Births
which occurred on a May 25: 1968 The Gateway Arch, part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, was dedicated.
1927 Robert Ludlum spy novelist (Bourne Identity)
1922 Enrico Berlinguer, dirigente comunista italiano.
1921 Jack Steinberger, estadounidense nacido en Alemania, Premio Nobel de Física en 1988.
1889 Igor Sikorsky developed a working helicopter.
1882 Gottardo Guido Segantini, Swiss artist who died in 1974.
1879 William Maxwell Aitken Beaverbrook, financiero y político canadiense.
1846 Gustave Jean Jacquet, French artist who died in 1909.
1841 Eugène-Samuel Grasset, Swiss-born French illustrator, decorative artist, and printmaker, who died on 23 October 1917. — more
1840 Cynara, fictional narrator of The Wind Done Gone. (the year is my guess). Cynara [picture >] is a mulatto offspring of the white master and a black mammy on the Georgian plantation 'Tata,' and tells her story of living in the South after the Civil War in 1873. She is the half-sister of 'Other' (Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind), whose former husband is 'R'. (corresponds to Rhett Butler). The couple 'Dreamy Gentleman' and 'Mealy Mouth' correspond to Ashley and Melanie Wilkes. The Wind Done Gone, by Alice Randall, is a parody of Gone With the Wind, to give the Blacks' point of view. On 25 May 2001 an appeals court overturned a lower court's decision which had imposed prior restraint on the publication of The Wind Done Gone.
1828 Karl Mikhaillovich Peterson, Russian mathematician who died on 19 April 1881. He worked mainly in differential geometry. A class of surfaces is named after him. Author of Über Curven und Flächen (1868).
1817 Cornelis Springer, Dutch painter and printmaker who died on 20 (18?) February 1891. — MORE ON SPRINGER AT ART “4” MAY with links to images.
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1803 Ralph
Waldo Emerson, lecturer, writer, poet, editor,
philosopher, who died on 27 April 1882. He was the leading exponent
of New England Transcendentalism of writers and philosophers, a part
of the 19th century Romantic movement. They adopted an idealistic
system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all
creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight
(over logic and experience) for the revelation of the deepest truths.
Their eclectic sources included German transcendentalism (especially
as communicated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge [21 Oct 1772 – 25
Jul 1834] and Thomas Carlyle [04 Dec 1795 – 05 Feb 1881), Platonism
and Neoplatonism, the Indian and Chinese scriptures, and the writings
of such mystics as Emanuel Swedenborg [29 Jan 1688 – 29 Mar
1772] and Jakob Böhme [1575 – 21 Nov 1624]. — Ralph Waldo Emerson was the son of the Reverend William Emerson [06 May 1759 – 12 May 1811], a Unitarian clergyman and friend of the arts. The son inherited the profession of divinity, which had attracted all his ancestors in direct line from Puritan days. The family of his mother, Ruth Haskins [09 Nov 1768 – 16 Nov 1853], was strongly Anglican, and among influences on Emerson were such Anglican writers and thinkers as Ralph Cudworth [1617 – 26 Jun 1688], Robert Leighton [1611 – 25 Jun 1684], Jeremy Taylor [bap. 15 Aug 1613 – 13 Aug 1667], and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. After William Emerson father died, his son was left largely to the intellectual care of his aunt Mary Moody Emerson [25 Aug 1774 – 01 May 1863], who took her duties seriously. In 1812 Emerson entered the Boston Public Latin School, where his juvenile verses were encouraged and his literary gifts recognized. In 1817 he entered Harvard College, where he began his journals, which may be the most remarkable record of the “march of Mind” to appear in the United States. He graduated in 1821 and taught school while preparing for part-time study in the Harvard Divinity School. Though Emerson was licensed to preach in the Unitarian community in 1826, illness slowed the progress of his career, and he was not ordained to the Unitarian ministry at the Second Church, Boston, until 1829. There he began to win fame as a preacher, and his position seemed secure. On 10 (30?) September 1829 he married Ellen Louisa Tucker [1808 – 08 Feb 1831]. After she died of tuberculosis, his grief drove him to question his beliefs and his profession. But in the previous few years Emerson had already begun to question Christian doctrines. His brother William Emerson [31 Jul 1801 – 13 Sep 1868], who had gone to Germany, had acquainted him with the new biblical criticism and the doubts that had been cast on the historicity of miracles. Emerson's own sermons, from the first, had been unusually free of traditional doctrine and were instead a personal exploration of the uses of spirit, showing an idealistic tendency and announcing his personal doctrine of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Indeed, his sermons had divested Christianity of all external or historical supports and made its basis one's private intuition of the universal moral law and its test a life of virtuous accomplishment. Unitarianism had little appeal to him by now, and on 28 October 1832 he resigned from the ministry. When Emerson left the church, he was in search of a more certain conviction of God than that granted by the historical evidences of miracles. He wanted his own revelation, i.e., a direct and immediate experience of God. On 25 December 1832, he left on a trip to Europe. In Paris he saw Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu's collection of natural specimens arranged in a developmental order that confirmed his belief in man's spiritual relation to nature. In England he paid memorable visits to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth [07 Apr 1770 – 23 Apr 1850], and (on 26 Aug 1833) Thomas Carlyle. After returning home on 09 October 1833, he began to write Nature. He gave his first lecture, "The Uses of Natural History", at the Masonic Temple, Boston, on 05 November 1833 and soon established himself as a popular and influential lecturer. By 1834 he had found a permanent home in Concord, Massachusetts, and on 14 September 1835 he married Lydia Jackson [20 Sep 1802 – 13 Nov 1892] and settled into the kind of quiet domestic life that was essential to his work. The 1830s saw Emerson become an independent literary man. During this decade his own personal doubts and difficulties were increasingly shared by other intellectuals. Before the decade was over his personal manifestos, Nature, “The American Scholar” and the Divinity School Address (15 Jul 1838), had rallied together a group that came to be called the Transcendentalists, of which he was popularly acknowledged the spokesman. Emerson helped initiate Transcendentalism by publishing anonymously in Boston on 09 September 1836 a book of 95 pages entitled Nature. Having found the answers to his spiritual doubts, he formulated his essential philosophy, and almost everything he ever wrote afterward was an extension, amplification, or amendment of the ideas he first affirmed in Nature. Emerson's religious doubts had lain deeper than his objection to the Unitarians' retention of belief in the historicity of miracles. He was also deeply unsettled by the mechanistic conception of the universe according to the physics of Newton [04 Jan 1643 – 31 Mar 1727] and by the psychology of sensation of Locke [29 Aug 1632 – 28 Oct 1704] that he had learned at Harvard. Emerson felt that there was no place for free will in the chains of mechanical cause and effect that rationalist philosophers conceived the world as being made up of. This world could be known only through the senses rather than through thought and intuition; it determined men physically and psychologically; and yet it made them victims of circumstance, beings whose superfluous mental powers were incapable of truly ascertaining reality. Emerson reclaimed an idealistic philosophy from this dead end of 18th-century rationalism by once again asserting the human ability to transcend the materialistic world of sense experience and facts and become conscious of the all-pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities of human freedom. God could best be found by looking inward into one's own self, one's own soul, and from such an enlightened self-awareness would in turn come freedom of action and the ability to change one's world according to the dictates of one's ideals and conscience. Human spiritual renewal thus proceeds from the individual's intimate personal experience of his own portion of the divine “oversoul,” which is present in and permeates the entire creation and all living things, and which is accessible if only a person takes the trouble to look for it. Emerson enunciates how “reason,” which to him denotes the intuitive awareness of eternal truth, can be relied upon in ways quite different from one's reliance on “understanding”, i.e., the ordinary gathering of sense-data and the logical comprehension of the material world. Emerson's doctrine of self-sufficiency and self-reliance naturally springs from his view that the individual need only look into his own heart for the spiritual guidance that has hitherto been the province of the established churches. The individual must then have the courage to be himself and to trust the inner force within him as he lives his life according to his intuitively derived precepts. Obviously these ideas are far from original, and it is clear that Emerson was influenced in his formulation of them by his previous readings of Neoplatonist philosophy, the works of Coleridge and other European Romantics, the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, Hindu philosophy, and other sources. What set Emerson apart from others who were expressing similar Transcendentalist notions were his abilities as a polished literary stylist able to express his thought with vividness and breadth of vision. His philosophical exposition has a peculiar power and an organic unity whose cumulative effect was highly suggestive and stimulating to his contemporary readers' imaginations. In a 31 August 1837 lecture entitled “The American Scholar”, Emerson described the resources and duties of the new liberated intellectual that he himself had become. This address was in effect a challenge to the Harvard intelligentsia, warning against pedantry, imitation of others, traditionalism, and scholarship unrelated to life. Emerson's “Address at Divinity College,” Harvard University, in 1838 was another challenge, this time directed against a lifeless Christian tradition, especially Unitarianism as he had known it. He dismissed religious institutions and the divinity of Jesus as failures in man's attempt to encounter deity directly through the moral principle or through an intuited sentiment of virtue. This address alienated many, left him with few opportunities to preach, and resulted in his being ostracized by Harvard for many years. Young disciples, however, joined the informal Transcendental Club (founded in 1836) and encouraged him in his activities. In Emerson helped launch The Dial (1st issue 01 Jul 1840), first edited by Margaret Fuller [23 May 1810 – 19 Jul 1850] and later by himself, thus providing an outlet for the new ideas Transcendentalists were trying to present to the US. Though short-lived, the magazine provided a rallying point for the younger members of the school. From his continuing lecture series, he gathered his Essays into two volumes (1841, 1844), which made him internationally famous. In his first volume of Essays Emerson consolidated his thoughts on moral individualism and preached the ethics of self-reliance, the duty of self-cultivation, and the need for the expression of self. The second volume of Essays shows Emerson accommodating his earlier idealism to the limitations of real life; his later works show an increasing acquiescence to the state of things, less reliance on self, greater respect for society, and an awareness of the ambiguities and incompleteness of genius. His Representative Men (1849) contained biographies of Plato [427-347bc], Swedenborg, Montaigne [28 Feb 1533 – 23 Sep 1592], Shakespeare [26 Apr 1564 – 23 Apr 1616], Napoléon [15 Aug 1769 – 05 May 1821], and Goethe [28 Aug 1749 – 22 Mar 1832]. In English Traits he gave a character analysis of a people from which he himself stemmed. The Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson's most mature work, reveals a developed humanism together with a full awareness of man's limitations. It may be considered as partly confession. Emerson's collected Poems (published on 25 Dec 1846) were supplemented by others in May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), and the two volumes established his reputation as a major US poet. By the 1860s Emerson's reputation in the US was secure, for time was wearing down the novelty of his rebellion as he slowly accommodated himself to society. He continued to give frequent lectures, but the writing he did after 1860 shows a waning of his intellectual powers. A new generation knew only the old Emerson and had absorbed his teaching without recalling the acrimony it had occasioned. After his death Emerson was transformed into the Sage of Concord, shorn of his power as a liberator and enrolled among the worthies of the very tradition he had set out to destroy. Emerson's voice and rhetoric sustained the faith of thousands in the US lecture circuits between 1834 and the US Civil War. He served as a cultural middleman through whom the aesthetic and philosophical currents of Europe passed to the US, and he led his countrymen during the burst of literary glory known as the US renaissance (1835–1865). As a principal spokesman for Transcendentalism, the US tributary of European Romanticism, Emerson gave direction to a religious, philosophical, and ethical movement that above all stressed belief in the spiritual potential of every man. EMERSON ONLINE: |
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1764 Jan Frans van Dael, Flemish painter and lithographer who died on 20 March 1840. — MORE ON VAN DAEL AT ART “4” MAY with links to images.
1749 Gregorio Funes, primer historiador del Río de la Plata.
1616 Carlo “Carlino” Dolci, Florentine painter who died on 17 January 1686. — MORE ON DOLCI AT ART “4” MAY with links to images.
