Emerson: The Ideal in America

but when he talks about the infinitude of the private man he's talking about something that's real and that most people still need to hear he's a friend to anyone that wants to live in the sphere and wants to be free and wants others to be free that's what he teaches everything was a prophet Emerson was a prophet here is the real secret of Emerson's work he stands still he listens to his heart and he writes as he listens at that time people were thinking and still do that there's only a few divine souls on this planet and he said absolutely not we are all divine idealism sees the world in God it beholds the whole circle of persons and things of actions and events of country and religion not as painfully accumulated Adam after Adam act after act in an aged creeping past but as one vast picture which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul [Music] [Music] the America into which Ralph Waldo Emerson was born was a nation on the verge of great changes just a short generation before it had freed itself politically and economically from England a freedom that would soon be tested in the war of 1812 it's example of democracy had inspired the French to overthrow their own monarchy and yet this newest of Nations was unsure of itself still looking to Europe for culture still clinging to many of the institution's bequeathed by the British it would be up to Emerson to carry the revolution to individual men and women by exhorting them to a freedom of the spirit as well why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of theirs Emerson was a universal man but also a quintessential New Englander he was born in Boston attended Harvard and although he traveled widely in American and Europe he lived from 1835 on in this house in Concord Massachusetts he came from a long line of respectable Puritan stock many of them Unitarian and Congregationalist ministers like his father William Emerson was the pastor of the first or old brick Church of Boston and was a man of wide-ranging interest who made a comfortable living for his wife and their six children but William Emerson died when Waldo was eight and although his widow received a small pension from the church the family fell into poverty sometimes feasting on stories and conversation rather than food despite their reversal of fortune Waldo's mother Ruth Haskins Emerson was determined that he receive a good education while she took in boarders he and his younger brother Edward would take turns going to the Boston Latin School since they had only one overcoat between them for long periods of his childhood walden lived here in concord and a house built by his grandfather which came to be known as the old manse much of his real education at this time came from a succession of brilliant women family friends and relatives such as Hannah Adams and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley Emerson grew up in in a world of women mostly the father died when he was very young and there were ants and there was Mary moody Emerson and there were his mother's women friends including a famous woman geographer Hannah Adams were around the house and these were his influences so he worked easily and comfortably within a world of intellectual women and the powerhouse in the group was Mary moody Emerson clearly which had enormous energy of mind and she had a kind of we would call it now and almost at Sarah ethic vigor and strain in letters and in person she encouraged all the Emerson children to read widely think deeply to love nature and to love God she was in many ways the model for self-reliance and I think what she taught it's almost inevitable was the power of individual force of utterance and individual inspiration following the tradition of his father and older brother William Waldo was accepted into Harvard with a scholarship at the age of fourteen while at Harvard in 1820 he began to keep a journal a practice he would continue almost until his death it did not begin auspiciously on october 25th he wrote I find myself often idle vagrant stupid and Hollow this is somewhat appalling and if I do not discipline myself with diligent care I shall suffer severely from remorse and the sense of inferiority here after all around me are the industrious and shall be great I am indolent and shall be insignificant but also in his journal he begins to record ecstatic religious experiences of identification with what he would later call the Oversoul I say to the universe mighty one thou art not my mother returned to chaos if thou wilt I shall exist I live if I owe my being it is to a destiny greater than nine star by star world by world system by system shall be crushed but I shall live [Music] Emerson's career at Harvard and for some time thereafter gave little indication of the confidence and purpose that would mark his later life he graduated in the middle of his class and then taught for some time at a school for young ladies his brother William had established well this improved the family finances it was not a vocation that he relished when William left in 1823 to study in Germany Waldo took over the school only to close it a year later he intermittently pursued studies at the Harvard Divinity School from which he was a probated to preach in 1826 there were burgeoning orders who were the ministers who were the political speakers who were the teachers and if you think about Boston on the time that Emerson was growing up he would have had access to all of those kinds of speakers for the next couple of years he served as a part-time supply preacher at various churches in New England but he was also played with ill health and made several trips south to Florida to recover but while his outward circumstances were unpromising inwardly he was beginning to feel a call of a higher vocation and a connection to a God not of rituals but of experience on a trip to Florida in 1827 he wrote in his journal there is a pleasure in the thought that the particular tone of my mind at this moment may be new in the university that the emotions of this hour may be peculiar unexampled in the whole eternity of moral being I lead a new life I occupy new ground in the world of spirits antenna turd before I commence a career of thought and action which is expanding before me into a distant and dazzling infinity strange thoughts start up like angels in my way and beckon beyond word I doubt not I tread on the highway that leads to the divinity however the practicalities of life were leading him down a more conventional path when preaching in Concord New Hampshire he had met the charming teenaged Ellen Louisa Tucker and in December of 1828 they became engaged of her he wrote she has the purity and confiding religion of an angel other words common the words are true well God forgive me my sins and aid me to deserve this gift of his mercy in 1829 he was ordained into the ministry at the second Church of Boston and on September 30th he and Ellen were married and moved into a house on chardon place he became chaplain of the Massachusetts legislature and a member of the Boston School Committee on the surface he had attained success respectability and financial security he was very young he was called to a major church he had a huge salary he was keeping to horse and carriages going he was on the School Committee for the Boston schools he was a very important public personage and he's not even 30 but this happiness was to be short-lived less than 18 months later at 9 o'clock in the morning of February 8 1831 Ellen died tuberculosis she was just 19 her machine recorded that one of the last things she said after much rambling and inarticulate expression was I have not forgot the peace and joy Emerson is heartbroken but deeply believed that Ellen lived on in heaven and would serve as a guiding spirit an intercessor to God Ellen's death shattered his dreams but not his faith it allowed him to step off the path of convention and open up once again to the direct intuitions of his soul ten years later in his essay on compensation he would write and yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also after long intervals of time the death of a dear friend wife brother lover which seemed nothing but privation somewhat later assumed the aspect of a guide or genius for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life and to be sure Emerson was experiencing a revolution in his life during the same time he was struggling with his calling to the ministry in an environment where sects were becoming more narrow and hostile to each other religion is the relation of the soul to God and therefore the progress of sectarianism marks the decline of religion looking at God instantly reduces our disposition to descent from our brother a man may die by fever as well as by consumption and religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference in September of 1832 against all advice from his family he resigned his ministry from the second Church in December he closed up his house sold all his furniture and made a clean break with the past the life that not long before seemed so secure had disintegrated not yet 30 his first love dead his career in ruins Emerson boarded a ship on Christmas Day and set sail for Europe he was a phenomenon in Boston but when his young really young and really beautiful wife and wanted to be a poet Ellen died very quickly of TB the whole edifice just came crashing down personal professional works so he sold off his furniture and think don't look the furniture just and took the first ship he could get on the captain didn't even want to take him he was so sick and the ship wasn't going to the right place it wasn't going to Europe it was going to Malta but he went and just bailed from the whole same like America Europe to was in the throes of change while relatively peaceful militarily culturally it was swept up in the move that would come to be called romanticism in large part a reaction to the rationality and formalism of the 18th century Romanticism stressed emotion and intuition as groups to knowledge as well as a deep curiosity about nature from both scientific and spiritual perspectives Beethoven and music Goethe and Wordsworth and literature and nature painters such as constable and Turner were the leading artists in addition fed by an interest in democracy and the war for independence in Greece there was a new interest in Plato's philosophy of idea this thread came down through Plato and then on to the important neoplatonist Platina sin particular and porphyry his student and then from there all of this philosophy went into the darkness until the Renaissance and was rediscovered by marci legal fascino who was the sort of court philosopher of the Medici and vitinho began to discover the neo-platonists in particular and teach neoplatonism and the perennial philosophy to the Italians and then from there it came north through Europe and eventually ended up in Cambridge in around 1660 with John Smith and Cudworth and then from there to England and on into America through Emerson reversing the usual route Emerson first landed in Malta and worked his way north through Italy as the winter turned to spring his own sickliness began to leave him and his attention was gone out to both the natural and cultural beauty of the ancient world coming from the severe Puritan world of Boston Emerson's eye and mine were dazzled by the connections to the classical world by st. Peter's in Rome and the artworks in Florence what had been to him descriptions from books now became real places and tangible objects he was immersed in Beauty and philosophy moving on to Paris brought him at first unwillingly back into the present I was sorry to find that in leaving Italy I had left forever that air of antiquity in history but her towns possess in coming hither I had come to a loud modern New York of the place but while Italy had overwhelmed him with art Paris would overwhelm him with a unitive view of science it was the center of a new taxonomy of the plant world that emphasized living specimens and the growth cycle visiting exhibitions of plants and animals Emerson was taken with the sheer number and variety of species and also with their expression of what he called the upheaving principle of life he also saw them as reflections of the mind of a man not a form so grotesque so savage or so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer an occult relation between the very scorpions and man I am moved by strange sympathies I say continually I will be a naturalist from France Emerson moved on to Great Britain given his English heritage he had always held it in special regard and he arranged to meet some of his literary idols the poet's Coleridge and Wordsworth he was graciously received but was disappointed that the visits more resembled audiences than conversations however his meeting with Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane he described as a white day in my years his essay on German literature had put into English many precepts of what was being called transcendentalism not so much a doctrine as a state of being transcendentalism saw a reason as an innate human faculty for knowing truth and it confirmed Emerson's own spiritual experiences the major thrust of idealism was first of all a reaction to the Enlightenment to the narrowing or reductionism the enlightenment that suggested that that the world is as we see it and as we experience it and that materialism is the fundamental ground of being that the world is made up of matter period and if there is a God if there is a religious basis to human existence it is separate from the world and separate from our experience of it what idealism does is to try to remove that duality Emerson had been away nine months and had been reborn he had met in books and in person the finest minds in Europe and knew now that he was their equal returning to America with no home and no job he was stepping into the unknown he returned to the Old Manse and began writing a book and arranging to give lectures it was the beginning of his transformation into what Professor Geldart calls our founding thinker I am sure of this that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage and thought and word and from all the wisdom that is in books he will come to hear God speak as audibly through his own lips as ever he did by the mouth of Moses or Isaiah or Milton arm now with a sense of his true calling as well as a small steady income from Ellen's estate Emerson entered the most focused and productive period of his life in 1835 he bought this house in Concord he married again lydia jackson of plymouth who he affectionately called lydian and to whom he would be married for the rest of his life in 1836 his son Waldo was born in the same year he published privately and anonymously his first book nature it was at least for America the transcendentalist manifesto was just a book and fewer than a hundred pages and he published in 1836 and when he was 32 we began to write it imagine sitting down at the age of 32 to write a book which is basically should be called how it is this is the way it is that's what he meant that's what he called it nature this is the nature of nature and it was his effort to get it all into one statement and he does in under a hundred pages and it still has this an electric jolt undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable we must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things is awakened in our minds the order of things can satisfy in the woods we return to reason and faith standing on the bare ground my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space all mean egotism vanishes I become a transparent eyeball i am nothing i see all the currents of the universal being circulate through me i am part and parcel of God there's there's wonderful stuff that it will never be worn out it's more than Emersonian ism it's more than the perennial philosophy it's more than neo stoicism but it's all of those it is a kind of way of looking at the world which says we have to start with who we are and where we are although nature did not sell widely it was extremely influential deeply discussed highly praised and fiercely condemned it established Emerson's main theme of the relationship of man to the natural and the transcendental worlds it also established Emerson somewhat against his will as the face of America's first homegrown intellectual movement it also increased his popularity as a lecturer until this time there had been two couriers open to a person of ideas teacher or minister Emerson had been both but a new phenomenon was appearing that offered a different choice the Lyceum movement drew on America's hunger for public education and self-improvement by presenting lectures on a wide range of subjects to audiences in large cities and small towns across the country Emerson would become one of its stars the Lyceum movement in New England in particular which of course Emerson was very much a part of that Lyceum movement started in many ways to extend the education once there was no longer the schooling available at the common grade level what he felt so strongly about what made a speaking occasion effective was not the fact that an individual had something particular that individual to say but that there was something much larger that needed to be said he felt that there was a much larger creative force that was holding us all within this world and that out of the speaker if you listen very carefully to what that larger force was asking you to say you could hear that and then in the right situation you were essentially the spokesperson for that larger idea he actually spoke about the lyceum being our national music that this was the music that we should all be listening to and all these violent toward now from his privileged position Emerson could take both the academic and the clergy to task for their narrowness and devotion to the foreign and the past in 1837 he addressed the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard and contrasted the image of the scholar as a bookworm with that of man thinking man thinking must not be subdued by his instruments books are for the scholars idle times when he can read God directly the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings in yourself slumbers the whole of reason it is for you to know all it is for you to dare all this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs by all motives by all prophecy by all preparation to the American scholar we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe less than a year later he would issue a similar challenge to the clergy speaking at the Harvard Divinity School he urged the graduates to renew the church by seeking and preaching a living and omnipresent God that may admonish you first of all to go alone to refuse the good models even those which are sacred in the imagination of men and dare to love God without mediator avail yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost cast behind you all conformity and acquaintance men at first hand with deity the way I was taught what really matters is history and the church and the big structures of society and what Emerson teaches is that those are secondary what really matters in each generation are the individual people he's calling people to wake up to wake up to this soul that that's the most important part of our being it's in other words it's called conscious living and living is the key because in everything he writes he's warning us against conforming to standards that have already been set thoughts that have already been thought and nothing new coming out of it a dead church a dead institution because Emerson believed so deeply that the message of Jesus was that each person is divine he felt compelled to point out what he called defects in historical Christianity this enraged many in the religious establishment of the time and he was banned from speaking at Harvard for many years thereafter but Emerson's increasing fame at his house a magnet for new thinkers and writers in many fields and we can only imagine the lively conversations that occurred in in this room Emerson lived for conversation throughout his life no matter what kind of writing you're looking at whether it's in his journals whether it's in his lectures whether it's in his sermons whether it's in his essays conversation is a theme he valued it he believed in it as one of the best places to develop our pots one of the first was the educator Bronson Alcott whose temple school in Boston was founded on the Platonic idea that knowledge was innate in humans and had only to be drawn out Emerson met Henry David Thoreau who was 17 years younger in 1837 and the two would become lifelong friends it was Emerson who first encouraged Thoreau to keep a journey and when Thoreau built his famous cabin on Walden Pond it was on the land that belonged to Emerson later in the 1850s he was the first to give recognition and encouragement to the poetry of Walt Whitman Emerson's wife Lillian herself was an active participant in the circle but she also had a way of seeing through the steady stream of reformers and zealots who clamored for Emerson's attention she wrote a short essay called the transcendental Bible whose principles included never speak of sin it is of no consequence to the being whether you're good or bad loathe and shun the sick they are in bad taste and they unto us for writing the poem floating through a line Emerson thought it was hilarious this was a happy time for him in 1839 lydian gave birth to a girl whom she generously named Ellen Emerson was lecturing doting on his children working with his friends on a literary magazine called the dial and dreaming of a free University he took long walks with Thoreau and all the while he was writing furiously and reading voraciously in addition to Plato and writers of the platonic tradition he was also being drawn to the text of the east he had first read the Indian classic Baha gawad Gita in 1831 and he kept returning to it as well as to the waiters and the Upanishads he understood implicitly the state of consciousness they described in all nations there are mines which inclined to dwell in the conception of the fundamental unity the raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in the one being this tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the east and chiefly in the Indian scriptures those writings contain little else than this idea they rise to pure and sublime strains in celebrating it there is a place at which Everson records his journals that these sacred books of the East are the bedrock of the eternal wisdom that he was in search of and covered almost every one of the salient points of what came to be known as transcendental philosophy he was reading Plato at 14 when he went to Harvard he had access to the great teachings of the East which in a nutshell point to the importance of what ideas we actually hold in the mind because they shape us this period culminated in 1841 with the publication of his essays which contains what is arguably his most famous work self-reliance there is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance that imitation is suicide self-reliance every sentence in the essay is pointing to us to abide by that supreme infinite being that is within us if we promote living due to the level of a creative act but this really doing is saying stop still listen to your heart and live as you listen who so would be a man must be a nonconformist he who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness but must explore if it be goodness nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind because your transcending the ordinary the voices of society that are constantly screaming at you and you your putting that at bay and you're saying no what matters is the my own voice the voice within the voice that Socrates spoke about that's still small voice so you're gonna do it through your mind or you're gonna close off your mind and say well I'm gonna do it through the Bible or I'll do it through this or that prophet or I'll do it through this institution or that society or this historical event or don't know do it for yourself and see what happens the soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation perceives the self existence of truth and right and calms itself with knowing that all things go well vast spaces of nature the Atlantic Ocean the South Sea long intervals of time years centuries are of no account and until we get in touch with our very essence we we remain bereft of spirit of spiritual life Emerson was at the height of his powers he had found his voice and had found his audience his essays such as the Oversoul compensation and circles and his lectures such as the poet the transcendentalist still had the power to move and astonish readers today we live in succession in division in parts and particles meantime within man is the soul of the whole the wise silence the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related the eternal one we see the world piece by piece as the Sun the Moon the animal the tree but the whole of which these are the shining parts is the soul you are not just your function in society you are not just the bookkeeper or just the bank or just this there is more there you are something new in nature he means that spark that spirit of divinity that is in every living being there are degrees in idealism we learn first to play with it academically as the magnet was once a toy and we see in the heyday of youth and poetry that it may be true that it is true in gleams and fragments then its countenance waxes Stern and grand and we see that it must be true it now shows itself ethical and practical we learn that God is that he is in me that all things are shadows of him the divine is not separate from the human that the real meaning of Christianity that the divine can be in a human being and we say he was in didn't believe in Jesus as a divine because he believed everyone was divine with the publication of the essays Emerson became the most prominent spokesman for what was being called transcendentalism a name taken from the work of Conte Emerson himself preferred the term idealism which hearkened back to the ideas of Plato he addressed the distinction directly in one of a series of lectures he delivered in Boston starting in December of 1841 the first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England at the present time is that they are not new but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times what is popularly called transcendentalism among us is idealism idealism as it appears in 1842 he stood alone among his contemporaries pointing the way to a new sense of self a new world of endless possibility in all my lectures I have taught one doctrine namely the infinitude of the private man and that he provides the basis I think through his sense of what he referred to as the infinitude of man the notion that in fact we have the ability to grasp this extraordinary universe and surely as he said there are no questions that we can ask that do not eventually have answers but soon he would be tested again by the finitude of death in the decade before two of his younger brothers died and their loss affected him deeply then shortly after these lectures On January 27th 1842 his son Waldo died suddenly scarlet fever at the age of five while those death inspired one of Emerson's longest and most deeply felt poems threnody it begins with a heart-wrenching account of his grief the south wind brings life sunshine and desire and on every mountain meadow breathes aromatic fire but over the dead he has no power the lost the lost he cannot restore and looking over the hills I mourn the darling who shall not return but then he says the deep heart answered and reminds him of the gift of vision he has been given but thou my votary weepest thou I gave these sight where is it now I taught the heart beyond the reach of ritual Bible or of speech and ultimately he realizes what is excellent as God lives his permanent hearts are dust hearts loves remain hearts love will meet thee again there's a previous point of view which argues that the death of Waldo is a watershed in Emerson's life he's an optimist up until then and after that he's really a kind of closet pessimist or open pessimist writing essays on experience and fate which are darker well I know it's really a darker they're more complex they acknowledge death as part of life but I don't feel as some people have felt that there's a shift away from openness and optimism because many of his best years were still to come as part of his healing Emerson threw himself into editing the dial the literary magazine he had helped found he and lydian had two more children a daughter Edith and a son Edward Waldo he was also writing works that would be published in the second series of essays the poet gifts and experience but in the solitude to which every man is always returning he has a sanity and revelations which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him never mind the ridicule never mind the defeat up again old hearted seems to say there is victory yet for all justice the true romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into practical power while Emerson is remembered today mostly for his essays he thought himself equally a poet and his prose is filled with startling images and metaphors in 1846 he published his collected poems which contains threnody as well as the popular Concord hymn but for all his admonitions of artistic freedom and despite his later enthusiastic support of the free verse of Whitman Emerson's own poetry is usually limited by very rigid schemes of rhyme and meter in the late 1840s his books began selling better and for the first time since his days in the ministry his finances were not precarious he was in more demand as a lecturer and began to travel further afield beyond New England in New York Westwood and into Canada more and more though his words were being quoted by others in supportive ends he never intended some were using his essay on self-reliance as a justification for the acts of strong but ruthless individuals the robber barons of the day perhaps already sensitive to how his words were being twisted in 1854 he stated unequivocally self-reliance the height and perfection of man his reliance on God God is then the true self of each individual it is significant that this quotation is found in one of his lectures condemning slavery his core belief in the essential divinity of each person caused him to begin to speak out against the forms of oppression he saw around him against women against native people and against African slaves he was an early supporter of women's right to vote and he continued to speak out forcefully against the institution of slavery it said that when the Civil War began soldiers from the Union went into battle carrying his anti-slavery essays with them an immoral law makes it a man's duty to break it at every hazard her virtue is the very self of every man it is therefore a principle of law that an immoral contract is void and that an immoral statute is void for as laws do not make right and are simply declaratory of a right which already existed it is not to be presumed that they can so stultify themselves as to command injustice as Robert Richardson says in a mind on fire by the mid 1850s Emerson was dangerously famous famous not only in America but also in England and increasingly throughout Europe and dangerous because the demands on his time which had always seemed great reached a new level of intensity he was now simultaneously an advocate of personal freedom and a voice of moral authority he was being drawn more and more into the world but he was also beginning to see the fruits of his call for an American literature in 1855 he received unannounced a book of verse cold leaves of grass he was as we would say today blown away in a letter to a friend he called it the best piece of American Buddhism that anyone has had the strength to write American to the bone Whitman had returned the favor by saying my ideas were simmering and simmering and Emerson brought them to a boil Emerson seemed to seeing Whitman of freedom that he could never quite attain but Emerson's own poetry was reinvigorated by their association and in 1856 he wrote one of his most powerful poems Brahma if the red Slayer think he slays or if the slain think he is slain they know not well the subtle ways I keep and past and turn again far or forgot to me is near shadow and sunlight are the same the vanished gods to me appear and one to me our shame and fame they reckon he'll who leave me out when me they fly I and the wings I am the doubter and the doubt and either him the Brahman sings the strong gods pine for my abode and Pyun in vain the sacred seven but thou meek lover of the good find me and turn thy back on heaven during the 1860s Emerson's memory began to fail he wrote in his journal only sporadically in 1860 Thoreau died followed by Mary moody Emerson in 1863 Emerson wrote very moving elegies for them both the Civil War was raging and although it promised the end of slavery for which he had so long fought Emerson like most could see only the suffering abroad but his stature at this point was such that when Lincoln was assassinated the nation listened for what he had to say he called it a calamity which darkens down over the minds of good men in all civil society as the fearful tidings travel oversea overland from country to country like the shadow of an uncalculated eclipsed over the planet in 1872 a careless servant started a fire in the Attic with quick action on the part of the family and neighbors they saved the front of the house including Emerson study but the house was uninhabitable and while it was being rebuilt Emerson traveled to England and Egypt with his daughter Ellen when he returned in 1873 the entire town of Concord came out to greet them but his public appearances grew fewer and fewer then stopped on April 27 1882 he put out the fire in his study and then climbed the stairs to this room it is said that his last words were oh that beautiful boy I know from being a teacher that's the source of my greatest happiness is watching people come to their own right watching them grow and develop and let go of the shackles that confine them and become free well that's what he's about so when you rely on that self you know that you're in tune with really what you need to hear what you need to know it's all given to you and when you trust that flow you have everything there's nothing that will not be given to you he could plant his feet firmly on the ground on a set of principles to live by he could literally move the earth and in fact I think he did and that in fact we are capable of doing the same well I was teaching a lot of Emerson I would say he would reach maybe one in ten students which is a lot these people would sit back and say whoa this means me insist on yourself never imitate the stick stick with who you really are what do we want from Emerson we want from Emerson what he got from the bhagavad-gita confirmation and modification of ideas or feelings that are already floating within us or burning within us the soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation perceives the self existence of truth and right calms itself with knowing that all things go well vast spaces of nature the Atlantic Ocean the South Sea long intervals of time years centuries are of no account this which I think and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances as it does underlie my present and what is called life and what is called death if I had a choice of only one word to apply to him and what I think of us is greatness I would say it was teacher or better yet the active participle teaching teaching and what I would say is the most important thing for me is that he succeeded in his own goal his stated goal was quote I sought not to bring men to me but to themselves [Music] you you you [Applause] you [Music] you [Music]

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Keywords: Documentary, The Snowstorm, Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Length: 53min 7sec (3187 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 01 2019