Musings on Lack of Clarity in Primary Documents

I've complained aplenty over the years about the lack of clarity in the primary documents written by George Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm.

Big issue I've had with Ripley has been his failure to define terms.

I guess it's the usual issue with human communication, though. Everyone in a conversation or argument believes all the participating parties share the same definitions and communication conventions. Then once argument or conversation devolves into semantics, people don't want to continue the interchange unless they're the more clever party or extremely committed to their cause.

I've gotten into reading one of Ripley's inspirations, William Ellery Channing, to try understanding more the intentions of Ripley and Brook Farm. People may not recognize Channing's name these days, but he has influenced a few people with sermons and some of his writings.

Channing's more well known sermons and writings include: “Self Culture” (probably one of the prime influences on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other American Transcendentalists) and “Slavery”, which argued for the equality of all man and provided an allegedly well thought out argument against slavery based on humans being created in the image of God (even though Channing didn't like disruptive activism). I say allegedly because I haven't read the whole of “Slavery” yet.

Suffice to say, Channing fails to define things clearly through all his sermons and writings that I've had the fortune to read. Channing argues for teaching people a religious and moral education. He doesn't provide a definition for these kinds of education or even what form a religious and moral education should take.

As for the benefit these types of education, they lead to a more stable society and someone less likely to indulge in vice: like excessive drinking, beating family members, sexual licentiousness and so on and so forth. These forms of education also will help the individuals get into heaven and on the good side of God.

The last benefit probably creates the clincher for Channing and his associates. Easy enough to argue that the upper classes could attach themselves to this type of argument because (a) they weren't expected to need the moral and religious educations as much since they had other "social pressures" to worry about, according to the people espousing the need for religious and moral education among some classes of people (see the 7th screen [“screen” meaning number of times scrolled down from the top of the Webpage] in the Preface of Andrews Norton’s A Statement of Reasons for Not Believing the Doctrines of the Trinitarians, Concerning the Nature of God and the Person of Christ (1819, 1833, 1859) and (b) if the middling and lower classes bought into the education, they would likely regulate themselves individually or by the family and work hard.

It didn't appeal to the middling and lower classes that much, though. I've tried finding information on why it didn't. I can't find a good argument against this approach by the people championing these middling and lower classes that practiced "infidelity." They either devolved into name calling their enemies aristocrats, citing past scholars for their own stance without any substantial criticism of the opposition, or they spent their energies trying to just open the ears of their opposition to reach enough of an understanding for a substantial debate.

At the same time, though, Channing didn't, in my opinion, make a compelling argument for buying into the moral and religious education. I say this as someone who agrees with him, too, on some level.

Maybe not necessarily the religious side, but I believe that receiving a moral education, learning to regulate and control yourself and trying to enrich the self leads to more fulfillment in life, whether you be Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, New Age, atheist, agnostic or whatever belief system you subscribe to.

Part of my ambivalence about Channing's arguments for people getting these types of education and fitting into an undefined category for unclear benefits probably comes from my ambivalence about the supposed accepted religious beliefs of the time and also of trying to REALLY understand late 18th-century to early 19th-century America/New England/Boston area.

I generally follow a fairly humanistic empirical scientific theory approach to the world, the universe and metaphysics. There are things that I, as an individual, and the human race knows and understands about existence.

Existence holds a lot that the human race has built understanding around. It also holds a lot that the human race doesn't have an inkling about.

The existence of God, to me, is beyond the understanding of the human race right now. . .or, at least, to me. How do we go about arguing the nature of God, the big issue between the Unitarians of Channing of his time and the Calvinistic Congregationalists at the time, when we can't provide irrefutable proof of God's existence? And how do we know that we are seeing irrefutable proof of God unless we know the nature of God? Creates something of an epistemological catch-22.

These questions, in themselves, beg a whole lot more questions, and those will most certainly beg for even more bigger questions. The number of questions on this topic force my rationality to remain open and wait to see where the facts and human understanding lead us for an answer. Even then, human understanding remains ever fallible and worth questioning to make sure we haven't misunderstood those things that we hold most dear.

Some might call me a skeptic.

So yeah, my ambivalence of the benefit of Channing's argument for unity among people and getting a religious and moral education may stem from my near-instinctual skepticism about nearly all knowledge and understanding, especially anecdotal and subjective knowledge about non-social information.

Social fact deserves skepticism, too. Social existence and relationships among people, however, have a slipperier aspect to them because of their bases in numerous perspectives and behaviors.

Not only that, but us human beings have something of an instinct to rebel against other people categorizing ourselves with social labels. If someone does the categorizing, it will be the person doing it to themselves.

My skeptical ambivalence of Christianity and supernatural rationalism creates a gap the blocks me from seeing the full "story" and "reaching an understanding." Channing, in my opinion, doesn't provide an explanation or purpose to satisfy someone with this kind of ambivalence.

Did this kind of ambivalence exist anywhere in Boston, Massachusetts, New England or the United States at the time? The Deists, including Jefferson and possibly even other founding fathers ((even Washington pretty much went to church more for social graces than anything), held a fair amount of skepticism of the understandings of Christianity previously.

More-orthodox Christians attacked the Unitarianism of the time that they got doctrines wrong, which included Christ not being part of the Holy Trinity. Nonetheless, the Unitarians at that time still believed Christ was on the level of savior.

The Transcendentalists received insults calling them pantheists and un-Christian. The Transcendentalists simply saw Christ as the highest example of man connecting with the Divine, not as being Divine. The majority of the Transcendentalists, however, still had some degree of monotheistic belief, even if somewhat influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism.

But what did the middle and lowering classes think? They didn't all believe the same thing, obviously. According to George Ripley, , Orestes Brownson along with probably others I don't know believed that Unitarianism didn't appeal to the lower and middling classes because of a complicated theology. I also think that the religion didn't address the concerns of the middle and lowering classes, which I don't even have a clue about.

From my all too brief understanding of those times, the more orthodox Congregationalists of the Massachusetts area appealed more to the lower and middling classes. The orthodox had made a concerted effort, however, by working more often with the Democratic-Republican party.

The business class in Boston practically used the Unitarian movement to get the orthodox Christians out of town. Giving some of the most powerful chairs at Harvard to Unitarians pissed off the orthodox Congregationalists.

A big lawsuit in Dedham that established that the property of a church/parish (a parish was a political/civic district in Boston at the time) was the property of the parish, not the church made things even worse, sending the orthodox out of the city and looking for support elsewhere.

I'll admit: I haven't looked incredibly deep into ALL the different perspectives in the matter. I've been just trying to understand the matter as it directly applies to the guy, George Ripley, and the community, Brook Farm.

Trying to fully understand the matter by looking at all the perspectives scares me. I wouldn't want even more crazy questions to pop up. I'm a bachelor student, not a professional historian!

Nonetheless, I’m pushing through the fear. I’m having to check out other secondary sources. Those sources are easy. . .they tell you practically everything. At the same time, though, they can leave out details that may not support their stance and hypothesis.

Primary sources scare me. I have yet to find an organized way to go through them to find useful information. Maybe I haven’t found the most useful way to look through secondary sources, but at least secondary sources make it clear where they’re going and possibly how they’re connected to each other. Primary sources, though, they don’t always map things out usefully, the author makes a lot of assumptions that I can’t understand immediately and, as I’ve been complaining in this entry, don’t always provide useful context.

And don’t even let me get into primary sources that are handwritten. It’s like translating a foreign language!

I wrote this entry mostly months ago. It’s pretty much a primary source, itself. I fear for a person in the future who might use it to try figuring out me, my personality, my psychology and the context of things around me. As with most primary resources, skepticism must be used and then it probably has to be cross referenced with other primary sources.

It’s a lot of work. . .and, unfortunately, I’m having to teach myself the skills required to use primary sources efficiently. How quaint and precious, eh?
Links of interest: by George Ripley, Brook Farm, William Ellery Channing, “Self Culture”, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Slavery”, Andrews Norton’s, A Statement of Reasons for Not Believing the Doctrines of the Trinitarians, Concerning the Nature of God and the Person of Christ (1819, 1833, 1859), supernatural rationalism, Deists, Thomas Jefferson, deist tendencies, even Washington pretty much went to church more for social graces than anything, Transcendentalists, Democratic-Republican party

The_Lex v. The Wisconsin Historical Society: Weekend Two

This looks pretty advanced compared to what I was using

Took another trip to The Wisconsin Historical Society this past weekend. This time, I reserved a Zipcar, drove up Saturday morning, studied all day then drove back after a Nepalese dinner. Proved more efficient, more affordable and heck, even more fun as I got to listen to my iPod over car speakers.

Even after the $10 in tolls, $5 max per day parking fee at State Street Campus Ramp and mileage costs, the Zipcar route ended up more affordable than the bus and hotel route. Top that off with driving a hybrid Honda Civic that averaged 40 mpg even on the highway, I think I did quite well, even by environmental standards.

I decided to take the trip spontaneously. The last weekend I went felt kind of disappointing. Not only did I not find anything that felt useful, I didn't even finish looking at everything, just a bunch of letters with really bad handwriting. Leaving, I planned to come back some day. . .when I budgeted for it.

Come the past Friday, though, and I hankered to get back up there. All week I had been studying the books in my home library on the topic of Brook Farm, George Ripley and the controversy between the old school Boston Unitarians and The Transcendentalists. I had first gone up to The Historical Society to find a source that would shed a light on Ripley's inspiration to start Brook Farm. By Friday, I hadn't found the answer to that question at home, either. The compulsion to do more research at The Historical Society had dug its feet into my attention, and it wouldn't go away until I scratched the itch.

I get crazy like that.

During the five hours at The Historical Society, I spent them all in the microfilm room, reading those damned letters with bad handwriting.

First off, I want to thank JohnnyHank for the tip about using the microfilm machine from the last entry. The ability to move the part that holds the microfilm, the lense and the light helped a ton.

Since Ripley occasionally wrote upside down, sideways and whichever way he desired to end his letters back on the first page, rotating the view could prove valuable. Sure, whoever made the microfilm would put another copy of the first page at the end of the letter, this time upside down or sideways. Reading the upside down stuff out of order had its uses, nonetheless, especially when trying to find my place on the microfilm when I first arrived at The Historical Society.

The biggest benefit from JohnnyHank's tip was that he got me to question what I knew about the microfilm machine. When you don't know much, questioning what you know has its benefits.

Last entry, I wrote in the comments that I thought I was projecting the wrong side of the microfilm until I put it through the machine in reverse. At that point, I realized the text was printed on the microfilm at a 90 degree angle, and I thought that was the only issue.

Boy, was I wrong. The text was on the right side of the microfilm, but I had loaded the film incorrectly! I probably should have realized that originally when I couldn't rewind the film. The way I had loaded it, I could only advance the film.

This past weekend, though, while rotating the lense/film holder, I noticed a diagram on the machine that showed how to correctly load the film into the machine. After loading the film correctly, I could move it forwards and backwards, providing me a lot more freedom. The "prehistoric" microfilm reader also made for easier reading than a computer screen.

It makes for easier reading, at least, when you have the correct kind of light. The first machine I had was in a pretty bad position. It had too much overhead light from the fluorescents up above. I don't know exactly how to describe other than imagine driving at dusk time, when it's the hardest time of day and night to see. You think you know what you're seeing, but you're not so sure. Everything is obscured and illusionary. You have to concentrate and spend a lot of cognitive energy to make sense of everything around your car that you just want to pull over, take a breather and wait until the sun sets to see better again.

Or maybe I can better describe by saying the text looked especially smudged and blurry. It looked like someone wrote something with a pencil, erased it then smudged it all over the place with their hand when they tried to brush away the remnants of the eraser on a piece of paper.

The whole lighting situation got so bad that I had to move to another microfilm reader. Less light rained down on it, so I had an easier time reading it. The handwriting still sucked, but I didn't have to squint or think so hard to try translating what I read. I didn't have to try figuring out whether light was causing the problem with the interpretation or if I just found the handwriting troublesome.

Within a couple hours I had read or scanned through the rest of the letters and picked out ones that I wanted to scan onto my flash drive. I chose a long one written while in Europe that mentioned Brook Farm and a bunch of other ones that proved especially difficult to read. Most of those amounted to ones written by Ripley's wife at the time.

Scanning from microfilm proved a chore in itself. I zoomed the view of the microfilm much bigger than "fit to page" or 100%. I would guess that I had zoomed it into 125% to make reading it easier on the eyes once I had printed it out on paper, which I plan on doing, too, to further help not damage my eyes. Biggest problem with scanning the pages in at 125% is that I had to take two scans of every full page.

Things get even more complicated from there. I had to highlight part of the view on the computer of what I wanted to scan. This part got tedious because the person who made the microfilm copied the pages in a weird sequence. Maybe Ripley has some responsibility for the strangeness of the layout. The letter would start out with a view of one page, the next page on the microfilm would have two pages of the letter on it, the next microfilm page would only have one letter page, then two letter pages, one letter page, two letter pages, etc. etc.

To scan these varying layouts of one page, two page, one page, etc., I had to keep manually moving the microfilm reader attached to the computer. Advancing, rewinding, rotating, changing the brightness and a whole bunch of features I could control with the computer. Moving the microfilm side to side, though, I had to play with the reader manually.

Whoever makes that hardware and software needs to add in controls to move the film side to side. Not only would it be more convenient. Having that capability would also help to navigate the film more precisely.

Fat chance programmers will listen, though. In my experience these days, a good user interface has gone out the window as a priority.

I ran into a weird issue after a bit. The external microfilm reader for my computer had somehow slid too close to the reader connected to the computer to the left of me. The source reel for Ripley's kept getting stuck on the other machine, causing my reader to hiccup and fail to advance. The reel on the right would try to pull over some film, it hiccuped then just stopped.

After awhile of just trying to work with it, not knowing the problem and not wanting to bother the attendant, the reader and the computer simply stopped communicating. The computer wouldn't acknowledge the existence of the reader. The software shut down. The attendant fixed the communication issues by turning off the reader then turning it back on.

The collision between the machines kept occurring, however. Enough frustration led me to figure out the problem. Separating the two readers from each other fixed the problem for the rest of the day.

So by the end of my session there, with only a half hour left until The Society closed, I had scanned five letters, half page by half page. Even more annoying, each half page has its own PDF file. If I had Adobe Acrobat and not just the Reader, I can merge these files together instead of having these files all over the place.

Right now, I have all the half pages in separate folders according to which letter they correspond to. Handling the scans in this fashion gets on the nerves of my anal side. Beggars really can't be choosers, though, can they.

The scans I got, sadly enough, may not be very useful to me. In fact, the collection of letters may not help much with my paper. I've already written enough tonight, however. This part of the story will have to wait until another day.

Relevant Links: Adobe Acrobat, Brook Farm, microfilm, George Ripley, JohnnyHank, The Transcendentalists, The Wisconsin Historical Society, Zipcar

Please, Do It for the Historians

I've had the idea for this entry in my head for quite awhile now. Only now, inspired to procrastinate away from starting the studying for my insurance continuing education, do I have the will to approach the subject. Yay!

(OK, OK. . .I just had to play with the kitties for a couple minutes first).

The current paper I'm working on for the last couple years has stretched on for quite some time. I ended up using a lot of time about a year ago having to sift through a lot of sources to figure out the central concept that the members of Brook Farm used as their theoretical goal. George Ripley and his fellow community members would talk around the topic by saying that Brook Farm was the best way to reconcile the individual with the community/society, but he never got that much deeper into how Brook Farm would accomplish that fact.

I ended up having to go to some old newspaper articles that really come off more as press releases than news articles that would sometimes talk around the topic, make assumptions, paint images of Brook Farm in ways that appealed to people's desires and wishes or just relate the history, the architectural design, the personalities, the financial situation and all types of pragmatic, everyday things. Only after digging deeper, deeper and ever so into the depths of the topic did I find a good basis for an explanation of how their method would work, how some theory of theirs would explain their method beyond appealing to the cause of utopian socialism. And no, I won't present the theory, as that could spoil a book that I might publish in the future.

Besides, getting into the theory goes beyond the scope of this entry. The search for this theory through historical documents just led to all types of frustration that could have easily been avoided if someone had written the "theory" in a letter, a journal or even a press release by George Ripley or some other Brook Farmer. Or about if it had become the topic of a debate in the papers or journals between George Ripley or Ralph Waldo Emerson. . .except for maybe the fact that they were either too polite to really get into it with each other or that Ripley thought Emerson was into utopian socialism, which kind of came out every time Ripley tried hitting up Emerson for investment capital for Brook Farm.

But no. . .they had to make my life difficult by not addressing the underlying theory but instead, painting pretty pictures with words, relating the practices of the community to religion and political causes and so on and so forth. They had to make me work months to figure out what was going on when a couple straight ahead paragraphs, an article, a chapter, what have you addressing the situation directly with a straight forward structured theory could have helped me A LOT.

Now I'll step away from this heated rant for a moment and tell a story from my own life.

I experienced defining moment a long time ago, 15 or more years ago but not more than 20 years. My parents, some friends of theirs and I had taken a weekend day to climb Mount Monadnock (which was apparently a favorite place of Emerson and Henry David Thoreau). Once past the tree line, I had either struck out on my own or had just moved a little ahead of my parents and their friends. Walking alone somewhere pretty like Mount Monadnock makes for great thinking time, whether conscious or automatic unconscious mulling over something.

There's this point near the top of the mountain, right before the rock becomes completely bare, where the trail dips down under some pine trees and the rocks form a wall that makes it impossible to take any other route. The ground there gets damp and muddy, and sometimes a big puddle waits in the middle of the trail, causing the hiker to slink around one side of the puddle, trying hard to balance and not get wet. It's a very short dip, but its isolation amongst mostly barren rock allows it to stand out as a unique feature. I don't know if it is so unique that everyone would remember it, though.

Walking through that dip, all those years ago, I came to a realization and came to a decision, which kind of depend on each other. I decided to start journaling and realized that I am a historical being. By journaling, I can create a historical and cultural artifact. No matter what I wrote, from the everyday to the lofty abstract world, I could communicate with the future and give them a glimpse into the past. And not only a simple glimpse, but an intimate one provided by someone who lived in the past and experienced it fully, immersed in it, having a certain perspective and not with the benefit of hindsight (which my journaling could help someone in the future develop).

I had a lot of thoughts of having my influence become immortal because I could affect people in the future by writing now, but I also got off on the imagining the wonder people in the future might have of reading a first hand account of the past, whether of experiences or of ideas. Communicating the power I felt at the moment has become difficult.

It feels powerful to me on a spiritual level. I think my first exposure to this type of thing came from first reading Thoreau's Walden. Honestly, I don't think I have the patience to read Walden nowadays. Back then, though, the book had somehow engaged me, even though I could barely understand what I was reading. Now, I feel like I'm not understanding what I'm reading, but I also realize Thoreau could have written a little clearer. At the same time, I think that abstruse unclear writing had a lot to do with enchanting me.

I had a lot more patience for reading things a long time ago that I couldn't immediately comprehend. Maybe something about being young, not having the constraints of time boxing you in, having a more malleable brain, not having anything else to compare the unclear writing to, not having a library of hang ups, concepts and facts in the brain to crowd in the interpretation of what you're reading. The brain at that time, if not stunted in the way, could be acting like a sponge for facts, knowledge, patterns and structure but not in an anxious, scary way, but in an exciting and passionate manner that just encouraged me to open book after book after book, absorbing what little I could understand and getting happily teased by the parts that I couldn't understand that had potential for vast amounts of understanding and wisdom if I just absorbed more and more.

But back to my defining moment and how Walden influenced me to have it. Walden showed me the thoughts of a man from around 140 or so years before the time I spent reading the book. It really just boggled my mind and inspired me that I could absorb the thoughts of this man who no longer lived. It touched me so much that I realized that I could do it, too. I could come up with my own thoughts, put them down on paper and someone 140 years later, probably around 70 to 100 years after my life and have the same experience. This experience could exist as a tradition, the passing on the experience and knowledge that you could affect people that come after you by writing your thoughts on paper, get it to still exist for that long and have it distributed enough that someone will more likely have a cause to read it than just a random incidence of finding a historical artifact in an archaeological dig or something.

So that's all good and everything. We can all exist, yes, even everyday Bob, Joe, Mary and Sara, as historical beings. We don't have to become just numbers counted in medical statistics, opinion polls, market research, incomes, bills, votes for politicians and your imagination can think up of plenty of other examples. We can all write down out thoughts in our blogs, in private journals and diaries, in articles, in articles of incorporation, in contracts, in wills and so on and so forth. I encourage all to do that. Grab a hold of your historical existence, write down your experience and thoughts and help the future get a more colorful idea of their past and our present. We all have that kind of power, as long as we have pen, paper, a computer, an Internet connection, whatever. . ..

But please, please, please, in all these ventures to becoming a historical being, please write clearly, please explore your thoughts, emotions, theories and impulses, please delve deeply into your inner conscious, into the trappings of society, into theories of why you did this, why your friend did that, why your enemy didn't do what they should have done, why you, your friend and enemy had the confrontation where all that doing and not doing just made a whole big mess. But above all, please explain your motivations, your actions, your reasons, your justifications, your theories, your causes, the things that get you to move, what you think makes other people tick and why the ticking in those people get you to do what you're doing. Explain your understanding of the patterns around you in ways that has a structure for you.

A lot of people probably don't think in this fashion regularly. It probably would take people some effort to start thinking this way then to continue thinking and acting on it. It's probably difficult and hard work. Frankly, I've got the misfortune of having developed a physiology that I believe depends on thinking this way and interacting with the world in this way.

Nonetheless, recording your existence in this way will definitely make the work of future historians that much easier. Please, for their sake, write about your interactions with the world and your acting on the world in this way. . .if you are to write about such things.

Thank you in advance for your charity. You will have done the future a great service.

The US at War

With all the changes that have occurred in the last 165 years or so, it's amazing how many things have remained the same. Shouldn't those with power have learned by now?

"I wish," he [Theodore Parker] said, "All of this killing of 2,000 Americans on the field of battle, and the 10,000 Mexicans; all this slashing of the bodies of 24,000 wounded men; all the agony of the other 18,000, that have died of disease, could have taken place in some spot where the President of the United States and his Cabinet, where all the Congress who voted for the war. . . the controlling men of both political parties, who care nothing for the bloodshed and misery they have idly caused, could have stood and seen it all; and then that the voice of the whole nation had come up to them and said, 'This is your work, not ours. . . We have trusted you thus far, but please God we never will trust you again.'"

- Quoted from Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History. Hill and Wang (New York 2007). p. 221-2, which quoted it from A Sermon of the Mexican War (1848) in The Collected Works of Theodore Parker. Ed by Frances Power Cobbe, 12 vols (London: Truber 1863-65), 7:59-60.

My Passive Aggressive Relationship with Research and my Bachelors Project

Starting a couple years ago, while walking around during a lunch break in Concord, MA, frustrated as all hell, I came to the conclusion that I'm in an abusive relationship with my bachelors project. Please don't be offended as I use the term because, honestly, even though I've never been in such a relationship, I feel like I've been whacked about quite a bit by mind and this research. I've reached the depths of hell and risen to the epiphanies of Nirvana, trying to figure out this albatross around my neck and trying to write it down on the page, all with incomplete knowledge, struggling with some foul beast to tame it, understand it and make it something usable to myself and the human race.

After today, after reading a lot of Roy Baumeister's Meanings of Life, I have a similar yet different concept of the situation. As I retain the abusive relationship imagery, I've started thinking of my research and writing as inhalation and exhalation, the rising and lowering of the chest, the growth of meaning then the thrashing about because it's not enough meaning and lose my whole sense of meaning because the meaning I've gathered together does make the coherent sense that I want it to make nor I can find an angle with which to approach the huge ugly, mangled mass of information and data that needs to be made into sense. It's these moments of frustration, of trying to make a shape to it all that I find myself withdrawing into myself and my books, compulsively looking for that answer and occasionally losing faith in the whole journey and quest. Only once I have given up all hope, my unconscious mind gets thinking, cutting things up and putting them back together, sewing a whole new quilt of sense then waking up my consciousness to fill it up once again with even more nonsense that seems to make some kind of coherence at the time.

Then at that point, like now after the research I have done recently and will detail a little bit more below, I feel elated and euphoric. I see a path to an end point, yet I have doubts whether I need to reach that end point. Nonetheless, I tell myself to ignore those doubts because I need to make progress. Maybe I won't reach the real final destination in a straight line, but as long as I keep struggling and making my way toward what I can see as a destination, I'll reach that point, even if I have to wend my way up the mountain in a windy and twisty type of fashion. Then I fall into the work, I read, I take notes, my mind ruminates and works on making connections while I do other things (all the while, thanks to my ADHD, I get to monitor the whole process as it goes while also questioning it and trying to direct in ways that look to be obvious), I outline (right now, I've written up a 22 single-space printed outline for the current paper that I need more information to tighten up and provide better support) then I move onto the writing stage. But, anywhere in that point, I can trip and land on my face, sending me into a state of frustrated meaningless and moodiness that, I think, Baumeister addresses as the state that people enter when life loses meaning because something pulls the rug out from under your feet. Unfortunate for me, the melodrama of my mind allows me to simulate this process quite often and a lot more frequently than your common everyday person.

I once had a friend who said that he respected me for my trait of searching for answers and truth. Friend, walk in my shoes for a year, walk in my shoes. . ..

Now to let you all know about the recent research:

Almost done with Roy Baumeister's Meanings of Life. Just the epilogue and two appendices. This book has proven so dense that I've had to check it out of the library twice to get as far as I've gotten so far. I will have to check it out many more times in the future to get quotes, information and pore over it some more. It will prove a major source for my bachelors project, and I've only just begun to glimpse the genius in it. . .along with the genius Baumeister's other works.

On Saturday, pretty much right after getting out of bed, getting some grub and doing the minimum to get out the door, I got on a bus to head down to the library. I checked out The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New Renaissance by William R. Hutchison. I read the first chapter at work and at home one day off of Google Books then read the rest of it that Saturday, after immediately getting on the bus home after checking it out. OK, I'll admit, I didn't read the last chapter.

The Transcendentalist Ministers doesn't have the same kind of density as Meanings of Life. Obviously. . .I pretty much read it over a weekend. Unfortunately, unless the last chapter has some really really useful information, only two or three chapters will prove of any use. The first chapter provided a good context for the "historical" situation that I'm writing about, confirmed that there's plenty of inconclusive issues at hand then and also provided a good interpretation for a major controversy that occurred before the "historical" situation that I'm writing about that could very well possibly influence the reasons for my focused "historical" situation. Interestingly enough, though, Meanings of Life provided a very interesting and possibly useful wider context on the situation by talking a bit about Victorianism, social reform and the increasing respect for women during that time.

And today, straight out of work, I got on the subway and headed down to the library once again. I checked out two books: American Transcendentalism: A History by Philip F. Gura and Walter Leatherbee Leighton's French Philosophers and New England Transcendentalism. I picked up the second one on a whim, since it was next to Gura's book and the title touched upon my need to know how exactly the French philosopher's did influence the ideas of at least a couple Transcendentalists. Hopefully it's good, but especially then, I'll need find something that addresses how German philosophers influenced the Transcendentalists. Dang Transcendentalists.

I've got a bit of hope for Gura's American Transcendentalism: A History, though. For one, it came out last year, which makes me think it might prove more colloquial than something written about 50 or so years ago. I also got to read the first chapter, which provided a good amount more context than I had before about the times and the type of stuff going on about interpreting the Bible. This topic has a lot to do with what the first generation Unitarians and Transcendentalists were arguing about. I can't even really get into that now, since it's in a state of thought that I'm just not used to thinking in. Nonetheless, theories about interpreting the Bible, whether miracles are supernatural interventions or natural phenomena that humans can't perform or fully understand, whether Jesus is part of the Trinity as a part of God or simply the epitome of the Divinity expressing itself through a human, whether humans are just tabula rasa that learn through sense experience and reflection or whether humans have a priori consciences and intuition and so on and so on to the point of me not understanding how all that leads to a compulsion for social reform outside of a church. . .but I need to know to get a better idea of why George Ripley and some others established Brook Farm.