Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature and Walking

by John Elder

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

CHAPTER ONE
Nature

CHAPTER TWO
Commodity

CHAPTER THREE
Beauty

CHAPTER FOUR
Language

CHAPTER FIVE
Discipline

CHAPTER SIX
Idealism

CHAPTER SEVEN
Spirit

CHAPTER EIGHT
Prospects

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

O N HIS MANTEL IN Martinez, California, John Muir displayed two portraits those of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Acknowledging his own debt to the authors from Concord, Massachusetts, this defender of the Sierra wilderness also reflected their influence across the entire, diverse terrain of American nature writing. In particular, Emersons Nature (published in 1836) and Thoreaus Walking (1862) have served as manifestos for their naturalist successors in America. The play of their voices, from local observations to visionary exaltation and back again, established a distinctive rhythm for this literature of meditative excursions. Other nature writers have developed the tradition in many ways, as new scientific vistas have opened and as they have sunk their own roots in different regions of the country. Yet Nature and Walking remain crucial points of departure texts to which, as frequent echoes of their language testify, our literature of nature continually returns.

The two works published together here held special places in the careers of their authors, too. Nature was Emersons first book, and one of his earliest formulations of the vision we call Transcendentalism, with its celebration of spiritual meaning throughout the physical universe. Early in the book Emerson asks, To what end is nature? The sweeping, luminous language with which he explores his theme proved inspiring to readers of the day, including Thoreau, who was still in college when this work appeared. Nature was originally published anonymously. But its success encouraged Emerson to claim it for his own and ratified his choice of three years earlier to leave the Unitarian ministry for a life of lecturing and writing. While subsequent essays by him such as The American Scholar and Self-Reliance have also become landmarks in our nations literature and culture, Nature remains unique in the way it has colored Americas nature writing. In addition to influencing Thoreau and Muir, this essay had a powerful effect on such early, prominent practitioners of the genre as John Burroughs and Mary Austin.

Walking, by contrast, was one of Thoreaus last published works. It was printed posthumously in The Atlantic of Autumn 1862. Nonetheless, as a lecture which Thoreau presented many times before Lyceum audiences during the preceding eleven years, Walking had long been one of his best-known compositions. From its first line, the written version retains the zest of a dramatic public performance: I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness Such exuberance connects Walking with Emersons Nature. Both pieces derive in part from declamations utterances from the pulpit and the rostrum.

Emerson and Thoreau did not invent the genre of prose we call nature writing. Instead, they were the heirs of Jonathan Edwards, with his insistence on the physical creations spiritual meaning; of Linnaeus and his delight in the sacrament of naming; and of the English parson Gilbert White, who identified his life with the features of a deeply familiar landscape. The two were also appreciative readers of Wordsworth and of the other Romantic poets who protested against a merely mechanistic view of life. But throughout the subsequent tradition of American nature writing, there are the concerns and images, even the specific vocabulary, of a nature writers voice that Emerson invented and Thoreau developed.

A voice, like a flavor, is hard to describe. But the taste of Emersons prose can at least be suggested by a few of its ingredients. One is that Emerson, as a journal keeper, begins in particular moments, which he notes, reflects upon, and works up in the grand rhetoric of the essay. One of Natures most famous passages starts with a precise description of a particular experience: Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Moments like this ground Emersons theories of the soul and allow a reader to participate more fully in the essays meander.

While this literary voice speaks of particular walks and sunsets, it also makes grand pronouncements. And what keeps Emersons sublime religious statements characteristic and appealing is his gusty extravagance. One of his favorite words, orphic, sums up this giddy dash toward higher truths. The continuation of his passage describing twilight on the common offers an astounding example of Emersons lofty enthusiasm. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. 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 eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The reader, too, is whirled up to circulate through that transparent eyeball entranced, amused, and elevated.