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6:00 p.m.
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At the center of
Emerson’s essay “Experience” stands a scene of instruction in which the writer
is “apprised of [his] vicinity to a new and excellent region of life,” a region
that is that is at once indescribable and the subject of a series of
traditional and invented names: the
“vast flowing vigor” of Mencius, the Nous of Anaxagoras, the fire of Zoroaster,
the love of Jesus, “the sunbright Mecca of the desert,” and “this new yet
unapproachable America.” This central source appears in many of Emerson’s
essays—for example as the “One” in “Self-Reliance” or as the “over-soul” in the
essay of that title, and it marks what is widely recognized as a Platonic and Neoplatonic
element in Emerson’s thought. It is not
hard to see the “sunbright” scene that Emerson portrays as a variation of the
central sun in the myth of the cave, the source of being and knowledge that
Plato calls the Good; and the dark
opening of “Experience” as a representation of the interior of the cave, a
scene not of insight but of confusion. Does
Emerson embark on a Platonic journey in “Experience” in which the aim is to
free oneself from the cave and its obscurities and confusions; or is it a romantic journey as understood by
critics from M. H. Abrams to Stanley Cavell, a quest for the ordinary, the
miraculous in the common? And what is
the shape of this journey? Is it a pathway out of the cave (as Cavell
suggests), a circular return (as Heidegger argues), or perhaps a journey in
which there is no one direction of progress (as Cavell also claims), in which
progress is to be understood not so much as getting somewhere as reorienting or
turning the self around? All of these
interpretations have merit, but my reading attends to the many places in the
essay in which we both find ourselves outside the cave or nearly so, but at the
same time immersed in human life, places for example where we “converse with a
profound mind” or “find the journey’s end in every step of the road.”
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