"In the name of Christ (and in twenty centuries this name has not been invoked more reverentially) let us cease distrusting others in our selfish way."
-- Richard Buckminster Fuller Draft of Speech for May 1928 AIA Convention, May 1928. Cited in Becoming Bucky Fuller by Loretta Lorance, MIT Press 2009, p. 99.
Fuller's earliest writings frequently cite God and selflessness. The most profound influence on this stream of his thought was the diary of his great-aunt, Margaret Fuller.
Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli (May 23, 1810 – July 19, 1850), commonly known as Margaret Fuller, was an American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States.
Crisis
Margaret Fuller suffered a Personal identity crisis that changed her permanently and determined her lifelong motivations. She eloquently documented the crisis, its build-up, moment of revelation beside a leaf-filled pool of water deep in a wood, and aftermath. These passages were reprinted later in “Margaret Fuller and Goethe”, a book that deeply impressed Bucky when he read it in February 1928 as reflected in letters he later wrote to his sister and mother.
Eldest daughter to a large family, Margaret Fuller was born in 1810 and quickly assumed two responsibilities: care for her growing family--her youngest sister was born when she was eighteen--and master the curriculum reserved at that time only for boys, including Latin, Greek, Italian and French. She excelled, reading Shakespeare at age eight and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations at age twelve. She continued her schooling and voracious study in Cambridge and Groton.
Margaret was not always happy, being a motivated young woman in the nineteenth century. Though smart, she was considered plain, not pretty, and haughty, not modest. In Cambridge in 1826, attaining the age of sweet sixteen, she began a period of study, meditation, and inner struggle with classic questions of personal identity such as “what is life,” “what is God,” and “what am I?” By nineteen she considered herself unlucky in love, but the intellectual superior of her classmates, which included later luminaries such as Oliver Wendell Holmes. Her father suffered a career setback and relocated the family to a remote farm, separating Margaret from any intellectual stimulation. This pain, combined with her increasing disillusion with conventional religion, culminated in her contemplated suicide.
It was Thanksgiving Day 1831. Margaret was twenty-one and wracked with pain and failure—failure to marry, to fit in, to answer her own questions or run her father’s house. “The past was worthless, the future hopeless… [I] envied all the little children… they could never know this strange anguish, this dread uncertainty.”
She tried her usual cure, a long and vigorous walk. Hours passed, and Margaret found that her anguish had passed, but had not restored her as usual; instead, she found herself contemplating the easy, available option of suicide. “It seemed as if I could never return to a world in which I had no place, to the mockery of humanities. I could not act a part, nor seem to live any longer.”
Stunned and submissive to her dark mood, she came to a pool of water. Her life passed before her eyes. In particular, she saw again a moment when she was a little girl, standing in her home, asking the questions of personal identity that had brought her to this low point, “how came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?” She wrote in her diary,
I remembered all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned. I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw, also, that it MUST do it,--that it must make all this false true,--and sow new and immortal plants in the garden of God, before it could return again. I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine.
Aftermath
The sun shone as before upon her in the wood, before the little pool of water, but Ms. Fuller was forever transformed. Her personal identity had become stripped of conventional anchor points such as father, family and nation. Instead, the central idea of her thought became the ineffability of Truth. She had a direct experience of the unity of time and space, and a vision of the role of humanity within that unity: to act on behalf of all life. Her thought and personality changed forever. She returned home a different person, and remained true to the perspective that she gained that fateful day through the rest of her difficult life. She embarked on a controversial life of letters and wrote about human nature, harmony, good and evil and patience.
Bucky Fuller found in Margaret's diary the words to describe the transformation he was undergoing. He was seeking solutions not just for one person, or one region, but for all humanity. He made her philosophy his own and it lent his program of industrialized housing a spiritual underpinning that would last to the end of his long career.
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