Lustres and CondimentsTony Tanner
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In Tony Tanner’s essay overview of Emersonian thinking, “Lustres and Condiments”, Tanner analyzes how Ralph Waldo Emerson was a strong believer of being rooted in several ideas which he laid out. Emerson believed in rejecting the old and embracing the new. He also had many ideas about nature, power, and movement. He believed, like Rushdie, that movement is good and “he was against whatever was ‘stationary’. Movement -transition- was what mattered. ‘Everything good is on the highway’ (‘Experience’)” (Tanner 4). Emerson claimed movement was essential to gain experiences and that the “refusal of ‘stationariness’ for which he continually speaks are essential things” (Tanner 8). Tony Tanner also discussed Emerson’s beliefs that nature, power, and movement are all connected. Emerson said man is just a part of nature and that in order to have power with being so small compared to nature, we must keep moving. Tanner writes that Emerson “would have approved the belief that ‘Power is in nature the essential measure of right.’ And ‘power’ was inseparable from movement” (Tanner 4). Tony Tanner successfully analyzes what Emerson believed to be crucial ideas to the American Experience, movement being one of them.
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Another person who believes movement is crucial to the American Experience is William Least Heat-Moon: