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.”
