Category: Blog Post

So goes the wise but rarely followed advice. (See Eric Posner for some good reasons if you remain unconvinced.) Emerson’s take, through, is my favorite:

And why must the student be solitary and silent? That he may become acquainted with his thoughts. If he pines in a lonely place, hankering for the crowd, for display, he is not in the lonely place; his heart is in the market; he does not see; he does not hear; he does not think. But go cherish your soul; expel companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then, will the faculties rise fair and full within, like forest trees and field flowers; you will have results, which, when you meet your fellow-men, you can communicate, and they will gladly receive. Do not go into solitude only that you may presently come into public. Such solitude denies itself; is public and stale. The public can get public experience, but they wish the scholar to replace to them those private, sincere, divine experiences, of which they have been defrauded by dwelling in the street. It is the noble, manlike, just thought, which is the superiority demanded of you, and not crowds but solitude confers this elevation. Not insulation of place, but independence of spirit is essential, and it is only as the garden, the cottage, the forest, and the rock, are a sort of mechanical aids to this, that they are of value. Think alone, and all places are friendly and sacred. The poets who have lived in cities have been hermits still. Inspiration makes solitude anywhere. Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, Dryden, De Stael, dwell in crowds, it may be, but the instant thought comes, the crowd grows dim to their eye; their eye fixes on the horizon, — on vacant space; they forget the bystanders; they spurn personal relations; they deal with abstractions, with verities, with ideas. They are alone with the mind.Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Literary Ethics” (1838)

From the third volume of Musa Americana, a 1920 collection of Latin poetry by Anthony Geyser, S.J., of Campion College (which seems to have morphed into a school for boys until closing in 1975, and which has become a state prison since then….):

It is hoped that the publication of the metrical Odes of the Third Series of _Musa Americana_ will help to arouse renewed interest in the Classical Literature of the Romans, and to stimulate a great love for the inimitable beauty of Horace’s immortal Odes.

Perhaps Geyser’s text (which doesn’t seem to be well known, even to Google) didn’t quite live up to its ambitions. But there’s some very neat material here that’s worth poking around—for instance, Geyser directs his talents to a translation of Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper”:

Behold her single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

…

He comes up with “Messor Solitaria”:

Solam in agris hanc videas puellam,
Montium florem! Cererem metendo
Concinit dulces numeros; morare, aut
Perge quietus!

Sola dum sternit segetes ligatque,
Concinit maestos modulos puella;
Arrigas aures! Humilis repletur
Carmine vallis.

…

Not bad! Geyser seems to have been pretty prolific, too: a 1922 volume of his Musa Americana series includes a translation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Latin iambics.

Last month, I typed up some thoughts on the Awl’s shuttering and how it’s a symptom of the “omnivorous, impatient orientation” of the kind of thinking and writing that gets amplified on today’s Internet: “ICQL-driven, algorithmically rewarded anti-content.” I was reminded of that line of thinking when Matt Mullenweg linked to a short write-up by Tom Critchlow on the virtues of “small b blogging.” Critchlow hits the nail on the head here:

I’d contend that too much of what you read on the web is written for large audiences. Too much content on the web is designed for scale, for sharing, for gloss and finish. It’s mass media, whether it’s made by a media company or an individual acting like one. So when people think of blogging their natural reference point is create something that looks like the mass media they’re consuming. Content designed for pageviews and scale.

He aphoristically revisits the point a bit later: “By writing for everyone we write for no one.” Sometimes a weird website like the Awl will try to make it in the Malthusian showdown for eyeballs and attention, but “deliberately obtuse” weather reviews are going to have a tough time in the struggle for existence.