THE CONDUCT OF LIFE
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
I
FATE
Delicate omens traced in air
To the lone bard true witness bare;
Birds with auguries on their wings
Chanted undeceiving things
Him to beckon, him to warn;
Well might then the poet scorn
To learn of scribe or courier
Hints writ in vaster character;
And on his mind, at dawn of day,
Soft shadows of the evening lay.
For the prevision is allied
Unto the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that awaits
Is the same Genius that creates.
_Fate
It chanced during one winter, a few years ago, that our cities
wsing the theory of the Age. By an odd coincidence, four or five
noted men were each reading a discourse to the citizens of Boston or
New York, on the Spirit of the Times. It so happened that the
subject had the same prominence in some remarkable pamphlets and
journals issued in London in the same season. To me, however, the
question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of
the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve
the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the
prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their
opposition. We can only obey our own polarity. ''Tis fine for us to
speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible
dictation.
In our first steps to gain our wishes, we come upon immovable
limitations. We are fired with the hope to reform men. After many
experiments, we find that we must begin earlier, -- at school. But
the boys and girls are not docile; we can make nothing of them. We
decide that they are not of good stock. We must begin our reform
earlier still, -- at generation: that is to say, there is Fate, or
laws of the world.
But if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation
understands itself. If we must accept Fate, we are not less
compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the
grandeur of duty, the power of character. This is true, and that
other is true. But our geometry cannot span these extreme points,
and reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by
harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last
its power. By the same obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs,
and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them. We are
sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with
liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit
of the times. The riddle of the age has for each a private solution.
If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of taking
up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of
human life, and, by firmly stating all that is agreeable to
experience on one, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts
in the others, the true limitations will appear. Any excess of
emphasis, on one part, would be corrected, and a just balance would
be made.
But let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad
name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been
boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have
manned themselves to face it. The Spartan, embodying his religion in
his country, dies before its majesty without a question. The Turk,
who believes his doom is written on the iron leaf in the moment when
he entered the world, rushes on the enemy's sabre with undivided
will. The Turk, the Arab, the Persian, accepts the foreordained
fate.
"On two days, it steads not to run from thy grave,
The appointed, and the unappointed day;
On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,
Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay."
The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as firm. Our Calvinists, in
the last generation, had something of the same dignity. They felt
that the weight of the Universe held them down to their place. What
could _they_ do? Wise men feel that there is something which cannot
be talked or voted away, -- a strap or belt which girds the world.
"The Destiny, minister general,
That executeth in the world o'er all,
The purveyance which God hath seen beforne,
So strong it is, that tho' the world had sworn
The contrary of a thing by yea or nay,
Yet sometime it shall fallen on a day
That falleth not oft in a thousand year;
For, certainly, our appetites here,
Be it of war, or peace, or hate, or love,
All this is ruled by the sight above."
Chaucer: _The Knighte's Tale.
The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense: "Whatever is fated,
that will take place. The great immense mind of Jove is not to be
transgressed."
Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad
ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which
preach an election or favoritism. And, now and then, an amiable
parson, like Jung Stilling, or Robert Huntington, believes in a
pistareen-Providence, which, whenever the good man wants a dinner,
makes that somebody shall knock at his door, and leave a half-dollar.
But Nature is no sentimentalist, -- does not cosset or pamper us. We
must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind
drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of
dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood,
benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the
elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way
of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the
snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle
of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda, -- these are in
the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just dined,
and, however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the
graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, -- expensive races,
-- race living at the expense of race. The planet is liable to
shocks from comets, perturbations from planets, rendings from
earthquake and volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of
equinoxes. Rivers dry up by opening of the forest. The sea changes
its bed. Towns and counties fall into it. At Lisbon, an earthquake
killed men like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand
persons were crushed in a few minutes. The scurvy at sea; the sword
of the climate in the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New
Orleans, cut off men like a massacre. Our western prairie shakes
with fever and ague. The cholera, the small-pox, have proved as
mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the crickets, which, having
filled the summer with noise, are silenced by a fall of the
temperature of one night. Without uncovering what does not concern
us, or counting how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx; or
groping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, or the
obscurities of alternate generation; -- the forms of the shark, the
_labrus_, the jaw of the sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the
weapons of the grampus, and other warriors hidden in the sea, -- are
hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature. Let us not deny it up
and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its
end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed
instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean
shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.
Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are
exceptional, and one need not lay his account for cataclysms every
day? Aye, but what happens once, may happen again, and so long as
these strokes are not to be parried by us, they must be feared.
But these shocks and ruins are less destructive to us, than the
stealthy power of other laws which act on us daily. An expense of
ends to means is fate; -- organization tyrannizing over character.
The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate:
the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically
its limits. So is the scale of races, of temperaments; so is sex; so
is climate; so is the reaction of talents imprisoning the vital power
in certain directions. Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards
the house confines the spirit.
The gross lines are legible to the dull: the cabman is
phrenologist so far: he looks in your face to see if his shilling is
sure. A dome of brow denotes one thing; a pot-belly another; a
squint, a pug-nose, mats of hair, the pigment of the epidermis,
betray character. People seem sheathed in their tough organization.
Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask Quetelet, if temperaments decide
nothing? ...
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