Day #8-Underground Freeway

Notes from the Underground
Underground Freeway–Day 8, May 29, 2009
By Pi Kielty

[See author’s note on Day #7 of “Underground Freeway,” about writing notes #s 7, 8, and 9 upon returning home from the “tour d-question”].

Day Eight began with the now usual waking fresh in the morning, rustling from the tent at almost 10:30 AM. The night before, Thursday (Day Seven), enjoyed a night out, perhaps playing pool on Stelliga’s uneven table. Lucky and I stayed home with her younger child, and the older one came home as we watched movies. The movie we watched the one movie of the 21st Century to make my favorites lists, an independent flick, small budget, beautifully done, sweet and sad as simple and awesome movie making can be done. The movie, Sweetland, I suppose, entertained my dreams as I found myself thinking about it as soon as my eyes opened. I owned the dvd we watched, and the message and theme–about liberty, life, land and love–always speaks power to my spirit.

Most friends think that I think too much. Yes, I guess I do, in their point of view. For myself, it depends on the Bunny speed or tortoise crawl at which my brain accelerates. My general goal in a day of life seeks to discipline my thinking on good, positive things. It did no wrong to me the morning of the eighth day to think the good. . . not thoughts, but concerning a bright spirit, or better, and the joyful feeling of knowing that good, right and happiness in life happen in the miracles we only forgot to observe. Miracles indeed happen in untold numbers everywhere, like the miracle of new life in any animal or flower upon birth. May be indeed if birth is such a miracle in this world, death could be a happy miracle as well, but one we often fail to capture on this side of joy and suffering. Observed from another side, what happiness does a reverse birth bring parents in a world we cannot see or know? Are we afraid without remembering when we enter the old and new worlds through a womb?

I read that morning, Day 8, and into the afternoon. Lucky and her family caroused in and out of the house from lunch with her mom, to all their jobs, from school, to errands. Friday was a clear day without rain and I took advantage of my last full day in Stone Mtn. to film the neighborhood and the house. Around 3 PM, I drove the seven blocks to the downtown. Why I did not walk dumbfounds me. I guess I think typical American-like. I walked into the bookstore I briefly visited the day before, Mr. Chet’s Book Nirvana Emporium. Like the rest of Stone Mtn.’s architecture, Chet’s had a white stucco exterior, with a black trimming and accent framing, what I believed an early 1960's rural but rich small urban community found in functional yet formal design theme. Stone Mtn. looked very busy and prosperous, past and present.

As a rail junction and depot, one through which rail traffic still crawled several times day, the community most likely grew wealthy on steel track highway traffic transferring the Wisconsin and Upper Plains commerce to Chicago and vice versa. From that point of departure, a strong middle and better-off working class might have developed to give their city much of the impressions I absorbed, in design, diversity, and even the words spoken by people I met. And as all communities with hard working, successful, earlier generations have done, and located so close to the one of the largest and most advanced Universities in the nation, Stone Mtn.’s founding families (I conjectured) would have sent their latter generations to higher learning. Such is an advantage of combining natural intelligence we all possess with the ability to invest return on labor in a better education. Nothing separates wealth and poverty like education, except perhaps nutrition and addiction, (with all the attendant effects of poor diet and over-indulgence). But, again, this is a quick theory, not a thesis I can prove.

Chet’s bookstore occupied two and half floors of space, the half floor containing the military history in a cubby hole mezzanine between a full third floor above the space that appeared to be a living space. I spent over an hour browsing at this book temple, on all three floors. Chet’s Book Nirvana Emporium displayed used books, new books, rare books, collector’s antiques, many signed by someone or owned by a yoohoo of esteem. Some great collections of comic books, movie franchises, and games of those, along with the BOOKS, filled me with desire to buy the entire store. Tens of thousands of good quality paperbacks, good quality in title and bindings, filled huge floor to ceiling stacks in the well-lighted dry basement. Without question, the entire store contained as many books or more I would guess four of the public libraries back home could compile at once and together. Thank the god I have not the wealth to feed that addiction.

After browsing, I talked with Chet, a man in his late 50s who chained smoked, about his views on the world. He was well-informed, to little surprise, considering the knowledge, ideas, and peer creativity contained in book-form within his store. While not sure if Chet himself read much, he had to know something about some things at least. Chet’s views, I decided, differed in a lot of ways from mine. He, a conservative dispassionate, and a cold-hearted realist about dollars, sense, and “god,” did not offend me in any regard. I, a libertarian, internationalist, and myopic utopian-optimist, just listened more than I shared. Chet did have knowledge, and he knew facts. In the spectrum, since neither Chet like myself appeared overly successful with life in business, we got along as equals yet in different worlds of viewpoint.

As a reader of these notes might guess by now, I do read more than average. Reading fills me with facts and theories, strategems, entertainment and fictional gambits. My friend, Ozzish back home, once commented that I hungered for knowledge, as we sat among the stacks of my library in temporary placement in the basement where I live. Indeed, I have at least a few thousand titles, if not several, of books, magazines, and other diverse media of music, movies, collectibles, antiques, games, etc., just like Chet’s, but not as many since I’m not yet 40. Such is my love of knowledge and entertainment, facts, fictions, sounds, and visions–art and letters, science and not quite science.

When talking to Chet, at one point I commented how I would like to spend part of eternity in his store, since such a vast vault of accumulated thoughts in print form appealed to me as some little, but not quite entire, slice of a universal “good place for me.” Chet asked, “Do you want to buy it?” Tempting as a day dream, thank the god I do not have wealth. I would never sell any of it if I owned, in all likelihood, as I would sub-real dream a delusion that I really could read all the books in Pi’s Book Heaven Store.

I wondered after visiting that cigarette smelling store what I would trade for even more knowledge, or the opportunity to gain as much as I could in this life. That question led me to explore more about the whole matter, that of knowledge by any means, and wisdom gained through life, after which I recognized that knowledge from sources like books, people, music or films, about real things or pigments of colorful imagination, never implies experience in life itself. Experience comes by doing. In my life, paralysis can stem from too much self-Socratic dialogue, contemplation; questioning or questing every premise, every solution. When I reach mental apoplexy, my life becomes frozen, wondering whether I missed one fact, made one error, too many. A life thinking about things, and paranoia about what might happen can really happen, would keep me in bed and never up and in the greatest game of all, life itself.

Knowledge does have certain advantages. It merely predicts the “offence to what is really happening.” And without some knowledge, humanity must start from negative infinity in everything, and do it all the time, just to get to the start of zero. I hope humanity can find satisfaction that Dante already wrote the Divine Comedy; Michaelangelo sculpted David for us so we do not have to do it ourselves, though we would only do it worse than he; that Einstein solved relativity; and that Leonardo da Vinci could very damn well have done anything he pleased. The trick with my contemporary fellow humanity must be: How can we take the next step from the past within our present, to get us to the future we want it to become?

The key, I think, comes, yes, with knowledge and experience, and more of that thing called WISDOM. All that I believe at this point in life about wisdom comes down to one moral, one axiom, one axe-edged blunt instrument that can lop off the branch of naive innocence from any tree of life: That WISDOM comes more so from pain than pleasure.

If where we fail brings greater learning than the lesser evils of triumphs, then humanity still has a lot to learn. I feel old, though, because of weariness and exhaustion from catching up with the high ideals that I think should be possible in my life. How many others do not feel the same, that fewer minority who reach mid-maturity and cannot deal with themselves in honesty. My friend, “Archon Lasan” was right when he said, “We are born human, and we grow up tribal. At some point, we spend the rest of our lives trying to be human again.” May the northern lakes’ very own Jack Armstrong rest in peace, for he taught many well. May we all reach humanity.

In this ruminating on Chet’s, in the days that followed since I’ve been home, the question of Day #8 on the Underground Freeway started to gestate. It had a hard birth, and I’m more grateful now than when I was at Chet’s. We learn for some reason; we build knowledge within and collectively for some purpose. In that sum of reasoning, facts, entertainment, and the pain of experience, would we trade all to relive a smarter life, a less painful one, or even one where we found more happiness than we did? History is like a repeating record on the stereo. Are we stuck on something past which we fail to rise to the next level of human spirit? toward another song, another thought, another pleasure, our muse which truly makes us happier to be us? Do we ever learn enough in life just to be in total peace before dying? I hope I’m not the only accidental optimist in thinking we can someday do better with all we know.

Question: “What do we do with whatever wisdom we suffered to learn if few, especially those younger, have to learn the same mistakes and successes as we?”

Day #7--Underground Freeway

Notes from the Underground
Underground Freeway–Thursday, Day 7, May 28, 2009
By Pi Kielty

[Author’s Note: As I returned home now 7 days ago, on Day 9 of the Underground Freeway, the final 3 notes of this “inquiry” come from my personal journal entries, and a recent memory already fading. Note #7, to warn a reader with apologies, will use a different tense than the present-tense. The final three days of my journey in search of a “Question” required a little reflection, yes, but gave way to pressing life and work which I had to resume upon returning home. With a sincere hope, days 7, 8, & 9 will not disappoint an audience too terribly much even though I write from elsewhere, off the road, back in the home Underground].

On the evening of Day 6, following the tour of Stone Mtn.’s church architecture, B., Lucky’s husband, remained at home, while Lucky and I joined a good friend of both their’s, a new friend I made that night. Bryce had an interest in history, my area of degree study in university. Bryce and I quickly engaged in discussion about obscure figures from distant times, and not so distant tragedies that befall the world in sharper episodes when reason fails to moderate illusions.

I drove both of them in Lucky’s van to a coffee shop that doubled as an empty Wednesday night tavern. Along the railroad tracks, just short of the business downtown up one hill and down another from Lucky and B.’s home, Stelliga’s was located within an old brick freight house in the restored depot of the rail yard. Inside, the coffee tavern had a high, empty ceiling, low lights dripping downward like stalagmites obscuring by the soft glare the black indoor cavern above us.

The bar occupied the far left corner of the main room, with the large landscape window to its left viewing an empty gravel marshaling yard the size of three football fields, and the two lone cars in it, the other belonging to the bartender. On the right wall, I saw the espresso machine, and on the back wall an orange oversized cooler thermos labeled with “Puggie’s Punch.” Not distracted and scarce aware of the liquor bottles lined up behind Bethesame, our blonde amiable bartender, I ordered from her an iced coffee. Lucky ordered a dark, acidy beer, and Bryce his draft in a clear bottle.

As a peculiar blend of tavern and coffee house, and empty of souls beside the four of us, I could relax enough in this easy, rather classic atmosphere of shaded red brick and old deep brown beams supporting the building like pillars of an ancient temple of Bachus married to Minerva. Inside Stelliga’s, Lucky, Bryce and I escaped the responsibilities of the real world beyond, as we played free pool on a black felt table that rolled like the hills on either side of the freight house.

We left Stelliga’s, once Bryce and Lucky drank three of their kinds of fermented fun, and I drank three strong brews of caffeinated hyper-time, “hurry up java.” Who was doing the worse drug–those who drank alcohol? Or I who pretended caffeine wasn’t a buzz?

I drove us to another near empty place uphill, in a refurbished downtown. Here, I ordered charged soda, my friends still drinking beer. My buzz on coffee lessened, and now I just enjoyed the fun. In the game room of Downer Diane’s, we failed to build a second story of a very ugly card house, on the green baize of the pool table, this one, however, costing a buck to play. We saved a dollar or two on the pool game, which my two friends would not have been able to see or play well enough anyway.

Lucky and I met a girl, here far away from our old Dodge, who years after we graduated school, drank and socialized at The Bar. Lucky and I left many old haunted beer and gin halls in Dodge behind us. Like ghosts of that past, The Bar appeared in our vivid conversation. Aubrey, with curly blonde hair, has a toddler and husband at home on this cool end of May night. Bryce channeled through the music stations on TV, and the two women and I shared stories about what was where, and what was the taste, feel, and sound in The Bar, a place of intricate and eclectic, eccentric, sensory entertainment. The Bar without exaggeration owns worldwide fame. Known without need of advertising, from Scotland to Japan, The Bar holds memories foolish and foul for me. For Lucky, I know, it gave her fun and headache pain on mornings after, demanding a bloody mary breakfast cure. For Aubrey, who knows? But what compelled her to leave family and home behind for a few hours at DD’s by herself, where she said she had never drank before?

Decades previous, before evenings in The Bar, the “guece” of my own homemade Kielty Cocktails put me in looped frames of mind that cut away layers of perception, and opened new colored pages of wonderland fiction. I escaped to other worlds, like many addicts before had done for several thousand years, and many others will do for thousands after me. The escape within became an outward isolation. In The Bar, I made no friends, and I didn’t want to make friends; hence Lucky was my only friend at times, in spite of myself, and I’ve been lucky to have her. For twenty years, she helped in repairing the reality I tried to destroy with malicious enthusiasm. Life at The Bar was not a life worth living for me, even if I pretend to reflect on the few odd accidents of fun.

I struggled for years on that binge. Whether marijuana, mushrooms, morphine or mash, and sometimes all in a single trip down a road I forgot to avoid, addiction near destroyed me. I achieved recovery from my selfish purge of all friends and feelings, family and second thoughts. For several years now, I neither drink nor indulge in anything clouding a clean conscience or the honesty of my spirit. Everyone I know who overcame the same self-imposed obstacle to living free from that in which they lost themselves, experienced the same strung out despair of losing not only themselves, but all the fun for which we all hope to fill our days. For those like me, it becomes a choice every hour, every minute, every second to live between two choices: Life and happiness or misery in living death. Death is the inevitable destiny on this side of our viewpoint. From my own poor point of view, why hasten the inevitable via uncontrolled and constant compulsion or complete intoxication, if there is only misery to be experienced? It would be better to live (then dying) while enjoying the fun, than not life as we should hope it could be: A happy life better lived than not.

Reflecting on the evening the next day, Day #7, a Thursday, I meditated on an essay I read more than 12 years ago, Leo Tolstoy’s musing on “why men stupefy themselves,” (which also applies to women). As people, we do have free-will, and for sure it is Nature’s greatest gift, greatest responsibility, and greatest curse all in one. For my mind and body, my free choice only found a more fulfilling path once I decided to not intoxicate myself with the garbage that littered my spirit. Only I could make that choice. Only others can do it for themselves. Yes, Lucky and Bryce, and a lot of my friends, find enjoyment, responsibly and irresponsibly as their personal Nature’s determine their ability to use alcohol, etc. to party for fun, or, like people like me, PARTY to perish. Some people can handle it, and still have fun. But I, almost from the start of drinking at age 17, lost the ability to have fun. It was desire to find the insatiable hunger for fun and forgetting that I fell deeper into the emptiness that has no face. People who do not seek that hunger like a starving vampire hunting for blood never think of it. It was in replacing the fun lost faster and faster every time I used that caused me to use faster and faster to try to keep it. Tolstoy explained that to me in a writing over a century old, a fellow I never knew, knew me well. Even once I knew the “irreplaceable life” remained too low as I got too high, my free-will still becomes a choice every minute to find a better way.

I never found freedom in funny fungus. An empty bag or empty bottle left me full of my guilt. The other things? Well, those rarely get mentioned in polite society. And they never come out with the impolite around. Lucky and Bryce? They had fun doing their thing. I had my fun doing mine.

On Day #7, all into the night, Lucky and I and the kids stayed home and watched movies. B. and Bryce went funnin’ at Stelliga’s. In that I found some real fun. I found in a life “uncomplexified” that simple things make me happy. Nature gives everyone, including the reformed addict, the inalienable Right to Pursue Happiness, not happiness itself. Finding it, achieving, living it, but most important, sharing the good times and fortune with others, goes back to the choices that each and everyone of us have to make. Life becomes a redux on a daily basis: Better to live the good life worth living than a poor one defined only by fulfilling selfishness. My use of anything at someone else’s expenses is a moral theft. My use of my life by living and sowing misery on me or others is theft of Nature’s most precious resource for me, which is the limited time I own everyday to live. Perhaps the “secret” I look for rests in becoming a more positive person making someone or something in the world better by my presence. Nothing ever seemed so fun as just pure, steady, simple happiness. I found I could only be happy by acceptance of reality as I found it. I do my best to refine each day of my life to the circumstances I find it, even considering the pain and grieving for loved ones hurt or dying.

I refuse to live for a cause of misery and pain! Long live optimism, faith, positive attitude, and the happy roads upon which those gates open!

As a good friend helped me frame drafting this note once I returned to work after the trip, the “Question”: “How do we find happiness? How do we enjoy life?” brought me closer to ultimate reason for my trip on the Underground Freeway. I still sought the question for the answer I lived without knowing the “why?”.Day #7, entwined with the evening of Day #6, unlocked a door barring my entry.

Centuria Memory Days BIG Show--July 11th

The Cepia Club LLC
P.O. Box 214
Centuria, WI 54824

www.cepiaclub.com


May 11, 2009

Contact–Centuria, WI, Village Hall: 715-646-2300

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Trejo Headlines Centuria’s July Memory Days Concerts

Javier Trejo Band, a nation-touring “rock-out” band from the Twin Cities, highlights Centuria, Wisconsin’s Memory Days two day main street concert on Saturday, July 11th.
Hoping to leap over other community festivals in western Wisconsin’s Polk County, the village of Centuria centers its “do-it-yourself” recession-economy recovery with a daring mix of diverse entertainment and “sustainable-market” renewal.
Most important to July’s Memory Days, according to event volunteer, Tim Krenz, is the entertainment around a Friday night and an all-day Saturday concert-festival, July 10th and 11th.
“Javier is a phenomenal artist and performer. He is strongly connected to the local area through his family, friends, and concerts, and he is a talent getting big time in other parts of the country, based on his outstanding music and ability,” said Krenz.
Javier Trejo Band, who play a “psychobilly” cowboy country-punk, outlaw rock and roll, is one of five local musical acts playing Memory Days. Other acts include Friday’s entertainment, Medula Headrush, and Saturday’s stellar line up of Sandy Bishop’s Children’s Variety Family Show, folk string and dance along by The Juggernauts, and the psychedelia “funk-it” rock grunge of the area’s own, Squib.
Centuria banks on bands drawing crowds to its foods, crafts, trades, professions and farmer’s markets featured that big day, Saturday, July 11th. For more info about Centuria’s July Memory Days, the concert-festival, or the low-fee vending booths, call the Village Hall at 715-646-2300.

Centuria Memory Days, July 11th-Update

The Cepia Club
P.O. Box 214
Centuria, WI 54824

www.cepiaclub.com



June 1, 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact Info: Centuria Village Hall, 715-646-2300


All-Market Bazaar for Centuria’s Memory Days

Centuria, Wisconsin, will host an “all-market bazaar” for its July 10th-12th Memory Days festival.
The village-wide sales and booths, including garage and yard sales, is open to out-of-town vendors for all manners of commercial crafts, trades, professions, hobbies, civic and social associations, non-profits, and farms and coops. Charging only $10 per day for prime spots in the downtown-area streets and sidewalks, or $30 for all three days, the village All-Market Bazaar seeks to create an authentic old style swap meet, where the diversity, variety and fun adds to the attraction.
The vending permits for concession foods on sale that weekend, while open to any licensed restaurant, civic group or social association, have been set at $50 for the big Saturday party, July 11th, coinciding with the music performances on Main/Fourth Street (off WI St. Hwy 35; just three miles north of US Hwy 8). Concession food vending permits for the entire weekend are $100.
“The big day is that Saturday, July 11th,” said event volunteer Tim Krenz. “We have live performances and entertainments, including four music acts, beginning that morning at 9 AM. Opening the commercial vending to bring more interest and more attraction will hopefully bring more people to enjoy what should be a memorable weekend festival.”
The music groups referenced by Krenz include: Sandy Bishop’s Children’s Family Variety Show; local folk string band, The Juggernauts; Polk County’s funk grunge favorites, Squib; and the Midwest’s own rock & country stars, Javier Trejo Band, on national tours this year via the Twin Cities.
For more on vending opportunities or concession food permits, and Centuria’s Memory Days, call the village office at 715-646-2300.

Ralph W. Emerson--Review of "The Conduct of Life"

Review of: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Conduct of Life.” Essays & Lectures: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures; Essays : First and Second Series; Representative Men; English Traits; The Conduct of Life; Uncollected Prose. Joel Porte Wrote the Notes and Selected Texts for this Volume. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. The Library of America, 1983.

Fate. Power. Wealth. Culture. Behavior. Worship. Considerations by the Way. Beauty. Illusions. These essay titles covering 197 pages in this Ralph Waldo Emerson collection combine themselves into a thoughtful psalm book for transcendental living.
Emerson was a product of his times, the first half of the 19th Century, and a heritage commodity grown from the place he lived, the wealthy, attuned “old” New England of seaborne commerce and world travel. He also formulated his own peculiar summaries of the Transcendental philosophy from the people with whom he learned and discoursed; and, finally, from living in the spiritous shadow of “1776 and its debate on Natural laws that defined the century of revolution for popular self-government, rule by the people and not by kings (1688-1789). These essays called “The Conduct of Life” form inner meaning of Transcendentalism.
Transcendentalism, in definition, is a system of beliefs that go beyond “knowable” things. The philosophy encompasses knowledge beyond what we experience, theorize, or know by logical deduction or mathematical/scientific calculation. This knowledge beyond us takes us to the realm of Nature, the place where pure faith resides to determine what is right and what is wrong. By implication, faith in something for no reason, acceptance as a spiritual axiom of healthy living, virtue for its own sake, and humility before the power of Nature and all it contains, “transcends” humanity. We are but a big miracle (perhaps?) on a little rock in space. Ours is not to know why. Ours is to live, enjoy, and love and die. Transcendentalism is, without question, a high order of Optimism. The world and our own individual lives will go according to the way things are meant to go. We are powerless over everything outside our attitude regarding it. This is not a fatal disease, called life. Transcendental philosophy sees us really as spiritual beings having a human experience. The secret is to make the best of it for the good of all.
In this philosophy, evil does not exist. Poor choices, bad manners, lack of caring, the criminally insane, etc., yes These create the chaos from which the good of the Universe flee, leaving the emptiness where things go wrong, but still go according to the Natural laws. In the end, though, Nature refills that temporary void. The basis of transcendence rest on the principle of One. Everything connects somehow, not in relative position, but in direct cause and effect. Right and wrong as expressions of free-will, undoubtably, operate in Nature. In a unification of all, there is only one “god.” He possesses indivisible good. To create evil would be contrary to that One, that unity. If so, then Lucifer would create more power, and become the One. There would be no good, which would contradict the laws of Nature, or everything gets divided into two. Hence, there is only the One, Nature, and Nature’s order. Evil would perpetuate only disorder, which is unnatural, by definition.
In this broader system, Emerson sets out in “The Conduct of Life” nine essays the way we ought to live, if we believe in Nature and Nature’s laws. The first four essays, “Fate,” “Power,” “Wealth” and “Culture” form the “macro-civilization” rules of life. The last five essays, “Behavior,” “Worship,” “Considerations by the Way,” “Beauty” and “Illusions” constitute the “micro-individual” ways we ought to carry ourselves within the Transcendental ideals. All nine essays explain the ideals for good, sound, “pursuit of happiness”-type of living which are wholly and completely the early libertarian creeds of individual-based awareness and actions against tyranny and theft by anyone against the personal property of free people or the collective good of the whole body civic.
One of the most quotable Americans in literature, Emerson’s truisms explain how balance between each person and between each group of different beliefs can be maintained, to keep the One in Natural order. For example, he says in “Fate:” If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character” (p. 943). In character itself, learning from others, and learning to agree to disagree, peacefully, is the foundation of human peace. “Any excess of emphasis, on part, would be corrected,”(p.944) by such an amicable parting of views. Each is allowed to think and live as they desire, so long as they do not impose by force, fraud, theft, or arbitrary power, ending rights of others to do the same.
In “Power,” each individual holds the check and balance against tyranny from any source. Within his or her hands, behold the scales of justice. This form of liberty-based republicanism, so soon after the English, American and French revolutions, requires the knowledge to exercise that right to personal and popular self-government. “A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works, and the education of the will is the flowering and result of all this geology and astronomy” [i.e., learning in general] (p. 971).
Emerson’s view of wealth holds insight for his time period and sense of place, New England. “Wealth is in application of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot” (p.989).
Yet, in culture, humanity reaches definition in the time, place, people, spirit–their age, community, wisdom, and lessons. Fate limits us, as Emerson said (p.952). It cannot teach more for that is the final end. Culture, on the other hand, allows success next time, by teaching lessons while still alive to apply them. Culture carries the transcendence forward, toward its unlimited potential for the One, the good–all of us. “Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success” (p. 1015).
For a successful future, we could use a little lesson now and then on the limits we face as people. Emerson gives many wisdoms. He would be okay even if people disagreed.