Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My FancyWhitman, Walt
History
Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy
Whitman, Walt
American literature
Leaving still unspecified several sterling parts of any model fit for
the future personality of America, I must not fail, again and ever,
to pronounce myself on one, probably the least attended to in modern
times--a hiatus, indeed, threatening its gloomiest consequences after
us. I mean the simple, unsophisticated Conscience, the primary moral
element. If I were asked to specify in what quarter lie the grounds of
darkest dread, respecting the America of our hopes, I should have to
point to this particular. I should demand the invariable application to
individuality, this day and any day, of that old, ever-true plumb-rule
of persons, eras, nations. Our triumphant modern civilizee, with his
all-schooling and his wondrous appliances, will still show himself but
an amputation while this deficiency remains. Beyond, (assuming a more
hopeful tone,) the vertebration of the manly and womanly personalism
of our western world, can only be, and is, indeed, to be, (I hope,) its
all-penetrating Religiousness.
The ripeness of Religion is doubtless to be looked for in this field of
individuality, and is a result that no organization or church can
ever achieve. As history is poorly retain'd by what the technists call
history, and is not given out from their pages, except the learner
has in himself the sense of the well-wrapt, never yet written, perhaps
impossible to be written, history--so Religion, although casually
arrested, and, after a fashion, preserv'd in the churches and creeds,
does not depend at all upon them, but is a part of the identified
soul, which, when greatest, knows not bibles in the old way, but in new
ways--the identified soul, which can really confront Religion when it
extricates itself entirely from the churches, and not before.
Personalism fuses this, and favors it. I should say, indeed, that only
in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the
spirituality of religion positively come forth at all. Only here, and on
such terms, the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight.
Only here, communion with the mysteries, the eternal problems, whence?
whither? Alone, and identity, and the mood--and the soul emerges, and
all statements, churches, sermons, melt away like vapors. Alone,
and silent thought and awe, and aspiration--and then the interior
consciousness, like a hitherto unseen inscription, in magic ink, beams
out its wondrous lines to the sense. Bibles may convey, and priests
expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one's
isolated Self, to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the divine
levels, and commune with the unutterable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account