Essentials

by Jean Toomer, Rudolph P. Byrd (Editor), Charles R. Johnson (Preface)

Essentials is the perfect book of meditations; a timeless collection of aphorisms and a seminal work of the Harlem Renaissance. This book explores many of the same themes that emerge in man's modern search for wholeness, connection, and resolution in an age of fragmentation, alienation, and exploitation. In a unique blending of Eastern religious belief and modern psychology - inspired by his extended study with G.I.Gurdjieff - Toomer reflects on topics ranging from the dangers of industrial society to the failure of modern religious and educational institutions.

Genres: Philosophy, Classics

88 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. Of mixed race and majority European ancestry, Toomer struggled to identify as "an American" and resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer.

He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Aberjhani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harlem Renaissance icon Jean Toomer first self-published the collection of aphorisms entitled Essentials in 1931. Hill Street Press of Athens, Georgia, republished it in 2000.

In this small powerful book, Toomer communicated in short bursts of insight some of his evolving spiritual ideas, such as the following:

-- "Each wrong idea kills one right instinct."

-- "The only man who can leave the earth to other men is he who has won himself."

-- "We do not suffer: seldom does our essence suffer; but pride, vanity, egotism suffer in us."

Many consider Essentials a masterpiece of its kind and rank it alongside Toomer's CANE, one of the defining literary masterworks of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism.

Aberjhani
author of I Made My Boy Out of Poetry
and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

[Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked a lot of these "essentials." I tended to disagree with the more cynical ones ("Man is a breeding place of problems..."). Here are some sections I liked:

III: "We should have a strong and vivid true sense of actuality. We should have a strong and vivid true sense of potentiality...We should have a strong and vivid true sense of ourselves as wholes, made up of both actualities and potentialities... I would call this last mentioned sense a sense of oneself...Also, I would call it a sense of reality...Modern man is losing his sense of potentiality as regards himself. Hence he is losing his sense of himself and of reality...We are lopsidedly concerned with actualities."

XXVIII: "We experience alternating phases of expanded and contracted consciousness, of increased and diminished being...Depression is caused when we pass from a greater to a lesser state...In the lesser state we experience the hell of absence... Happiness is caused when we pass from a lesser to a greater state...In the greater state we experience the heaven of presence."

XLIV: "An artist is he who can balance strong contrasts, who can combine opposing forms and forces in significant unity...Real art demands the intense purity and wholeness of the very materials we artists often irresponsibly mutilate...One must become a man before he can be an artist...Far about a single talent I price a multiformed man...Art is a means of communicating high-rate vibrations."