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Today, we will read selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays, Second Series, entitled “Experience,” in which the philosopher urges his readers to exercise patience, not be distracted by trivial aspects of daily life, and remain hopeful and open to the intuitive revelation that would offer “the light of our life.”“We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that it is wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born.”“So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours. So, in this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem organic in the speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity.”“People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality. Grief too will make us idealists.”“The child asks, ‘Mamma, why don’t I like the story as well as when you told it to me yesterday?’ Alas, child, it is even so with the oldest cherubim of knowledge. But will it answer thy question to say, Because thou were born to a whole, and this story is a particular?”
