophy around the world.

While I haven't evicted Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman from the house entirely, it's been refreshing to put them aside for a few days. It was fun to revisit them so many years after high school, but I'm glad my senior thesis won't be about Thoreau and his influence on the 21st century perception of nature.

Speaking of the senior thesis, we have our first assignment, and one of my classmates is having a senior thesis party next week. I'm not sure if beer, notebooks, or both are involved in this kind of celebration, so it will probably be a learning experience.

Crowded House

Thoreau and Emerson are making room for Walt Whitman, whose "Song of Myself" is on the reading agenda this week. Thoreau scowls and says he's going to move to the garage, while Emerson, despite his essay "Self-reliance," is being very social and agreeable. I suspect that Whitman doesn't notice either of them. As one of my fellow students once said about a yoga instructor in Centralia, "He's, like, really into his body."

There's more to Whitman than that, but I'm too new to his work to say much more. It's interesting that so many teachers have assigned this poem to my classes over the years, but always only in parts. It's easy to see why they left out most of the poem: there's a lot of material that probably isn't suitable for grade-school students, and it's a phenomenally long work. I can just imagine what Marvin, the guy who sat behind me in sixth grade, would have asked Mrs. Ryan if he'd seen more than two pages of the "Song."

I don't have to imagine how my parents would have reacted to my reciting parts of the poem if it had been assigned in its entirety. As I said earlier, Whitman was really into his body, and a lot of other people's, too. The difference between Whitman and a zillion other similar minds is that he says it so well. He must have been irresistable in the flesh.