Tfw undergrad american literature classes

>tfw undergrad american literature classes
>expecting yet another boring puritan poem or babby's first ethical ideas
>find genuinely insightful and very well-written thoughts on going against the grain and how independence and originality are a measure of greatness, reminiscent of Nietzsche
this shit is great

Transcendentalism is the only strand of American philosophy worth reading, and yet again proves the superiority of New England culture over the rest of the intellectually barren continent.

got any recommendations?

I really enjoyed that book. My favorite quotation was the one about how no landowner lets any old cart mess up the soil by travelling across it, and so too nobody with sense should allow extraneous noise and garbage to ruin their mental purity.

Nietzsche loved Emerson. Pity the vast majority of Nietzscheans here don't care to investigate this fact. Well pieced, undergrad senpai.

"Emerson does not know how old he is now and how young he is yet to be!" - Nietzsche

Emerson is great.

My mommy never gave me the attention I needed so now I relive this shit by compulsively spending every ounce of energy I have towards others, trying to make them notice/like me and not towards myself and my well being.
What does RWE recommend in such cases?
(Asking for a friend not me ofc)

Wrong. The transcendentalist feeder group Pragmatists are well 'worth reading.' Particularly William James.

Read a few Emerson essays willy-nilly. Perhaps History, The Poet, Circles. Then go outside, stretch, and take a good, long walk. Meditate. Determine to become an anachronism. After a light meal read Self Reliance. Before retiring read Whitman's The Sleepers. Next morning youll be cured.
By 'anachronism' I mean be someone determined to live in a time and place that antedates your current articulation of what ails you. Play YOUR OWN game (the one your playing now is hackneyed). Don't be afraid to use your imagination, but at the same time keep all your new ways and means to yourself.

Why is hermitism so common theme in (moral) literature? Were /ourguys/ always tortured by normies and their bankrupt morality?

If I descend from my 10y mountain exile and follow my own way am I any better than the braindead normie conformist whose values were always aligned to the majority's? I mean, he kind of always does what he wants too

No. Youre not. But then why worry about him? What he does, what he enjoys is done en masse. That his fate and general condition are the same as yours and mine is no argument to live his life too. Of course what's key is to live your own life, and hopefully die with the (presumed) satisfaction that (you) have. There are of course no guarantres, which is why life's still an adventure, or can be.

i'm going through a very similar process in my class, OP.

It's difficult to accept that I have been fucked by biological design or upbringing and I have to suffer and persevere so as to -maybe- enjoy life the same amount as the well adjusted normie.
I need to think my sufferings grant me some superior understanding and high ground or that his ways are shitty and he is no more than an animal going through the motions

Unlike most normies, you're pretty self-conscious. This means that right now you're conscious of the problems with yourself and your life, which hurts.
That being said, it also means you have the capacity to change those things, and once you do change them, the fact that you worked so hard for your happiness will make you even more happy.

No matter what, you can never fully become a normie. You have to seek your own path through life in order to be happy.

Read for enjoyment, senpai. Live life the best (you) can. Don't make excuses not to fight. Fight.

bump

If you like this type of literature, read more Henry David Thoreau. Walden is a good read, although many people find it to be dry.

idk, thoreau comes off as kind of whiny and teenage and self-righteous. Emerson seems to have a much more mature view of the world

bumping for you Americans out there
read your philosophers

Muir is a good place to go from Emerson

N was a huge Emerson fanboy. Personally I find him a bit overrated...he had a huge mancrush on Carlyle and it gets tiring when he just repeats C's ideas.

>Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers...The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?...The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

being from Massachusetts myself I only found an interest in the transcendentalists after an encounter with German idealism. people take the concept of individualism to unfortunate ectremes around here without gibing proper thought to what is meant by things like self-reliance or authenticity. i mean every other 18-26-year-old in new england is a sartre fangirl who calls herself an 'exisdtentialist' or claims an interest in 'existentialism' but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who has actuaally studied the contects political and philosophical from which existentialism arose.
so i understand where emerson is coming from, to be a good exemplar of this culture (dominated by cosmopolitcan Bostonians who treat Worcester County like an occupied territory separating them from their properly integrated colonies in the Western part of the state) you have to crib styles from elsewhere, because there's nothing but pretensiion at the heart of new england culture. our intellectual roots are puritan; our great writers have roots in puritanism; surely this is anomalous in the English language.
maybe i'm bullshitting, i'm tired and stoned. but it's hard not to crib someone else's style when you come from a culture like this one. though 200 years removed from emerson i feel the need to defend his honor.

...

>reminiscent of nietzsche
Get a load of this tard

I have a copy of the first, and have used it, but something about the spacing and typography bothers me. When I want to look over an essay or reread one or two my copy of choice is an old Everyman cloth-bound.

He writes in english, and has been published in america for a while. If I were you I'd get a sexy antique hardcover with his collected work

thoreau is cooler
do NOT fall for the whitman meme

There's a Library of America edition that's excellent.

>thoreau is cooler
hes a neckbeard in both senses of the word

This is true. The only transcendalist that actively spoke out against slavery and for the union too.

>10154275
>Tfw too intelligent to be happy