"Artists are the antennae of the race."

Ezra Pound

p. 371.

Discussion Notes:

"Moby Dick is neither good nor evil,"

p. 317.

"the machine-in-the-landscape trope"

p. 374.

"Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine."

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849.

1. Sleepy Hollow
2. The Tempest as the model
3. The Garden
4. The Machine
5. Two Kingdoms of Force
6. Epilogue
7. Afterword

Sleepy Hollow

I "Soon the dream of a retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy was removed from its traditional literary context. . . Embodied in various utopian schemes...in essence political-the ideal has figured in the American view of life..." (p.3)

Shakespeare's American Fable
II Fabled Tempest "a highly civilized European who finds himself living in a prehistoric wilderness." (35)

The Garden
III "the idea that the American continent may become the site of a new golden age could be taken seriously in politics." (74)

The Machine
IV "technology somehow is a match for the power of intellect implies a progressive idea of history." (146)

Two Kingdoms of Force
V "a regeneration in the New World. They become new, better, happier . . . " (228)

Epilogue: The Garden of Ashes
VI "Ours is an intricately organized, urban, industrial, nuclear-armed society."

"the contradiction between the rural myth and the technological fact." (354)

"The machine's sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics." (365)

Context of Thoreau's politics

1. I "Soon the dream of a retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy was removed from its traditional literary context. . . Embodied in various utopian schemes...in essence political-the ideal has figured in the American view of life..." (p.3)
   1. the sentimental or simple pastoral retreat (5)
   2. "such little events as may happen." Nathaniel Hawthorne in "Sleepy Hollow" (11)
   3. commentary " the decisive part played by the machine image. . . .Now tension replaces repose:" (16)
   4. "By design I refer to the larger structure of thought and feeling of which the ideal is a part." (24)




2. II Fabled Tempest "a highly civilized European who finds himself living in a prehistoric wilderness." (35)

1. "visual images of a virgin land" (36)
2. "the effort to reconcile conflicting attitudes toward the New World." (46-47)
3. "we still must cope with what now seems a paradox:..[paradise away from MIlan] "how lush and lusty the grass looked" how green!" (57-59)




1. III "the idea that the American continent may become the site of a new golden age could be taken seriously in politics." (74)

1. Robert Beverley's Virginia where "America as nature's garden, a new paradise of abundance." (75)
2. by 1785 the transformation of pastoral retreat from literary trope to political ideal mixing the primitive with the "doctrines of perfectibility and progress." (88)
3. "an American rural scheme....How could rural America possibly hold off the forces alreadt transforming the economy of Europe?" (116-117)




1. IV "technology somehow is a match for the power of intellect implies a progressive idea of history." (146)

1. "Jefferson's passion for utilitarian improvement, gadgets, and labor saving devices of all kinds...." led him to say of the steam engine "it is 'simple, great, and likely to have extensive consequences.' . . . so as to supersed the use of water ponds.' . . . and in America fuel is abundant'." (146-47)
2. "a capable spokesman of the nascent manufacturing interests" 1792 Report on Manufactures (150-51)Tench Coxe
3. "it came out of Germany by way of England...Schiller's "degeneration of contemporary culture." (169)
4. by 1829 "a profitable factory system was firmly established in New England; new roads canals and cities were transforming the landscape," thirteen miles of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad "were under construction." (180)
5. "The image of the machine had become a major symbol of value." between 1786 and 1831(190)
   1. As a sample of the rhetoric of progress (193) The machine and nature
   2. The machine and history -- more or less a record of continual progress (197)
   3. The machine and mind -- "steam power. . .will upset the moral economy of the world." (199)
   4. The machine and America -- telegraph lines "lands now traversed in perfect security by these frail wires." (203)
6. Daniel Webster and Northern railroad dedication:"one way of neutralizing the conflict between the machine and the rural ideal." (209)




1. V "a regeneration in the New World. They become new, better, happier . . . " (228)

1. Emerson's "The Young American, (2-7-1844) "sense of teh land as an economic and political force with a transcendental theory of mind, he expounds . . . the philosophy of romantic American pastoralism." (229-230)
2. "Walden begins with the hero's withdrawal from society in the direction of nature . . . .that the experiment has been a success. (242-43)
3. Hawthorne and Melville match themig motif to a darker view of life than Thoreau's. . . conveys a sense of the widening gap between the facts and ideals of American life, but the implications are more onerous." (265)
4. "No book confirms the relevance of the pastoral design to American experience as vividly as the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) . . . the sudden incursion of the new power has the effect of shattering childhood trauma...a pattern of contradiction so nearly absolute that the promised resolution of comedy is unconvincing." (319)
5. "about the contradictions said to embody what is most distinctive in American thought."
   "Culture . . .the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate--it is nothing if not a dialectic." (341-42)




1. VI "Ours is an intricately organized, urban, industrial, nuclear-armed society." "the contradiction between the rural myth and the technological fact." (354)

• "images of mankind in the grip of uncontrollable forces."
• Charles Sheeler (1930) "No trace of untouched nature remains. Not a tree or a blade of grass is in view." (355)
• 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Nick says "There was something gorgeous about him." (356-359)
• "The difference betwen Gatsby's point of view and Nick's illustrates the the distincton, with which I began between sentimental and complex pastoralism . . . . a symbolic repository of meaning and value." (363)
• "Like Melville's Starbuck, Gatsby would let faith oust fact."
• "the industrial Naturmensch who is blind to the complexity of modern civilization." He seldom "learns how destructive they (felicitous pristine images) are when cherished in lieu of reality."
• "destroyed by his inability to distinguish between dreams and facts" in that " the fantasy of pleasure is checked by the facts of history." (363)
• American writers seldom, if ever, have designed satisfactory resolutions for their pastoral fables. (364)
• "But the inability of our writers to create a surrogate for the ideal of the middle landscape can hardly be acocounted artistic failure"
• "the root conflict of our culture."
• "To change the situation we require new symbols of possibility, and although the creation of those symbols is . . .in greater measure the responsibility of society." (365)

Afterword, He reveals the passage of his thinking as reflected in this work that began as a 1949 dissertation from a Harvard education in the late 1930s (1937-41) and a Naval enlistment during the 1941-45 war turned into a book in the1964. p. 367

What is a paradigm?