conceptual US/my life

You should see a Google Map below. If you don't, just click here.




Even if you do see the map, you'll have to click on it or click here to get the full effect.

Basically, there are some colored areas:
* light pink (Pennsylvania) = "BIRTH"
* light green (the Mid-South) = "GROWTH"
* dark pink (California) = "TOXIC"
* dark green (Yosemite) = "REFUGE"
* blueish (Pullman) = "PEACEFUL"
* all gray strips are labeled "CORRIDOR" and they're the various routes I've driven between the other colored areas.

There's a story, essentially the story of my life from age 15 to 34 (now), in all the individual points.

When you click on the map, you should see a list of points and labels in a chunk on the left. You can click on a point and it should zoom over to that point, and you can read a description. The points are relatively chronological ("My Hometown" is first and "Hello, Pullman" is last) and the descriptions for each point make up the story. Or, the story I'm telling now, which of course is just a little bit of the story. The framework of the story. Something like that.

When I think of the US, I don't think of it as states or cities or even regions like "the midwest" or anything like that. I think of it in terms of where I've been and what I did there. For me, the US is four specific chunks and then a wide swath of "underexplored" territory. Not "unexplored," because I have been to more places than I point out on the map, but "underexplored" because I haven't spent enough time to make the area a part of myself.

seminar paper plans

I plan to write a seminar paper in some way involving Humboldt, Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. Duh, right?

But seriously. Humboldt was fundamentally influential on many 19thC philosophers, scientists, writers, people who fancied themselves somewhere in-between. By "fundamentally influential" I mean something between "I have studied extensively under him" and "if you look hard enough, you'll see that a lot of principles are similar." Vague, I know.

In one position you have Emerson, who was all about Nature and its uses and how it's emblematic and we must experience it, and yadda yadda yadda—good Transcendentalist/philosopher, not so good scientist. In another position you have Thoreau, who was all about walking around in nature and cataloging and being a good scientist—good conservationist/preservationist philosopher, good scientist, bad Transcendentalist. In a third position you have Muir, who was all about walking around in nature in a big way, not the huckleberry excursions in the local park but in an "I'm going to walk from Wisconsin to Florida and hopefully hop a boat to South America but I got sick so I went to California instead and boy howdy look at these glacial creations and let me give you my theories on glaciation and while I'm at it I'll discover and name a whole passel of plants" sort of way; influenced by Emerson, by Thoreau, by Humboldt. Decent enough Transcendental philosopher, great conservationist/preservationist philosopher, good scientist. More than Thoreau, he met the criteria for what Emerson was looking for in a premier Transcendentalist naturalist.

It's common to place these fellows on a continuum: Emerson! Then Thoreau of course, influenced by Emerson. By the numbers, there's Muir next in line, surely influenced by both. But it's actually trickier than that due to publication and accessibility of texts, which I won't go into here. What I'm getting at is that the better thread that runs through them all is a Humboldtian one. If Humboldtian science can be reduced to this simple definition (which I will use here in this blog post without any more thought given to it)—moving toward an understanding of the interconnectedness of nature through precise and accurate measurement—then anyone who has spent any time with Emerson will realize that thought runs through a great deal of Nature. Same thing for Thoreau and for Muir.

This isn't exactly groundbreaking information. For general, big picture connections between Humboldt and Thoreau, I have Laura Dassow Walls and Seeing New Worlds. Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science; for Humboldt and Muir there's Aaron Sachs and The Humboldt Current (chapter on Muir).

But what I plan to do is to look at the influence from the inside out—what, specifically did Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir say about Humboldt in their published works or in their journals. How and why did they invoke him, and what sort of cultural import did that bring to their own work? The list of references is rich without being an overwhelming amount of work. I remain hopeful.