Essay
Nature
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1836
Opening lines
OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
The essay opens with a question: why should the living be content to look at the world through the eyes of dead generations. Eight chapters then review what nature gives, material use, beauty, the language for which it supplies all the images, the moral lesson, and then turn the whole into a philosophical question: does what is outside exist otherwise than in the mind that perceives it. In passing, the narrator crosses a bare meadow, says that he is nothing and becomes a transparent eyeball through which the current of the Universal Being flows.
Context
On returning from a journey to Europe in which he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, the author published the essay anonymously, in Boston with James Munroe, on 9 September 1836. The same month the informal circle that would be called the Transcendental Club met for the first time. Two years later, his address to the divinity students of Harvard caused such a scandal that the university did not invite him back for some thirty years.
Who it is for
A short essay, in eight chapters that can be read separately. The language is dense, made of formulas that must be reread, and the last sections ask more of the reader than the first.
Prizes and reception
The first major philosophical statement of its author, it is regarded as the founding text of American Transcendentalism.
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