"Emerson, Ralph W. - Essays 2nd Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the
populace with theirs. In our political parties, compute the power of
badges and emblems. See the great ball which they roll from
Baltimore to Bunker hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes
in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the
cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all
the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some
stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other
figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of
bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth,
shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most
conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they
are all poets and mystics!

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are
apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby
the world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems,
pictures, and commandments of the Deity, in this, that there is no
fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and
the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and
high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol.
Thought makes every thing fit for use. The vocabulary of an
omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite
conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene,
becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. The piety
of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is
an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.
Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the
type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the
more lasting in the memories of men: just as we choose the smallest
box, or case, in which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare
lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited
mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he was accustomed to
read in Bailey's Dictionary, when he was preparing to speak in
Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for all the
purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts?
Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us
as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from
having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can
come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need
that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new
relation is a new word. Also, we use defects and deformities to a
sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world
are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists
observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to
Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances.

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God,
that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature
and the Whole, -- re-attaching even artificial things, and violations