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Do I need to explore human history, and how?
Emerson: Art and history as a private and universal adventure
From: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, I: History
Page 5
Every thing the individual sees without him, corresponds to his states of mind, and everything is in turn intelligible to him, as his onward thinking leads him into the truth to which the fact of series belongs.
The primeval world, the Fore-World, as the Germans say- I can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching fingers in catacombs, libraries and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas.
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods, from the heroic or Homeric age, down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later?This period draws us because we are Greeks.
It is a state through which every man in some sort passes. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses- of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In it existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phoebus and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint, and take furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole head.
The manners of that period are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for personal qualities, courage, address, self-command, justice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury is not known, nor elegance. A sparse population and want make every man his own valet, cook, butcher and soldier; and the habit of supplying his own needs educates the body to wonderful performances. Such are the Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. "After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground, covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an ax, began to split wood; whereupon others arose and did the like."
Cf. Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet | Plato, Whom are we talking to? | Kierkegaard, My work as an author | Emerson, Self-knowledge | Gibson - McRury, Discovering one's face | Emerson, We differ in art, not in wisdom | Joyce, Portrait of the Artist
