Puppies: More important than Homework

Well, reading this essay was certainly an “Experience” in itself. I surprisingly did not feel like I was struggling as much with Emerson’s meaning as I was with the way I felt when I read his words. From one paragraph to the next, or sometimes even within the same paragraph, he would have me feeling so emotionally charged or volatile that at times I felt I needed to set it aside or go back and read over. I think this is part of the performativity of his essay. At times his writing was so dark and despairing I couldn’t help but flood the margins of my page with things like “NO! L” and “Don’t despair Emoson.” In the beginning I simultaneously believed that he believed every word he was saying, speaking at times with such vehemence, and at others thought that all he wrote was a contradiction of the great soul that resides within him. I guess that is the polarity of humanity he is working to bring out within us. To show that two opposites can at times be true. It is an uncomfortable place to be and it all depends on what we WANT to believe. It is both a sorrow and a joy when Emerson belittles our greatest pains and triumphs, handing over the blame of our foibles as well as the credit of our victories to a greater and untouchable power. This is debatable, but I believe though at times Emerson seems to be making bold statements in one way or another, he means to create balance in all and thus only means them in a degree to show the multiplicity of Nature, Man, Reality, Truth and All. The passage that struck me to violently to the soul were these three lines: “That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the art, we find with more pain in the artist. There is no power of expansion in men. Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed.”  Here I feel as though Emerson is striking through the veil, right into the core of my eternal soul. I believe so deeply in the mutability of not just mankind, but man on an individual level, and have seen evidence of this daily in my own life and ability to change and grow. However, I think as definitively as he writes, he only means some of what is written. I believe there is a part of each human being that does not grow, that does not change, because to disrupt it would compromise our integrity and make us unstable within our own individual worlds. But it’s like Emerson says in the passage just before this when he mentions the child growing tired of a story, “Because thou wert born to a whole, and this story is a particular. The reason of the pain this discovery causes us is the plain of tragedy which murmurs from it in regard to persons, to friendship and love.” People are simultaneously incredibly fragile and resilient beings, and while these suggestions frighten and disgust us, we know that we are capable of dealing with great tragedy and starting anew. We simultaneously long for variety but desperately cling to anything stable we can find. “Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but the health of body consists in circulation and sanity of mind in variety of facility of association. We need change of objects.” At times it makes us feel empty, this constant draw between two truths, that we can never really KNOW anything, and so we seek to stake our claim in what we can.  We become creatures of habit, conformists, desperately trying to maintain SOME kind of status quo… it is our nature, and yet also against our nature. But as the essay progresses it picks up, becomes while not less troubling, lighter, easier to bare somehow ending on “Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! It seems to say, there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.” <3