365 Day Project: Day 117

He Dared to See Forbidden Beauty

Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803–1882).?Essays and English Traits.?

[Vol. 5, pp. 297-310 of The Harvard Classics]

Today’s reading is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, Beauty.?Emerson is one of my favorite writers of all time. I could spend hours repeatedly reading just one of his essays, seeking to uncover new insights I might have previously missed.

The following are a few of the passages I highlighted while reading this essay today.

“We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington.”

“The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science. These geologies, chemistries, astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us where they found us. The invention is of use to the inventor, of questionable help to any other.”

Note: One of my personal goals is to travel to Concord, Massachusetts to see Emerson’s home, Thoreau’s Walden Pond and Authors Ridge in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. If LinkedIn still exists by the time I make this trip, I will post an updated article on the platform.???

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To learn more about me, as well as my coaching services, please visit my website at?https://www.silverarrowcoaching.com/?or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Resources

Kindle version of The Harvard Classics ($1.99):?https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089K4RP1F/