Commentary on a Better Future
Thomas Johnson, editor-in-chief
I used to keep a printed copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The American Scholar in my US Army assault pack. Those are the backpacks issued to soldiers for use during foot marches and, well, assault. In carrying it like that, I had intended for The American Scholar to provide some kind of inspiration on regular occasions throughout my military career, a sort of annual reminder to keep my chin up. I knew Emerson’s speech would go with me everywhere that way and be there when I needed it. I folded it half and threw it in the hydration pocket near the back of the pack and usually forgot about it.
This all rushed back to me a couple of weeks ago for reasons I can’t recall. I think I was just in the middle of another of life’s crossings and wondering where to look for grounding as the memory came back. Most certainly in that particular moment I was probably meditating. I sit on pillows and close my eyes for a few minutes at a time. Thoughts come and go and I swat them away, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but whatever channel of recall that led me to remember that particular thing I used to do for a while, the carrying Emerson around thing, I knew immediately on recall that it was time for another read.
“In the right state, [the scholar] is,” Emerson spoke, “Man Thinking.” All printed editions of his oration capitalize those words. They’re not my words and they’re out of date, but he continues, “In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
I won’t linger on the obvious there. But let’s remember Emerson’s distinction between Thinking and the thinker as ways of being. One active and constant in state of work, the other static.
Something I think about too much probably is that if you meditate long enough, the effect is to learn that there’s nothing there. I mean, the world does surely exist but it can’t touch you in the ways you think. It’s something like this: take the sum total of all your tasks and problems and ordeals and set them aside, then sit down for fifteen minutes and you’ll realize that those tasks and problems and ordeals still exist even after you’re done sitting. The problems and tasks and ordeals have gone unchanged regardless of any intervention or completion that might’ve been accomplished during those minutes. No amount of agitation extending out from your physical body needed to make a difference at any point during those particular minutes. Everything is still there without your involvement.
The inverse is, and this is the nectar, true as well. Those problems and tasks and ordeals can’t touch you. For those fifteen minutes you were a sitting, breathing, thinking individual, and nothing more. This is because nothing more is required of you.
The universe set you here. The rest is what the world tries to extract from your essence. All the toil, struggle, and pain of living are just things beseeched of you by a world of noise. You are free from it in moments of meditation. It’s once we get up from that static position, though, that it becomes our job to make a better world, a world with a future that extracts less from its people and gives more back to its cosmic kingdom.
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Do you ever feel like you’re having the same conversation over and over again? With others? With yourself? A whole world of information and all the things repeating themselves, not only at great bore but at imminent danger to the art of thinking, from which true progress and change manifest. Even in the pursuit of change, repetition and echo are in threat of becoming Emerson’s parrot, where people are repeating information consumed without thought, process, and mostly importantly, the wisdom of time.
This is the fair and true reason for what we’re doing here, where all the fine-tuned reason of being emanates. Quiet meditation and thoughtful repose, often in silence and for long periods of time, are the tools required to reach a deeper understanding. So why more fiction, why more poetry? Emerson again:
“It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.”
This is what we’re aiming at with Union Spring Literary Review: to soar and sing. We hold this hope not only for the state of fiction and poetry, but for the prospect of a better future.
Let the world’s stories come into us, then let them go. Let all the accumulative facts and terrors of our present state be challenged, then let them go. Let the demands of the earth’s problems and desires and needs and attention be met only in proportion to their time and place, then let them go. Recognize the world around us, define it, detail it, then let it go.
Work to be a better individual.
Together we work toward a better future.
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