I love your work, and want to thank you for sending along the note about, “Whose Words These are. ” What a great series! I have passed it on to several poets/faculty.

I currently have students listening to your interview, Oh Ya, Emerson. It’s a classic, as is all the work you’ve done with the Transcendentalists. I wasn’t able to find it by searching the archive, so I’m glad I saved the URL in a document in my files. I hope you are doing well. I am still warming up to the new technologies–but love curling up with a text, electronic or paper, during the turning of the frost. Keep those fires burning.

This has immense practical import. Emerson is saying that if the preacher, rather than speaking from the privileged position of the pulpit on high, is placed on equal footing, on the level plane of one on one, face to face contact, that is, submitted to the test of direct personal experience, the listener, instead of accepting what’s said without question, would naturally confront and challenge him, treating the preacher as an interlocutor and not a superior.

I can’t help but see the application to the banshees and browbeaters that currently populate our televisions. We, a nation of TV viewers, are content to sit back and allow these pseudo-experts and pundits to yell and scream at us, bully and intimidate us, for apparently no other reason that they happen to reside behind the glowing screen. If we were to actively imagine them sitting face to face beside us, thereby removing any implied differential of power, we would see them as they really are, people with no special claims beyond our own. And I think we’d be much more likely to tell these rude, loud, horrible guests to get the hell out, and expel them from our living rooms. For we are, after all, by tuning in, inviting these people into our homes. And, leaving it to Emerson again, “Let us sit at home with the cause. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within.�

Whether from the pulpit or the pundits, we must continually take back the right and dignity of our primary experience. This is Emerson’s emphatic message. Emerson called this country “this our talking America.� He saw that there would be those who would seek to intimidate and manipulate through earsplitting and bombastic rhetoric. He felt it imperative therefore that each person lay claim to his or her own voice, and speak from direct experience. A site like this encourages exactly that. Just wanted to say thanks for the work, and keep it up.

John Elias