Tag Archives: melville

In the liner notes to the album Pithecanthropus Erectus, Charles Mingus calls the title song “his conception of the modern counterpart of the first man to stand erect – how proud he was, considering himself the “first” to ascend from all fours, pounding his chest and preaching his superiority over the animals still in a prone position. Overcome with self-esteem, …

In his most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote perhaps his most famous sentences: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” The “gulf” is where we …