Emerson framed Oriental life as extreme, unstable, and fate-driven

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. The prolific sun and the sudden and rank plenty which this heat engenders, makes subsistence easy. On the other side, the desert, the simoon, the lion and the plague engender it, and life hangs on the contingency of a kin of water more or less. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 406

Categorization

• SHARE: Emerson, of all people, writing ‘All or nothing is the genius of the Oriental life’ — a Transcendentalist endorsing the environmentalist caricature. Good for a friend who studies American Orientalism.
• CANDY: The Emerson quote ‘A war is undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as in Europe for a duchy’ is a striking, self-contained line.