`Certain Complications in Life '

`Certain Complications in Life '


A
reader questioned my use of “Transcendentalist mumbo-jumbo” to characterize a
passage in Thoreaus journal, and I replied via email that the New England
doctrine is a man-centered religion, one that inverts the true nature of things
to flatter its acolytes, and thus a precursor to much New Age silliness. In
particular I object to Emersons utter incomprehension of evil. “He has no
great sense of wrong,” says Henry James in an 1887 review of A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James
Elliot Cabot, “– a strangely limited one, indeed for a moralist – no sense of
the dark, the foul, the base. There were certain complications in life which he never
suspected.” James, a nuanced anatomist of evil (The Portrait of a Lady, The
Golden Bowl), is exquisitely tactful. David Middleton in “Emerson at Belsen”
(The Burning Fields, 1991) puts it more
witheringly:
“Yes,
I have come to see them, even I,Sifting
through these pits of lime and boneTo
find that utmost evil I deny:This
is the Old Worlds doing, not my own.
“Original
sin transcended was such bliss(Brave
Nature's healthy language my true bond!)That
even now I hear, through some faint hiss,Clean
showers fall on Concord and the pond.
“`Evil
the Unreal, my German masters said.(See
the blossomed wire, each daisy in the sun!)So
if they died en masse and what is saidWas
done, I say the All received them, one by one.”
Middleton
takes his epigraph, “Our word is our bond,” from Geoffrey Hills essay of that
title in The Lords of Limit (1984).
It seems a direct comment on the poems sixth line. Hill notes that bond denotes both restraint and communion,
and observes, “`Our word is our bond (shackle, arbitrary constraint, closure
of possibility) is correlative to `our word is our bond (reciprocity,
covenant, fiduciary symbol). `Mastery is as much as isnot servitude.” In We Are Doomed (2009), John Derbyshire
characterizes Emerson as “a key progenitor of modern smiley-face liberalism.”