emerson.

when i was a lad, and rattled, as lads are, with crazy tsunamis of hormonal emotion, i was fortunate enough to come upon a volume of emerson’s essays which i promptly rescued from the dusty library shelves. that same book sits beside me at this very moment, complete with adolescent pencil lines shakily underscoring portions of 19th century wisdom which seemed especially resonant. one essay which bears a larger than average portion of these marks is the 1841 essay titled love.

many people seem to look back on their adolescent emotions as invalid, being somehow negated by the more mature emotions which come after. i disagree. yes, they were naive in comparison. yes lessons are learned and wisdom begins to accrue casting a comical and even embarrassing light over what came before, but as i see it those emotions were no less real, and no less valid, they were simply experienced by a different person, a you who no longer walks the earth.

reading emerson’s essay on love at that earlier point of my life was most akin, i suspect, to reading a travel guide for a country i had not yet visited. his characterizations framed for me what love was supposed to be, even if i was at the time stretching adolescent versions over the framework. puppy love, infatuations, crushes, for me they were all emersonian somehow, for better or worse. now that i have visited said country, and live there everyday, i still find that he characterized love quite nicely.

judge for yourself. here are a few of the bits i underlined (and no doubt quoted in many a hastily passed note)-

no man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all things new; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone.

and when the day was not long enough, but the night, too, must be consumed in keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song; when all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures.

so… it’s a bit saccharine for modern tastes perhaps, (o.k. a lot saccharine,) but then i first read it when i was 13 (not yet packed with bile and frozen in “cool”) and today, well, it’s valentines day, and i’m trying to not be a cynical sourpuss, so cut me some slack on that point.

if you’d like to read the whole essay it’s here.

otherwise let me just say happy valentine’s day to my baby girl miller, and to all the rest of you beloved sourpusses as well. if we’ve gotta put up with this pink heart-shaped teddy bear shit at least we can make the best of it eh? could do worse than a little serving of good ol’ ralph.