Transcendentalism....

I am a very transcendental thinker. I believe, like Emerson and Thoreau, in the goodness of man, in the strength of the individual, and in the grace of God present in the good acts of men.

The Transcendentalists of the mid-1800s were new minds in their day. The idea to go back to nature, to return to who we truly are, was almost unheard of in the early days of America. Our new nation was about progress and invention; it was not about humans, it was about humanity. The Puritans who came before the Independence believed only in following like sheep under the rule of God, working to survive, but really living seemed like either nonsense, heresy, or dreams. The Transcendentalists believed that dreams come true.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature : "The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible." With this statement one can see that Emerson knew something that many were ignoring. In the 1840s Polk was taming the West under a reasoning called Manifest Destiny that gave men a god-given right to take all the land they could. Men worked and traded, bought and sold for profit, for goods, for industry, for everything that they could ever hold in their hands. Emerson understood the value of things of a higher scale: the beauty of the unattainable, the value of the untouched, the wisdom of the wilderness. (If Emerson was ever the president of the United States, we'd have a much wilder and wiser country.) He continues, in Nature, "few adult persons can see nature...at least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child." I find him most wise in "the lover of nature," and thus a truly alive man, "is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other." There is nothing more true. Emerson believes in the goodness of man, the grace that shines through; he simply understands that men are losing this in their interactions with other men. There is something that needs to be changed, the misunderstood by society are the only truly great men and women, but he provides no options for salvation. Whereas the Puritans said we need salvation for being born as demon-ish men, the Transcendentalists said that we need salvation from being the foolish men we are trained into being; "The voices we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter the world." (from Self-Reliance). Why, oh why is this so?! What goes wrong when a group of good individuals get together? How is it that they can make bad decisions, forget the virtue of helping others, forget the needs that every man needs?

I don't know. And neither really did Henry David Thoreau. He just laughed at it, and turned his back. He did not turn his back intellectually -- his mind was on the bettering of our society all his life, but his actions denied that any problems existed. This is so possible still! An individual life can live true and free despite a government or a society, denying them, perfecting them on a small inaudible level. Thoreau knew this very well: "There will never be a really free and enlightened state, until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power." Though Thoreau still believed in a government (it seems he did not ever fathom life with one) he knew that the individual had all the power inside himself and the government would never cease to be oppressive till this power was seen. Thoreau gave good advice, treated himself as an equal with every other man and thought that if other men just sat down to envision and question want they wanted (especially in terms of a kind of government) then we would have want we wanted, "that [would] be one step toward obtaining it."

What I really like about these men is that they are brutally honest and overwhelmingly hopeful. There was never an end, there were never battles lost, they lived until they died and they made the most out of what they could during their lifetimes. These Transcendental ideas were new and truly American ideas. No one else had every expressed them so eloquently before. The Transcendentalists really gave hope to the American man, and still do.

Considering your second scenario, if I were Chris, Chris would change his career, give up a money making career and go to teacher's school. "Imitation is suicide" and "he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion" says Emerson, and so he must. Chris will never truly succeed in Law if he goes into law school knowing he doesn't really want to be there; that is fact (though unproven [sometimes the heart knows more in the end than the mind]). And if his wife is unhappy with him for not choosing the wealthier career plan, then maybe he shouldn't have married her.