Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Although Brook Farm might well have provided the ideal environment forEmerson’s Man Thinking, Emerson felt he still needed to get his own housein order first. In 1840 he helped found, contribute to, and finally edit TheDial, the publication of the Transcendentalists. In 1841 he published Essays,First Series. The following year, his six-year-old first son, Waldo, died, leavingEmerson’s faith deeply shaken. The prophet’s voice regained some ofits power only gradually, through writing poetry and through a lecture tourto Washington,D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York in 1843, at theage of forty.In these years of 1839 through 1843, the pendulum swings betweenthe human being and nature, between Vishnu and Maya, but not back andforth, for the focal point is not fixed; it moves; the pendulum spirals. Emersonwrites in his journal in the summer of 1841, “The metamorphosis of Natureshows itself in nothing more than this, that there is no word in our languagethat cannot become typical to us of Nature by giving it emphasis.” Severalmonths earlier, in April, he writes, “ I am of the Maker not of the Made. …Through all the running sea of forms, I am truth, I am love, and immutableI transcend form as I do time and space.”As Emerson recognizes that the intellect and active powers seem tosucceed each other like alternate states, we recognize that in this period ofhis life (we in this incomplete sketch are not yet aware of the seven-yearperiods Emerson several times intimates), Emerson focuses more on the stateof Man than on the state of Nature. In fact, in these years he appears to referrarely to nature per se. (When he does address nature directly in essays notexplored in this sketch, he portrays it, according to S. Whicher, Freedom andFate, not as the primarily static last issue of the spirit, as in Nature, 1836, butas ever flowing, ever changing, “and nothing fast but those invisible cordswhich we call laws, on which all is strung,”) In Self-Reliance, 1841, he states,“Time and space [one ‘word’ for nature] are but physiological colors whichthe eye makes, but the soul is light … A true man belongs to no other timeor place, but is the center of things. Where he is, there is nature.” Characterbecomes the reality that “takes place of the whole creation.”Man is actually the pendulum. Rather than swinging back and forth,he swings in and out: in toward the center of his own soul, of the anthropomorphicuniverse of which he is the creator in the finite; out toward theperiphery where forces “not me” hold sway. The further in toward center,the more aligned is man with the universal; the further out toward the periphery,the more confined is man in the particular. The more centered one is,the more free one is from outer authority, outer forms. The clearest trumpet166