glorycloud's Diaryland Diary

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the Brook Farm experiment

"Leary and Alpert's transcendental community in the Boston suburbs was a harbinger of the hippie communes that would pop up across the country in the late 1960s. But it also harked back to an earlier social experiment conducted not far from Newton, in the Roxbury section of Boston.

One hundred and twenty years before Leary and Alpert established their three homes in Newton, a transcendentalist and former Unitarian minister named George Ripley founded Brook Farm, a utopian community organized in the 1840's-the same decade in which Henry David Thoreau set up camp at Walden Pond. Leary would soon come to see his life as a continuation of the work of Thoreau, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, the American writer and protofeminist who participated in the Brook Farm experiment.

Leary and Alpert liked to compare their ouster from Harvard with the earlier banishment of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wore out his welcome with a famous 1838 address to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School. In that speech, Emerson condemned the odious errors of historical Christianity, calling its depiction of the Son of God a "noxious exaggeration." True religion, Emerson proclaimed, would allow "every man to expand to the full circle of the universe." Twenty years after he was kicked out of Harvard, Leary would cite the transcendentalists as the inspiration behind his call that every man "turn on, tune in, drop out."

"They, too were saying turn on, tune in, go within. Become self-reliant. Before Emerson came back to Harvard in 1838, he was in Europe hanging out with notorious druggies like Coleridge and Wordsworth," Leary said at a 1983 Harvard reunion. "They were expanding their minds with hashish and opium and reading the Bhagavad Gita. Then he came back here and gave that famous speech where he said, 'Don't look for God in the temples. Look within.' Find God within yourself. Drop out. Become self-reliant. Do your own thing."

"Leary was notorious for his overstatements, grandiose thinking, and inflated sense of his own place in the universe. After all, this was a guy who had enough chutzpah to stand in front of a New York City theater marquee that proclaimed, "Dr. Timothy Leary-Reincarnation of Jesus Christ." But at the same time, the iconoclastic Leary truly was following in the footsteps of Ralph Waldo Emerson. So it's not surprising that Harvard University-founded by Puritans and nurtured as an exclave for the Protestant elite-was not quite ready for Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary. Neither were their neighbors on Homer Street, Kenwood Ave, or Grey Cliffe Road. This early chapter in the psychedelic sixties was coming to an end, and the band of gypsies would have to find somewhere else to go." pg.105,106 Don Lattin "The Harvard Psychedelic Club"

1:06 p.m. - 2010-10-31

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next

latest entry

about me

archives

notes

DiaryLand

contact

random entry

other diaries:

joy-in-god
x--8letters
realthoughts
exegetical
msboston
journey2one
koorikaze
coldwars
freakyouout
jonathan
fragilegirl8
msjessica
broken-in-nc
trapeze-act
fan4
poolagirl
jedidiah77
oldjake
talktogod
silverluna
jondavid2010
newschick
kabukicharms