TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSCENDENCE. I had always taken Emerson’s injunction “Hitch your wagon to a star” as an example of the idealism of one strain of American thought. I don’t know enough philosophy to talk about “transcendentalism”, but Emerson’s phrase reminded me of the aspirationalism of phrases like “a city on a hill.” I was delighted to see a fuller explanation of the phrase in John Banville’s review of Robert D. Richardson’s latest book about Emerson (in the New York Review of Books for December 3). It turns out that “Hitch your wagon to a star” is an example of American devotion to technological progress—of praise for Yankee ingenuity. The phrase was inspired by Emerson’s admiration for a mill that obtained its power from the tides in Massachusetts Bay. Emerson wrote: “I admire still more than the saw-mill the skill which, on the sea-shore, makes the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, and which thus embraces the assistance of the moon, like a hired band, to grind, and wind, and pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron. Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves.” The full quote is given here with an interesting discussion of the history of the phrase.
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