“The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.” ―Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”
What is gone is gone always. Or so we tell ourselves, melancholy materialists who have seen the disappearance of so many things we loved: people, objects, eras, ideas. Waldo, of course, was less certain about these matters. It was in “Nominalist and Realist” that he seemed to deny the reality of death itself. “Nothing is dead,” he insisted. “Men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.”
He wrote these sentences (or at least published them) in 1844. He was still reeling, in other words, from the death of his son. Was he soothing himself with the idea that he would someday see Little Waldo’s eyes peering out at him from another face? Or was this a tribute to the power of memory, wrapped in another of his deadpan metaphors? Or simple denial?
His conviction that nothing truly ended—that extinction was illusory—ran deep, and he never expressed it more beautifully than in “Circles,” from his first collection of essays. “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”
His argument went far beyond the question of mortality. Regeneration was the engine of the universe. “Thus there is no sleep,” he wrote, “no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate, and spring.” Nor did human beings live in straight lines, but in a kind of glorious circularity. (In a moment of self-mockery, Waldo actually referred to himself as a “circular philosopher.”) Has he not encouraged us, then, to turn directly from his death—with his body still warm—to his birth?
He entered the world on May 25, 1803. This was in Boston, the city he would later condemn as a necropolis of dead ideas and faint hearts and mercantile mildew. But what he saw as a child was very different. The yellow wooden house on Summer Street sat on two acres of land, girdled with spreading elms and Lombardy poplars and with a view of the harbor down below. All around were leafy estates and open, cow-dotted pastures. It was a small bucolic paradise within the city limits, and probably defined Waldo’s notion of tranquility forever.