• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Aesthetic Realism: Life, Love & Learning

Leila Rosen, English Educator & Aesthetic Realism Associate

  • Home
    • About Me
  • Life & Love
    • Being Important: What Does It Mean & What Mistakes Do We Make about It?
    • What Are Women Looking For in Love?
    • What’s Real Intelligence—about Ourselves & the World?
    • What, in a Woman Herself, Interferes with Love?
    • A Woman’s Determination: Right or Wrong?
    • Is Kindness Intelligent, Selfish, Strong?
    • Independence & Need in Our Lives: How Can They Make Sense?
    • Caring for People—Wisdom or Foolishness?
    • Care for Yourself & Justice to Others—Do They Have to Fight?
    • Justice versus Injustice in Men & Women
    • We Want to Be Happy—But Do We Also Want Not to Be?
    • What Does Getting Ahead Really Mean?
    • The Debate in Every Person: To Have More Feeling or Less?
    • True Self-Expression, and What Interferes
    • What Is a Husband’s Biggest Mistake?
    • Can Men & Women Be Intelligent in Love?
    • Everybody’s Big, Dramatic Question: How Much Should People Mean to Us?
    • A Man’s Imagination: What Makes It a Friend or Foe?
    • Individuality and Love: Do They Have to Fight?
    • Public Self & Private Thoughts—Does A Man Have To Pretend?
    • A Woman Whose Name Was Truth
    • Wowing People and Liking Oneself—What Is the Difference?
    • Does Our Anger Weaken or Strengthen Us?
    • What Makes a Man Truly Strong?
    • What Is Woman’s Greatest Victory—Appearing Beautiful or Seeing Beautifully?
    • 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
  • Language, Literature & Poetry
    • Man Is Poetically Shown in Southern Road, 1932
    • How Musical Can Sadness Be?—or, Grief, Anger, Hope
    • The World Is in Idioms
    • Art Is Within Science
    • Poetry, Atmosphere, and Neatness
    • Some Poetry Is Distinguished
    • The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett
    • A Thrilling Talk on Literature, by Sheldon Kranz
    • Favorite Links about Literature & Teaching English
    • Literature & Life: A Blog
  • Notable Men & Women
    • Ruth Hale
    • Queen Isabella of Castille
    • Minerva Mirabal of the Dominican Republic
    • Mary Benson of South Africa
    • Sojourner Truth
    • Thaddeus Stevens
    • Spencer Tracy
    • Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
  • Blog: Literature & Life
  • Links–& More
    • Photos & Travel
      • Dominican Republic
      • Mississippi
      • Italy, 2012
      • Puerto Rico, 2016
      • Maine
      • Water and land, East Coast
      • Near home
      • Alaska
      • Utah
      • Photographs from some of my travels
      • Cities
    • To find out more about Aesthetic Realism
    • “Timothy Lynch Represents America”

Hawthorne

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

Primary Sidebar

Find out about Aesthetic Realism classes!

During the past two pandemic years, many of the thrilling classes that had been given at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation began to be given in a new form: via video conference. I’ve loved attending them, learning about the visual arts, poetry, music, anthropology, and more—and to see the subjects as related to my very self. Though registration is now over, you can request to audit a class. I encourage you to find out about this great, great education!

 

© 2014–2022 by Leila Rosen