The Good Husband
Sensei stepped over to the driveway, walked past the UPS box, underneath the basketball hoop, sodden all, puddles there and there, pointed to leaves wet and brown on the lawn and driveway, a carpet building. He pointed to the capon; most leaves still hanging. First cold night tonight. Overman nods, and nods, all right all that nodding becomes bobbing after a point. Rain calm, the internet exaggerates all, and suggests more anger and evil than there really is. We have forgotten the hour, have lost the day. We walk numb across our urban deserts, our suburbs split, good counsel member bad counsel member and dueling signs. Stay away pseudo-species! And yet, Emerson counsels don’t go there. Riff up his chapter “Prudence,” just three of them that is the point. Remember what God told you, remember what you commanded through your choices leading to actions leading to the play set up before you. Follow your own prompting - this the divine idea and the ox. There is no other relationship for us.
The man writes a list of phrases defining his chosen Word. Word is Idea. What’s the big idea, man? What’s the word. Write down a list. Here Emerson opens with several definitions; he ends the essay with the art of living as his definition. Prudence is the virtue of the sense. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is God taking thought for oxen. Here the lecturer, comedian, initiates his essay. “These fine lyric words” - rap, his essays are lectures, he lectured his essays, he stood and delivered. Comedy, showing how distant he is, slovenly and idle he, from prudence, “and whoever sees my garden discovers that I must have some other garden.” Basically Robin Williams; Kevin Hart we’re hearing. His audience laughed.
But Emerson ends the essay, after his exploration rap of living in the world, as Suburbia Sensei has as he’s raised children in America, he ends the essay demonstrating prudence as “the art of securing a present well-being.” Now you know, Republican, Democrat and LGTBQ that this is true. We live in a noisy land. Babel real and not a soul pays mind.
Prudence is a devotion to matter. There remains tension with the poet and the opium eater. Classes of men in this world (today we mean “people,” all people alive in this world no matter identity or classification), a “third class lives above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified,” here he lived in the 19th century, and rapped semiotics for all assembled.
His writing is also self-help literature. He took the message on the road, in a tight T-shirt, better to show that he works out, and microphone along his cheek. Ted talk master, late night infomercial. Tony Robbins. Supreme Trump diss. Should send this out: “Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” Ouch Trump, ouch his family, hurt our institutions, ouch GOP, ouch America, good luck with the era of argue and epoch of hatin’ -
- Is there a “u” in that margin, or along the running head? Up there near the page number? No. Then move on to the next page. Ooh-ooh-ooh, there’s one, Master! Then write it up, according to the position perspective insight vibe master showman the thing that is what the tingle bury me a jingle core chemicals showing divine the stand, the notice, the seeing. There’s the place for the man turned 50, along these lines, the zone line, prudence for daily living, while knowing the hour and the day, and your neighbor, your friend, you family, your wife. The good husband husbands wisely, according to the circumstance in which he swims, the choices shown, contexts grown, family and work, money and place, this hill will protect you, she said, and Raj visited the prayer circle. Sensei nodded at the wet leaves, and pointed to those remaining.