The Quiet Crisis. Stewart L. Udall
Goethe, and fresh air. The easiest way to develop Olympian insights was to turn the mind into an aeolian harp and attune it to the winds and sounds and rhythms of nature. Many of Emerson’s essays were forest prose poems and, for our purposes, the principal significance of the transcendental movement lies in the fact that it is rooted in nature. Solitude and meditation were Emerson’s meat and drink, and the inner harmonies of fife were clearest in his mind in the out-of-doors.
Emerson had many messages for his countrymen, but none was more profound than his conviction that they would find their own pathway only if they gave up their veneration of the Old World, cultivated self-reliance, and responded to the rhythms of the American earth:
Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past . . .? In the woods is perpetual youth. . . . In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity . . . which nature cannot repair . . . the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.
The transcendental philosophy needed poets to sing of the natural world and natural men, so Emerson wrote verse and was the first to hail the roughhewn images of young Walt Whitman. Before Emerson’s work was done, he became the first great American philosopher. His message was an affirmation of optimism, but in terms of land the optimism was the mote that marred his vision. Self-reliance was a quality that had defects, and already men who possessed it to excess—men who were solely concerned with immediate profits—were plundering their way through the forests and across the countryside.
Emerson, however, viewed such developments with unconcern. He was so attached to his hopes for America that he dismissed flagrant waste with the euphoric observation that pirates and rebels were the real fathers of colonial settlement, and men would adopt sound policies once the frontier was settled and the ennobling influence of nature took effect. This was sophistry, as Emerson would have realized had he roamed the back country as Bartram did, or traveled west with Parkman.
If Emerson made no major protest against resource waste dining his lifetime, his grand themes nevertheless helped arouse interest in the natural world, and inspired his Concord neighbor, Henry David Thoreau.
Fourteen years Emerson’s junior, Henry, in 1837, gave a Harvard commencement address in which he enlarged on Emerson’s Nature essay and offered the proposition that the order of things should be reversed: the seventh day should be a day of work, for sweat and toil; the remaining six days man should be free to feed his soul with “sublime revelations of nature.” He then proceeded straightway to turn his life into an object lesson of this expansive proposal.
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