ABSTRACT
On the other hand, the man who owned the land on which Thoreau achieved transcendence, while anything but impervious to the claim of Romantic Joy, was nevertheless unable to forget his unhappy discovery that what you see, all this rich, fostering Nature, is just what you see—because, in fact, “The senses interfere everywhere and mix their own structure with all they report of.” “Illusions”; God’s very own method. If in Nature, so too in Society, a “carnival” in which “Nobody drops his domino”; and so too most painfully in Love, where a certain “Anna Matilda” (named slyly for a fictitious eighteenth-century poetess) becomes invested with all the heart and soul could desire. Why, it’s just as if we were all in some sort of cave, like the one Emerson visited in Kentucky where, with a trick of light in the palpable dark, the guides performed the stars and some people sang hymn[s]. Like the man said, light source hidden, shadows on a wall. Except, dear Mr. Plato, nobody gets out. Not the mystic, and certainly not the philosopher. No one should think to proscribe the love of wisdom, but the modern pursuit is constrained to observe that an object is what can appear to a subject. Is this nothing more than an elitist, first-world problem? I don’t know: go to my other volume and ask Emily Dickinson.
