Emerson

      So, I live in Mount Vernon, which I’m willing to bet everyone in this part of Maine has heard of, but maybe hasn’t found on a map or in their explorations driving around. This is because you could drive through ‘downtown’ Mt Vernon and have no idea you actually passed through a town. I grew up in Providence and Boston (mom and dad one living in each) and I like this whole living in the middle of nowhere thing. Therefore, my walk to the post office is counting as this week’s walk. I have yet to run into another person while walking around Mt Vernon. Sneaking up on small children who swim in the lake doesn’t count. Having been to the Midwest, I have to say I am not comfortable being in a place that doesn’t have immediate access to water. Regardless of the fact that water is directly essential to, uh, ahem, life, water is beyond important to my mental well-being. I don’t know exactly what it is about knowing that I’m able to be literally submerged with fish and various plants and who know what kinds of weird floating bits of trash every now and then that is simultaneously calming and pee-inducing, assuming of course that it’s running water. So, I guess what I’m really saying is that when I walk down to the post office I get to walk by the lake, and it’s refreshing.


About this Emerson guy, he was sort of, okay, really obsessed with the idea of Nature being an entity unto itself beyond just trees and plants and stuff outside a house. I’m cool with the idea of capital N Nature being something other than the literal stuff outside and meaning something metaphysical as opposed to convenient or just there. What really makes me dislike Emerson aside from his tendency towards the run-on sentence is his inability to recognize the fact that he sexualizes nature and it’s almost problematic to his distinctions of what nature’s existence does for man and how that interacts with his interpretation that man’s relationship with nature is purely spiritual. “Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace; to the decoration of her darling child.” Granted, nature as a mother is not a new interpretation. These lines bring out the knee-jerk reaction of the violently passionate feminist in me. Who says nature follows man Mr. Emerson?! Why is man more important and nature serving his needs? To the decoration of her darling child i.e. man, she gives up things that were greater than him within her embrace. Here, nature is embracing man provided his thoughts equal hers and then she bends her lines of grandeur to his decoration. The majority of the time, he goes on about nature representing (although I struggle to find one instance where he uses the word represent) the spiritual connection and the ideal relationship of man and God. Now, clearly he subscribes to the all-encompassing Christian doctrine that God is a father-figure but even though he acknowledges that Nature is a mother, this mother is completely unrelated to the father he wants man to recognize and strive to emulate! In fact, the instances in which nature is portrayed as being convenient to man’s needs and spiritual completion outnumber the instances in which God is fulfilling a purpose to spirit. Nature as a bountiful mother is more than just a physical manifestation and spiritual love for trees and corn and meat and yummy vegetables. God as a father is interestingly not a sexual being even though he indirectly relates God to creation. However, mother, with her bounty and subservience, is providing for and creating man and his sustenance. Why isn’t the father, God, providing for man? Why is it that the physical needs of man are taken care of by a beautiful, perfectly created, varied in splendor and clothed in miracles, woman?!