Sunday, March 4, 2012
"Everything good is on the highway."
My idea about "Experience" is really rather simple -- it's wonderfully and frustratingly inconsistent, both in its tone and in its content, moving from mood to mood ("our moods do not believe in each other," Emerson says in "Circles" -- an insight that I'm fairly sure Heidegger borrows in his own philosophy of moods). There is, in the early part of the essay especially, a dark, uncomfortable feeling of impermanence and flux, best illustrated by his description of his son's death and by the wonderful phrase about "the evanescence and lubricity of all objects." Later, though, though this sense of the slipperiness of things remains, Emerson's mood changes, and what was "the most unhandsome part of our condition" becomes cause for celebration -- becomes "The miracle of life which will not be expounded, but will remain a miracle." This shift pretty perfectly performs Emerson's idea that experience is ultimately a flux, an unarrestable stream, that "all things swim and glitter."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I feel like this ties back to the beginning of the year, where you asked us what is most normal in a situation and a number of us responded with the similar answer of life, death or a key component of death.
ReplyDeleteBecause death catches us so by surprise and brings it... present at hand I believe, we find only shock and examination, with no answers to be uncovered. I feel that Emerson's mood change with in the text correlates to the change in the way one looks at death when it becomes obvious that staring are the facts and the hopes will yield nothing, even to philosophers. The only step from here would be acceptance, the fading back of death into the normality as it occurs over again and there are no more answers or questions to be found in it. Or perhaps that never happens to those who don't stop thinking.