Solitude and Stars: Emerson, Nature I.1
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
I wonder why the emphasis on being alone?
My impression so far: E’s aloneness takes you away from yourself and the familiar, especially from the world of ideas. He’s not praising aloneness for its own sake but advocating something that shakes up your perspective.
He is not, bless him, going down the trite “solitude is different than loneliness” path (à la May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude) or otherwise airbrushing the vulnerabilities of isolation.1 The passage seems to be more about confronting the unknown, about seeking vulnerability.
It reminds me more of Millay’s “Wild Swans”:
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wildness wakens hunger for something beyond the self.
Back to Emerson:
One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime.
“The perpetual presence of the sublime.” Yes: the stars function here as a way of making the human viewer aware of smallness and vulnerability.
Side note: I think E is echoing prevailing attitudes at the time? Basically, the world exists for human benefit. It’s a very cat-and-can-opener perspective. The reasoning seems to be: because we happen to benefit from the world, therefore the world was made for us to benefit from. (Not sure yet if that’s E’s view.) The benefit isn’t materialistic here. The stars wake us up to something, and the main thing seems to be awe.
The starting point is awe. That may be worth the price of admission right there.
But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
We descend from the sublime to the picturesque, with anthropomorphism to boot. Am I being unfair to E? Maybe. At any rate, E’s universe is actively benign.
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence….Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit.
I’m more fascinated by E’s mind than his thesis. He has labeled everything as Nature except for his own consciousness. It is all present but inaccessible. Having created the gap,2 E seems to be longing to bridge it. Not from loneliness, either, or a desire for connection, but because it’s…exciting? Full of possibilities? A way to a deeper truth? His response is to go out into it—to become viscerally aware of otherness. Open to its influence.
Going out into otherness alone—it’s courageous. E prefers discovery to comfort.
I still get riled up when I remember the passage near the end where it dawns on her that some people are actually housebound and don’t have a choice. Better late than never, I guess. And her idea of solitude involves endless rounds of visitors!↩
Or inherited it from other philosophical traditions? From the nature of consciousness and the sense of being a separate self?↩