metacomment: foxworthy on emerson on olberman

Let me begin by saying that I like hearing from you, dear reader.  I read your comments, your email messages, your Twitterings, your smoke-signals.  I read everything you send me.  Because, you know, Reading is Fundamental.

And because occasionally one of you will drop something cool on me.

In reference to a post of last evening, Sensei Jim weighed in with the following:

I know Olbermann is a practiced speaker, but something happens towards the last couple minutes. Reminded me of one of my favorite R.W. Emerson quotations, taken from his personal diary (below).

"The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief; it agitates and tears him, and almost bereaves him of the power of articulation. Then it rushes from him as in short abrupt screams, in torrents of meaning. The possession by the subject of his mind is so entire, that it ensures an order of expression which is the order of nature itself, and so the order of greatest force and inimitable by any art. And the main distinction between him and other well-graced actors is the conviction communicated to the hearer by every word, that his mind is contemplating a whole, and inflamed with the contemplation of the whole, and that the words and sentences uttered by him, however admirable, fall from him as unregarded parts of that terrible whole, which he sees, and means that you shall see."
--- (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1845)

Shazam!