Emerson on The Tragic

Emerson’s essay The Tragic was originally a lecture called “Tragedy”, the seventh lecture in a course on Human Life given by Emerson in Boston in the winter of 1838 – 39. This revised and re-named version was printed in the last edition of the Dial, April 1844. (You can compare it to The Comic, the eighth lecture in the series which I already read)

Emerson is a master of aphorisms, and this essay has many starting off with the very first sentence:

He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the house of Pain.

Emerson, who lost his five-year-old son to scarlet fever and his first wife to consumption knows a thing or two about tragedy. When he writes

In the dark hours, our existence seems to be a defensive war, a struggle against the encroaching All, which threatens surely to engulf us soon, and is impatient of our short reprieve. How slender the possession that yet remains to us; how faint the animation! how the spirit seems already to contract its domain, retiring within narrower walls by the loss of memory, leaving its planted fields to erasure and annihilation.

When he writes that, you know it comes from personal experience. He continues on that path for a few more sentences, enough to make your heart ache both for him and for yourself and the memory of your own dark hours. Then he blessedly takes a step back and wonders what are the tragic elements in human nature?

Would you be surprised to know what Emerson finds most tragic is the tendency to reject Reason and cling to other things? Those other things include Fate, a subject he has an entire essay about. Our lives are not Greek tragedies nor do superstitions fend off Fate. The universe does have laws but Fate is not one of them. Our Destiny is in our own hands and is controlled by our Reason, our Faith and our Will. You are the captain of your ship so to speak.

The essence of tragedy does not belong to any particular evil or list of evils. Emerson acknowledges that famine, fever, madness, etc, are all very real. However, our terror of tragedy is often greater than the actuality and there are people who get their jollies from always imagining the worst or always being the one to whom the worst happens. Such people lead Emerson to suggest that “tragedy seems to consist in temperament, not in events.”

He also notes “tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.” Those who are in the midst of suffering are generally not the ones to call the experience a tragedy; they are too busy trying to cope and deal with the situation. The label generally comes from the outside. What Emerson suggests that those on the outside do not see is the compensation that those who are experiencing the tragedy are receiving. He outlines his idea of Compensation in an essay. Basically it is the idea that that there is a balance in the world, a sort of karmic reckoning that happens in the here and now and not in an afterlife or a second or third reincarnation. It is an optimistic philosophy.

The thing we need to do in order to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, is to commit ourselves to tranquility. Tranquility, however, does not reside in things. Things can and will be lost and when one loses one’s house, or savings, or favorite book then one’s tranquility is lost too. We need to work toward the “sublime tranquility” that we see on the faces of Egyptian sphinxes, or, I would add, the Buddha. For the Sphinx and a meditating Buddha, “their strength is to sit still.”

In the hubbub, the rushing to and fro, we need to remember

All that life demands of us through the greater part of the day is an equilibrium, a readiness, open eyes and ears, and free hands. Society asks this, and truth, and love, and the genius of our life.

We also need to remember that “time consoles,” as does art and literature. The greatest consoler of all, however, is the intellect:

the intellect in its purity and the moral sense in its purity are not distinguished from each other, and both ravish us into a region whereunto these passionate clouds of sorrow cannot rise.

Just as in the beginning from Emerson’s description we know he has had some dark hours of his own, here too we know that he speaks from experience. His whole life was spent in service to the intellect and the moral sense and in trying to teach us that we are each Divine.

This is the last Emerson essay. It is appropriate that it is on the tragic since I am rather sad that there are no more. I do still have his journals to read but that is not quite the same. I had no idea when I began reading Emerson that it would turn into such a project. I was only going to read a few essays. He and I have had some arguments along the way, but I have grown quite fond of him. I am certain I will be returning to him again. I look forward to that.

In the meantime I have a big fat book called Clarissa I hope to be able to share my progress on next week.