RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND THE EVER-EVOLVING ART OF ...

Every ship is a romantic object except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance
quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon…Men seem to have
learned of the horizon the perpetual retreating and reference. ‘Yonder uplands are
rich pastrage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field,’ says the
querulous farmer, ‘only holds the world together.’ I quote another man’s saying;
unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.
(Emerson EXP 199)
We have become accustomed to deferring to someone else’s language—and, therefore,
their experiences—rather than affirming our own, as this alien vocabulary has a strange,
seductive appeal to it by virtue of its being another’s. Simply residing in a quotation is
only a “retreat and a reference”, and this is problematic because seeking shelter in
another’s lexicon without examining its foundation elides the understanding that that very
shelter is itself only a part of an infinite whole and one person’s “truth”. Earlier, in “Self-
Reliance”, Emerson warns against these conclusions, declaring that, generally speaking,
“Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic” (Emerson SR 129), but that this should not
keep us from affirming that “If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to
your companions; I will seek my own” (Emerson SR 131). Yet, in “Experience”,
Emerson expresses the inability to “seek his own” truth for fear of not having a sufficient
vocabulary, and it is clear his conception of language has evolved beyond the transparent
model in “History” and the sublime multiplicity in “The Poet”.
Indeed, Emerson’s language in “Experience” is constantly pushing against its
denotative restrictions in an attempt to encapsulate the visceral feeling of loss and
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