Semi-Daily Scribbles

Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World – Coursera Assignment 5
Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories

It wasn’t wretchedness or an aversion to work that made Owen Warland dwell in the dark regions of his mind, alternating between passionate states of doubt and elation. After all, as Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” showed us, Owen was a skilled mender of timepieces when he applied his faculties. His troubles, however, stemmed from not extending that same dexterity to knowing his own soul. It is no flight of fancy to surmise that along with Owen’s disdain of Father Time, he was also a student of Transcendentalism (1).

When viewed through the lens of Transcendentalism, we gain knowledge of Owen’s penchant for wasting “the sunshine, as people said, in wandering through the woods and fields and along the banks of streams” (2). He was doing more than flitting about like a butterfly. He was practicing a philosophy where, by immersing himself in the pure joy and perpetual inspiration found in nature, his spiritual body could ascend to a place of visionary reason rather than brutish understanding.

Owen perceived his path to the divine was through his works, and this is when the butterfly became more than the sum of its mechanical parts. The case can be made that Owen’s inspiration for his clockwork butterfly came to him after reading R.W. Emerson's essay titled "Art" (3). In it, Emerson posits: “In landscapes, the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendor.”

Owen took to heart the concept of the sublime, but he also discovered being an artist of the beautiful was to embrace alienation. He believed his fellow man clung to an outmoded, false knowledge, and that they’d never see the utility in beauty. Owen’s art, his true occupation, was the crafting of a universal perception of the everyday divine.

Works cited:

(1) Goodman, Russell, "Transcendentalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
(2) Mosses from an Old Manse and other stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne
(3) Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Munroe Company Boston 1841, Essay XII
Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This appears in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the popular distinction of works according to their aim, either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim. In landscapes, the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that the landscape has beauty for his eye, because it expresses a thought which is to him good: and this, because the same power which sees through his eyes, is seen in that spectacle; and he will come to value the expression of nature, and not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy, the features that please him.