Excerpts
from
Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay
Circles
1841
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle.
Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.
Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no
preservation, but all things renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import
rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the
only disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever,
intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are all forms of old age:
they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way
onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what
is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive,
aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons
itself to the instruction flowing from all sides. But the man and woman of
seventy assume to know all; throw up their hope; renounce aspiration; accept
the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become
organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their
eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope
and power. This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every
moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is
sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love
can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth
so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People
wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
The new position of the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning.
The
simplest words,—we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire.
Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.
But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and
obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not
set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as
if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No
facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless
seeker with no Past at my back.
“Blessed be nothing” and “The worse things are, the better
they are” are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.
The natural world may be conceived of as a system of
concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations
which apprize us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but
sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chemistry and vegetation,
these metals and animals, which seem to stand there for their own sake, are
means and methods only, are words of God, and as fugitive as other words. Has
the naturalist or chemist learned his craft, who has explored the gravity of
atoms and the elective affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law
whereof this is only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws
to like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need not
be pursued with pains and cost?
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful. It is by abandonment.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manner and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.
There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness.
….the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
all images courtesy of dear, wonderful james prochnik's art centered
The Careful Construction of a Personal Practice Part 1
(pose and counter pose theory)
Circles by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Asana for Home Practice from The Heart of Yoga
No comments:
Post a Comment