| ‘Build Your Own World. So Fast Will Disagreeable Things ... Vanish,’ illustration for Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'Nature,' by Christopher Pearse Cranch (1830-92) |
Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Tantalizing, Unsentimental Prophet, Is Miles More American Than Maya Angelou
Just don’t ask him about sex
FEBRUARY 27, 2024
“If an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an Italian opera than he would by reading Emerson’s volumes,” John Jay Chapman remarked. “He would learn from the Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin.” Chapman, a devoted reader of Emerson, was not wrong. Emerson seems willfully ignorant about the torments of love and sex, the pangs of vengeance, the rancor that afflicts the weak, and our sadistic domineering urges. And in Emerson, unlike the opera, no gorgeous women plunge to their deaths.