The final pages of Emerson’s English Traits basically amount to a summing up and have nothing additional to add to what came before. There is, however, an amusing bit about a visit to Wordsworth who was woken up from his nap and was a little grumpy about it. And so I move on to The Conduct of Life. This book began as a series of lectures in 1851, was refined over time, and finally published in book form in 1860, not long after Lincoln was elected president (but before he took office). The Conduct of Life was well received and fairly flew out of the shops. Emerson was not without his critics, however. The London Saturday Review commented that the “American audience likes to hear the dreariest of all dreary platitudes when they are strung together in what is called an oration” and filled with “mystical language.” And The New Englander criticized Emerson for “the utter shallowness and flippancy” of his judgments and expressions “concerning Christianity.” My guess is Emerson didn’t really care what the Saturday Review thought and probably was rather pleased to have gotten The New Englander riled up.

The first essay in The Conduct of Life is Fate. Emerson begins with a discussion of Fate for a reason. The purpose of the whole book is to answer the question, “How shall I live?” He has a point to make about Fate and everything that comes after hinges on it. And what is the point? There is no such thing as Fate. This may not seem like a big deal, but it really is. If there is no such thing as Fate, no such thing as predestination, then that means we are in charge of our lives and therefore we have to take responsibility for who we are and what we become. How liberating! How terrifying!

Fate is what we call the things that happen to us that we don’t understand. Fate is what we call our limitations. Everybody is born with limitations of one kind or other, these are the circumstances of life. And yes, there are forces bigger than we are

Famine, typhus, frost, war, suicide and effete races must be reckoned calculable parts of the system of the world.

We can add more, of course, so much more that

The force with which we resist these torrents of tendency looks so ridiculously inadequate that it amounts to little more than a criticism or protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of millions.

In the first half of the essay, Emerson cites example after example of Fate. He makes it seem like an inescapable force; like the course of our lives is written before we are even born. But I’ve read enough Emerson at this point to know that this is his favorite rhetorical structure. That last quote above comes almost midway through the essay and has us wondering how one person could possibly resist the power of millions. Emerson, very obligingly, spends the second half of the essay telling us how.

What we call Fate is opposed by two forces of our own: will and intellect:

He who sees through the design, presides over it, and must will that which must be. We sit and rule, and, though we sleep, our dream will come to pass. Our thought, though it were only an hour old, affirms an oldest necessity, not to be separated from thought, and not to be separated from will. They must always have coexisted. It apprises us of its sovereignty and godhead, which refuse to be separated from it.

Together, these create Power and it is with Power that we may oppose Fate. But that is not all. The Will that Emerson is talking about here is not a personal will. Will is composed of “the perception of truth” and “the desire that is shall prevail.” The truth here is not a personal truth either, “Where power is shown in will, it must rest on the universal force.” In other words, Will must be based in a sort of desire for the transcendental truth of divinity to prevail. Thought and Will, perception and desire, which Emerson also calls affection, must always be in balance. He uses examples of balance and harmony in nature–ecosystems, geology, evolution.

How does all this help us prevail against Fate? Help the minority of one against the millions? Emerson writes:

The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. Person makes event, and event person. The “times,” “the age,” what is that but a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the times?…the soul contains the event that shall befall it; for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts…The event is the print of your form. It fits you like your skin. What each does is proper to him. Events are the children of his body and mind. We learn that the soul of Fate is the soul of us.

As much as we might all want to be great persons, be one of those “few profound persons” or “few active persons” who create an age, Emerson recognizes that we aren’t and can’t, and that is the way it should be. But that also doesn’t mean we all can’t attain the power he talks about to oppose Fate. What it means is that we are each individuals with our own limitations and talents and what matters most is that we each do what we can where we can:

The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or the place. Life is an ecstasy…Each creature puts forth from itself its own condition and sphere, as the slug sweats out its slimy house on the pear-leaf, and the woolly aphids on the apple perspire their own bed, and the fish its shell.

I like that, “life is an ecstasy.” A good essay this one, thought-provoking and exciting and beautiful. I wish I could say the same for the book I read it from. I checked the book out from my library and its moldy pages that haven’t been aired in who knows how long gave me quite the allergy attack. My library has two copies of the book for check-out, this one and another equally as moldy and falling apart on top of it. I will have to buy my own copy. But if all the essays turn out to be as good as this first one, and I have high hopes that they will, I don’t mind adding it to my shelf to have on hand to dip into again in the future.

Next week’s Emerson, hopefully from a fresh, unmoldy edition: Power