Ralph Waldo Emerson – Northcoast Antiquarian

Paul Klee, *Rose Garden* (1920, 44, oil and pen on paper on cardboard, 49 cm x 42.5 cm), Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich, on permanent loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich, CC BY-NC-SA.

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.

Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

In an earlier post, I described how, while in junior high school I had written on a piece of paper those quotes which had mightily impressed me and, after folding that paper multiple times, placed it in my wallet and carried it with me faithfully for many years. The quote above, from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, Self-Reliance, is one of the quotes that I scratched in my barely legible adolescent handwriting onto that piece of paper. Those who had the misfortune to work with me over the years, know well that I took the import of that quote to heart.

In truth, as I oft explained to my colleagues, it was my duty, when articulating an idea or position, to defend it with vigorous rationality until reason and evidence had persuaded me of the error of my position. It was also my duty, I advised, to listen carefully to the construct of their opposing arguments, and to present their arguments to myself even more ably than they had, if I were able, so as to ensure the integrity of my position. But, until I was ultimately persuaded of the error of my position, there would be no hint that I was considering the abandonment of my position and I continued to defend it in “hard words.”

My approach to case discussions, in conformity with the quote above, sometimes resulted in what would appear to colleagues as a sudden and inexplicable change in my position on cases: suddenly I was in agreement with them whereas I appeared solidly opposed the day before and unpersuaded by all arguments and reason. Friends, hard words do not mean one is deaf to reason, persuasion, and commitment to duty (e.g., to search for truth). Regardless of my hard words in articulation of my position, I am always listening, persuadable, and picking up the arguments of my interlocutors to make their arguments better than even they so that I may determine if their position should prevail over mine. And if their position, based on reason, should prevail, it will prevail, and I will embrace it without being fearful of the seeming contradiction. For the seeming contradiction is no contradiction at all, in my mind. And this observation leads nicely to the final paragraph.

Some may recognize that the quote above comes from the paragraph in the essay which begins with an even more famous quote – a quote that did not make much of an impression upon me when I first read it over five decades ago: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Indeed.