Exploring Paul Klee’s Rosengarten and Emerson’s Philosophy

Periodically, I revisit the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His writing style is sometimes jarring but just as often sublime (Henry James, in Partial Portraits (1888), observed that Emerson “never really mastered the art of composition” (p. 20) while also acknowledging that “he had frequently an exquisite eloquence” (p. 32)). The visit is always profitable.

While rereading Emerson’s perhaps most famous essay, Self-Reliance (1847), I found that after much of my recent reading focusing so heavily on things temporal, especially in the past month (e.g., Carlo Rovelli’s masterful works The Order of Time, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, and Reality is Not What it Seems and Tom Siegfried’s lyrical The Number of the Heavens: A History of the Multiverse and the Quest to Understand the Cosmos), the following passage resonated in a manner it had not on previous readings of the essay:

“Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”

Such an extraordinary observation and lesson—that there is no lamentation of the past, or anticipation of the future, only presence for the rose.

Lamentation, or regret more precisely, I have long regarded as the most useless of human endeavors, if it is more than rectification of error, amends to others, and lessons learned. Anticipation, or anxiety about the future, is also too often misplaced and misdirected energy. Yes, we can and should make plans, but when the energy and effort extend beyond the necessary such that the future becomes a thief of reason, serenity, and equanimity, we are perilously close to toppling over.

The image of the rose in the above essay also brought to mind, fortuitously or not, a wonderful piece of art, Rosengarten (1920) by Paul Klee, ensconced in Lenbachhaus, an art museum in Munich.

After reading Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg’s words about Klee from Der Blaue Reiter im Lenbachhaus München (2007) at the Lenbachhaus website, I readily envision Rosengarten as exemplifying the same harmonious integration of presence and timelessness that Emerson attributes to the rose. Created in 1920, the painting merges organic and constructed forms into a rhythmic whole. Klee’s garden unfolds as a grid of irregular, red-tinged rectangles, delicately framed by black lines, with roses—symbols of growth and vitality—scattered like musical notes across the composition. These roses, like Emerson’s, embody the eternal present; their rounded, spiral blooms suggest continuous life and creation. For Klee, as for Emerson, nature’s rhythms transcend human constructs of time.

Interestingly, Klee drew inspiration from music, speaking of “cultural rhythms” in his Bauhaus writings and comparing his visual compositions to musical structures. In Rosengarten, he achieves a polyphony of visual forms, where the temporal becomes spatial, and each element contributes equally to the whole. Just as Emerson’s rose is “perfect in every moment of its existence,” Klee’s garden suggests an infinite unfolding—a melody extending endlessly beyond the canvas.

Both Emerson and Klee challenge us to inhabit the present, to find harmony in life’s rhythms, and to appreciate the completeness inherent in each moment. The rose, whether in prose or paint, invites us to rise above time.