|
What is the Oversoul?
During the Rranncendentalist Era of the 1800s, one of the most famous transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote an essay entitled, "The Over-soul." Its core thesis was that there was this giant soul that connects all people; "that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other." In simpler terms, even though each of us are individuals, we are all part of this over-soul and connected by it. |
|
Connections between the oversoul and the Grapes of Wrath.
IA. Casy, pgs. 32-33 "I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus rod. I figgered, 'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; Maybe that's the Holy Sperit - the human sperit - the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of'. Now I sa there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent - I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it." IB. Oversoul pg. 386 "We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime withi man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE." IIA. Narrator pgs. 157 - 158 "And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger that has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are no the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more that its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on he earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. Bu the machine man, driving a dead tactor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land IIB. Oversoul pg. 387 "All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie, - an immensity not posseszed and that cannot be possessed." Analysis Page |
