Odd Jobs (31 page)

Which brings us back to Melville’s charge of coldness, his picture of Mark Winsome “coldly radiant as a prism.” Emerson in his lifetime was accused of coldness, by Margaret Fuller and Thomas Carlyle among others, and in “Experience” addresses the issue: “The life of truth is cold, and so far mournful; but it is not the slave of tears, contritions, and perturbations. It does not attempt another’s work, nor adopt another’s facts.… I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people’s facts.… A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.” The practical ethics of Idealism, then, turn out to be seclusion and stoicism. “We must walk as guests in nature—not impassioned, but cool and disengaged,” Emerson says in “The Tragic.” Is there possibly, in this most amiable of philosophers, a preparation for the notorious loneliness and callousness and violence of American life which is mixed in with its many authentic and, indeed, unprecedented charms?

Emerson was the first American thinker to have a European influence; Carlyle sponsored him, and Matthew Arnold once said that no prose had been more influential in the nineteenth century than Emerson’s. He was, in German translation, a favorite author of Friedrich Nietzsche, who copied dozens of passages into a notebook, borrowed the phrase “the gay science” for philosophy, and wrote of the
Essays
, “Never have I felt so much at home in a book, and in
my
home, as—I may not praise it, it is too close to me.” Both men were ministers’ sons exultant in the liberation that came with the “death” of the Christian God; both were poets and rhapsodists tagged with the name of philosopher. Almost certainly Emerson’s phrase “Over-soul” influenced Nietzsche’s choice of the phrase “
Übermensch
,” even though “Over-soul” in the edition that Nietzsche read was translated “Die
höhere Seele
,” the higher soul, which is echoed by Nietzsche’s talk of “the higher men.” From the Over-soul to the
Übermensch
to the Supermen of Hitler’s Master Race is a dreadful progression for which neither Emerson nor Nietzsche should be blamed; but Emerson’s coldness and disengagement and distrust of altruism do become, in Nietzsche, a rapturous celebration of power and domination
and the “ ‘boldness’ of noble races,” and an exhilarated scorn of what the German called “slave morality.” Not just the mention of Zoroaster seems Nietzschean in this passage from “Self-Reliance”:

The essay approvingly quotes Fletcher’s “Our valors are our best gods” and bluntly states, “Power is in nature the essential measure of right.” Totalitarian rule with its atrocities offers a warped mirror in which we can recognize, distorted, Emerson’s favorite concepts of genius and inspiration and whim; the totalitarian leader is a study in self-reliance gone amok, lawlessness enthroned in the place where law and debate and checks and balances should be, and with no obliging law of compensation coming to the rescue. The extermination camps are one of the developments that come between us and Emerson’s optimism.

Another is modern science, as it has developed. “Our approach now,” my dermatologist told me the other day, “is that nature is utterly stupid.” The same chemical mechanisms, he went on to explain, will destroy as blindly as they heal, and a goal of contemporary medicine is to block the witless commands that unleash harmful reactions in the body. Where, in this molecular idiocy, can we find indication that “acid and alkali preëxist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit”?

Also, we find aesthetic difficulty in a disconnected quality of Emerson’s discourse that in the actual lectures must have been greatly masked and smoothed by his handsome manner and appealing baritone voice. We are left with his literary voice, which (unlike Thoreau’s similar voice) seems pitched a bit over our heads, toward the back rows, and too much partakes of what he himself called “the old largeness.” Knut Hamsun, in his own lectures on
The Cultural Life of Modern America
, expressed what many a student has groped to say since:

I myself found, preparing for this talk, that the essays melted and merged in my mind; so exciting in their broad attack and pithy sentences, they end, often, disconcertingly in air, and fail to leave an imprint of their shape in the mind. This need not have been so: the one sermon of Emerson’s commonly reprinted is his farewell sermon in the Second Church of Boston, explaining why he could not in good faith administer the Lord’s Supper and therefore must resign.
^‖
It moves dramatically from careful examination of the relevant Biblical and patristic texts to the speaker’s own conclusions and thence to his beautifully understated but firm farewell. We remember it; its segments are articulated in a single gesture of argument. Of few of his essays can this be said. With his belief in inspiration and what he called “dream-power” and in patterns that all nature would conspire to express once a sufficiently pure surrender to the Over-soul was attained, Emerson read in his Concord study as his whim and his interest dictated and wrote in his celebrated journal, maintained since his college years, such quotations and paragraphs of independent thought as came to him. He assembled his lectures from this lode of intellectual treasure and, though the joinery is cunning and the language often brilliantly concrete, the net effect is somewhat jumbled and vague. We have been superbly exhorted, but to what effect? A demonstration of wit has been made, but somewhat to the stupefaction of our own wits. Modern critics, my impression is, are additionally embarrassed by the Neoplatonic, supernaturalist content of the early essays, and prefer the later, more factual considerations and the journals themselves, where the discontinuity is overt and the tone is franker and more intimate. Yet would the journals and even the excellent
English Traits—
the centerpiece of Mark Van Doren’s
Portable Emerson
—make a major claim on our attention had they not been hoisted into prominence by the celebrated, evangelical early addresses and essays? There is this awkwardness, I believe, in Emerson’s present reputation: what we like about him is not what is important, and what
is
important we do not much like. Emerson the prophet of the new American religion seems cranky and dim; what we like is the less ethereal and ministerial Emerson, the wry, observant, shrewd, skeptical man of this world.

Emerson was always such, of course; as Oliver Wendell Holmes said of him, “He never let go the string of his balloon.” The founder of Emersonianism was not its ideal practitioner; his extraordinary loyalty to the exasperating Bronson Alcott must have resided, it seems to me, in his awe of Alcott’s greatly superior impracticality. Thoreau, too, appeared to Emerson a kind of saint, who, he said in the beautiful eulogy delivered at Thoreau’s funeral in 1862, “lived extempore from hour to hour, like the birds and the angels.” Thoreau even worked miracles: “One day walking with a stranger who inquired, where Indian arrowheads could be found, he replied, ‘Every where,’ and stooping forward, picked one on the instant from the ground.” More amazing still, “From a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp.”
^a
No such magical sureness, his self-doubting journals reveal, had been granted Emerson; he felt skeptical about his own enthusiasms, mocking himself, in the essay “Illusions,” as susceptible to any new style or mythology. “I fancy,” he wrote, “that the world will be all brave and right, if dressed in these colors, which I had not thought of. Then at once I will daub with this new paint; but it will not stick. ’Tis like the cement which the peddler sells at the door; he makes broken crockery hold with it, but you can never buy of him a bit of the cement which will make it hold when he is gone.”

I found the preparation of this lecture a somewhat recalcitrant process, especially since Emerson himself, as I read him, seemed to be advising against it. Such a performance by a would-be creative writer goes against my own instincts; it is something done to please society, that society which, we have just learned, is a “conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” And I did not even have the excuse, which Emerson had, of making a living by lectures. Further, the subject
himself proved elusive and problematical, in the manner I have tried to describe; as I read, a hundred stimulated thoughts would besiege me, but all in the nature of paint that would not stick. What notes I took became scrambled; seeking to refer back to a key passage, I would find the words had quite vanished from Emerson’s pages. So, one morning, I decided to take leave of my bookish responsibilities and work in my cellar upon some modest carpentry project that had been long left hanging. While happily, brainlessly planing away, I turned on the radio—an “educational” station, to be sure—and was treated to a lengthy “Earth Mass” employing not only human voices and conventional musical instruments but tapes of howling wolves, whales conversing in their mysterious booms and groans, and the rushing sound of the Colorado River. How very Emersonian, I thought: and felt his ghost smile within me. For have we not late in this century come to see how it is that “the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative”? Amid all our materialism, have not sheer crowding and shared peril merged nature with our souls?

Then I had to make haste, for I was to take a train from my suburban town into Boston; I was to have a painless session at Massachusetts General Hospital, where anesthesia was first demonstrated in this country and where my dermatologist stood ready to tell me that nature was utterly stupid. I walked down to the tracks through my own woods and in my transcendental humor perceived the oddity of owning woods at all, of legally claiming a few acres of forest that so plainly belong to the trees themselves, and to the invisible creatures that burrow and forage among the trees and will not mark with even a minute’s respectful pause their ostensible owner’s passing from this earth. Emerson, expanding his holdings in Concord, in 1844 bought fourteen wooded acres by Walden Pond; but it was Thoreau who built a cabin and lived there, and Thoreau who wrote the masterpiece called
Walden
. We possess, that is, by apprehension and not by legal fiat; the spirit
does
create matter, along its circumference of awareness.

Emerging from my own neglected woods, I crossed the railroad tracks and bought at a so-called Convenient Food Mart a can of ginger ale and, after much hesitation, a bag of peanuts in the shell. Most of my life has been lived with women who find peanut shells a trial, especially those papery inner husks that elude every broom; I have associated shelling peanuts with the exercise of personal freedom ever since, as a boy, left alone to wander for an hour in the Pennsylvania city three miles from
my home, I would buy a half-pound bag and eat the peanuts as I wandered, dropping the shells into what trash cans and gutters and hedges and sewer grates presented themselves during my carefree stroll. Buying and eating so whimsical a lunch as peanuts and ginger ale appeared to me, obsessed with preparations for this address, as a peculiarly national opportunity and an appropriate celebration of the American insouciance that Emerson had labored to provide with a philosophical frame.

The train, I should say, was equipped with plastic windows, since younger Americans than I had been long celebrating their own insouciance and yielding to their own inspirations by tossing rocks at the windows as they flew past and shattering them if they were glass. Substituted plastic solved that problem, but in time the plastic has clouded to near-perfect opacity, so that as I hurtled to Boston the trees and houses and vistas on the way were vaguer and less to be guessed at than the shadows flickering in Plato’s famous cave, the womb out of which both Emersonianism and the Gospel of St. John were born.

I arrived, still cracking peanuts, at the hospital. What better exemplifies modern-day America than a hospital! Here a true cross-section of colors and creeds, ages and classes mingles, united by our physical fallibility and our hope that science will save us. Though it was autumn, the weather in New England was lingeringly warm, so the crowd summoned to the hospital was lightly dressed, in bright colors, in sandals and jogging shorts. Nubile, merciful nurses and brisk, sage physicians moved in angelic white through the throng of the infirm and their visitors. There were limping young athletes called in from their game by some injury they would forget in a week, young women pushing delicate bug-eyed babies in strollers or lugging them on their hips, elderly couples with an air of having long harbored a single complaint between them. “Life is an ecstasy,” Emerson tells us in “Illusions.” “Life is sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman dripping all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer in the field, the negro in the rice-swamp, the fop in the street, the hunter in the woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a certain pleasure to their employment, which they themselves give it.” Now a multitude of such as these had been fetched here, smelling of nitrous oxide, bearing the rainbow auras of their lives and their employments; to be among them was happiness.