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Aesthetic Realism: Life, Love & Learning

Leila Rosen, English Educator & Aesthetic Realism Associate

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    • Justice versus Injustice in Men & Women
    • We Want to Be Happy—But Do We Also Want Not to Be?
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    • The Debate in Every Person: To Have More Feeling or Less?
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    • Everybody’s Big, Dramatic Question: How Much Should People Mean to Us?
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    • Is Kindness Strength?—Aesthetic Realism & Thaddeus Stevens
  • Successful Teaching: Here’s How
    • Through Aesthetic Realism Interest Wins, Cynicism Loses
    • On Gogol’s “The Nose,” a Satire on Snobbishness
    • More on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method
    • Through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, Knowledge Opposes Anger—and Students Learn!
    • Lessons on Rhyme, Using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method
    • Poetry as Justice: Through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, Aesthetics Defeats Contempt
    • Students Choose Knowing the World, Not Fighting with It
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    • The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett
    • A Thrilling Talk on Literature, by Sheldon Kranz
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Blog: Literature & Life

Happy Birthday, Nathaniel Hawthorne

July 4, 2020 by leirose

July 4th is, of course, a big day in the US, even in this turbulent year. We all know it’s the day on which, in 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence from England’s tyranny—an event that deserves to celebrated with gratitude. It’s the day on which, in 1855, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was published. Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong liked to say it was his birthday, though it was actually a month later.

I always think of another person, too, on the 4th of July: the great writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, born on this day in 1804. I love Hawthorne’s work. Its style has power and grace. It is impelled by ethics, by the need in people to see justly—and it shows Hawthorne’s own vivid awareness of the consequences for a self of being unjust.

In an essay on the writer’s short story “The Man of Adamant,” Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, writes:

If there is any one work, it seems to me, where Hawthorne has presented concisely and richly his attitude to the world and the heart of man, that work is the short story “The Man of Adamant.”…

“All through Hawthorne’s work, there is the admonition: “Do not be alone in concealed glory. Do not separate yourself from the rest of things, so that, darkly, you can establish yourself in another world.”…

“Indeed, a meaning never absent from Hawthorne’s writing is that being alone makes for pride, but it also makes for an unresting sense of iniquity within and a sense of hardening that is also corruption. Perhaps Hawthorne never said this so plainly, so unmistakably, so compactly as he does in “The Man of Adamant.”

Because Aesthetic Realism, as conscious study, teaches about the two opposing desires in us—that which Hawthorne is illustrating in this story, the desire to have contempt, and our greatest desire, to like and be just to reality and see our deep relation to other people—it is the education every person needs.

So I recommend two things: 1) Read “Hawthorne’s “The Man of Adamant,” by Eli Siegel, and the story itself; and 2) find out about how to study in Aesthetic Realism consultations. They are thrilling, kind, eye-opening education in how to know and like the world and yourself honestly.

Filed Under: About Literature Tagged With: Aesthetic Realism Consultations, American literature, Eli SIegel, ethics, Hawthorne

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Successfully Opposes Racism

June 16, 2020 by leirose

Poetry as Justice: Through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, Aesthetics Defeats Contempt

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Aesthetic Realism, anti-prejudice, Eli SIegel, poetry, social justice, teaching method

More Maxims by Eli Siegel from Damned Welcome

May 21, 2020 by leirose

Two weeks ago, I pointed to several Aesthetic Realism maxims by Eli Siegel from his book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. These statements—many of them swift and pithy—are, he wrote, “meant to bother into appreciation.” I find myself thinking of some of these maxims as I try to make sense of what’s happening in our confusing time.

So here are others that encourage me very much.

“If you have time, remember it’s a privilege.”

“The universe, being clever, has given scientists trouble.”

“Let us not be angry at the way we’re angry.”

“It hasn’t yet been scientifically proved that any lovely thing is really over.”

“We are of the world; our job is to be fair to the preposition.”

Filed Under: About Literature, Uncategorized Tagged With: Aesthetic Realism

Aesthetic Realism Maxims by Eli Siegel

May 7, 2020 by leirose

As we’re all looking to make sense of a world that has beautiful spring flowers and a terrifying pandemic, we need the way of seeing that’s in the study of Aesthetic Realism. A means to this is the wonderful maxims by Eli Siegel in his book Damned Welcome. In the preface to the book, Mr. Siegel writes:

These maxims are…in behalf of a world too often seen as unkind, dull, and just too bewildering for anything. It is better to be bewildered by an Aesthetic Realism maxim about things than by things themselves….

The present maxims…are on the side of a reasoned gaiety, and a spontaneous, bubbling seriousness. They are meant to bother into appreciation.

Here are some that I love, and feel are relevant to our time. More will follow!

“Our loveliest memories can be helped by our most fundamental hopes.”

“Sighs should be efficient; if not, we should long for their departure.”

“A person is courageous who is comfortable in larger territory than is usual.”

“When we don’t want people to get the hard facts about ourselves, we are not in favor of these three things: the facts, people, ourselves.”

“Only a person who loves people can be alone rightly.”

“Being oneself is a lifetime job, not to be shirked when we sleep.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Aesthetic Realism

Eli Siegel’s majestic poem “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana” on film

April 15, 2020 by leirose

Aesthetic Realism itself began with Eli Siegel’s seeing of the relations among all the things reality has. It showed through his early writing in poetry and prose. He later wrote: “It was these thoughts that, becoming passionate and musical, took the form of “Hot  ‘Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana.'” This grandly sweeping poem of relation—relation in time and space, the relation among the outward doings of life and the inner thoughts of people, the relation of the inanimate world and living beings—won the Nation magazine’s poetry prize in 1925.

The poem begins:

Quiet and green was the grass of the field,
The sky was whole in brightness,
And O, a bird was flying, high, there in the sky,
So gently, so carelessly and fairly.

Award-winning filmmaker and Aesthetic Realism consultant Ken Kimmelman made a film of this majestic poem. Historian Howard Zinn wrote: “Ken Kimmelman’s reproduction, on film, of Eli Siegel’s magisterial poem, is an extraordinary achievement. It matches, in its visual beauty, the elegance of Siegel’s words, and adds the dimension of stunning imagery to an already profound work of art.”

You’ll be stirred to your depths by this great combination of words and visual images. Now, more than ever, we need to feel that beauty is just as real as the things that can frighten us. I’m grateful to be learning that from Aesthetic Realism. I hope this film encourages everyone else to feel it too.

Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana

Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: film

Filed Under: About Literature

A lesson on viruses, based on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

April 10, 2020 by leirose

At this critical time, as people all over the world are worried about the power of a virus, I want to share with readers this important article by my friend and colleague Sally Ross. She taught her high school biology students about viruses in a way that we can all learn from, including as to how to see what’s different from ourselves. The lesson is based on the great Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, which was also the basis of my English classes for many years.

Filed Under: About Teaching, Uncategorized

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A thrilling talk on G.K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens

As someone who loves literature, I want people to know of a great talk by Eli Siegel, Imagination Has Emphasis, now being serialized in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. In it, Mr. Siegel takes up a critical work he shows is tremendously important: G.K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens. I’ve read this book, and love it! Chesterton’s writing has, Mr. Siegel says, “one unrestrained exuberance after another,” presenting truly who Dickens was. There is much more in this great issue, which I hope everyone will read.

© 2014–2023 by Leila Rosen