Emerson canonized the Oriental as extreme and unchanging in contrast to the West.

Evidence

Oriental life and society, especially in the southern nations, stand in violent contrast with the multitudinous detail, the secular stability, and the vast average of comfort of the Western nations. Life in the East is fierce, short, hazardous, and in extremes. Its elements are few and simple, not exhibiting the long range of undulation of European existence, but rapidly reaching the best and the worst. The rich feed on fruits and game—the poor, on a watermelon’s peel. All or nothing is the genius of the Oriental life. Favour of the Sultan, or his displeasure, is a question of Fate. A war is undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as in Europe for a duchy. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 406

Categorization

• XREF: A canonical American intellectual endorsing the arrested-Orient trope strengthens the reader’s claim that the manufactured image was a transatlantic project, not just a European one.
• CANDY: Emerson writing that an Eastern war is fought ‘for an epigram or a distich, as in Europe for a duchy’ is a quotable absurdity.