John Rachal's Blog

I owe my title to Mark Twain’s humorous essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”

I am re-reading Emerson’s essay “Nature” and finding myself mostly annoyed by it. I have long admired Emerson, the writer once referred to as the “indispensable man” in American letters, having studied him a little in both undergrad and grad school, visited his house in Concord back in the 70s and again in 2018 with Russ, and admired and partaken of his Unitarianism as a teenager. I came to love the gestalt of Concord, inhabited by Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Louisa Mae Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It became a town of my imagination, its winters, springs, summers, and falls all easily summonable. For me, Walden Pond was the hub of this “hub of the universe,” Thoreau being, for me, the true central figure whose present and continuing fame seems to have slightly eclipsed the seventeen-years-older Emerson. Emerson, the Unitarian minister, speaks to God in prayer; Thoreau, imbibing all the deified nature around him in four-hour daily walks, does so in conversations. Emerson was an essayist and poet, but no single work of his quite captures the enduring impact of Walden, and I wonder if any of his essays—as famous as “Nature,” “The Divinity School Address,” “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar,” and others are—has had the continuing appeal and especially the real-world impact of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.”

So, despite my greater affinity for Henry, why does this other man I admire annoy me with his “Nature”? It is true that I have drifted a bit toward Mencken’s opinion of meta-physics, in which the meta is that vast unseen world and universe which provide much room for philosophical speculation and for mischief. Being good Transcendentalists, both Thoreau and Emerson enjoy the interplay of the material, concrete world and what they see as the meta-physical world. But where Thoreau, in the introductory “Economy” chapter of Walden, anchors his grand Transcendentalist vision of living an “economical” life unencumbered by a thousand superfluous objects and (for him) frivolous diversions in the prosaic business of buying a few nails and boards to build his cabin, Emerson flies higher, and thus is less appealing and more obscure. I get lost in the empyrean sublimity of his prose. One might think of Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates, hovering over the earth in The Clouds, holding forth with his speculations and queries, a slightly fatuous old man whose un-sandaled feet don’t touch the ground.  Magically teleported forward twenty-two centuries to Emerson’s day, would Aristophanes put the Concord sage on an even higher plane, looking down and jousting with Socrates?

Emerson is capable of concision, but his attraction to spirit and God and soul call him to Olympus. His prose teeter-totters between rapturous metaphor and an anthropomorphic nature-spirit bordering on the incomprehensible. Take this barbarous sentence suggesting the latter:

“We learn that the highest [truth] is present to the soul of man; that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the 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.”

This, for a fellow like me chained to the soil, is flying high indeed. We do have a nice simile at the end, but it is swimming against a fierce meta-physical current to get there. I love a comma as much as anyone, but dear Waldo, the period is not the harbinger of the bubonic plague. True, some of Jeremy Bentham’s sentences crush your mere 120 word-storm for sheer volubility, but his is a dubious prize. Yes, a contemporary critic must avoid the fallacy of presentism and not scorn the author for a style no longer in vogue—in this case sometimes  horizonless sentences floating in the stratosphere. The same may be said for his use of whence, whereto, whilst, even saith. But I don’t recall those words in Thoreau (despite a couple of methinks and fains), even though the last sentence of Walden does aspire to that empyrean sublimity Emerson both achieves and is guilty of.

As the uber Transcendentalist, as well as Platonist, theist, and mystic, Emerson has no particular objection to the senses except when they blind us to what is beyond or behind them, namely, God, spirit, Ideas, and the all-encompassing Over-soul (a term not mentioned in “Nature”). Which apparently is often. He approvingly quotes an unnamed poet: “The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit.” He refers to “this despotism of the senses”—a Platonic idea for certain—and wishes to “build science on ideas,” presumably rather than building it on observed facts. “Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.” Such a fate “leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander without end”—a gorgeous metaphor, meant to warn. I wish that he could acknowledge that in climbing out of the labyrinth he might also see chimeras, intuiting things that might not exist. Of course finding the supernatural behind the natural and the sublime in the minuscule is the Transcendentalist’s stock-in-trade, and the minister’s too. It is what they do. We can appreciate his search for the divine in the material, the meta beyond the physics; but both Emerson and his admirers (of whom I am one) should take care not to let the fruits of that search devolve into dogmatism or self-delusion.