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I first encountered William Ellery Channing while doing massive amounts of research for two productions in rep at an arts festival in Flagstaff, Arizona: “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail,” and an original reader’s theatre piece that was being developed as a companion to the "Thoreau."
That original piece became what my husband refers to as “a whole stone bear.” Work on it started months before we went to Flag, with several actors and even a tech person doing research, but one by one, they quietly quit coming to the meetings, and it was finally down to me, our Director/Acting Coach, and one other actor.
So I read and made notes about the Transcendentalists until my eyes felt like they’d been sandpapered and my hands cramped. The other actor took on the Abraham Lincoln and historical background research – the project needed some “fireworks” and some kind of framework to give the audience “context” for the issues of the day and people like Channing, Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller, whose fame hadn’t reached the heights of Emerson and Thoreau, and who were largely unknown outside of New England.
Wikipedia:
William Ellery Channing (April 7, 1780 – October 2, 1842) was the foremost Unitarian preacher in the United States in the early nineteenth century…..one of Unitarianism's leading theologians. He was known for his articulate and impassioned sermons and public speeches, and as a prominent thinker in the liberal theology of the day. Channing's religion and thought were among the chief influences on the New England Transcendentalists, though he never countenanced their views, which he saw as extreme.
So here’s this brilliant man, this major influence on the Transcendentalists, yet he was an Anti-Transcendentalist. He was anti-slavery, but like many Americans of the day, thought that people of color were inferior to white people.
So many contradictions – not an easy person to like or admire. But this single work of his has had a profound influence on my life:
My Symphony
To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy not respectable,
and wealthy not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully,
do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.
This is, of course, impossible to live up to, but as a goal toward which to strive, it has been my compass and North Star ever since I first read it, exhausted and overwhelmed by my task, around 2 AM one late spring morning.
The reader’s theatre piece was the most unwieldy, lumpy thing I ever helped put on the stage. I’ve worked on productions that were truly awful, but this one was frustrating because it had flashes of all that brilliance we discovered, but it was so hastily patched together when time ran out that the center could not hold. It had 4 performances, and then mercifully disappeared forever.
How many times the process is the pay-off, not the end result.
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In memory of CelticLassie's Symphony
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