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Transcend This!  A Quantitative Interpretation of American Transcendentalism

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How to Allocate Your Time, Avoid Burn-out, Boost Your Spiritual Power, and (Possibly) Make it to the Other Side

The word “transcend” is derived from the Latin “trans” (across) and “scandere” (to climb).  In a sense, the word means to cross a mountain range.  Like the scout William Lewis Manly, who found a route across the Panamint Mountains bordering Death Valley, made it to coastal California, and returned with food to save his comrades who were starving.  This was in 1849.[1]  Go back further in time, and it’s not hard to imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors staring at a mountain wall, wondering what they would discover on the other side.  If they could find a route across.

Today we use the term, “self-transcendence,” in a more general sense, wondering if we could become tomorrow, in some way, better, stronger, happier, and more productive than we are today.

American Transcendentalism was a 19th century philosophical movement which included authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, John Burroughs, and John Muir, among others.

The central premise of Transcendentalist philosophy was that people could achieve self-transcendence by drawing spiritual power from nature.  In this regard, the Transcendentalists were reacting to problems they perceived in 19th century America, where industrialization and urbanization were spreading rapidly, and the frontier was shrinking and would soon close.  Among the clerks, mechanics, priests, professionals, and others who spent their days indoors, Thoreau remarked on what he perceived as “lives of quiet desperation.”  Emerson railed against the conformity, timidity, anxiety, and toxic egotism he associated with conventional society.  Whitman was blunt – writing under the pen name Mose Velsor, he warned that a sedentary indoors lifestyle devoted purely to mental work was “death.”

Fast forward to today.  The Transcendentalists are still remembered, but the popular narrative has shifted.  The new philosophy is Transhumanism – the hope that we will transcend our limitations through technology.  Transhumanism culminates in the “Singularity” – the point at which humans and machines merge.

Exhibit 1:  Search Trends Show Transhumanism Eclipsing Transcendentalism

Exhibit 1

Source:  Google Trends

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Transcend This!  A Quantitative Interpretation of American Transcendentalism

Super Pemi Loop

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Some highlights from a 37-mile circuit over the holiday weekend along the so-called “Super Pemi Loop” in New Hampshire’s Pemigewasset Wilderness.  The purpose of this trip was i) to make progress on the peak-bagging list for New Hampshire’s 48 mountains over 4,000 feet and ii) to test gear and train for my upcoming trip to the John Muir Trail in California’s High Sierra.

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Super Pemi Loop

Texas Clouds

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As a teenager I was fascinated by Nietzsche (I was desperate, of course), but now, forty years later, here I am on an airplane flight, Beyond Good and Evil on my lap — and no, I don’t remember what prompted me to dust it off after all these years.

The page falls open to an aphorism so widely quoted it has become cliché —

“Take care that if you fight monsters, you do not become a monster.  For if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

I wonder what was he suggesting — did he mean that introspection is dangerous?  That would be a strange thought, since every schoolchild knows the unexamined life is not worth living.  But maybe there is a question of degree.  In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow describes Kurtz as lost — “I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines.”  Alone in the jungle, Kurtz’s soul “looked within itself.”  And whatever it saw drove him mad.

Perhaps Nietzsche gazed into the abyss and saw the heart of nothingness.  For elsewhere he wrote that the self contains an “abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement” —  symptoms of the impoverishment of life that results when the “will to power” turns against itself – symptoms of the spirit of nihilism that grasped 19th century European culture, once it became apparent that their god was dead.

Abyss means “a deep or seemingly bottomless chasm.”  You lean over, drop a stone, listen.

I picture a cave hidden deep within a canyon.  A cave which lies in the bottom of my mind.  It reaches back to my earliest memories.  Reaches back farther — to the source of that collective, ancestral knowledge handed down over generations.  I wonder, if you followed this tunnel far enough, would it lead you all the way back to the inception.  If you ventured deep enough within the darkness, would you bump into the primordial forces that animate us?

I put down the book.  Glance out the window.  Staring straight at me is — a cloud.

This was a year or two ago.  Ever since then this strange idea has stuck with me, namely, that deep within the abyss you might find a cloud….

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Texas Clouds

Notes from the Adirondacks

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Some random notes from a recent trip to the Adirondacks, the purpose of which was to make progress on climbing the 46 high peaks.  This trip bagged me 8 more, bringing the total to 37 out of 46, and hopefully I’ll be able to make a couple more trips this summer and complete the goal…. Continue reading “Notes from the Adirondacks” →

Notes from the Adirondacks

Random Notes from Dallas

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Apologies to anyone who might be following this blog, I haven’t had time to post in a few months, having started a new job recently.  The work is interesting, my new colleagues friendly, and it’s exciting to have the chance to make a difference.  As an aside, the job requires frequent travel to Dallas, which is a change of pace from the Hudson Valley and a nice place to spend some time in the winter.  True, there have been a few cold days with rainy gray skies and temperatures in the 30s (perfect hypothermia conditions if you were wandering around outside), and sometimes the northern wind comes howling across the flat open prairie so hard it might knock you over.  But a few days later, the sun’s back out, the winds have calmed, and the temperature’s soaring into the 70s.  And the next morning I’m surprised when the car thermometer reads 24 F…

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Random Notes from Dallas

Setting Foot in Yosemite (for the very first time)

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My four-week southwestern pilgrimage is drawing to a close, and what stands between my current location in Mammoth Lakes and the San Francisco airport is. . . . Yosemite National Park, John Muir’s temple of the wilderness, in which “every rock seems to glow with life.”

This is sacred ground, with 4.3 million visitors last year.  This year, having just reopened after a month’s closure due to forest fires, no doubt the park will be thronged.  What’s needed is a thoughtful plan:  an infiltration route from a remote trailhead to a suitable vantage point overlooking the valley, sparing me the crowds below.  A chance encounter with a friendly trail volunteer supplies me with exactly this:  a 16-mile route from Porcupine Creek Trailhead to North Dome and the top of Yosemite Falls.

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Setting Foot in Yosemite (for the very first time)

A Visit to the Coral Pink Sand Dunes

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Working on the route from Zion to Grand Canyon, a little dot pops up on the map:  Coral Pink Sand Dunes.  Who doesn’t like scrambling around in sand?  How could you not want to check out dunes with such a distinctive color?

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A Visit to the Coral Pink Sand Dunes

Bishop Pass and Sabrina Lake

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After three days in Lone Pine, California, the grand tour of Owens Valley continues, and now it’s time for Bishop.  First stop:  the public land visitor’s center, where I enter the lottery for an overnight permit for the Bishop Pass trail.  It’s a popular trail, but there’s not much competition mid-week, and a little later that morning, after a series of instructions from the Rangers (where to park, where to camp, how to dispose of waste, how to keep bears from eating your food, and not to mention watch out for dead deer on the pass and the thunderstorm forecast for tomorrow afternoon) — I stroll out with permit, map, and rented bear canister in hand.  Now it’s time to prepare for the mission: map the drive to the trailhead, study the route, buy food, pack my pack, and rig up a carrying strap for the bear canister so I can sling it over a shoulder, it being far too large to fit in my 20-liter day pack.

The next morning I’m up at 3:00 AM, determined to steal a march on the weather and secure a parking spot before the crowds….

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Bishop Pass and Sabrina Lake

More in Moab

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My objectives:  explore the desert, get acclimated to the heat, build back some running stamina without aggravating injuries, continue to condition the feet.  The goal isn’t to overdo things, but still to do a lot, and this requires an aggressive tempo of operations:  breakfast, run or hike, dinner, plan the next day’s activities, bed — repeat.  The planning is time-consuming:  there’s an overwhelming volume of information on the internet, and not all of equal quality.  My best source turns out to be the motel clerk who’s been exploring this area with his wife for the last ten years.

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More in Moab