Ralph Waldo Emerson 🎙️ LIVE at Emerson Resort & Spa

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Brett Barry  0:03  
Welcome to "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast" recording live from the Emerson Resort & Spa in Mount Tremper, New York, where we're celebrating the birthday of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the famed essayist, philosopher, and father of the transcendentalist movement. Emerson was born 221 years ago on May 25, 1803, 65 years before Memorial Day was first observed. I'm Brett Barry and this is "Kaatscast." Welcome to the show.

Campbell Brown  0:31  
"Kaatscast" is supported by the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for the local regions such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call 518-763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com; and by Briars & Brambles Books. The go to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily. For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call 518-750-8599. This episode is supported by Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past and learn about the ingenuity of the historic milling industry. Watch the waterwheel bring a working sawmill to life. Bring a picnic to enjoy by the millpond. For more information about scheduling a tour or about their 2024 exploration days, visit hanfordmills.org.

Audio  1:33  
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Brett Barry  1:38  
Emerson's classic essay titled "Nature" posited that scientific inquiry and spiritualism are not mutually exclusive, and that our connection to nature can reveal universal truths and insights into the divine, with or without organized religion and churchgoing, and this from a Harvard Divinity School grad and Unitarian minister. His essay turned heads, and it, along with other essays like self-reliance, and the American scholar inspired the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Fuller, and even the Catskills own John Burroughs. To help understand Emerson's impact then and now and why he's still worth celebrating, I'm joined by Leslie T. Sharpe, a student of ancient Greek with undergraduate and graduate degrees to show for it. She credits her dad for the encouragement to pursue such a major, and this is important because, as we'll hear later in the show, Emerson was also a special guy with progressive views and a generous spirit. Leslie was named one of the 50 Stewards of the Catskills by the Catskill Center, she's the former VP of the New York City Audubon Society, and she's the author of "The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills" with a companion audiobook, narrated by Leslie and produced by Kaatscast's parent studio, Silver Hollow Audio. She's also one of my biggest fans and a good friend. Welcome, Leslie.

Audience  3:03  
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Leslie T. Sharpe  3:08  
Thank you, Brett. I am one of your biggest fans.

Brett Barry  3:12  
Sitting to Leslie's left is another good friend and another steward of the Catskills. Bill Birns, so in other words, 4% of the Catskill stewards are right here. Bill is the author of several locally focused books, including "A Catskill Catalog" and "I Was Corning a Beaver, Like You Do: Joe Hewitt, John Burroughs, Mountain Culture." Generations of Catskills kids had Mr. Bill Birns as a teacher, and he's known by many graduates of Margaretville Central School and Onteora High School. Bill was also the president of the John Burroughs Woodchuck Lodge, where I first met him, and even though he pulled me onto that board and then left it; we're still on very good speaking terms. Bill has a PhD in rhetoric and linguistics, and he's never once asked me to call him "Doctor." Welcome, Bill.

Audience  4:04  
[APPLAUSE]

Bill Birns  4:07  
Thank you.

Brett Barry  4:09  
And finally, to underscore today's Emerson program, we're joined by Catskiller Steve Koester, whose band "Two Dark Birds" was recently hailed as poet-grade and quietly experimental folk music. Their fourth album, "Reservoir," was created as a soundtrack to Nina Shengold's book, "Reservoir Year," and is described as woody, watery, meditative, deeply Catskillian. Steve also led the John Burroughs Memorial Locust & Wild Honey Mountain Orchestra, celebrating the works of John Burroughs through music, and even though he's not in the Catskill Center's First Batch of Catskill Stewards. His wife, Jessie, interviewed and wrote about all fifty of them for the companion book. Steve, welcome to the show.

Audience  4:53  
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Brett Barry  4:53  
So let's talk, Emerson. Leslie T. Sharpe and Bill Birns, there's a reason I asked you both to join us. Today, in 1877, Catskills naturalist John Burroughs wrote about Emerson, and in his book, "Birds and Poets," there's an excerpt that says, "Where he is at all he is entirely—nothing extemporaneous; his most casual word seems to have laid in pickle a long time, and is saturated through and through with the Emersonian brine. Indeed, so pungent and penetrating is his quality, that even his quotations seem more than half his own." He also writes, "He is being or has been so completely absorbed by his times, that readers and hearers hereafter will get him from a thousand sources, or his contribution will become the common property of the race." "Emerson appeals to youth and to genius. If you have these, you will understand him and delight in him; if not, or neither of them, you will make little of him. And I do not see why this should not be just as true any time hence as at present."

Audio  6:10  
[MUSIC]

Brett Barry  6:14  
So if youth and genius aren't on my side, how accessible is Emerson to today's readers, and what are some of his lasting influences? And I guess, Leslie, if we can start with you to tell us a little bit about "Emerson Man."

Leslie T. Sharpe  6:28  
And thanks so much, Brett. You know, how many writers do you know have a resort named after them? This guy here ... he was, as Brett just said, found a transcendentalism; he was at the center of one of the most glittering literary circles that included, you know, Thoreau, as we try to pronounce that name right, and, of course, Walt Whitman, but who was this guy, and the first thing you need to know is that he called himself "Waldo," and his family and friends called him "Waldo." I think that's a very humanizing thing, but he wasn't in any way a mere man of the mind. He had such beliefs as the transcendentalist did in goodness. I'm going to give you some quotes, I'd rather tell you about him through his quotes. "The purpose of life is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well." He placed, though, a high premium on laughter. I think people tend to see a figure like Mr. Emerson and wonder. What was this guy? He said, "To have played and laughed with enthusiasm, and sung with exultation—this is to have succeeded," and his ultimate success was this and this I find very moving because this goes to the man's compassion, and above all, he was a very compassionate person. We would only give him sainthood but, you know, he was pretty close. "To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." The transcendentalists, led by Emerson, are very strongly anti-slavery, and part of that is the core tenets of their belief was personal freedom and free will. They have had a reaction to predestination and original sin and all of that stuff, and he said this sentence, which is very broad, "Emancipation is the demand of civilization," but listen to this quote, and Brett referred to his quotes. A lot of people think that the story of his literary output can really be told more in his quotations. He had the ability to extract, in a few words, such important messages and to really hit you with them. Listen to this. "If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own," and of all of the statements about slavery, it's not just talking about the effect on the enslaved, but how soul-destroying it really is for the slaver, and it's very clever. As a writer, I appreciate this so much, and fast is itself around your own meaning; he talks right to the people. The transcendentalists, as I said, were very fiercely anti-slavery. Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's dad, who was a member of this circle, took in John Brown's family after John Brown was hung. They were part of the Underground Railroad, and also ... Emerson entertained John Brown in his home. A lot of people Emerson had, I think, because, you know, we think of his essays; the essays were originally lectures, so they start off in ... from a kind of cool sort of, you know, rhetorical point, and then they'll build a bit, so I think in a sense, a lot of people look at those so-called essays that were lectures and thinking is a little bit tepid about some things. That's why the best way to read him is to find his journals, because that's where he really lets us narrow down, as we will see. One of the things that I want to talk about to a degree that isn't explored is his relationship with women: how they influenced him, shaped his attitude towards women's rights, and pushed him to support them, and it's the essay ... woman is one that is not even put in the canon of ... essay is three, but it's very interesting, and some of you may have heard of Margaret Fuller, who we're going to talk about a bit. Today, she was the woman that changed so many of his precepts about women and about gender, for that matter, and she was an extraordinary figure, really the first American public intellectual. She lived in the nineteenth century [of the nineteenth century] and lived into the nineteenth century. She was called the most well-read woman in New England, and she was the only person really regarded as Emerson's intellectual equal, which was kind of interesting to think—and partially, she's kind of had a resurgence because of women's studies and things like that, but again, so often women tend to sort of fall by the wayside, and a lot of people haven't even heard of her, and she was a hoot, as we'll see, just some general influence: he was raised by his mom, Ruth Haskins, and by his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who spent a lot of time in the house, and what happened was ... his dad was a Unitarian minister, died when he was eight, and there was a lot of influence on him of death. You know, as Brett and I were talking earlier, I said, "In those days, Brett, death was in a shadow." It was your companion and he lost two. He would lose two brothers; he would lose his oldest child when his child was five, Young Waldo, and he lost, and he never quite recovered; he lost his first wife to tuberculosis when she was just twenty, and that's one of the things that Margaret Fuller kind of walked in because, as much as he loved his second wife, he was bereft of intellectual companionship, but his mom was also a teacher, and in those days, a little bit about girls' education, which is kind of interesting. Obviously, there are no public schools; that wasn't a mandate to teach girls so that the girls, maybe of the upper classes, would go to schools and genteel ladies homes and they would learn reading, writing, arithmetic, maybe singing, maybe dancing, and they also learn embroidery, which is actually pretty serious. I'm sure some of you collect colonial samplers; I sure do, and that was an art form that sprung out of that very early girls' education. Now, Emerson and his older brother, William, who was also to die not of tuberculosis but of tetanus, something was gonna get you young in those days. They both taught in his mother's school, and although it was kind of a modest curriculum, the emphasis of these, if you want to call them "transcendentalists" [these sort of New Englanders], was on progressive education, and part of progressive education meant teaching girls, and he did. He had that mandate. Now, just a couple of words on that to give you an idea: Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's dad, founded the Temple School in Boston, which was co-ed, and Bronson was a whole book in himself. He was a total character: transcendentalist, passionate, anti-slavery, passionate, progressive educator, and all of the women that would come out of this era and do anything, and this is a shout out to all you girl dads in the audience, including these guys, is that those women were educated by their dads independently very often. These women were pushed by their fathers; certainly some of you may have heard of Susan Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper's daughter, and he educated her with his own sons, and she would write "Rural Hours," which was the first nature book of place. It was about Cooperstown that influenced John Burroughs, and it influenced Thoreau, too, and then, of course, you had Bronson Alcott. Guess who ... his daughter? I guess it was his daughter, Louisa May, and they had a passionate relationship; he and his wife of the mind, and they were both, you know, not only supportive of her and educated her, but pushed her to be independent ... pushed her. Not just ... she not only wanted to be a great writer. She was an interesting young woman. She wanted to be famous. That's what Louisa May wanted to be. She wanted to be rich, and guess what? She got it, and that a lot at ... had ... had to do not only with her parents but with a father behind her who pushed her, so [then], as now, dads are very important for daughters. Now, it's a story about Bronson Alcott. This will give you a sense of the progressive educators he found at the Temple School in Boston. You had kids; girls came co-ed; that was important to them. Everything was fine, and then Bronson, being Bronson, started discussing religion. Oh, here we go, and then he just started discussing sex; that was really getting a little bit, so half the family left, right? But what he really did ... he brought a young African American girl to the school, and that was the end of the school, so the point is ... the transcendentalists, and, of course, Bronson was a big one. They always believed in pushing the envelope for social justice, and they also believed. They were all progressive educators. The wives of many of these transcendentalists were also educators. They believe that education is the ... truly the first and most significant step to equality, which is equality of the sexes, equality of the races, and that seems so obvious to us today, but you know what? it was radical and shocking then, and you know what? In some cultures, it's still radical and shocking, as we know, and [her] Margaret Fuller—she was ... by the time she entered Emerson's Circle in 19 ... excuse me, I put it up a little bit here, 1835, he was already established as the sage of Concord. Now, he was only seven years older than she was at 32, but it sounds like he was so much older, and she was 25, and as with most women, her dad had educated her. She was reading it, for she was a prodigy. She knew Latin and Greek, and thank you for giving me my Greek credits. No one ever talks about that, and I forget to, and she knew ... taught her ... French, German, Italian ... she was versed in philosophy, and she was a student in pure mathematics. She clearly was a wunderkind, and she wanted to meet Emerson, and Emerson would invite people to his home, and they didn't just come for tea; they stayed for like three weeks, and, of course, we know that Thoreau and this is part of Emerson's generosity. Thoreau stayed as this tutor and the handyman. Don't you love the idea ... Thoreau is your handyman? I guess ...

Everyone  17:52  
[LAUGHTER]

Leslie T. Sharpe  17:53  
I guess I really shouldn't make fun of that because the guy did build his own cabin, didn't he? But I don't know; I just really ... cracks me up that idea, and so what happened was that Emerson had heard her ... her reputation; she was so erudite for such a young person, and he also read her ... her translation of Goethe's "Tasso," so I'm just going to sit down and spend a couple of days translating Goethe; that's what Margaret Fuller was. He also was intrigued by this quote, and this will give you a hint. He read this quote of her as all the marriages I've ever known were a mutual degradation. Emerson was very taken with her—well, her originality—can we call it that? The truth was, he himself was sorrowing in an intellectually unriveting marriage; his wife is lovely, but he didn't have that connection, and he would bond with Margaret in a way that he would with no one else. Now, he's very circumspect in his essays or his lectures, but in his journal, he's another person. He wrote this in his journal, one of his journals, and when it's ... I almost cried ... too involved with this guy. Most of the persons whom I see in my own house, I see across a gulf. I cannot go to them, nor they come to me. I mean, that's kind of heart-rending, but Margaret, with her glittering intellect, she bridged that gulf. She became the first woman member of the Transcendental Boys' Club. I added boys, and that was something that he would move out of because of her. Now, this is Emerson. Now we know Emerson measured. This is what he wrote to her in a letter. "O divine mermaid or fisher of men, to whom all gods have given the witch-hazel-wand ... I am yours & yours shall be." Can you imagine Emerson saying that? Well, you did. Margaret was really ... fire to his water, but he would recoil from her intensity and the intimacy of their correspondence. He wrote in his journal, "There is no terror like the terror of being known." Now for Margaret's part, this is what's so interesting about her: 100 years before Virginia Woolf, 100 years before Simone de Beauvoir. She experienced friendship and romance, much as she did male and female, in a non-binary way. She denounced the duality of gender. This is an 1830s ... Remember ... and insisted that quote, "There is no wholly masculine man and no purely feminine woman." Can you imagine saying this? Now would get her in trouble. The boundary she noted in her groundbreaking "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," which was the first great work of feminism, and the first great work of feminism until the Second Sex—de Beauvoir. She wrote, "The boundary between male and female is porous. Fluid hardens to solid; solid rushes to fluid as male and female are perpetually rushing into one another." Now, this was a century before Virginia Woolf challenged gender identity in Orlando, which was a book that I read when I was in college, and I really had no idea what it's about. Now I do. Woolf challenged gender identity and stated, "In each of us, two powers preside: the male and the female." This was 100 years after Margaret said the same thing. Now, both Emerson and Margaret accepted the notion of innate differences between the sexes: the male and female principles in nature, but thanks to Margaret. Emerson came to believe that the best and most interesting natures had both elements. He said, "This is Emerson, a highly endowed man with ... with good intellect and good conscience is a man-woman. Can you imagine? "This is Emerson," he wrote, and what he really got from her. Because he was a man of his time, he was a little more conventional religion, and he pulled back from assigning women a separate domestic sphere of influence, and he wrote, "I think it is impossible to separate the interests and education of the sexes." Every county, in its role of honor, has as many women as men. That was a big thing, and in 1850, he signed the Declaration of Principles put forth by the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. His essay lecture, "Woman [1855]," which no one has read, but has read but may ... call for women, and really, you don't need to. Call for women to receive their "one half of the world," their "full rights of all kinds—to education, to employment, to equal laws of property, equal rights in marriage, in the exercise of their professions, and of suffrage." She argued that if women were denied suffrage, they should not be taxed. Here he goes, and what's kind of, you know, he still was not quite sure why women would want to be in the public sphere like it's ... it's this, it's corrupt, it's based, you know, and he had a romantic image of women of being so above that, so he said, "He didn't quite understand it," but he said, "I don't really get it," but if women demand votes, offices, and political equality with men, it must not be refused. One of the things that he's talking about [this], I think, is so important because, you know, if you look at Emerson ... and there's so much about him, that I love his ... his ... his belief and goodness, and his stress on the ... on the possibility of goodness ... always there in all of us is that you're stressed intellectually, independence and critical thinking more than anything, and it's easy to talk that game, but the guy did it to himself; he applied self-criticism, self-critical thinking, and he was moved by her; she enabled these changes in him, and in 1840, when Margaret was 30, he appointed her the editor of "The Dial," which some of you may know was the first magazine in this country that was independent of a university, of a religious organization, whatever. It was independent and free thought—all subjects: literature, science, art, you name it—and he he not only did it because he felt she deserved it, and he did put her there over men in the transcendental group, but he wanted to give her an income, and this is also another characteristic of this that I love; it goes to his generosity. He was not only very forthcoming with himself, but he was very forthcoming with money, and he wanted her to be paid so she could write and be independent. Now we know that he was generous with Thoreau. I mean, Thoreau, really ... oops. Thoreau was really living with them for a while, you know, and he also let him use the 14 acres [that] with a Walden Pond area, but he was also always bailing out the Alcotts because Bronson was incompetent and he was always buying him houses, so there was this great generosity, and Margaret was Thoreau's first editor, and she kept sending us stuff back and saying, "Would you revise? Would you revise? Would you revise?" Can you imagine being Thoreau's first editor? Now, Edgar Allan Poe, who wasn't of this circle but who did have some of his work published there, said about her ... about Margaret. "Humanity is divided into men, women, and Margaret Fuller," and then, as it goes on, two years later, and, you know, there's all kinds of ways of looking at it. I didn't touch on it in detail, and one really can't ... doesn't have the time, but the correspondence between the two of them was passionate; it was clearly an under ... undertone of eroticism, clearly the push-pull of attraction repulsion; she wanted more; you know, he not only was married; you know, he was trying to be self-reliant, so it was this constant assailing in a way of him that she brought, but he was every press ... presser really drawn to her, and not only was she fired his water, I like to think that he was the ocean. That's a great way to think of him, but she was the wind, and the result was a lot of waves with these two, but she eventually left, and some people think ... well, you know, she was in love with, I don't know, we don't know any of that, and the relationship, I think, was more ... far more complex than that. She was ... she went on to be ... Horace Greeley ... hired her—the first woman columnist there. She became the first male or female literary critic. She was sent abroad by him to be the first woman foreign correspondent. She was a war correspondent during the Italian Revolution. What happened was Margaret, who was firmly against marriage; there's a line, and it's in Walden, where Thoreau says, "I came to the woods because I wanted to suck the marrow out of life, and I wanted to ... I wanted to experience all and know that I had lived." That's was ... that was really the transcend ... transcendentalists—a core to a degree—and that was Margaret, so what did she do? She goes to Italy. She gets picked up by some guy, or she picked him up ten years younger, a Marquis, who was illiterate, and they had a big affair; she had a baby with him when she was in her late thirties, which I think shocked or like, "Am I really pregnant?" and they refer to them as husband and weapon. No one ever found the marriage certificate, and I'm sure she didn't marry, and the proof of that is that Horace Greeley fired her. I think that it was a bridge too far; maybe not the affair, but she comes back with a baby. 20-month-old, poor Nino ... you know, what happened was they came back in a steamer; they didn't have a lot of money, and Emerson's true to his generosity said, "Let me buy a ticket on a good boat. No, no, no," and it was a terrible tragedy. The boat sank right off the coast of Fire Island. It's an awful tale, and he sent Thoreau. He was devastated. He sent Thoreau to try to find her manuscripts. She was writing what she thought was her masterwork, the history of that revolution, and it couldn't be found, and there was ... I used to go to Fire Island and go to that place on Point o' Woods, and I would stand there and think, "Oh my god, this is where it happened," and Thoreau was here and all that, and it was ... it was a great tragedy if he was. She was 40—great tragedy for American intellectual tradition. When I think of the relationship between these two, the only way I have of placing it is in the next century to think of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and that relationship was wrapped around a movement, too, which, of course, was existentialism. He wrote, "I have lost in her my audience," but more in her heart, which few knew was as great as her mind, which all knew, and then he devoted himself to editing her memoirs, which actually had thirteen printings. It was the most popular work until "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came along, even though they seemed to edit all the juicy stuff out—all the stuff that Margaret had in there, which you can imagine. That's ... that's the only downside to it. In terms of her death, I just want to say one more thing about him. You know, we've seen his ... his goodness; we've seen his intellectual honesty and ability to be, you know, self-critical; and we've seen his generosity. He had a lot of losses in his life. This really was very difficult for him, but he never turned to bitterness; he never let tragedy affect his spirit, and there's a great quote because we're living in a time where everybody is so damn mad all the time. This is a great quote. "For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness." It's a good thing to remember, and I'm going to leave you with my personal favorite quote, which has resonances of ... another great New Englander, Robert Frost: "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail," and that was ... is my favorite Emerson, so that's kind of a background a little bit into who he was and remember he was Waldo.

Audience  31:36  
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Brett Barry  31:36  
When John Burroughs, our hometown boy, started writing, he got his first break in the summer of 1860, when the Atlantic Monthly, a fairly new publication, accepted his essay called "Expression," and the editor found the essay very similar to Emerson's work, and it was thought that maybe he had plagiarized his longtime acquaintance. I have a couple quotes here to show the similarity. One of the famous quotes by John Burroughs is, "The place to observe nature is where you are: the walk to take today is the walk you took yesterday. You will not find just the same things: both the observed and the observer have changed; the ship is on another tack in both cases." Let's go to Emerson. Emerson says, "To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again." He also writes, "Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position, apprizes us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air," and one more quote from another essay called "The American Scholar," where he says, "Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature," so Bill, talk to us about Emerson and Burroughs and transcendentalism, and what can you tell us?

Bill Birns  33:43  
The three great influences on our hometown Catskill mountain spirit [John Burroughs] were Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, and from Darwin, he got his basing observation in observable fact. In dealing with nature, his nature [actually] is his scientific side, but Burroughs was the prophet of nature. You're out the back door, so he was very much in the Emersonian spirit of being the ... what did he call it? The transcendent eye, the invisible eye that we see—the nature that we see in a new and different way because the present moment is always different from the past, which was a present moment that no longer exists. Emerson was very much about being in the present moment, and Burroughs was very much about being in the present moment, which is why so much ... I was surprised, for example, to learn that [Burroughs] one of his famous ... favorite ... famous essays, "In the Hemlocks," which, you know, you get the least. I got the impression that he had gone to some hemlock stand distant in the Catskills but distant from, you know, he hiked in there was actually a grove that was like a quarter mile from his house because it didn't matter the distance. The distance is in the fact that we're now in a different present moment, so Emerson was very much an influence on him. What he got from Whitman was ... lead with your personality, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, it's interesting that Emerson and Karl Marx were both born about the same time, about 1803. I think, you know, three for Emerson and Karl Marx, so sometime around the same time, and so both were facing the same kinds of ... of challenges, just as we face today, the challenges of the technological communication internet world, the AI world that we're now entering quicker than we thought we were going to, and how do we deal with that? They had just entered, when both of them were born, the new industrial age. Mark's in Europe, and Emerson, certainly in New England—I mean, Lowell, Massachusetts—was churning with water-powered textile manufacturing during the early part of ... all have ever since life, in fact, and so looking for an alternative from that, Marx said, "US." Emerson said, "YOU." That was the big difference. Marx, it was everybody in this room is going to work together ... think alike in order to change this challenging situation, where for Emerson, it was the development of the individual, and the most important thing was the individual, which leads to his concern for education. I'm sure that Mary Lyon, when she ... I don't know this, but I'm sure that when she founded Mount Holyoke College, which I believe was the first female seminary that she had been reading Emerson, or new Emerson, that she was an Emersonian, bringing that forward. I don't know about Wellesley, but I'll bet it was the same idea that all the women's colleges were essentially Emersonian. You're a Wellesley girl.

Leslie T. Sharpe  37:09  
You don't, but no. But I'm close to that, yeah.

Bill Birns  37:11  
Yeah.

Leslie T. Sharpe  37:11  
They started the seminaries.

Bill Birns  37:13  
Yeah, so this idea of the individual being the ... the center of ... of his philosophy, and I think for me, it's safe to say that Emerson was America's first philosopher. Now, if you go up to the Philosophy Department at Mount Holyoke and speak to the philosophy professor, she's gonna say, "Oh, Pleshaw, Emerson is not a philosopher." My brother was a philosophy major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Strange, and he used to tell me about analytic philosophy, which I didn't understand at the time. I think I got it now, which is the ... the ... the mode of philosophy that's taught in the American Academy today; it focuses on analysis. Analysis is logic. Logic has nothing to do with Emerson's philosophy. It's intuitive; it's what we feel. Education ... a very important part of Emerson's philosophy, but unlike [the] European education, which was ... the professor was ... hair doctor, who was very much up here not to be associating with the Plebeian students that he always ... he was. I hate to say "indoctrinating," but I might, and for Emerson, education was NBA, just like the basketball league: nature, books, action—so now, knowing that ... this quote out on the wall, something like the book is always the same, it's the reader who is ... who is different is right up there. That's Emerson right there, because every time we come to the book, we come to it in the present moment as the individual we are at that moment, and we make the knowledge with the help of the book. Emerson once wrote, and I think this says a lot about our present time when everybody, you know, you don't get sick in America today; you start a journey, right? You know, we're all on a journey. We're all alike, and, you know, he's ... he's ... he's ... he or she is, you know, discussing their journey, and our life is that journey. Well, for Emerson, that process was absolutely key. "The life is the text," Emerson said, and the book is the commentary, so to put it in Judaic terms, the Torah ... the truth, because that's what the Torah supposedly is the truth ... is the life ... commentaries just the Talmud; it's what people have to say about it, so the books are less really important in education than [the] life, and whereas the life lived as the other quote on the wall outside says, "Out in the wild air," and then the third thing, and this is very American, isn't it, and that's what Emerson was very much up to. He came, you know, born in 1903. It's interesting to me that Jefferson was president when he was born. Whatever criticism we have about Jefferson, he did write the Declaration of Independence. It was very [kind of] hopeful. We're starting something new ... kind of time, and when he died in 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes was the president. He was the one responsible for saying, "Oh, we won't worry about the Negroes; as they call them in the South, you can do whatever you want with them as long as you turn your votes over to me so I can be president," so he had gone from, you know, this very hopeful time to being, as Leslie pointed out, being very, you know, involved ... he did become an abolitionist. He did become an abolitionist. Margaret Fuller was a very great influence on that. He was kind of, you know, in the middle ground there. For a while, as many people were, Whitman never came out for abolition before the war; he was a free soiler, which meant leave it where it is, but don't let it extend, so Whitman, or, excuse me, Emerson, I think, understood at his time, that if this new country, this America, was going to be [a] culturally independent, not just a political independence of the Declaration of Independence, but a political cultural independence, they put those values of the Declaration of Independence, values of equality and ... and pursuit of happiness, and all those things [life, liberty] into the culture at the time, we couldn't just borrow the stuff that was coming from Europe, which is what everybody was doing. He wasn't our first writer, right? Washington Irving was very popular in England, but Irving wrote stuff like "The Knickerbocker Almanac" there, where it's ... which were ... was, you know, kind of extending the characterization of the old time New Yorkers and for a little bit of a chuckle, and Cooper was ... was a novelist, but they were romances. You know, when my mother was a girl—she was born in 1911—she wasn't allowed to write and read novels. Novels were considered ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  40:06  
Naughty.

Bill Birns  37:13  
Thank you. They were considered naughty, and the fact that Emerson [he] never wrote a novel; he wrote essays and poems, and those essays and poems were specifically designed to break free from the European manner of writing ... the English manner of creating literature in ... a British literature. We were ... he was going to create—help create—new American literature, and he certainly did. So, can I go on? So one other thing I want to add is, "If you talk to people today, you know, the two subjects we're not supposed to talk about in polite society are politics and religion," and it seems like, "Oh, we talk about these days, so at least the politics part, but if you ask a progressive, educated, intelligent crowd like this, "Are you religious?" Eight out of ten people. Nine out of ten people I find say, "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." Emerson invented that. I'm serious, that did not ... as far as I can tell, that did not exist before Emerson. You could be a theist like our Founding Fathers, you know, where you might, you know, Washington had a pew in the local church, but, you know, he believed, you know, the watchmaker god, you know, it wasn't really a god that's going to intervene and things that happen, you know, he was not a Calvinist god whatsoever. You could be that, but you had to be ... some religion, and Emerson famously left. He left his pulpit in 1831–32. After his wife died, he had a crisis of faith. You can imagine a young woman. She was 19 years old. She had TB when he married her. He knew it was going to be a rough road. He didn't know she was going to die at 19. She did. He was broken-hearted. What kind of a god can do this? And he focused his religious doubts on the Eucharist, on the communion service in the Unitarian Church, that he was the pastor of the Second Church in Boston, and he finally may be a little bit cocky. Maybe he could be cocky occasionally, he said to his congregation, "I'm sorry. You're gonna have to choose between me and the communion service because I can't do it anymore. I just don't believe in it, and if I keep doing it, I'm going to be a hypocrite, and I think he was sure." They choose him. They didn't. They chose the communion service. He resigned honorably because they didn't choose him, and that idea of being spiritual—he wasn't. You know, he was a fill-in, you know, he made a living in the beginning by being a fill-in preacher, so, you know, you could always make a few bucks by giving a sermon at somebody's church who has to be away that Sunday, and a lecture ended up giving up the fill-in preaching and being a pretty much full-time lecturer, so really became if Margaret Fuller was our first female public intellectual. Emerson was really our first public intellectual. You know, a guy who was commenting, not just on politics, although there was some of that, but culture and all that kind of stuff, but he invented that idea of being spiritual without being religious, and the other thing I think he invented, it seems to me, is ... is reinventing yourself. Once he was no longer Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson, no longer the pastor of the Second Church in Boston, who was he, and he had to kind of reinvent himself, and today, what's more American than reinventing yourself, right? Most of the, you know, we just had Cher's 78th birthday, and not a woman—not a person in this room—knows her last name. She reinvented herself, right? She became Cher, not the girl [that] went to high school in California somewhere. Say thank you to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cher. Thanks.

Audience  40:06  
[APPLAUSE]

Brett Barry  46:39  
Thank you, Bill. So at this point, since we have a live audience, we should open it up for a little Q&A before we move on to the next segment, so Juliana has a mic there that ... even though we might be able to hear you in this room, please use the mics. We can hear you on this recording, so would anybody ... anybody have a question for Leslie T. Sharpe or Bill Birns?

Rebecca Rego Barry  46:56  
I guess I would just like to hear more about the relationship between Emerson and Thoreau, because I feel like Thoreau kind of looms large. Larger, maybe even than Emerson, in our culture, and so how did that come about?

Leslie T. Sharpe  47:11  
Yeah, it's a ... I think Bill can talk about it. I, you know, I think that's what's so ... it's a very interesting relationship in that. Thoreau was really ... started up by being more like a younger brother, even and certainly, and Emerson was his mentor, and Emerson always kind of looked after him. I mean, he sort of did that with these folks and ...  gave him a place to say, as I said, he was ... I love the idea of him being Emerson's handyman. He was also the tutor to their kids. Wasn't he, Bill? Right, but what was really interesting was ... people don't really know this, but Emerson himself spent two years in the woods, you know, doing what Thoreau would do later, you know, in a cabin writing. He did that before when he was quite young, after he graduated from Harvard, and I'm not saying that Thoreau imitated that because they're obviously took it to another level because he wrote "Walden: Life in the Woods" out of that, but ... but he gave him ... he led ... gave him the use of those 14 acres. We were sort of ... think of Thoreau in the woods, and we think of him like maybe on Mount Tremper, but those 14 acres ... they were in Concord. I mean, what Thoreau would do: he build his cabin, and he would very often ... people would come and visit. He would very often go into town and have dinner with friends. He would go over to the Emersons. He wasn't in wild nature. Isn't that fair to say?

Bill Birns  47:23  
Yes.

Leslie T. Sharpe  47:24  
You know, and ... but one of ... we were talking earlier about, and, of course, another influence. Emerson himself read was being very influenced by Eastern religion ... mysticism, and Thoreau, of course, really went in that direction, too. I mean, this is ... remember, this is the 1830s, the 1840s, and you had Thoreau. I love this image of him sitting cross-legged outside of his hut—you know, being a swami—and he was moving towards so many of the principles of Eastern religion, including vegetarianism. He did come to the point where he basically. I think he said it about a groundhog. This ... this is not ... this life has no more value than my own. He really came to that, but Emerson also had those influences, so I do think there was not a falling out at the end, but sort of unnecessary redefining that Thoreau did of himself and so stepped away a little bit. Bill, maybe, you know.

Bill Birns  49:51  
Well, I think we lose a little something about these kinds of relationships when we think of them as individual relationships. You know, it's Waldo and Henry David, but really, there were ... there were family relationships involved, too. I think I just read this great book. I can't give you the title. It's on my phone. If you're interested, I'll give it to you later, but it was about this guy who wrote a history of the world from, like, you know, way, way back in BC, focusing on families, so he didn't write about Julius Caesar. He wrote about the Caesars [the family], and when he introduced ... he didn't even write about Donald Trump. He wrote about Donald Trump's grandfather coming to America for the first time, so everything was through the family. Thoreau did tutor, as Leslie pointed out, the children of Emerson, so he was involved with his kids. We all here have people who we became friends with because our kids were friends with their kids. If we have children, you know what I mean? So there was that thing going on, and Thoreau and Mrs. Emerson [Lidian] and you had pointed out, which I didn't realize Leslie pointed out to me earlier, that Lidian Emerson [Emerson's second wife] ... they had a good relationship. She was a fine, wonderful person, but she wasn't on the same intellectual plane that Waldo was. But she seemed to be on the same intellectual plane as Henry David was because they got along famously, and so not only was, you know, if Henry David could get exasperated with Waldo, which he could occasionally like once I was telling the story earlier when he was in jail, and Walter wasn't in jail, and he was in jail because he didn't pay his taxes to support the Mexican War, and Waldo looks through the bars at the jailhouse, exasperated with his young mentee because it really was a mentor-mentee kind of relationship, and says, "What are you doing in there, Henry?" and Thoreau says, "What are you doing out there, Waldo?" Right, you paid your taxes to support these lousy wars; wasn't where you were the one, but so even when he would get exasperated with Emerson or Emerson would lose his patience with the younger, and I don't know what the age difference was, somehow 18 years.

Leslie T. Sharpe  52:02  
I think about, yes.

Bill Birns  52:03  
Yeah, interestingly, let me finish, but there was always that connection with Lidian, so, you know, it's a kind of thing where you're friends with a family and you're a little bit perturbed with one of the members of the couple that ... that had up that family, but you're still very much friends with the other one, so that family connection was very important to the two of them as well.

Leslie T. Sharpe  52:25  
Yeah, I think [also] his attraction for Lidian ... it's part ... as you pointed out, it's the family thing, and being in the family, you know, tutoring the kids, he really was like another child, and it was she ... if you read what Emerson said when we're talking when I was talking earlier about Margaret Fuller and what, you know, she brought the fire to him intellectually that his wife didn't have it. His wife was very threatened by her, by the way, you know, because, you know, she would come and she'd stay for three weeks, and the two of them would sit at the dinner table together talking, and she would be they didn't mean to, but she was completely excluded, you know, from that whole thing, and they would work across from each other in different rooms and there, and before 'Young Waldo,' the ... when it ... before he died at five would carry notes back-and-forth, they had this kind of romantic, you know, link ... linkage, but he wasn't. Walter wasn't looking for a mom. I think Thoreau ... Thoreau, to a degree, was looking for a mom, and he was looking for that family structure because his whole life was so unstructured, which is one of the things that we love about him. You know, he was such a wild man in a way, and, of course, he ... again, he died very young, and he died of tuberculosis. He was 42. I think—another one, you know—and it was another loss that he experienced.

Bill Birns  53:46  
Interestingly enough, Walt Whitman and John Burroughs were close friends about the same age difference as Emerson and ... and Thoreau, so and there, too, it was the family, the wives, that get left out of the history book, you know, so Lidian Emerson was very important in the relationship between Ralph Waldo and Henry David. Well, Ursula Burroughs [John Burroughs' wife] was very important in the relationship between John Burroughs and Walt Whitman because, if you know anything about John Burroughs, he was not a good husband, and he ... he was not.

Leslie T. Sharpe  54:24  
Normally.

Bill Birns  54:25  
Yeah, sorry.

Leslie T. Sharpe  54:26  
I'm laughing because ... I'm laughing because Walt Whitman of all people scolded him for being a libertarian, and so if Walt Whitman's scolding you, you're in trouble.

Bill Birns  54:35  
Exactly, and whenever there would be difficulty between Ursula and John, "Walk always took Ursula's side," so that ... that in that marriage, he felt that John was the one who was messing up, not Ursula, and, you know, they had brunch—what we would call brunch together. I don't know if mimosas were included. Every Sunday in ... when Burroughs and Ursula were living in Washington D.C., which was from 1864 to 1873 [nine years], and the whole reason that Burroughs went to Washington, not the whole reason, he also wanted to find a job that would allow him to work for the government and for the government's purpose of defeating the South without joining the army, which he didn't want to do, but he also went down there to meet Walt Whitman, because he'd read in the paper that Whitman was in Washington, D.C., tending to the wounded, and Burroughs wanted to meet him, and Burroughs ... if you've ever seen that picture that Burroughs had taken a photograph in Chicago when he was like 22 years old before the beard, of course, the beard he grew in tribute to Whitman, and I swear, when I got to Margaretville in 1971, the boy ... we all wore beards and sideburns in all. It's 1971, and the ... the guys from Roxbury wore longer, fuller, less trimmed beards than anybody from the surrounding towns, and I swear that was still the influence of John Burroughs, who had been dead for exactly 50 years at that point. I believe that I will until I die, but anyway, before the beard before it, which was a tribute to Whitman, Burroughs was a really handsome young kid. and, of course, that might have spurred some of Whitman's interest as well, though there's no evidence that Burroughs returned any of that, although he had great affection for Walt, so you know that ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  56:24  
I think one of my favorite ... I think Burroughs' so loved his work. He called him Jesus Christ on Earth.

Bill Birns  56:31  
As do a number of people.

Leslie T. Sharpe  56:32  
Right.

Bill Birns  56:33  
Yeah.

Leslie T. Sharpe  56:33  
No, that might have been a little, you know, hyperbole intentionally, but he adored Whitman, and he was a great champion of Whitman, and, of course, Emerson was Whitman's great champion, too.

Bill Birns  56:43  
Yes, yeah.

Brett Barry  56:44  
Everybody seemed to know each other back then.

Bill Birns  56:46  
Yeah.

Leslie T. Sharpe  56:47  
So totally cool about this, you know, but the difference was they knew each other, but they don't seem to have all been sleeping with each other. Now, it would be ... they don't know each other, but they're all sleeping with each other.

Bill Birns  56:59  
And people will say, "Well, was Burroughs a transcendentalist?" Well, there was a self-identified transcendentalist in Columbia County named Benton. I don't remember his first name, and Burroughs would visit with Benton, but Burroughs never called himself a transcendentalist, although when you look at the spiritual views of Burroughs, which are very much tied up with nature, and there is that sort of pantheistic sense in him, in many ways he was, but what did Emerson teach? He taught, "Don't follow somebody else's school of thought." Don't you know? You've got to have your own original thought at each time, so calling yourself a transcendentalist [maybe] makes you not a transcendentalist because you've identified with somebody else's school of thought.

Brett Barry  57:50  
Did that answer your question? [LAUGHTER] Juliana, can we get a microphone over here, please?

Bruce Barry  57:57  
You had mentioned earlier that Mount Holyoke was influenced by Emerson. What about Emerson College? Do you have any connections at all?

Bill Birns  58:08  
Well, I think Emerson College is a lot younger than Mount Holyoke, is my guess. Again, I don't know any of this, so it's all making ... I'm making all this stuff up, but no, it just seems to me that Emerson College is a lot younger than Mount Holyoke, so it probably was less directly, whereas I ... I'm sure I'm going to look it up when I get home. I'm gonna look up Mary Lyon, and I'll bet Emerson's name will appear somewhere in the article about her. I'm not sure that I think ... my guess is the naming of Emerson College was like the naming of the Emerson Spa & Resort. It was a tribute to somebody whose historical importance fit with the mission, as it fits with the mission here since the mission here is to get people out into nature, expanding their individual, you know, spa feelings.

Brett Barry  58:59  
We have another question.

Lou Mauriello  59:02  
So you just ... just now ... mentioned everybody knew everyone, right, and you ... earlier we're talking about his ... his kind of ideology about slavery, and I was watching an Orson Welles video earlier today where he was talking about Julia Howe, her version of "John Brown's Body," which became the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Leslie T. Sharpe  59:28  
Exactly.

Lou Mauriello  59:28  
And ... and I'm thinking about, like, her kind of concept of not being controlled by others. Was she part of the, you know, the Emersonian ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  59:37  
She's not really mentioned, is she?

Bill Birns  59:38  
Not that I'm not aware of, no.

Leslie T. Sharpe  59:41  
But, you know, what's so interesting about that, though? John Brown—he's an endlessly fascinating figure, and, of course, as you all know, he led the raid on Harpers Ferry, and people were killed, and he was doing it to start the Civil War to have a ... hopefully have a slave uprising. It didn't happen. They hung him, blah, blah, blah, and a lot of people thought it was sort of a failed gesture, but you know that ... it's so interesting, and we forget this today that he really did end up doing what he wanted to do. There was a civil war, and John Brown, who was sort of looked at like a criminal, and it was Robert D. Lee that actually caught him. It's interesting when he was with the Union Army, but the thing about John Brown that was so interesting that the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"—"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored"—originally was "John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave," and that's a version that we've all forgotten, but that's what the Union Forces sang going into battle, so John Brown, who was considered to be a criminal, turned out in retrospect to be the rallying cause of the Union troops, and that's what they marched through, and then she came along, and someone said, "Do you think we could sort of finesse this a little bit?" Maybe that guy, you know, and that, and that's how they ... they changed it, and that's how we know it, but that original song was the exultation of him, and he basically achieved what he wanted to do, and his ... it's still kind of an ambivalent attitude that the country has toward him because he did. He did lead a raid on an American military facility. He did kill soldiers. His own. He took [his] half his family there. He was killed with him, but there are some times in life when you need an unrepentant, fervid, wild-eyed man. If you see the pictures of him that they always show, well, guess what? It worked, so here's to John Brown.

Bill Birns  1:01:53  
Here's my theory: you can tell where the American society is at any point in time by your attitude towards John Brown.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:01:55  
That's a great ...

Bill Birns  1:02:01  
So that ... I graduated high school in 1966, and in 19 ... 2000, and let's say 2006, just to be even, I was teaching a class in Onteora High School. It was a team taught class with my friend and former colleague, Jason Calinda, and it's ... he's doing the Social Studies. I'm doing the English, but we're really doing everything together, and now it's time to turn towards the Civil War, and he turns towards John Brown, one of the great heroes of America, and I'm like ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:02:28  
What?

Bill Birns  1:02:29  
Ah, because when I was in school, John Brown was a criminal.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:02:33  
Right, exactly, exactly.

Bill Birns  1:02:35  
And it just jumped me about when Jason was in school, and when many of ... some of you were in school, some of the younger ones here, John Brown was a hero, and today, I think John Brown is seen as a hero because I think that's where America is today, but much as we look back at ... well, the sixties, we hadn't caught up with John Brown yet. I'll tell you that. He was still a bad guy, so and what will he be in 50 years? I don't know. Some of us will be around to tell the rest of us who aren't.

Brett Barry  1:03:09  
So as ... oh yes, please. Jonas?

Jonas Finkel  1:03:13  
Hi, um, I'm kind of curious about the Thoreau-Emerson thing in a specific way, so like my sense of reading Thoreau is that ... at least especially in the later years, um, that there was this sort of line between him and Emerson that they couldn't quite ever piece together, and that was that Thoreau, it seems to be ... to me that he was his hatred of humanity almost kind of was ... it was his contribution in a way to transcendentalism, in which and you kind of get the sense that he's ... he's always going towards nature and farther away from humanity, whereas Emerson, his ... his idea of transcendentalism was using nature as a ... as a way to build sort of civilization and society around sort of the archetypes within nature as opposed to ... Thoreau, who almost wanted to escape the sort of shackles of being part of society kit, would you be able to comment on that at all?

Bill Birns  1:04:20  
I personally think that's exactly right.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:04:22  
Right.

Bill Birns  1:04:23  
That I don't believe.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:04:24  
Well said!

Bill Birns  1:04:25  
I'm not a big Thoreau guy to tell you the truth, and John Burroughs was not a big Thoreau guy. He was constantly being compared to Thoreau and he did not see the comparison.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:04:33  
So there was a lot of competition ...

Bill Birns  1:04:34  
There was a lot of competition.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:04:36  
... because the road got the credit.

Bill Birns  1:04:37  
Right, Thoreau did ... Thoreau ... to my way of thinking, Thoreau was not going into nature. Thoreau was leaving society that he ... that's what he was all about, and ... and he was, I mean, the very fact that he didn't really go into nature. He was at Walden Pond, which was on a plot of 9 acres that was owned by his friend, Emerson, and I think he went to have breakfast with Lidian properly every morning. He spent a lot of time with ladies.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:05:04  
He was always going into town.

Bill Birns  1:05:06  
And, you know, walled so much of Walden is about counting nails. You know, isn't it? Right, isn't it? I built it. I built this cabin with this carton of nails and ... and it was really about this being self-sufficient thing and less about using the NBA: National Basketball Association and Nature, Books, and Action, so, I guess, Henry David could say that, you know, he's in nature by being out in that cabin. He's got books with him, and his action is simply being out there, but I don't think as you pointed out, Jason, it was that ... that same idea of using your immersing into the natural world for personal growth. It was more like, "I want to get away from this corrupt society."

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:05:53  
But, you know, if you look at all of these guys, I mean, if we're looking at Emerson and if we look at Burroughs, of course, and we look at, I guess, we have to pronounce this as a, you know, Thoreau is supposed to ... we're supposed to pronounce it that way. Who ... who is the one that has the most lasting influence? I think who is the one that people hearken to? I think it's got to be Thoreau part ... partially, you know, because of his experience in jail, and how ... what was the ... remind me the name of that wonderful essay that he wrote.

Brett Barry  1:06:24  
"Civil Disobedience."

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:06:24  
"Civil Disobedience"—that was ... that essay, really, if you think about the ripples, if you think about everyone, Gandhi, if you think about Dr. King, who, you know, was reading that, so many people were so influenced by that ... that he ... in a way, I don't think Emerson had the temperament to sort of step outside, and this is not a criticism, but Thoreau didn't care, and he didn't get any ... didn't like society, and he didn't like society because of these criticisms of society. He thought it was on just ... not just the taxation for some stupid war, but he thought everything about it was unjust, and he's the one ... he's the one, I think, that endures more than ... more than anyone not that he's easy to read. God knows. He's not, and Margaret Fuller was right when she sent back his stuff, and said, "Rewrite it," you know, but he really is the one that ... that lights a fire, and I ... I can't help, but love him so much because of how totally ahead of his time he was, and he was another one who ... who changed and who grew, but I think if you look at ... if you look at the lasting influence and I do think "Civil Disobedience" still stands as maybe his greatest contribution, it's ... think of how it changed: Gandhi in India and Dr. King here. I mean, that's pretty impressive, you know.

Bruce Barry  1:06:41  
That is ... this podcast is fantastic, and what's brought us all ... what's brought us all here, and I'm saying the big picture to the Catskills ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:07:57  
Right.

Bruce Barry  1:07:59  
... is the philosophy of Emerson to get out here in nature and enjoy what we have—not get caught up in the daily grind of human activity. Thank you.

Male Voice  1:08:25  
Thank you.

Female Voice  1:08:26  
Thank you.

Audience  1:08:33  
[APPLAUSE]

Tommy Rinaldo  1:08:34  
Thank you. The comment about everyone knowing each other, just a name that is popped up in my mind is, as that didn't come up in any of his conversation was Frederick Douglass, and ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:08:48  
Oh, interesting.

Tommy Rinaldo  1:08:49  
... and, you know, there's ... there was crossover between white abolitionists, and ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:08:54  
Yes.

Tommy Rinaldo  1:08:54  
... and I'm just wondering was too much of a Nexus that was between Frederick Douglass and the people are talking.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:09:02  
Do you know?

Everyone  1:09:03  
I don't. I don't.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:09:04  
I don't either, which probably means "no," that there's ... that there for ... for all of the transcendentalists, you know, pushing progressive education and everything like that. There was still color lines clearly.

Bill Birns  1:09:19  
One of the things it's hard for us to kind of grapple with is the population change. You know, yes, everybody knew each other, but there were so many fewer people in America, and America was such a smaller place. In terms of, you know, we were not a continental nation at that time. I mean, I'm always surprised when I ... John F. Kennedy was elected president when 130 million people lived in this country. It's 330 million now, so ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:09:50  
Wow!

Bill Birns  1:09:51  
... you know, when I was first teaching in Margaretville, I taught a class in "The Population Explosion," and that was what everybody was talking about in the early seventies was, you know, "The Population Explosion." It's uncomfortable to talk about now because we know that there are people actively talking in our socio political world who would propose solutions to the population that shouldn't be said, so we don't talk about it anymore. So instead, we talk ... this is my view anyway. Instead, we talk about climate change. It's the same thing. There's just too many people on the same size earth, right, and that's changed the climate ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:09:51  
Yeah.

Bill Birns  1:09:54  
... and it's easier to deal with the idea of climate may not be easier practically, but it's easier morally to deal with the question of climate change than to deal with the fact that we've got seven or eight billion people on the planet, and we thought we had a population problem when there were two or three billion people on the planet.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:10:50  
Well, there's a third rail for you.

Bill Birns  1:10:52  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  1:10:56  
Well, we've covered a lot of ground, and I just want to thank you, Bill and Leslie. Bill and Leslie are no strangers to the Kaatscast podcast. In fact, if you search "Birns" [B-I-R-N-S] at kaatscast.com, you'll find two episodes that feature him including a history of Hobart's greatest son, John Davenport Clarke, which we recorded during the pandemic outside at a distance, and our ... another episode of "Voices from the Central Catskills" with reminiscences of John Burroughs, Steve Koester's in that one, too, and if you search for Leslie on our website, you'll find her on "The Bluebird Chronicles: A Catskills Romance" and "The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills." Also, she's featured in a show about "Writers in the Mountains," so lots of information there to ... to delve more deeply into the many, many things that these two individuals can talk about intelligently, so at this point in the program, I just want to bring in Jonas Finkel, who is the social media coordinator and quite a few other things here at the Emerson Resort, including house trivia host, so we asked him to host our Ralph Waldo Emerson trivia complete with Emerson Resort prizes. That's for our live studio audience right after the show, so please stick around, and listeners at home, you can play, too, just click the link in the show notes for our online version, and we'll mail a prize to the three listeners with the highest scores, but please, no googling. So, Jonas, please take that microphone right there, and welcome to the show. Thank you for ... for hosting us, and can you tell us a little bit about how you feel this resort [The Emerson Resort] embodies Emerson [the man]?

Jonas Finkel  1:12:44  
Yeah, well, I mean, besides him being our namesake, I would say, "I mean, first of all, I think it was mentioned earlier, but the first thing you basically see when you walk into the Emerson are his quotes," and they lined the hallways, they're right behind the front desk, so they're everywhere. You know, we also sell a lot of the transcendentalist collections of essays, books, whether we're talking: Thoreau, Burroughs or Emerson, you can find them all over. We ... we have a lot of his quotes inside the rooms, whether you're in the inn or over the lodge, so there, you know, we do take pride in his name, and we do try to sort of champion what he or at least carry on the legacy of that, and, you know, he had a lot to do with this area, and why ... why a lot of this land is forever wild right all around us, and, you know, we are basically in the heart of the Catskills here and enveloped on all four sides by the Catskill Mountains, and I think it's ... it's going to forever look like this. It's the reason why we get tourism here, in my opinion, is the fact that, you know, you can still come here and sort of be your own version of a modern day transcendentalist, you know, in a place like this because it's possible because it's capable, and also, I mean, we're two hours from New York City, you know, and to think that those two worlds so separate can be so close. I think it's really ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:13:06  
Well, excuse me, I think it's important to remember that the reason for that is ... this is all part of the Catskill Park ...

Jonas Finkel  1:14:19  
That's right.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:14:19  
... the Adirondack Park ... I mean, the ... it's millions of preserve land, but that forever wild is ... was put in to preserve our forests, and so it's really codified in state law that ... Catskill Park, the Adirondack Park, nobody can screw it.

Jonas Finkel  1:14:38  
That's right, and when you look outside, you'll see there's ... there's no McDonald's around the corner. It's ... it's green.

Brett Barry  1:14:44  
How has the Emerson or how does the Emerson embrace and celebrate the Catskills on a day-to-day basis and the opportunities that you provide the guests here?

Jonas Finkel  1:14:54  
Yeah, yeah, we have a lot. Well, first off, we do guided nature walks here and part of that is actually explaining the history of the Catskills and of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his impact, as well as other transcendentalists, and that's really big, but we also do a lot of like experiences and activities here as well with ... with found objects, whether it's pebble painting or we actually use a lot of other ... sort of found objects like ... we have this Japanese knotweed that is actually, you know, kind of an invasive species, but what we do with it is, you know, we'll cut it down and we create ... like wind chimes out of them and things like that for ... for our guests to experience. Also, I mean, just the spa itself. You know, it's ... it's inspired by nature, and ... and ... and, you know, I'll put it to you this way. I've ... I've been working here for over a decade now, I mean, and that's essentially a third of my life, and, you know, it is. In some ways, a job [like most jobs], and most of the time, I spend a lot of time on screens, you know, reading emails, doing what I have to do, and that way, but, you know, I get a lunch break or ... or just, you know, any kind of break, really, and I can come outside and go sit on the banks of the Esopus Creek, and just ... just doing that, as someone who works here, I mean, just that idea and knowing that, basically, you know, my job is ... is to kind of give out the invitation to people who really need that ... that sort of thing, need that break, need that ... that three inches of shoulder-lowering, you know, from the rat race of life, and I think that that's ... that's really the main focus of the Emerson is to kind of get people away from ... from that and to really feel like they're ... they're being enveloped by nature.

Brett Barry  1:16:43  
It's great. Thank you so much, Jonas.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:16:46  
There's one other thing I wanted to point out that Emerson has that is personally exciting to me because I know the artist, and that's Alison Berry.

Female Voice  1:16:46  
Yes.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:16:46  
If you go out, take a right, you will see a series of panels. She's an incredible painter/artist, and it's been ... it's a permanent installation. I'm thrilled to say, "I hadn't seen it for a while," and I was hoping it was still up, and it's the history of the Catskill Watershed from the very beginning, all the way up to now, and I really urge you all to look, and that's such a wonderful thing that Emerson did. First of all, I was so happy for Alison because she's at the house, but secondly, it's a brilliant, brilliant series of paintings that are ...

Jonas Finkel  1:17:28  
It's ... it is. It's a great piece, and actually, usually when ... when we do one of these guided nature walks, that's usually the first thing we point out to kind of set up the context.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:17:38  
Right.

Jonas Finkel  1:17:39  
We know where we're about to go walk.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:17:41  
That would make her so happy ...

Jonas Finkel  1:17:41  
Yeah.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:17:42  
... and as we're talking, it occurs to me kind of like then and now like we all know each other up in the Catskills. You know, everybody who's a writer, everybody who's an educator, everybody who is a naturalist. It's like, we all know each other, don't we? Yes.

Jonas Finkel  1:17:57  
All cool kids do cool stuff together.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:17:59  
It's really cool.

Jonas Finkel  1:18:00  
Yeah, it's, yeah, it's almost as though the transcendentalist were sort of like the ... the ... like the precursor to the beatniks in a way where they had this ... this sort of crew.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:18:10  
Yeah, they certainly were as iconic classic ...

Jonas Finkel  1:18:13  
Yeah.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:18:13  
... and that's shocking. You know, I mean, but ...

Jonas Finkel  1:18:16  
Maybe even more so in their, you know, in a way.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:18:18  
... and we were ... you were talking about, you know, Emerson and religion, and, of course, one of the things he did ... he gave this ... he gave the Commencement Address at Harvard Divinity, in which he announced that, "Bible stories are all no miracles, just stories, and Jesus was a great guy, but he wasn't the Son of God," and that was the end of it, so I mean, you know, they just were always moving in a progressive direction. Not ... that's necessarily progressive; they were pushing the envelope all the time.

Jonas Finkel  1:18:46  
Yeah.

Bill Birns  1:18:47  
And I think of literature is always was strangely enough been moved by small groups of people. I mean, the beat ... the beats were not like ...

Jonas Finkel  1:18:54  
Right.

Bill Birns  1:18:54  
... unprecedented, you know, so it's always these small groups of people that end up doing something different, but together, so that it's not just one voice, and that ends up changing the direction of American literature.

Jonas Finkel  1:19:07  
And one more thing I wanted to add about sort of what we do here at the Emerson Resort is ... if you walk outside there and go down about 40 yards, you'll see we have a stream buffer garden, and that's something that we're really proud of and working towards. It's basically trying to get a lot of the natural species, plant species ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:19:26  
That's good.

Jonas Finkel  1:19:27  
... where he originally in, and to be able to help pollinate once again, and you can actually walk through those. They're really nice to have a little trickling stream in there, and something like that, but ... and the flowers will change constantly, you know, over ... over the ... overtime, but you also see ... you'll see honey bees, you'll see these butterflies, and everything like that, and you can see that it is actually working, and we're actually trying very hard to get this Japanese knotweed out of the way, so ...

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:19:51  
I know I wish like you could come and take all of our time.

Jonas Finkel  1:19:53  
It seems to be a plague on ... on everyone around.

Leslie T. Sharpe  1:19:55  
It's a single problem. You know, we know is the naturalists and environmentalists is the, you know, invasive species, which is why our hemlock forests are now struggling. That's the whole history of the woolly adelgid, and that insect that's preying on them, so that's the single biggest thing, but we keep fighting and we'll ... we'll find answers because we're going to be optimistic like Emerson.

Jonas Finkel  1:20:16  
Yes.

Bill Birns  1:20:16  
It's also a great hot tub.

Jonas Finkel  1:20:18  
It is a good hot tub.

Male Voice  1:20:19  
That's true.

Brett Barry  1:20:21  
And you just need to make more wind chimes ... more wind chime.

Jonas Finkel  1:20:23  
We've got plenty of wind chimes, actually, and we ... I bring them home to my daughter all the time. It's a lot of fun.

Brett Barry  1:20:30  
Well, thank you again, Jonas, for ... for having us here in this great room, which is called "The Great Room," and at this point in the program, we're ready for a performance of original nature-inspired selections by Steve Koester of Two Dark Birds. Take it away, Steve.

[Steve Koester plays]

Brett Barry
Steve Koester, thank you. Thank you for joining us for Kaatscast's special live recording in celebration of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who would have been 221 years old this weekend, and whose philosophies and writings still resonate. Live audience, stick around for trivia with Jonas. Podcast audience, click the link in our show notes to play at home. Many thanks to Steve Koester, Leslie T. Sharpe, Bill Birns, production assistant Juliana Merchant, announcer Campbell Brown, and the Emerson Resort and Spa for hosting this event and supporting our guests and audience with gift certificates and prizes. If you're here in person, please take some time to explore the resort after our show, and if you're listening from home, come visit the Emerson's nature-inspired spa, dine at their signature restaurant, Catamount, enjoy the Shops at Emerson; and marvel at the World’s Largest Kaleidoscope!