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5 : Emerson's Beautiful Estate roper endings aside, Ralph Waldo Emerson is reported to have uttered on his deathbed, "Oh that beautiful boy." 1 The allusion, it is generally assumed, was to the poet's five-year-old son Waldo, who had succumbed to scarlet fever forty years earlier. Clearly, the child's early and swift departure helped to inspire "Experience," which, unlike the earlier (and later) essays , did not begin as a lecture. "In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate," he wrote in the essay, and added stoically, "no more." 2 Psychologists tell us that it normally takes three years to recover fully from the emotional trauma attending the loss of a loved one. In little more than one thousand days we come to accept the fact of the person's life as one more of our fictions in terms of the life that remains to be lived. Although Emerson's statement in "Experience" indicates a quicker recovery, his "deathbed confession" rings a little truer. It suggests that in writing the essay Emerson discovered that life's illusions were not so "caducous." "Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion"-or allusion, he might have added. Following the death of his first wife, an event as painful as Waldo's disappearance, he had written in his journal: "There is one birth & one baptism & one first love and affections cannot keep their youth any more than men." In its fullest context, Emerson is anticipating his published response to Waldo's death in "Experience," that "grief too will make lIS idealists ," but what stands in relief to this Transcenden- [ 72] Emerson's Beautiful Estate talist pose is the fact of the "first love" and the problem of its lasting imprint on the experience which follows. 3 In "Experience" Emerson appears to be arguing against himself, or his former position in Nature (1836). On the one hand, he continues to resist with Kant Hume's idea that since knowledge is based on perception , we can never know for sure that God exists; 4 but on the other hand, he now agrees that experience is not clearly emblematic of the Oversoul but the result of perception, whose source may be the subjective self.5 Where he found himself in the middle of his life was between allusion and illusion: "We wake and find ourselves on a stair: there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight" (p. 27). What he had known more surely, that which had filtered his perception with delight, was gone: "I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,-no more." That which he was yet to know was sure to come: "There are always sunsets, and there is always genius" (pp. 29-30). This statement is different in tone, if not completely in meaning, from that in Nature, where "the sun shines to-day also."6 There the focus was upon the developing present; here it is one of the interstices of life-between the seemingly concrete object and its subjective meaning in both the past and the future that would become the past almost before it had enjoyed a meaningful present and presence. In fact, "Experience" is the record of Emerson's most wakeful moment in life, his waking up from the Transcendentalist dream that was always a story about conclusion to face a present that was filled with allusions to the past. God existed in such a present as nothing more than experience, that continuous transition from moment to memory. From ocular illusion to actual allusion, the pattern of experience allowed only the stability of temperament-what Emerson calls "a succession of moods or objects " (p. 32). Rather, they were moods of perception in which the past became a surrogate for the future. Like Hawthorne's "Actual and the Imaginary," they met and imbued each other on the 11eutral ground of the present. Life's symbiotic essence is most vividly conceptualized in "Experience," where the "loss of a beautiful estate" transforms the "property" of experience into the problem of living in the face of death. "Nothing is left us now but death," he writes. "We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, There at least is reality that will not [ 7 3] [18.190.156.212] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 08:16 GMT...

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