Backbone > Frankly Speaking

Celebrate the Sage
By Frank Crocitto. Illustration by Leslie Bender

In a world ravaged by hunger and starvation, though its granaries be full to overflowing, without a truck to haul the grain the hungry
will waste away. This is as true for empty bellies as it is for empty heads. The food of knowledge doesn’t get to the people. Libraries, our storehouses, are stacked with books containing wondrous, nourishing knowledge, yet life stumbles on oblivious to most of it. We starve amidst plenty.

I caught a painful glimpse of this paradox in my teens and only the years have made it more evident. In rummaging through old books I’ve dug up astounding things. When I tell people about them it comes as news. The knowledge is all there but people have no access to it. Few people have the time or the tools to go digging; so few feast on the food sitting on the library shelves.

When I was a boy we had a bookcase in our hall packed tight with great books—collecting dust. And we lived the days of our lives as if the knowledge held in them didn’t exist. A book unopened is a book that doesn’t exist—leather binding and embossing and gilt edging notwithstanding.

One of the authors on the family bookshelves was Emerson. Everybody knew the name Emerson in those days—they made radios. But nobody I knew had either heard or read Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson that is. People read the papers and matchbook covers and cereal boxes and comic books and murder mysteries but no one read Ralph Waldo.
Well, one day a year or so ago as I was prospecting in the university library I came upon the musty volumes of Emerson’s journals. Stiff, dense hard to read. But as I picked through them I was thrilled by the startling statements and amazing observations and, as he put it: “piercing poetic insights” I came across. Here was buried treasure. Here’s what people should be reading or at least have the chance to.
Then and there I determined to become a trucker. I dug out the best passages, laid them out in a readable, appealing format and packed them into a book. I’ve called it Emphatically Emerson. And I’ve sent it bobbing down the mainstream of the Amazon River (dot calm).
If you haven’t already met, allow me to introduce Ralph Waldo:
You won’t think much of him—at first. Nobody did. Skinny, slope-shouldered, without aspiration or ambition. Sickly, too, under the influence of his mother and a spinster aunt. Others were out playing, making their mark. Like his brothers who were talented, who carried the hopes of the family.

He went through the motions of life—school and study, desultory. Then Harvard—a dim, unnotable performance. Afterward, he had to do something. So he veered to the ministry, a path well worn by many of his ancestors. He was waiting for life to happen to him so he could decide what to make of it.

It happened. He got a post at a Unitarian Church. He fell in love, married. He moved back to the village of his forefathers. His health was more stable. All was well. Except she died after a year. He lost interest in preaching to a placid cup of dutiful listeners. Found an issue, gave a final sermon. Traveled.

But if you look a little closer at him you will notice his sharp, blue eyes. Ah, they are the doorway to an inner life of pulsing restless intensity. Ralph Waldo had something in store for life. He’d been thinking for years, writing it all down day by day in his journal, since he was sixteen. This journal was chock-full of thoughts, daring thoughts, piercing observations, revelations, and illuminations.

He was reserved—cold some thought; he did, too, sometimes. His vest was tightly buttoned over his heart. He had buried his great passion, with his first wife. When he married again it was a settled, staid affair, fertile with children. His prize, little Waldo, died at six. In a short space his mother and both brothers died. He suffered quietly.
But he was a simmering pot. He had something to say, after awhile—and he said it. In vivid, eloquent, unforgettable words, in a clear, thrilling voice. He went on a circuit of the thousands of literary clubs and lyceums around the nation. His congregation became America. And he took as his text Truth itself.

He published his talks and essays. People flocked to him. They came to live near him. He had friends all over the world. He became the “The Sage of Concord”—the fount of American spirituality, that wondrous mix of truth from Europe to the Far East, from ancient times to the present. Ralph Waldo became a force.

You’d like him in his ripeness—grand, tender, full of understanding—his great blue eyes fixed on the generations to come and the hope that lives in the heart of every man—that Truth will eventually triumph.

Somebody I know calls him “America’s Founding Thinker.” And he is. His roots reach deep into the rich soil of this grand, glorious experiment known as America. What he says won’t please everybody, nor will he be very politically correct. But he will be clear and bold and eloquent and always on the money.

Unlike politicos and the media and corporate honchos he is unafraid of the truth. That’s putting it mildly. The truth is what he lives for. And here’s more—a sampling of some morsels of his thought. Taste them. Chew on them. Let’s call it a truth-tasting.

When a whole nation
is roaring
Patriotism
at the top of its voice,
I am fain to explore
the cleanness
of its hands
and purity
of its heart.

Do not
waste yourself
in rejection;
bark against the bad,
but chant
the beauty
of the good.

When I bought my farm,
I did not know
what a bargain I had
in the bluebirds, bobolinks,
and thrushes;
as little did I know
what sublime mornings
and sunsets
I was buying.

Among provocatives,
the next best thing
to good preaching
is bad preaching.

I have even more
thoughts during
or enduring it
than at other times.

My garden is an honest
place.
Every tree and every vine
are incapable
of concealment,
and tell
after two or three months
exactly
what sort of treatment
they have had.
The sower may mistake
and sow his peas crookedly:
the peas make no mistake,
but come up
and show his line.

America
should affirm
and establish
that in no instance
should the guns
go
in advance
of the perfect right.

It is very easy in the world
to live by the opinion
of the world.

It is very easy in solitude
to be self-centered.

But the finished man
is he who in the midst
of the crowd
keeps with perfect sweetness
the independence of solitude.

Yesterday,
the best day of the year,
we spent in the afternoon
on the river.
A sky of Calcutta;
light,
air,
clouds,
water,
banks,
birds,
grass,
pads
lilies,
were in perfection,
and it was delicious to
live.
The
believing
we do something
when
we do nothing
is
the first
illusion
of tobacco.

We shall pass
for what we are.
Do not fear to die
because
you have not done your
task.
Whenever a noble soul
comes,
the audience awaits.
And he is not judged by
his performance,
but
by the spirit of his performance….

So it’s his birthday this coming 25th of May. He’ll be—not would have been—two hundred years old. Some folks die when their time is up; Ralph Waldo keeps right on going. He’s still talking, still saying things that matter and saying them emphatically.
All he needs is a listener or two...

More Frank Crocitto at www.candlepower.org