The Annotated Emerson

The Annotated Emerson, David Mikics

I am studying Emerson, who represents the most original American philosopher. He is the American transcendentalist, the mentor to Thoreau and Whitman and Jane Addams and many others. He is a new Englander who lived from 1803 – 1882 and suffered personal tragedies in his life, but always remained a stoic. He wrote more essays than any other published American, always trying to ferret out the truth and maintained a personal journal that fills 16 volumes at Harvard.

We know him by name, but much of the person and his writing is lost today and we seldom go back to read from the source the way we continually publish and reflect on Walden by Thoreau.

 Phillip Lopate, in the forward writes: “Privately he recorded in his journals his liberal views on every issue of the day: he was for abolition of slavery, woman’s suffrage, and property rights, against the removal of the American Indians from their land, for the new immigrants, unequivocally against U. S. imperialism. Stating that “nationality is babyishness for the most part,” he opposed the Mexican War, Texas’s annexation, and the expropriation of Hawaii: “Let us wait a thousand years before we seize them by violence.” He thought capitalism was a form of cannibalism, and that the wealthy always voted for the “worst and meanest things”: for tyranny, for slavery, against the ballot, “against schools, colleges, or any high direction of public money.” He was defining what we would call progressivism today.

There is not much to critique in a collection that publishes the important essays and poems of America’s first great philosopher – a founder of the Unitarian Church, an advocate of abolition of slavery, a proponent of women’s rights, a lover of nature and the Earth and a companion to Thoreau, Whitman, Alcott and other prominent people in the world of his time. 

The words he wrote still have power, even though the style may grate on our modern ears.  So rather than a critique – here is a sample of his thoughts through his own words.

5/25

It's the birthday of the man who said, "Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air." That's Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in Boston (1803). His father, who died when he was eight, was a Unitarian minister, as were many of Emerson's family members before him. He was a quiet and well-behaved young man, not an exceptional student. He graduated in the middle of his class, studied at Harvard Divinity School, and got a job as a ministerial assistant at Boston's Second Church. Not long after his ordination, he was married. He was happy at home and in his work, and soon he was promoted to senior pastor.

Two years after Emerson was married, his wife, Ellen, died of tuberculosis, at the age of 19. He was devastated. He began to have doubts about the Church. A year after Ellen's death, he wrote in his journal: "I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers." He took a leave of absence and went on vacation in the mountains of New Hampshire. By the time he returned, he had decided to resign from his position as minister.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

 From Garrison Keillor

From Nature:

In Nature, chapter 1 - Emerson wrote: "To go into solitude a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.  I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me.  But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars." 

The closing lines of this paragraph remind me of Rachel Carson in A Sense Of Wonder, " If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!  But every night come out of these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."

Nature chapter one has a passage that makes me think of the wonderful musings of Winston Borden  "...none of them owns the landscape.  There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet.  This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title."

  "The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.  His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food."

“The succession of native plants in the pastures and roadsides, which make the silent clock by which time tells the summer hours, will make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer.  The tribes of the birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has room for tall.  By water-courses, the variety is greater.  In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel weed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in continual motion.  Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold.  Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new garment.” 

“We know more from nature than we can at will communicate.  Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence."

“Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.”

"What is a farm but a mute gospel?  The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun, - it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields.”

"The true philosopher and poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth which is beauty is the aim of both"

"I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it."

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”

From The American Scholar:

“The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature.”

“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.”  “They are for nothing, but to inspire.”

“Life is our dictionary.”

From “History”

“Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.”

“Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws.  She hums the old well known air through innumerable variations.”

The Divinity School Address:

“A snowstorm was falling around us.  The snowstorm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window and behind him, into the beautiful meteor of snow.  He had lived in vain…If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it.”

Literary Ethics:

Emerson in Literary Ethics sets the stage for Thoreaus' dictum - Simplify, Simplify, Simplify when he wrote,  " Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed to be simple is to be great."

“By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.”

History:

“Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.”

“Nature is an endless combination of repetition and of very few laws.  She hums the old well known air through innumerable variations.”

FROM EMERSON’S JOURNAL:

“the knowledge of nature is most permanent, clouds and grass are older antiquities than pyramids or Athens.”

“Every man that goes into the  wood seems to be the first man that ever went into a wood. His sensations and his world are new.  You really think that nothing new can be said about morning and evening.  And the fact is morning and evening have not jet begun to be described.”  J5:469

“Life is a train of moods like string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.” An epigraphs from Emerson in the novel moods by Louisa May Alcott.

Self Reliance:

“Your own reason is the voice of God himself which speaks to you and to all mankind without an interpreter.”

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that eny is ignorance; that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our won; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

“Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’  ‘I am’, but quotes some saint or sage.”

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.  Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

Circles:

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

“There are no fixtures in nature.  The universe is fluid and volatile.”

“The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it.”

“No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.”

“No truth so sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts.”

“Life is a series of surprises.  We do not guess today the mood, the pleasure, the power of tomorrow, when we are building up our being.”

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

The Poet

This essay was really enlightening for me.  We know Emerson more as a philosopher, than a poet or a critic, but he was the voice for poetry during his lifetime - the inspiration, mentor and friend of Walt Whitman and this long treatise on poetry delves deeply in to the perspective he has for this form of writing.  He writes, “With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration.”

Then he goes on to look at poetry in his own analytic way and suggests that “Every word was once a poem.”  This is fascinating because he sees the power in each word and how that power can shape a picture or image for the reader, “The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it."

I have been working to review poetry for Lake Superior magazine's next issue and this has caused me to not just read poetry, but to think about it.  I found myself thinking about the concept of "to turn a phrase" and thinking instead that poetry phrases the turns in our perception.

In the following paragraph Emerson goes further in this analysis and I am going to take the liberty to underline phrases that really spoke to me.  “The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses.  For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer.  The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.  Language is fossil poetry.”

In this reflection the poet is put in the unenviable position of needing to let their own lives move to the background and let life as it surrounds them take over the pen. “So the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low, that the common influences should delight him.  His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.  That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and half-embedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste.”

Finally we begin to see that poetry in its purest form and within the essay Emerson bemoans how few poets are really writing the highest level of poem.  “Art is the path of the creator to his work.”  The creator is not a god, but the poet. “He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him.  The poet pours out verses in every solitude.  Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful.  That charms him.  He would say nothing else, but such things.  In our way of talking, we say, ‘That is yours, this is mine..."

and then we come to the crux of this dialogue.  The product of the poet, the essence of the poem is moving and inspiring, but in fact comes from beyond the writer - "but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is a strange and beautiful thing to him as to you…”

POLITICS

"That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it appeared in former times, partly, because doubts have arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed in the laws, to property, and such a structure given to our uses, as allowed the rich to encroach on the poor and to keep them poor; but mainly, because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure and yet in articulate, that the whole constitution of property, on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading; that truly, the only interest for consideration of the State, is persons: that property will always follow persons; that the highest end of government is the culture of men: and if men can be educated, the institutions will share their improvement, and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land."

"Good men must not obey the laws too well." "Parties are founded on instincts, and have better guides to their own humble aims than the sagacity of their leaders."

"Our quarrel with them begins, when they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding of some leader, and, obeying personal considerations, throw themselves into the maintenance and defense of points, nowise belonging to their system. A party is perpetually corrupted by personality."

"The vice of our leading parties in this country (which may be cited as fair specimen of these societies of opinion) is, that they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth."

FATE

"Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought;- for causes which are unpenetrated." 

" In astronomy, is vast space, but no foreign system; in geology, vast time, but the same laws as today.  Why should we be afraid of Nature, which is no other than 'philosophy and theology embodied?'"

ILLUSION

"Science is a search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all corners."

 "And I have known gentlemen of great stake in the community, but whose sympathies were cold, - presidents of colleges and governors and senators, - who held themselves bound to sign every temperance pledge, and act with Bible societies, and missions, and peacemakers, and cry Sic to every good dog."

"The permanent interest of every man is, nver to be in a false position, but to have the weight of nature to back him in all that he does."

THE NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS:

“The popular education has been taxed with a want of truth and nature. It was complained that an education to things was not given.  We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.  We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms.  We do not know an edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our course by the stars, not the hour of the day by the sun.  It is well if we can swim and skate.  We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of a spider.”

“The lessons of science should be experimental also.  The sight of the planet through a telescope, is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.”

“All our things are right and wrong together.  The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.  Do you complain of our Marriage?  Our marriage is no worse than our education, our diet, our trade, our social customs.  Do you complain of the laws of Propery?  It is a pedantry to give such importance to them.  Can we not play the game of life with these counters, as well ast those; in the institution of property, as well as out of it.  Let into it the renewing principle of love, and property will be universality.”

“If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused.”

MONTAIGNE; OR THE SKEPTIC:

“We hearken to the man of science, because we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers.”

“Society does not like to have any breath of question blown on the existing order.”

“Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know.  The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers.  How respectable is earnestness on every platform.”

“Fate is for imbeciles.  All is possible to the resolved mind.”

Shakespeare; or the Poet:

“Great genial [inborn] power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.”

“Thus all originality is relative.  Every thinker is retrospective.”

“Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakespearized.  His mind is on the horizon beyond which at present we do not see.  Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm.”

FATE:

“Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are exceptional, and one need not lay his account for cataclysms every day?  Aye, but what happens once, may happen again, and so long as these stokes are not to be parried by us, they must be feared.”

“In certain men, digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker.”

“All conservatives are such from personal defects.  They have been effeminate by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.”

“Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought;-for causes which are unpenetrated.”

“In astronomy, is vast space, but no foreign system; in geology, vast time, but the same laws as today.  Why should we be afraid of Nature, which is no other than philosophy and theology embodied?”

ILLUSIONS

“Science is a search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all corners.”

“We see God face to face every hour, and know the savour of Nature.”

Thoreau:

“If he slighted and defied the opinions of others it was only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief.”

“When asked at table what dish he preferred, he answered, The nearest.”

“He chose , wisely, no doubt, for himself to be a bachelor of thought and Nature.  He had no talent for wealth, and knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelebance.”

“He chose to be rich by making his wants frew, and supplying them himself.”

“He lived for the day, not cumbered and mortified by his memory.”

“I must add the cardinal fact, that there was an excellent wisdom in him, proper to a rare class of men, which  showed him the material world as a means and symbol.”

“The other weapon with which he conquered all obstacles in science was patience.  He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rork he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back, and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him.”

“And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind.  Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole.  His determination on Natural History was organic.”

“His study of Nature was a perpetual ornament to him, and inspired his friends with curiosity to see the world through his eyes, and to hear his adventures.”

“The axe was always destroying his forest. ‘Thank god,’ he said, ‘they cannot cut down the clouds!’”

“The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance.”

Thoreau from Emerson’s Journals

“August 6, 1947 letter – Henry D Thoreau is a great man in Concord, a man of original genius and character who knows Greek and knows Indian also,-not the language quite as well as John Eliot – but the history monuments and genius of the Sachems, being a pretty good Sachem himself, master of all woodcraft, and an intimate associate of the birds, beasts, and fishes of the region.”

J5:480 – a report of time spent on a cliff with HDT “A crow’s voice filled all the miles of air with sound…At night I went out into the dark and saw a glimmering star and heard a frog and Nature seemed to say Well do not these suffice?  Here is a new scene, a new experience.  Ponder it, Emerson, and not like the foolish world hanker after thunders and multitudes and vast landscapes the sea or Niagara.”

J14:91  “Having found his flowers, he drew out of his breast pocket his diary and read the names of all the plants that should bloom o this day, 20 May;  whereof he keeps account as a banker when his notes fall due.”