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Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

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Toward an <strong>America</strong>n LanguagebyThornton Wilder[In 1952 Thornton Wilder, triple Pulitzer Prize winner, was invited by Harvard Universityto give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. “Towards the Making <strong>of</strong> <strong>America</strong>n Language,”“<strong>America</strong>n Loneliness,” and “Emily Dickinson,” by Thornton Wilder. Copyright 1952 by <strong>The</strong>Atlantic Monthly. Copyright renewed 1980 by Union trust Company. Reprinted by arrangementwith the Wilder Family, LLC and the Barbara Hogenson Agency. All rights reserved.]“No, here they are. …” Last night I had the lecturer’s vocational nightmare:I dreamed that I had lost my notes.Since this is a series <strong>of</strong> lectures concerning <strong>America</strong>n characteristics, I mustbe sure to <strong>of</strong>fer these young people an <strong>America</strong>n lecture.Is there a difference?Bronson Alcott (in 1856) claimed that the lecture is an <strong>America</strong>n invention.If so, it was also invented independently in Europe. Discourses have been deliveredin all times and ages; but the lecture as we understand it, the secularization <strong>of</strong> thesermon and the popularization <strong>of</strong> the academic address, is probably a product <strong>of</strong> themiddle-class mind. <strong>The</strong> Swiss have a passion for lectures. Conrad Ferdinand Meyersaid that if the citizens <strong>of</strong> Zurich were required to make a choice between going toHeaven or going to a lecture about Heaven they would hesitate only a moment.Yet there is a wide difference between an Old-World and a New-World lecture,and the difference arises from those <strong>America</strong>n characteristics that are preciselythe subject <strong>of</strong> these lectures.Emerson, describing the requirements for lectures in the Lyceums <strong>of</strong> hisday, said:<strong>The</strong>re are no stiff conventions that prescribe a method, a style, alimited quotation <strong>of</strong> books and an exact respect to certain books,persons, or opinions.183

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