Your eye is trained to see things from different perspectives. Emerson sees beauty in everyday things. How is beauty related to Virtue? You can't find beauty by trying to "clutch it". Have to make your mind sensitive to nature.
Does Emerson contradict himself? In Self-Reliance he says, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
The Most Beautiful Thing Ever Filmed: Clip from American Beauty--The brilliant flying bag scene from the movie American Beauty.
"Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in."
How does detachment figure in to all this? How can one find beauty in death? If you are more attuned to beauty, are you more virtuous?
Is death as beautiful as life? We're all complicit in the circle of life - death. We are all alive by having consumed living things.
For Monday 11/23: Read Emerson Chapter 4, Auto dialectic journal #3
Lecture: US Environmental History
Next week: Modern Ecological Movement
Town Hall meeting/Committee work.
Applications to IGSS program for next year will be on our website Monday 11/23. Application is open until January 20, 2010.
Meeting this morning with prospective IGSS students went well.
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