I would like to share a love story — framed by two solitary moments separated by fourteen years, two months, three days, and sixteen hours before the same telephone in the same hotel room in Boston, Massachusetts. But, to begin with, let me go back to the first meeting I had with the young woman. But I hope no one will think that I believe I can parallel Mr. Emerson on any greater terms than that small coincidence. I had been to the house a number of times before.
But on this trip, when I saw the lovely tour guide — I see her now in memory in a long black skirt and black cardigan sweater — I encountered a kind of feminine beauty that I did not expect to find while paying homage to idealism and to my stoic compass. I knew the tour well, so in desperation I forced myself to invent an esoteric question about the lore of Concord. In view of an open closet, in which Mr. Two rooms on in the tour she asked me where I was from. I was too flattered to be able to recall the name of Preston Brooks while under pressure.
I then marveled at her voice and her fingertips as she pointed to a bust of Mr. Emerson by Daniel Chester French. Emerson is said to have observed upon assessing the skill of the likeness. I left the house and the young woman, and I endured what I decided had to be a pardonable regret, for I could not think of how it could be rectified. I lived two hundred miles away. Still, I lingered for a few moments in Mr.
I imagined this infusion spreading beyond the bounds of the house and spreading through all matter in the village, reaching unto the Musketaquid River just beyond the Mill Dam. I drove down through Connecticut and returned home by crossing the Long Island Sound by ferry. I did remember that in many a Sonata-Form movement a quiet and brief Andante section often precedes a massive and principal Allegro.
My parents are of Pennsylvania origin, but, again, I was born to Long Island. That left me a solitary, native, figurative orphan of Paumanauk. Some little boys had come up on the steps and were looking into the hall; when I told them who had arrived, they went reluctantly away.
Gatsby has long been high on my list of the great Transcendentalists, both fictional and actual, a careful list that includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, Captain Ahab, Henry David Thoreau, and perhaps, too, Master Yoda of Dagobah. For I was too hell-bent on my piano studies in youth to get into common trouble. They practice too much to do harm. Gatsby, for me, the highest of American Transcendental Priests. For I knew Mr. First performances often reveal a compromise of nearly fifty percent of control.
I had had my romantic scrapes, but even as a thirty-three-year-old man I held a full and intact heart, and only a half-tested gospel in my head.
May yielded to June , and I still thought of the young woman in Concord. When I had stood upon the shores of my native village, New England had always pressed down upon my imagination and my shoreline like a branding iron. I am surprised that its intensity has not steamed off the Sound.
The north shore harbors are proof of the pattern of the iron, the mark of the brand. I live on the edge of Cow Harbor. With all this in my mind, I went to my desk on a June night and looked up the address of Mr. Not since, perhaps, Walt Whitman had any native Long Islander written to that Cambridge Turnpike address with such hope and interest.
Again, I hope you do not think this silly. I mailed the letter on June 3. I heard nothing for more than a month, and I did not really expect to hear anything at all. On July 10, however, I had a reply by email. As I look now at the boxed records of our correspondence, from even just the month following that reply, I see the history of a romantic quickening without precedent in my life.
The Andante preamble before a looming Sonata-Allegro form was subject to an accelerando as by the most welcome case of stage-nerves and excitement I have ever known. I was fascinated by the caution of our telephone conversations when compared with the romantic character of our writing correspondence.
I remember that Julie asked me with care when we first spoke if I had the intention of practically emulating a Thoreau, of hoping to test life at its fundamental level by living in a cabin. I replied with levity: no, that I had already known too much of the woodshed from all my years of practicing.
But even in those calls there was an ardent quickening, and we suggested that our conversations recalled the earnestness of children with cups and strings in place of phones between neighboring windows.
Soon after our correspondence began, we agreed to meet in Boston, on August 5. Romance apes the satisfaction of creative activity; thus I cannot express the electric idleness I enjoyed while waiting for my journey. And there I suddenly heard, even saw on paper — the complete construction of the Rhapsody, from beginning to end. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.
I was sent to Room , which even then had the numerical significance to me as that of a bar number in a score. I had never thought to do that in a hotel before; nor had I ever seen anyone else ever do so. I took a walk in the nearby neighborhood, and I remember the cuckoo calls of the crossing signals. And I recall being afraid that I might see the subject of my appointment before the appointed time.
I had lunch, and I returned to the room to prepare. The small room then was as a greenroom before a recital. I showered, and I dressed with great care. I had new clothes for the meeting. But when I added my new black trousers, my torso looked like the base of the white-key D between the blackness of D-flat and E-flat. My heart beat as if I were running meter repeats on a track, though I did no more than pace.
And yet I wished to hold that moment, to live in the eve of event, to hold back the most anticipated of things. I took a last pause and checked myself in the mirror, and then I went to the elevator. I had never found elevators of particular significance before in my life.
Yet I must attempt to say how much occurred on that ride. Lobby buttons and descending elevator rides have now a remarkable suggestiveness to me. I muttered a few hellos to fellow passengers as I made the descent, but permit me to share the truth. I have said that I had made it to that point of life, my thirty-third year, with my heart completely intact.
I had been safe on earlier visits to Massachusetts before my last trip to Concord, for only an empty house was there; an orbit I could escape. I shook with magic. I burned and sparked with friction as I fell deeper into the atmosphere of that lobby. I was affected by the once-in-a-lifetime resistant material of an atmosphere. But the volume of my heart as fatal asteroid was such that no atmosphere could burn it up before it could make its strike. The elevator came to rest at L; the Chicxulub Impactor made its landing.
The doors opened. I stepped into the busy lobby and its Yucatan waves of people, its lighting to me like that of a Merchant-Ivory Edwardian amber. We had joked days before that we would find each other in the darkest and most private corner of the lobby.
There were no such spots. Nor did I need to look for one, for Julie was the first thing I saw as I stepped forward. On the opposite side of the lobby — on a settee parallel to the front entrance and to School Street, but perpendicular to the row of elevators — she sat below a painting of the hotel itself. Her face was already turned to mine. Her hair was as brilliant as a Ginger Rogers publicity still, as blonde as the rich and grained and warped light in the bell of a French Horn under stage lights.
There was a rectangular, rose quartz, Malaysia Jade pendant on her neck, and her crossed legs emerged from an olive green shirt dress and were tipped by black shoes, and on one visible tiny joint, there was a single glistening toe ring.
It had been a very hot day, and her skin showed a sheen. But her skin showed more than this. Her makeup had sparkles, had glitter in it. There was even sunburn in one spot of her tan — from the mermaid too long on the surface, as the mild burn as from the ash of impact, just to the right of her sternum. All the impact fire was wiping out the last of the mermaids — yielding a new species for Venus worship as yet untold. She stood to meet me.
I said her name with caution, almost uncertain if this could be the same young woman. She said mine, and then embraced me and then my palms, and placed a book in my hands: Literary Trail of Greater Boston. But then she kissed me. The great abstractions could take shape from her, as if her kiss would be to taste bardic epigrams at their human source, the transfusion from her kiss far more ambitious than any resurrection she could grant to the wood of an ancient house. They also believed that government may not interfere with freedom of expression.
Their writings influenced the civil rights , equal rights, and anti-war protest movements of the s and s. They also influenced the thinking of some Supreme Court justices and, indirectly, judicial interpretation of the First Amendment. Transcendentalism, which lasted from about to , was a vital part of the Romantic movement. Ralph Waldo Emerson was its putative leader.
Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller were among the principals of the movement. The Transcendentalists believed there is a divine spirit in nature and in every living soul.
Through individualism and self-reliance human beings could reunite with God. In Walden , Thoreau explains how to live the good life and be at one with nature.
His celebrated essay Civil Disobedience lauds the benefits of peaceful resistance. His Leaves of Grass and other poems celebrate freedom, independence, and the value of nonconformity. And his dissent in United States v. Justice Louis D. In turn, these two justices influenced the direction of First Amendment jurisprudence.
The opinions of other justices also evoke the Transcendentalist concepts of individuality and nonconformity. For example, Justice Robert H. Justice William J. For the younger generation, their problems seem tiny in comparison to the problems plaguing older Americans. The younger generation has an acute lack of motivation, a fight for gay rights, and a near disregard for the earth, the generations that come after us will look back in contempt of our actions.
People have unrealistic expectations of soldiers thinking that they are able to remove their own humanity and become cold-hearted killing machines. What he tries to hit home with is that normal things got people killed and that was impossible to avoid because of human fallibility.
How can anyone have a passion for leading men into combat over a senseless war? Big Daddy at his old age even looks forward to having intercourse with a woman. However, many people emailed him, arguing that rejecting health care reform has nothing to do with racism.
Unfortunately, a criminal cannot be deemed as a perfectly good man if he also did good deeds. Essays Essays FlashCards. Browse Essays. Sign in. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Show More. Read More.
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