Alone and Unacknowledged—Emerson I.3
The greatest delight which the field and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.
The occult relation between man and the vegetable surprises me more than the transparent eyeball, maybe because I’ve spent the last few mornings pulling weeds. (But these don’t count as Nature in the poetic sense, because they’re my weeds. The ones I can see on the hill to the north, where everything is green and growing and springlike—those are Nature.)
Nature apparently requires a diffuse lens, and a demotion to the impressionistic rather than the practical; also the glossing over of labor and laborers who pull weeds or tend fields. Those are not part of the integrated, poetic whole. (I don’t believe in the integrated, poetic whole, not as something to base a theory on. That’s dangerous work, Mr. E.)
Still, reading him say that he is not alone and unacknowledged makes me sad. What a lovely perspective, so far from Camus’s indifferent universe. It might have been mine once. It rests on a premise that a unified, benign, creative impulse underlies all that exists.
Oddly, I also have felt like the natural world is the one place you can’t be alienated or alone, because you are, in fact, always part of nature. Human society can be ruthless about who belongs and who doesn’t. But the rest of nature is mostly figuring out whether you’re edible or useful to it, really. See: packrats, houseflies, mosquitoes, deer, etc.
(On the other hand, if I were a wild animal, I’d likely be dead now, because disability is generally fatal out in Nature. It’s only because of human society that I have my needs met.)
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both.
Yes, quite possibly because you’re projecting, Ralph Waldo.
I wish I’d encountered Emerson earlier. A younger me would have read him more wholeheartedly and embraced his aphorisms from the inside out, rather than resorting to snark. Is snark such a beautiful thing? It’s just hard for me to counter so much unwarranted certainty any other way.