Tag: Margaret Fuller

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The Everlasting “Huh?”: Thoughts on Being a Member of Estate 4.0

Herewith, my five-hundredth entry in the broadcastellan journal. Without making a big to-do about it, I shall mark this occasion by summoning the irascible, inimitable Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), whose carte de visite (pictured) lies among the books and papers in my attic room, the “Sage of Chelsea” whose house in 24 Cheyne Row I can be seen inspecting below. Featured here as a character in a radio play about Margaret Fuller, America’s first female foreign correspondent (“The Heart and the Fountain” [28 April 1941], Carlyle had much to say about the press, to which he referred as the “fourth estate.” Perhaps, that makes us web journalists the estate 4.0. What is our role, our place, our worth? Whether derided, courted or ignored, we carry on surveying and opining, spreading and reprocessing what goes for news these days. In my case, chiefly old news.

According to Carlyle, “fourth estate” is no mere “figure of speech, or a witty saying,” but “a literal fact,” and a “very momentous” one at that. Publishing one’s thoughts, the Scottish philosopher-historian remarked, “is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable.” What might he have said about the phenomenon of web journalism? I shall put a few words in his mouth, a cheekiness duly signalled by brackets, and update his thoughts as expressed in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840):

Writing brings [publishing]; brings universal everyday extempore [publishing] as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures. The requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually there [. . . ]!

On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call [Blogs]! Those poor [digital bits and bites, . . . ] what have they not done, what are they not doing!—For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing [. . . ],

is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of man’s faculty that produces a [Blog]]? It is the Thought of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man works all things whatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought. This [modern world], with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One—a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, [cars, highways], and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.—The thing we called [digital bits and bites] is the purest embodiment a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest.

All this, of the importance and supreme importance of [bloggers] in modern Society, and how [web journalism] is to such a degree superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the academia and much else, has been admitted for a good while; and recognized often enough, in late times, with a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It seems to me, the Sentimental by and by will have to give place to the Practical. If [bloggers] are so incalculably influential, actually performing such work for us [. . .] from day to day, then I think we may conclude that [web journalists] will not always wander like unrecognized unregulated Ishmaelites among us! Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has virtual unnoticed power will cast off its wrappages, bandages, and step forth one day with palpably articulated, universally visible power.

Perhaps, I am squandering this magical potential, the thaumaturgy of casting myself broadly, by writing obscurely on the obscure, all the while revelling in my own obscurity. And yet, without romancing the scale, the struggle and the thrill of writing seem to outweigh any desire I might have to be read, let alone understood . . .

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"Much is published": A Silence Surrounding Henry David Thoreau

Sure, his life near Concord, Massachusetts, as he describes it in Walden, was a quiet one. Thoreau “kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the chum, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this.”

There is violence in the phrase. And for once I can sense it. Silence being “broken,” I mean. For the next two months or so, my life will be less quiet than I have come to live and like it of late. There will be old friends visiting in July and September, there will be travels in good company, and there will be reunions in New York and in New England this August. I shall endeavor to keep my journal all the while; but journals like this are so much easier to keep in the monotone and silence of a retiring life, a life which need not be tired or tiresome as long as there are thoughts to be spun from whatever impulses and impressions there are to be got and gathered in the everyday. Such contemplative quiet, which to some might spell disquietude, was experienced by Henry David Thoreau, who was born on this day, 12 July, in 1817.

Yet even in its remoteness, his life was still filled with the “Sounds” to which Thoreau dedicated a chapter of Walden. In it, he argues that, while “confined to books,” we are “in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed.” What he found being made public were the sounds that not only surrounded but defined his everyday. During that first summer at Walden, Thoreau did not read. Instead, he looked, listened, and took in:

I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an end.

Even then, the drama of the scheduled, orderly life of the city was penetrating the quiet woods, sounds that told of a life governed by the ticking of clocks rather than the time told by the elements and the stirrings of nature:

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here’s your pay for them! screams the countryman’s whistle; timber like long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city’s walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.

The wits writing plays for , who often lent Walt Whitman their ear, very rarely listened to Thoreau, even though a sound effects artist might have appreciated the noise that lent rhythm to Thoreau’s seemingly disorderly existence. Perhaps, his civil disobedience went against the grain of those laboring in a mass medium whose commercial sponsors counted on conformity.

An impersonation of Thoreau was heard, however briefly, in “The Heart and the Fountain,” a radio play about his contemporary, Margaret Fuller. Produced by the Cavalcade of America it was presented on 28 April 1941—at a time when it suited American broadcasters to be quiet about the war in Europe, a time when life on a commune like Brook Farm sounded like escapism,” a Blithedale Romance to blot out thoughts of Blighty.

Getting away from modernity need not be an escape; it can be a chance to come to your senses by subjecting yourself to silence and simplicity—a challenge that, in an age of over-stimulation, may very well drive us out of our narrow minds.