The Devil And Tom Walker And Transcendentalism

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A transcendentalist values the natural world compared to the obsession of the synthetic values of those before them. Among the well respected Transcendentalists are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, and Henry David Thoreau. A common dream world consists of simplicity, admiration, and individualism, and there hasn’t been a clear line drawn regarding the connection between transcendentalism and utopian thinking. A future ‘utopia’ should be founded on transcendentalist philosophies in order to restore the value of nature and one's own individual spirit, due to the qualities shared by a 21st century ‘utopia’ and transcendental ideas.
The transcendentalist literary movement was a reaction to the strict doctrines …show more content…

Many times weather conditions symbolize the unstable life that this worldliness thinking will bring upon us, for example the earthquake in the beginning of the passage is used to suggest the shaky life that people have been living in. Later in the passage Tom Walker is walking through his neighborhood and decides to take a shortcut, “like most shortcuts, it was and ill-chosen route” (Irving). Showing how people at the time were constantly taking short cuts to prosper, such as when Irving introduces the investors later on he notes how these people become successful yet by taking shortcuts they faced pitfalls and failures which often put you right back where you started. People today are taking shortcuts in many aspects of life, whether it be in the workplace or in relationships people are losing sight of true compassion. Technology is taking away the meaning behind many so called “romantic” gestures, for example a text saying “I love you” should not have the same meaning as someone saying “I love you” in person. Humans should restore the value of relationships to what they once …show more content…

For instance, in William Faulkner’s, A Rose For Emily, Emily would not go out to pay her taxes because she did not want to interact with society. When describing Emily’s house “decorated with cupolas” and a replica of the “style of the seventies”, Faulkner uses and extended metaphor to go in depth to show how deeply rooted Emily was in transcendentalist thinking (Faulkner). A future ‘utopia’ is not typically thought of as being stuck in the past, a ‘utopia’ is often a place to look forward to, this being said one could argue that transcendental thoughts are not ones in which we should aim to create a society

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