Brother Gerry made a passing remark to me this summer, which has set me along a path of affirmation and discovery. His words to me had the effect of saying: "you are an individualist, in the style of Emerson." I already had a latent interest in Emerson - through reading of his associations with Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau - and decided to go straight to the horses mouth, and see to what degree I agreed with the man.
The pocket-sized, leather-bound copy of his Essays and Representative Men, which I borrowed from Elgin library, looked like a Gideon's bible and I have come to employ it as such: carrying it about with me everywhere I go, unable to put the thing down, imagining that it might even save my life if somebody ever decided to shoot at my coat pocket. I am so glad that Emerson decided to write his ideas down and permit a lad in the north-east of Scotland to peer into his mind. His writing affirm thoughts which were already in my head, and introduced a few more besides. And they are expressed so pleasingly: a real pleasure to read. I started scribbling down the words that most struck me, then realised that I would end up copying down half the book and that the best thing would be to procure my own copy, and be able to reread it at will.
It took me a while to tune into Emerson's early eighteenth century language. His expressions are not only thusly dated but also constructed in his own idiosyncratic style. However, Emerson had something to say on this point: that whosoever speaketh of eternal truths, speaks timelessly, and writes unbound to the particularities of their time. Shakespeare's dialogues are such a realistic portrayal of human nature, it is as if they are occurring here and now in front of the reader. The insatiable intellectual inquiry of Plato is recorded in terms whose tone could be mistaken for that of a modern writer.
Further reading soon led me into a full appreciation of Emerson's pithy, stylish turns of phrase, and his lapidary mind behind them. His pithiness lends itself felicitously to quote plucking.
Emerson's emphasis on the self-reliance and "infinitude of the private man" is placed within his underlying pantheism. Everything is united; All is One; each seemingly distinct incidence occurring within time and space is simply yet another manifestation of the same underlying spiritual reality; in the same way that each individual mushroom appearing above ground is but a superficial excrescence of an invisible underground network, containing, as it were, the Platonic idea of mushroomness. Emerson gives me the image of material reality seen like a kaleidoscope: manifold shining shapes together creating momentarily a pattern, soon to tumble onward, ever subject to the wheel of life's tireless rotations and the creation of ever new reconfigurations.
This puts me in mind of Alan Watts' notion of the material universe as God playing hide-and-seek with himself. This game analogy should not be seen to trivialise the import of existence, but rather may help to give it meaning to those who see none. Playing a game may have several purposes, not least of which being that it is an interesting way to allow time to pass. How else would God decide to spend infinity?
An idea that Emerson has affirmed for me is that I am (a microcosm of) the entire cosmos (giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "I feel whole.") I carry the world within me. As within, so without.
This puts me in mind of my idea that the world is not only an interpretation seen by each mind, but also the representation of the interpretation of the self. The relationship you have with yourself is the same as the relationship you have with the world. If you are entirely at peace with yourself, so will you be with the whole world. If you do not accept parts of yourself, so will you have misgivings about parts of the world.
Emerson's essays were first delivered as lectures all over America before being published. He exhorted his listeners, and later his readers, to feel in nowise inferior to the glory of illustrious civilizations - whether they be the Greeks of yesteryear or contemporary Europeans. The same spirit animating the whole of Nature may manifest itself here and now as well as anywhere else in the world at any other time. Only sixty years after America gained independence, Emerson's emphasis on the strength of selfhood had the wider significance of strengthening a new sense of American nationhood. His lectures were described as "America's intellectual declaration of independence"
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
If I am the Devil's child then I will live from the Devil. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.
Men do good actions much as they would pay a fine in expiation of a daily non-appearance in parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of living in the world. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate but to live.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after our own but the great one is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Suppose you should contradict yourself? What then? With consistency a great man has simply nothing to do. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow [do the same], though it contradict everything you said today. Is it so bad to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.
We must go alone.
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. The wise man throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than theirs to find his weak point.
In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.
Men suffer all their life long under the false superstition that they can be cheated, but it is impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself.
Nothing can work me damage except myself, the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault.
...for it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered, the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.
The rich man lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.
A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labours are unnecessary and fruitless, that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous actions we are strong.
Like draws to like, the goods which belong to you gravitate to you, and need not be pursued with pains and cost.
"my children," said an old man to his boys, scared by a figure in the dark entry, "you will never see anything worse than yourselves."
When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy and somewhat asquint.
A work of art, of whatever kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist was when he made it.
The wisdom of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge [people]; he lets them judge themselves, and merely reads and records their own verdict. That which we are we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. The infallible index of true progress in found in the tone a man takes. If he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall i say, of all his opinions, will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have found his center, the Deity will shine through him. The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having is another.
The great man will not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much deduction from his grandeur, but it behooves each to see when he sacrifices prudence, to what good he devotes it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead.
[Old age consists of] rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia, not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old but young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eyes looking upward, counts itself nothing, and abandons itself to the intuition flowing from all sides.
In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten. The coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth is so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.
The one thing we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Dreams and drunkeness, opium and alcohol, are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. They ask the aid of wild passions to ape in some manner those flowers and generosities of the heart.
"A man" said Oliver Cromwell, "never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going."
The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be anyone who understand it or not.
The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.
Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for a universal one. The morning-redness happens to stand to Jacob Behmen for trust and faith; and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweler polishing his gem. Either of these, or a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. The mystic must be sternly told - all you say is true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it.
The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary, between men of the world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying, half insane under the infinitude of his thought, is that one class speak from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class from without, as spectators merely [...] Jesus speaks always from within, and in a degree that transcends all others.
St Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.
I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics and commerce and churches cheap.
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
The pocket-sized, leather-bound copy of his Essays and Representative Men, which I borrowed from Elgin library, looked like a Gideon's bible and I have come to employ it as such: carrying it about with me everywhere I go, unable to put the thing down, imagining that it might even save my life if somebody ever decided to shoot at my coat pocket. I am so glad that Emerson decided to write his ideas down and permit a lad in the north-east of Scotland to peer into his mind. His writing affirm thoughts which were already in my head, and introduced a few more besides. And they are expressed so pleasingly: a real pleasure to read. I started scribbling down the words that most struck me, then realised that I would end up copying down half the book and that the best thing would be to procure my own copy, and be able to reread it at will.
It took me a while to tune into Emerson's early eighteenth century language. His expressions are not only thusly dated but also constructed in his own idiosyncratic style. However, Emerson had something to say on this point: that whosoever speaketh of eternal truths, speaks timelessly, and writes unbound to the particularities of their time. Shakespeare's dialogues are such a realistic portrayal of human nature, it is as if they are occurring here and now in front of the reader. The insatiable intellectual inquiry of Plato is recorded in terms whose tone could be mistaken for that of a modern writer.
Further reading soon led me into a full appreciation of Emerson's pithy, stylish turns of phrase, and his lapidary mind behind them. His pithiness lends itself felicitously to quote plucking.
Emerson's emphasis on the self-reliance and "infinitude of the private man" is placed within his underlying pantheism. Everything is united; All is One; each seemingly distinct incidence occurring within time and space is simply yet another manifestation of the same underlying spiritual reality; in the same way that each individual mushroom appearing above ground is but a superficial excrescence of an invisible underground network, containing, as it were, the Platonic idea of mushroomness. Emerson gives me the image of material reality seen like a kaleidoscope: manifold shining shapes together creating momentarily a pattern, soon to tumble onward, ever subject to the wheel of life's tireless rotations and the creation of ever new reconfigurations.
This puts me in mind of Alan Watts' notion of the material universe as God playing hide-and-seek with himself. This game analogy should not be seen to trivialise the import of existence, but rather may help to give it meaning to those who see none. Playing a game may have several purposes, not least of which being that it is an interesting way to allow time to pass. How else would God decide to spend infinity?
An idea that Emerson has affirmed for me is that I am (a microcosm of) the entire cosmos (giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "I feel whole.") I carry the world within me. As within, so without.
This puts me in mind of my idea that the world is not only an interpretation seen by each mind, but also the representation of the interpretation of the self. The relationship you have with yourself is the same as the relationship you have with the world. If you are entirely at peace with yourself, so will you be with the whole world. If you do not accept parts of yourself, so will you have misgivings about parts of the world.
Emerson's essays were first delivered as lectures all over America before being published. He exhorted his listeners, and later his readers, to feel in nowise inferior to the glory of illustrious civilizations - whether they be the Greeks of yesteryear or contemporary Europeans. The same spirit animating the whole of Nature may manifest itself here and now as well as anywhere else in the world at any other time. Only sixty years after America gained independence, Emerson's emphasis on the strength of selfhood had the wider significance of strengthening a new sense of American nationhood. His lectures were described as "America's intellectual declaration of independence"
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
If I am the Devil's child then I will live from the Devil. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.
Men do good actions much as they would pay a fine in expiation of a daily non-appearance in parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of living in the world. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate but to live.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after our own but the great one is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Suppose you should contradict yourself? What then? With consistency a great man has simply nothing to do. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow [do the same], though it contradict everything you said today. Is it so bad to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.
We must go alone.
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. The wise man throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than theirs to find his weak point.
In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.
Men suffer all their life long under the false superstition that they can be cheated, but it is impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself.
Nothing can work me damage except myself, the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault.
...for it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered, the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.
The rich man lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.
A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labours are unnecessary and fruitless, that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous actions we are strong.
Like draws to like, the goods which belong to you gravitate to you, and need not be pursued with pains and cost.
"my children," said an old man to his boys, scared by a figure in the dark entry, "you will never see anything worse than yourselves."
When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy and somewhat asquint.
A work of art, of whatever kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist was when he made it.
The wisdom of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge [people]; he lets them judge themselves, and merely reads and records their own verdict. That which we are we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. The infallible index of true progress in found in the tone a man takes. If he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall i say, of all his opinions, will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have found his center, the Deity will shine through him. The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having is another.
The great man will not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much deduction from his grandeur, but it behooves each to see when he sacrifices prudence, to what good he devotes it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead.
[Old age consists of] rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia, not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old but young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eyes looking upward, counts itself nothing, and abandons itself to the intuition flowing from all sides.
In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten. The coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth is so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.
The one thing we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Dreams and drunkeness, opium and alcohol, are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. They ask the aid of wild passions to ape in some manner those flowers and generosities of the heart.
"A man" said Oliver Cromwell, "never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going."
The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be anyone who understand it or not.
The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.
Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for a universal one. The morning-redness happens to stand to Jacob Behmen for trust and faith; and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweler polishing his gem. Either of these, or a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. The mystic must be sternly told - all you say is true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it.
The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary, between men of the world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying, half insane under the infinitude of his thought, is that one class speak from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class from without, as spectators merely [...] Jesus speaks always from within, and in a degree that transcends all others.
St Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.
I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics and commerce and churches cheap.
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento