"A man will not be observed in doing that which he can do best. There is a certain magic about his properest action, which stupefies your powers of observation, so that though it is done before you, you wist not of it. The art of life has a pudency, and will not be exposed. Every man is an impossibility, until he is born; every thing impossible, until we see a success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism, — that nothing is of us or our works, — that all is of God. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral, and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man, but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself."
I absolutely love this paragraph. Even though this entire essay is written by Emerson and is made up of his own thoughts and ideas, I feel like we get a very strong sense of his ideas in this one paragraph, and I love what he's saying. The line "Every man is an impossibility, until he is born; every thing impossible, until we see a success," really strikes me. After all, doesn't it seem like mankind, so different from every other species on this Earth, is kind of an impossibility? More than that, mankind does the impossible daily. It wasn't long ago that no one truly thought that man would ever fly, but now we are able to get people to the moon and back. However, at the same time I believe that Emerson is right, in that we seldom end up with what we expected to. To continue off of the idea of flying, I doubt the Wright brothers believed that due to their work we would have air crafts that can make it to literally any place in the world in a very short amount of time. In this case, their idea, "turned out somewhat new, and very unlike what they promised themselves."
Cassidy! I also really like this passage and I'm glad you chose to write about it because it wasn't one I thought about extensively until reading it again here! While I found that much of Emerson's writing was troubling and at times even "dark," I feel like this strikes at the uplifting and significant point he was trying to make about whether life is graspable or not, whether we are slave to our biology and circumstance or not, we are all miracles and what we do is significant even if our individual mistakes do not always bring about truth intentionally. I like the suggestion that none of our works are our own, but rather we serve to be a tool of the divine whose only medium is to move through man and his infinite possibility. It reminds me of a moment earlier in the essay when he states:
ReplyDelete"Like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for another moment from that one."
It reminds me also of Ubuntu, the saying: "I am human because you are human, and my humanity rests in yours."
There is just something so humbling yet at the same time absolutely grand about the way Emerson words something, you can't help but feel simultaneously insulted and comforted.