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Sometimes I stand in the second floor hallway
at All Souls and gaze into that face of
the photographic portrait adorning the wall. There
he is, looking off at an angle, a hint of a smile
carved by a firm mouth, eyes that aimed for the
depths of whatever they pierced, and a nose slightly
dipped, the better to take in the scent of the day.
I imagine his presence, all six feet of him, those
blue eyes, that sandy brown hair of his earlier
years. Here is the Emerson not known for his warmth
but most surely for his affection. Then in my mind’s
eye I surround him with his young wife Ellen, his
later wife, Lydian, his four children, most especially
his beloved little Waldo, and his dear and delectably
eccentric friends—Henry David Thoreau, Branson
Alcott, William Ellery Channing, George Ripley,
Margaret Fuller, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, Thomas
Carlyle, so many more, and of course Aunt Mary Moody
Emerson towering above them all. He simply comes
alive.
The words of Emerson himself are convincing:
“All history becomes subjective; in other
words there is properly no history, only biography.”
(Essays, History, First Series, 1841, 127)
It’s a year of historical biography, for
on May 25, we marked the 200th anniversary of the
birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher, essayist,
poet, preacher, father, husband, and friend. It
is a year that calls us to honor his life and to
revisit those constructs of life through which he
is rendered memorable.
Nature
Nature was Emerson’s most trusted communicant.
Its each and every element he recognized as a receptacle
of moral and divine truth. Nature was a perpetual
allegory.
“The beauty of nature,” he wrote, “
reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation,
but for new creation.”
(Essays, Nature, 1836, 13)
How surely he rejoiced before “the blade
of grass or the blowing rose.” How confidently
he proclaimed that in every particularity of nature
there is teaching.
“The moral influence of nature upon every
individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates
to him.”
(Essays, Nature, 1836, 24)
The verticality of the blade of grass is like the
verticality of a pulpit from which truth is spoken.
“All things with which we deal, preach to
us,” he proclaimed. “What is a farm
but a mute gospel?”
(Essays, Nature, 1836, 23)
Enthusiasm
Emerson had a remarkable penchant for joie de vivre,
for pure joy in living, however profound his losses,
however many times death visited his home and the
homes of his dearest friends. He trusted the possibilities
of each morning and recovered his zest for the day.
From his essay on Circles:
“The one thing which we seek with insatiable
desire,” he observed, “is to forget
ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety….
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.”
(Essays, Circles, 1841, 290)
And from his first essay on Nature:
“Give me health and a day, and I will make
the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”
(Essays, Nature, 1836, 10)
Embedded in the lengthy verse of May-Day, we find
an optimism that surely answers a yearning of our
own time.
“Spring is strong and virtuous,
Broad-sowing, cheerful, plenteous,
Quickening underneath the mould
Grains beyond the price of gold.
So deep and large her bounties are,
That one broad, long midsummer day
Shall to the planet overpay
The ravage of a year of war.”
(May-Day, Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations,
138)
Yet his was not a naïve gaiety or a blind
enthusiasm. Death was a frequent visitor in the
circles of his family and friends. His sorrow ran
as deep as his affections.
Sorrow
Private as his sorrow was, undemonstrative as he
was with those who did not know him intimately,
Emerson surely gave vent to his grief in the wake
of the death of his brother Edward and a scant year
later the death of his brother Charles. Tuberculosis
had been their common killer. Edward had been 29;
Charles, 28.
At Edward’s death, Waldo penned in his journal:
“So falls one more pile of hope for this
life. I see I am bereaved of part of myself.”
(Richardson, The Mind on Fire, 1995, 183)
It had been only six years earlier that he had
lost his first love, Ellen Tucker. They had married
in a state of seeming bliss, knowing that she too
suffered from the symptoms of the deadly tuberculosis,
but hopeful as only young lovers can be. Before
their second anniversary, she was gone at the age
of 20. He was 25. While Emerson was to refer to
her death as ‘the complete wreck of earthly
good,’ he found solace through his poetry,
his journals, and in long walks through the silent
woods and fields.
Love came again in the form of Lydia Jackson, whom
Waldo affectionately named Lydian. They married
in the autumn of his 32nd year and were to have
four children—Waldo, Ellen, Edith, and Edward.
He adored his children, celebrated their antics,
listened to their thoughts, and hovered over their
bedsides when fevers came. The death of his darling
Waldo, only five years old, hit him especially hard.
While he never succumbed to the numbness that such
loss can bring, he did ask why. From the verse of
Threnody, written shortly after the loss of his
child:
Was there no star that could be sent,
No watcher in the firmament
No angel from the countless host
That loiters round the crystal coast,
Could stoop to heal that only child,
Nature’s sweet marvel undefiled,
And keep the blossom of the earth,
Which all her harvests were not worth?
(from Threnody, Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations,
120)
Experience and Intuition
His Bible of answers to the unanswerable was written
above all through his experience and intuition.
We honor Emerson’s trust in those sources.
In his early lectures, he proclaimed that history
itself “is all to be explained from individual
experience,” (Richardson, 257) But he spoke
of “winged facts” in “endless
flight,” of experience, of the sense of experience,
of intuition.
Transcendentalism, or idealism, as Emerson preferred
to call it, was on intimate terms with intuition.
“Transcendental” was a term that he
respectfully attributed to the 18th century German
philosopher Immanuel Kant; it was simply a popular
term for what was connected with intuitive thought.
“There is no pure Transcendentalist,”
he wrote in his 1842 essay of that name, “yet
the tendency to respect the intuitions and to give
them, at least in our creed, all authority over
our experience, has deeply colored the conversation
and poetry of the present day; and the history of
genius and of religion in these times, though impure,
and as yet not incarnated in any powerful individual,
will be the history of this tendency.”
(Essays, The Transcendentalist, 1842, 93)
Courage
We honor Emerson’s courage and eloquence
as he marshaled his intuitive intellect to take
on the issues of his day.
In 1838, he raised the eyebrows of the grandest
theologians of Harvard Divinity School, in his address
to their graduating seniors.
Jesus, he proclaimed, “spoke of miracles;
for he felt that man’s life was a miracle,
and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily
miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the
word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches,
gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not
one with the blowing clover and the driving rain.”
(Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism, Skinner
House Books, 1986, 97)
His words rankled the orthodox for many months
but drew great praise from the likes of William
Ellery Channing and of course, the leftist Henry
David Thoreau.
In 1854, Emerson would speak out against the Fugitive
Slave Law. In the second of such speeches, his words
resounded here in this very city:
“If slavery is good, then is lying, theft,
arson, homicide, each and all good, and to be maintained
by Union societies….To faint hearts the times
offer no invitation, and torpor exists here throughout
the active classes on the subject of domestic slavery
and its appalling aggressions.”
(Essays, The Fugitive Slave Law, 1854, 870, 873)
As we honor the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
we honor the each and all that is all of us—our
nature, our enthusiasm, our sorrow, the experience
of our living, the wisdom of our intuition, our
courage, our blessed humanity and infinite possibility.
How Emerson preaches to us all in these terms of
admonition and promise:
“You think in your idle hours that there
is literature, history, science, behind you so accumulated
as to exhaust thought and prescribe your own future…
In your sane hour you shall see that not a line
has yet been written; that for all the poetry that
is in the world your first sensation on entering
a wood or standing on the shore of a lake has not
been chaunted yet. It remains for you; so does all
thought, all objects, all life remain unwritten
still.”
(from Emerson’s journals, quoted in Richardson,
283)
Standing again in front of that portrait, I am
reminded that it is our eyes that gaze into his,
our minds that filter his, our hearts that open
to his. To honor Emerson’s life is to heed
the call of our own. Emerson was right. “…all
life remains unwritten still,”—the beauty
of nature, the bounty of enthusiasm, the texture
of sorrow, the epiphanies of experience and intuition,
the requisite courage, and the uncharted course
that is ours to walk.
This article was adapted for LifeSherpa by the
Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull from her sermon at The
Unitarian Church of All Souls, New York City, delivered
May 25, 2003
Sources:
The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Edited by Brooks Atkinson, Random
House, Inc., 1940.
Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations, edited
by Harold Bloom and Paul Kane, Literary Classics
of the United States, Inc., New York, 1994.
Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on
Fire, University of California Press, 1995.
Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism: Channing-Emerson-Parker,
Introduced by Conrad Wright, Second Edition, Skinner
House Books, 1986.
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