What do you think?
Rate this book
The Portable Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, poet, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the early nineteenth century.
This volume, edited by Carl Bode in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley, presents the essential Emerson, selected from works that eloquently express the philosophy of a worldly idealist. The Portable Emerson comprises essays, including “History,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” “Circles,” and “The Poet”; Emerson’s first book, Nature, in its entirety; twenty-two poems, including “Uriel,” “The Humble-Bee,” and “Give All to Love”; orations, including “The American Scholar,” “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and “John Brown”; English Traits, complete; and biographical essays on Plato, Napoleon, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Carlyle, and others.
This volume, edited by Carl Bode in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley, presents the essential Emerson, selected from works that eloquently express the philosophy of a worldly idealist. The Portable Emerson comprises essays, including “History,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” “Circles,” and “The Poet”; Emerson’s first book, Nature, in its entirety; twenty-two poems, including “Uriel,” “The Humble-Bee,” and “Give All to Love”; orations, including “The American Scholar,” “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and “John Brown”; English Traits, complete; and biographical essays on Plato, Napoleon, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Carlyle, and others.
670 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1946
96 people are currently reading
1000 people want to read
About the author
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3,411 books5,355 followersRalph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. Educated at Harvard and the Cambridge Divinity School, he became a Unitarian minister in 1826 at the Second Church Unitarian. The congregation, with Christian overtones, issued communion, something Emerson refused to do. "Really, it is beyond my comprehension," Emerson once said, when asked by a seminary professor whether he believed in God. (Quoted in 2,000 Years of Freethought edited by Jim Haught.) By 1832, after the untimely death of his first wife, Emerson cut loose from Unitarianism. During a year-long trip to Europe, Emerson became acquainted with such intelligentsia as British writer Thomas Carlyle, and poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. He returned to the United States in 1833, to a life as poet, writer and lecturer. Emerson inspired Transcendentalism, although never adopting the label himself. He rejected traditional ideas of deity in favor of an "Over-Soul" or "Form of Good," ideas which were considered highly heretical. His books include Nature (1836), The American Scholar (1837), Divinity School Address (1838), Essays, 2 vol. (1841, 1844), Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849), and three volumes of poetry. Margaret Fuller became one of his "disciples," as did Henry David Thoreau.
The best of Emerson's rather wordy writing survives as epigrams, such as the famous: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Other one- (and two-) liners include: "As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect" (Self-Reliance, 1841). "The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being" (Journal, 1836). "The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain" (Address to Harvard Divinity College, July 15, 1838). He demolished the right wing hypocrites of his era in his essay "Worship": ". . . the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons" (Conduct of Life, 1860). "I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship" (Self-Reliance). "The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature" (English Traits , 1856). "The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant." (Civilization, 1862). He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity. D. 1882.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was his son and Waldo Emerson Forbes, his grandson.
The best of Emerson's rather wordy writing survives as epigrams, such as the famous: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Other one- (and two-) liners include: "As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect" (Self-Reliance, 1841). "The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being" (Journal, 1836). "The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain" (Address to Harvard Divinity College, July 15, 1838). He demolished the right wing hypocrites of his era in his essay "Worship": ". . . the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons" (Conduct of Life, 1860). "I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship" (Self-Reliance). "The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature" (English Traits , 1856). "The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant." (Civilization, 1862). He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity. D. 1882.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was his son and Waldo Emerson Forbes, his grandson.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
May 24, 2022
The stature of Waldo Emerson in American letters is not easily overstated, even if his originality as a thinker is perhaps more questionable than his most devoted acolytes would prefer to acknowledge. Harold Bloom rightly insisted that the Sage’s influence was such that virtually all of his prominent contemporaries in American literature—both fellow “Transcendentalists” (a term of which Emerson never took ownership) like Whitman, Thoreau, and (sometimes) Hawthorne, as well as opponents like Poe and Melville—had to contend with him in some fashion. Likewise, it is easy to concede that Emerson’s spiritual solipsism and his elevation of action over intellection as the prime discloser of elemental truths make him the common ancestor of both the American Pragmatists and the most obnoxious strands of political libertarianism—two of the most notorious cultural exports of the United States.
But to Bloom’s assertion that Emerson was America’s first truly original writer, or indeed the prophet of an entirely new American religion centered around “the god within”, I can give only qualified support. Emerson’s writing is always compelling, and often interspersed with effulgent shards of astonishing stylistic brilliance; but contrary to his proselytization of “manly” self-trust over sheepish conformity, the bold and self-admittedly juvenile enthusiasm with which he affected to discard everything rote and traditional, it seems to me that, to a large extent, much of his approach to nature and spirituality consisted in making a great pretense of rejecting classical Christian metaphysics, only to reassemble the jettisoned pieces from such more “exotic” sources (at least to a nineteenth-century American readership) as Plato, Plotinus, Swedenborg, and the Bhagavad Gita, before then declaiming his “new” American philosophy as something akin to the rediscovery of fire.
This is in no way to diminish Emerson as a wisdom writer of profound ability. “Nature” is a wonderful recapitulation of the traditional (Platonic, Christian, Vedantic, etc.) theistic understanding of the relation between the natural or material order on the one hand, and the ideal, supernatural, or metaphysical on the other. Rejecting both a simple idealism that “leaves God out of me,” and “balks the affections in denying substantive being to men and women,” and a spiritless naturalism that reduces man to an entirely material object, Emerson joins ranks with the metaphysical poets George Herbert and Thomas Traherne in recognizing the deep affinity or correspondence between the transitory properties of nature and the intemporal spirit or reason (for Emerson the terms are roughly synonymous) through which rational creatures comprehend and reify it; even as, in the very act of doing so, they look beyond it.
“Nature always wears the colors of spirit,” Emerson says. “Nature is so pervaded with human life that there is something of humanity in all and in every particular.”
“The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.”
This affinity between nature and the transcendent self-consciousness of spirit indicates that the latter is, in some sense, the foundation and the object of the former. Spirit appraises nature, goes out into nature; but nature, in its very being and in the transcendental forms it imperfectly reflects, mirrors spirit back upon itself, always gesturing beyond itself and never resolving itself into an autotelic quiddity*. For Emerson, the transcendental perfection of beauty is “the entire circuit of natural forms,—the totality of nature . . . But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good.”
Nature is “a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.” It is eternal spirit’s self-discovery in a temporal mode; “a projection of God in the unconscious,” guiding the realization of our spiritual depths—accomplished through the operation and growth of the understanding—as “the present expositor of the divine mind.” In “The American Scholar”, Emerson conceives of the world as the “shadow of the soul,” or the “other me”, whose attractions to the understanding “are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself.” As nature is a patiency of spirit, and as the spiritual faculty of the rational creature is an individuated inflection of the “universal spirit” or “Supreme Being”, nature is breathed through the “individual” spirit by the universal one; making each individual the center of his own cosmos, its “creator” or “god” insofar as he adopts a likeness to God as the understanding taps into the latent divinity of nature.
“[T]he Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible power. . . . [W]e learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view . . . animates me to create my own world through the purification of my soul.”
“’Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit it is fluid it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven. Know then that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. . . . Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.’”
In “The American Scholar”, Emerson restates and intensifies the concept that we each create our own world:
“It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.”
Each individual is somehow the center of the cosmos; and the centrality of one person in no way interferes with or precludes the centrality of another. As Thomas Traherne wrote in his Centuries of Meditations, “I alone am the end of the World.” Emerson, like Traherne, retains a soteriology. The ego swims in the murky waters of illusion; and it is only when we climb over the ego, discarding this false simulacrum of the self by pouring ourselves out through the world, becoming incarnate to ourselves, that we come into our eternal spiritual inheritance as created gods, or “the creator in the finite.” The world is created through each person; but at the center of each world, or the world as it exists to each of us—the axis mundi wherein the individual spirit-world is conjoined with the universal spirit—is a cross which is also a tree of life. We must lose our lives in order to find them; we must die for our world in order to create it.
We are, at this point, not far afield from Origen or the Greek Fathers; but once the soteriological dimension is dispensed with; once a culture loses its awareness of the fallenness of creation and identifies the ego with the self, the leaf upon the surface with the ocean on which it haplessly bobs; we are not far from monotonizing narcissism, consumerism, or solipsistic “virtualism”. We become enmeshed in the illusion that the world, and everyone in it, is at our disposal, existing only to serve our impish appetites; that it is our fiefdom, and we its potentates; that true creation is satanic rebellion rather than godly self-sacrifice. At our most pathetic, we become “sovereign citizens” who don’t think we need a driver’s license to operate a motor vehicle because we never signed a “social contract.” Emerson is not culpable for the narcissistic turn in American culture, but the latter was no doubt abetted in part by a certain misreading of his exposition on man’s spiritual dominion over nature, and perhaps more especially of his championship of “self-reliance” against the degradations of “conformity,” and indeed of “society” itself.
To be fair, the misreading is an easy one to make. In certain passages of “Self-Reliance”, Emerson seems disturbingly petulant, antisocial, and amoral. He eschews traditional concepts of good and evil as conventional expediencies employed in the service of social control, or the enforcement of “conformity,” which for Emerson is practically the essence of sin. He refuses to countenance any allegiance to any ethical imperative that does not proceed from within himself, claiming an absolute right to defend his truth from all comers.
“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.”
When he excoriates society as an emasculating conspiracy against the individual, he sounds positively Rothbardian:
“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”
But this apparent egotism must be corrected with an understanding that, for Emerson, the self is not synonymous with the ego—or the “understanding,” in Emerson’s phraseology—but is instead the fulfillment or totality of spirit’s self-realization through “unconscious” nature. The self is not our point of view, or our own conception of who we are; rather, the self reveals itself to the understanding over a lifetime (or several, if one believes in the transmigration of souls), furnishing the growth of the understanding into its ultimate identity with itself. The self, as the plenitude of spiritual self-consciousness, is inseparably conjoined with the universal spirit that is only distinct from individual spirit insofar as the latter exists as the former in an individuated mode of becoming. The self-reliant man does not lean unto his own understanding, but finds within his deepest spiritual reaches, his profoundest internality, the most universal truths. Self-reliance is, paradoxically, meticulous obedience to the universal laws of God; while true individualism is the embrasure of the Universal Man Who inheres in all men; Who is one in eternity but in temporality exists only in isolated fragments: “In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of our degradation.” The social state is one of division, “in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”
Self-reliance is thus the end of our redemption, not a rejection of the need for such redemption. Until it is accomplished, “We are like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can set limits to the remedial force of spirit?”
“‘A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.
‘Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon.’”
“The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. . . . The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.”
*My usage of this word is probably not correct, but I’ve been desperate to employ it somewhere.
But to Bloom’s assertion that Emerson was America’s first truly original writer, or indeed the prophet of an entirely new American religion centered around “the god within”, I can give only qualified support. Emerson’s writing is always compelling, and often interspersed with effulgent shards of astonishing stylistic brilliance; but contrary to his proselytization of “manly” self-trust over sheepish conformity, the bold and self-admittedly juvenile enthusiasm with which he affected to discard everything rote and traditional, it seems to me that, to a large extent, much of his approach to nature and spirituality consisted in making a great pretense of rejecting classical Christian metaphysics, only to reassemble the jettisoned pieces from such more “exotic” sources (at least to a nineteenth-century American readership) as Plato, Plotinus, Swedenborg, and the Bhagavad Gita, before then declaiming his “new” American philosophy as something akin to the rediscovery of fire.
This is in no way to diminish Emerson as a wisdom writer of profound ability. “Nature” is a wonderful recapitulation of the traditional (Platonic, Christian, Vedantic, etc.) theistic understanding of the relation between the natural or material order on the one hand, and the ideal, supernatural, or metaphysical on the other. Rejecting both a simple idealism that “leaves God out of me,” and “balks the affections in denying substantive being to men and women,” and a spiritless naturalism that reduces man to an entirely material object, Emerson joins ranks with the metaphysical poets George Herbert and Thomas Traherne in recognizing the deep affinity or correspondence between the transitory properties of nature and the intemporal spirit or reason (for Emerson the terms are roughly synonymous) through which rational creatures comprehend and reify it; even as, in the very act of doing so, they look beyond it.
“Nature always wears the colors of spirit,” Emerson says. “Nature is so pervaded with human life that there is something of humanity in all and in every particular.”
“The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.”
This affinity between nature and the transcendent self-consciousness of spirit indicates that the latter is, in some sense, the foundation and the object of the former. Spirit appraises nature, goes out into nature; but nature, in its very being and in the transcendental forms it imperfectly reflects, mirrors spirit back upon itself, always gesturing beyond itself and never resolving itself into an autotelic quiddity*. For Emerson, the transcendental perfection of beauty is “the entire circuit of natural forms,—the totality of nature . . . But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good.”
Nature is “a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.” It is eternal spirit’s self-discovery in a temporal mode; “a projection of God in the unconscious,” guiding the realization of our spiritual depths—accomplished through the operation and growth of the understanding—as “the present expositor of the divine mind.” In “The American Scholar”, Emerson conceives of the world as the “shadow of the soul,” or the “other me”, whose attractions to the understanding “are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself.” As nature is a patiency of spirit, and as the spiritual faculty of the rational creature is an individuated inflection of the “universal spirit” or “Supreme Being”, nature is breathed through the “individual” spirit by the universal one; making each individual the center of his own cosmos, its “creator” or “god” insofar as he adopts a likeness to God as the understanding taps into the latent divinity of nature.
“[T]he Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible power. . . . [W]e learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view . . . animates me to create my own world through the purification of my soul.”
“’Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit it is fluid it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven. Know then that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. . . . Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.’”
In “The American Scholar”, Emerson restates and intensifies the concept that we each create our own world:
“It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.”
Each individual is somehow the center of the cosmos; and the centrality of one person in no way interferes with or precludes the centrality of another. As Thomas Traherne wrote in his Centuries of Meditations, “I alone am the end of the World.” Emerson, like Traherne, retains a soteriology. The ego swims in the murky waters of illusion; and it is only when we climb over the ego, discarding this false simulacrum of the self by pouring ourselves out through the world, becoming incarnate to ourselves, that we come into our eternal spiritual inheritance as created gods, or “the creator in the finite.” The world is created through each person; but at the center of each world, or the world as it exists to each of us—the axis mundi wherein the individual spirit-world is conjoined with the universal spirit—is a cross which is also a tree of life. We must lose our lives in order to find them; we must die for our world in order to create it.
We are, at this point, not far afield from Origen or the Greek Fathers; but once the soteriological dimension is dispensed with; once a culture loses its awareness of the fallenness of creation and identifies the ego with the self, the leaf upon the surface with the ocean on which it haplessly bobs; we are not far from monotonizing narcissism, consumerism, or solipsistic “virtualism”. We become enmeshed in the illusion that the world, and everyone in it, is at our disposal, existing only to serve our impish appetites; that it is our fiefdom, and we its potentates; that true creation is satanic rebellion rather than godly self-sacrifice. At our most pathetic, we become “sovereign citizens” who don’t think we need a driver’s license to operate a motor vehicle because we never signed a “social contract.” Emerson is not culpable for the narcissistic turn in American culture, but the latter was no doubt abetted in part by a certain misreading of his exposition on man’s spiritual dominion over nature, and perhaps more especially of his championship of “self-reliance” against the degradations of “conformity,” and indeed of “society” itself.
To be fair, the misreading is an easy one to make. In certain passages of “Self-Reliance”, Emerson seems disturbingly petulant, antisocial, and amoral. He eschews traditional concepts of good and evil as conventional expediencies employed in the service of social control, or the enforcement of “conformity,” which for Emerson is practically the essence of sin. He refuses to countenance any allegiance to any ethical imperative that does not proceed from within himself, claiming an absolute right to defend his truth from all comers.
“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.”
When he excoriates society as an emasculating conspiracy against the individual, he sounds positively Rothbardian:
“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”
But this apparent egotism must be corrected with an understanding that, for Emerson, the self is not synonymous with the ego—or the “understanding,” in Emerson’s phraseology—but is instead the fulfillment or totality of spirit’s self-realization through “unconscious” nature. The self is not our point of view, or our own conception of who we are; rather, the self reveals itself to the understanding over a lifetime (or several, if one believes in the transmigration of souls), furnishing the growth of the understanding into its ultimate identity with itself. The self, as the plenitude of spiritual self-consciousness, is inseparably conjoined with the universal spirit that is only distinct from individual spirit insofar as the latter exists as the former in an individuated mode of becoming. The self-reliant man does not lean unto his own understanding, but finds within his deepest spiritual reaches, his profoundest internality, the most universal truths. Self-reliance is, paradoxically, meticulous obedience to the universal laws of God; while true individualism is the embrasure of the Universal Man Who inheres in all men; Who is one in eternity but in temporality exists only in isolated fragments: “In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of our degradation.” The social state is one of division, “in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”
Self-reliance is thus the end of our redemption, not a rejection of the need for such redemption. Until it is accomplished, “We are like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can set limits to the remedial force of spirit?”
“‘A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.
‘Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon.’”
“The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. . . . The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.”
*My usage of this word is probably not correct, but I’ve been desperate to employ it somewhere.
August 5, 2013
I could - and maybe should - read "Self-Reliance" at least once every month. For me it's one of those texts that gives you a good slap on the face and forces you to really scrutinize your priorities. There are things I still have questions about (namely, his attitude towards charity) but that only adds to the richness of the text. Quite non-dual, too.
June 21, 2020
Amongst all his poetry the following is one of my favorites.
The Snow-Storm
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
The Snow-Storm
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
April 24, 2018
The stridency, ambition and intensity of Emerson’s greatest work - Nature, Self-Reliance, American Scholar - is its strength and also its undoing. At best, there is an accumulation of pithy, wise and insightful observations; at worst, he reads in a hectoring tone, full of wild and willful explorations, which are unprovable, fantastical and unsustainable.
If you’ve read contemporary philosophy, say, you’ll be shocked by how is able to define art, language, morality and of course nature without pause. Shocked because he offers little restraint when taking in, say, the genius of Shakespeare, where others may fear to tread. He is bold and sometimes reckless. It it is refreshing too, if you like the German idealists and the way they thought they might assemble a universal and timeless framework. Emerson is a high point of this kind of idealism.
The ‘portable’ edition book contains all you need to get started. His poetry is terrible, but useful for biographical purposes.
If you’ve read contemporary philosophy, say, you’ll be shocked by how is able to define art, language, morality and of course nature without pause. Shocked because he offers little restraint when taking in, say, the genius of Shakespeare, where others may fear to tread. He is bold and sometimes reckless. It it is refreshing too, if you like the German idealists and the way they thought they might assemble a universal and timeless framework. Emerson is a high point of this kind of idealism.
The ‘portable’ edition book contains all you need to get started. His poetry is terrible, but useful for biographical purposes.
April 15, 2013
Despite efforts to reduce Emerson to an avuncular source of pithy quotes, his essays, when read in their fullness, still contain the power to move and inspire people today. He was deeply American, yet also aware of the tradition of Idealism, dating back to Plato and beyond, which shaped much of his thinking. His use of language takes some getting used to, since he was often writing at the edge of what is expressible in words, but when you have acquired a taste for him it's difficult to go back to the pablum that characterizes much of today's "spiritual" writing. This book offers a good cross-section of his essays, lectures, and poems.
July 2, 2013
How can a man who said and wrote so many lovely things also, somehow, be sooooo egregiously boring?
Seeing as how I am most certainly NOT a philosophy scholar, I think it would have been better for me to have half-assed it and read something closer to "Emerson's Greatest Hits." ...although I thought that's kind of what this was meant to be. Eh.
Seeing as how I am most certainly NOT a philosophy scholar, I think it would have been better for me to have half-assed it and read something closer to "Emerson's Greatest Hits." ...although I thought that's kind of what this was meant to be. Eh.
February 4, 2008
Well, this is the great Ralph Waldo Emerson. When one speaks of Emerson as regards words and thought, there comes the muse that herein lies the 'sentence.' Few if any realize that Emerson had attained what in some circles is coined "Cosmic Consciousness." His writings were among the most principled, spanning the periods of the 18th and 19th Centuries among the men and women of Letters of America and Britain -- and simply literary concerns generally, regardless of origin. One today relies so heavily upon colloquialism and slang but should one get-on to the like of an Emerson, one finds that eloquence of word and thought far exceeds anything that can be got-up by popular thought and speech. Emerson's was classic.
April 20, 2009
This book is a collection of Emerson's essays and poems--perhaps the standard collection for the generl reader. For the scholar, it is often useful to quote this edition, since it is so widely available. Sound scholarship--though now a little older than the recent work in the current Emerson revival. The book has been frequently reprinted.
March 4, 2015
Solid primer on one of America's master writers. I profess that the subject matter was very difficult to follow at times, as I'm not that big on poetry or long-form essays with more classical language. Nonetheless, this is an excellent book for anyone just getting into the man's works, and there are some short stories and speeches that stay with you after you've read them.
Recommended.
Recommended.
April 23, 2008
Living in New York, you can lose touch with nature. Reading this on the subway in the mornings instead of AM new york or Metro, really helps one connect with something bigger than themselves even in a crowded, materialistic, adrenaliine driven city.
August 6, 2011
Self-reliance is one of a handful of essays and books I dig out and reread every couple of months, or whenever I'm feeling a bit adrift. It's about as close as I get to inspirational, but this has an edge to it.
September 23, 2019
This book, Emerson’s words, showed me to the light and set up the tee ball and whispered for me to swing.
At the age of 25, an American man living in Izmit, Turkey with way too much reading time on my hands, my true nature was directly experienced.
Always grateful to the Sage of Concord.
At the age of 25, an American man living in Izmit, Turkey with way too much reading time on my hands, my true nature was directly experienced.
Always grateful to the Sage of Concord.
September 11, 2009
A major book for my 'deserted island' list. Dip into it every year since I discovered him in the 1960's and am always pleasantly surprised how much I learn.
February 1, 2011
Perhaps one of the most quintessential American reads. I don't believe I will ever stop reading this book.
March 1, 2013
Love this book, I always turn to the essay "self reliance" when I feel down.
November 4, 2013
Smartest American of all time?
July 31, 2018
A brilliant man, famous during his time, but today he would be criticized for inconsistency, hypocrisy and egoism. He does not stand the test of time well.
July 30, 2015
Read in Bordeaux while preparing my thesis
partially-read
October 8, 2016Read:
"The American Scholar"
Nature
"Self-Reliance"
"The Poet"
"Experience"
"The American Scholar"
Nature
"Self-Reliance"
"The Poet"
"Experience"
April 9, 2017
obviously a reread, but really liking this penguin collected edition
September 6, 2022
I cycle between love and hate with Emerson, but glad I read.
February 11, 2023
“Heartily know,
When half-gods go
The gods arrive”
I wish I could say everything this man wrote or said was gold, because a nice chunk of it is, but alas. I was disappointed to not really be taken with any of his poetry, but I also see so much insight in Emerson’s essays that it feels a fair trade. This is a collection I’ll be happy to come back to time and again throughout my life.
When half-gods go
The gods arrive”
I wish I could say everything this man wrote or said was gold, because a nice chunk of it is, but alas. I was disappointed to not really be taken with any of his poetry, but I also see so much insight in Emerson’s essays that it feels a fair trade. This is a collection I’ll be happy to come back to time and again throughout my life.
Read
September 18, 2021Read the Self-Reliance section, though I hope to be returning to the rest of it soon.
November 7, 2024
I only started this book to read Self-Reliance, but I somehow ended up reading all of the other essays.
Great collection!
Great collection!
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews