A Lineage of Mentors and The Wild Delight of Slow Walks
Ways that Ralph Waldo Emerson can be connected to my son Jukie
I take a walk with my son Jukie every day. Last year his walks with me averaged over six miles a day, while this year we have dropped down to a mere five miles a day. For both of us, these walks provide most of our exercise, and most of our time deep in meditative wonder.
NOTE: This essay has been radically edited and shortened.
One of my intellectual heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, is connected to my son Jukie via a direct intellectual influence lineage.
Emerson mentored his godson William James, the father of American psychology, who taught and influenced Josiah Royce and George Santayana at Harvard.
Royce taught T.S. Eliot, while George Santayana was a subject of Eliot’s undergraduate thesis at Harvard.
Eliot, and his focus on poetic and literary ambiguity, directly influenced the British New Criticism critic and poet William Empson, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, a book that quotes Eliot approvingly.
At Cambridge University, Sir Christopher Ricks was deeply influenced by William Empson, whom he called “a genius” whose “prose is at least as well written as good poetry.” Even when he was chosen as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Ricks continued to praise Empson.
And Sir Christopher Ricks taught me, Dr. Andy Jones, classes on Beckett, Eliot, Shakespeare and Tennyson at Boston University, writing me a letter of support of my start at UC Davis as a graduate student.
And I am my son Jukie’s most constant teacher, most often out on our nature walks.
I bet you also have a direct connection to someone notable. Please share who that is in the comments below.
Meanwhile, I am heading back outside. As John Muir says, “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”
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Best,
Dr. Andy
P.S. Three "original names" questions from last week:
18. The city once known as Byzantium and later Constantinople is now called what?
19. What actor who was Oscar-nominated for Bugsy (1990), Sexy Beast (2000), and House of Sand and Fog (2003) was born in 1941 with the name Krishna Pandit Bhanji?
20. What breakfast cereal was originally named “Sugar Smacks”?
This is a New Yorker piece, Andy. Not that Eager Mondays isn’t the blog everyone should be reading, but (it most definitely IS!!!), just saying: this essay is remarkable.