A Rare Book From Pioneering Educational Reformer Elizabeth Peabody – The Marginalian
“The man who keeps on changing is the man who keeps on living,” wrote Virginia Woolf in one of her most insightful remarks as she looked at the dying art of letter writing. This may be the central paradox of life: We yearn for permanence and stability despite a universe of constant change as a way to protect the inescapable reality of our mortality, our individual imperfection. And yet this flawed coping mechanism results not in immortality but in self-inflicted, stagnant, and living death. Emerson captured this paradox with divisive accuracy when he measured the key to personal growth: “Men desire resolution; only when they are uncertain is there hope for them.”
That's Emerson's contemporary and collaborator, the great educational reformer Elizabeth Peabody (May 16, 1804-January 3, 1894), explores in an 1838 letter to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister, included Measurement. (Peabody's sister, Sophia, would eventually marry Hawthorne, living through her romance with Herman Melville.)
As a child, Peabody had taught herself Latin and Greek in order to attain worldly wisdom and cut her curls in rebellion against her culture's preoccupation with young women's looks rather than their minds. She studied astronomy and geography at a time when higher education was not available to women and became the first woman to be admitted to Boston's only lending library. (An exception lasted only a month, during which he borrowed twenty-one books.) In his nineties, Peabody founded the first English-language kindergarten in America, translated the first American edition of Buddhist scriptures, launched the first foreign-language bookstore and circulating library, and named it. Transcendentalism to describe the current philosophy sweeping New England, and introduce the king and queen of Transcendentalism. The epitome of intellectual restlessness and creative reinvention, she never married – she lived a life that her younger sister described as one of “high thinking and simple living.”
Quoting advice a friend once gave him, Peabody writes:
The most dangerous time for the most talented is not youth. The sacred sentiments of intelligence — for all sentiments of intelligence are sacred — keep their possessor unharmed as long as the animal spirits and the sense of being are small in the end; but the dangerous age is the middle age, when false wisdom tempts them to question the divine origin of the dreams of their youth; when the world comes to them, not with a siren song, which all the books warn us about, but like a wise old man who advises to accept what is beneath them.
Peabody concludes with the admonition that the road to self-reliance is paved with careless friends:
No social character can be more inclined to fall to the level of his friends.
Therefore, the solution to standing, lies in surrounding yourself with creative people. Pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell – Peabody's contemporary and important Measurement – we can make this clear two decades later when we think about how we unite and rebuild ourselves through friendship: “No matter how good we are as friends, we are under their influence more than we realize.”
Joins pioneering sociologist John Gardner on a phone call and legendary cellist Pablo Casals, 93, on the vitality of creativity and how working with love can increase your life.
