Weaving: Breathing: Thinking: The poetics of Emerson’s Nature

Text derives from texere, which means “to weave” and “to construct.” As Emerson states later in the essay, nature weaves texts: “A life in harmony with nature . . . will purge the eyes to understand her text . . . so that the world shall be to us an open book . . . ” (CWI 23). As Emerson writes later in “Goethe,” “All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river its channel in the soil; the animal its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or stone” (CW IV 152). If our action is to be proportioned to nature, we too must weave and build, not biographies, history, and criticism, which are among the dead, but active, creative essays. His essay wishes to drive out, to purge the desire to see nature through the eyes of others, and to drive his readers forward to join nature’s floods of life. Joined with nature, one will understand its text, and its text says that he should live and create as it does.– Weaving: Breathing: Thinking: The poetics of Emerson’s Nature