In the Library
Nature
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 9
- Length
- Length 15k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau takes Emerson's philosophy to the woods and lives it, and the disciple outwalks the master.
£1.99
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
Wordsworth arrives at the same transcendentalism thirty years earlier, but from the Lake District instead of Concord.
£1.99
Song of Myself
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself takes the same faith that the self and the natural world are continuous, but it sings it as sprawling first-person catalogue rather than measured essay.
£1.99
About the book
Cross a bare common at twilight, the snow still standing in the puddles, nothing lucky in your day, and feel a gladness rise that borders on fear: this is where Emerson begins. Then comes the sentence that started a literature. Standing on open ground, his head bathed in the blithe air, he feels the small self dissolve until he is nothing and sees everything, a transparent eyeball through which the currents of the universe pour. Nature is the founding document of American thought, the essay that told a young country it need not borrow its religion or its poetry from the Old World, because the woods past the door were scripture enough. Emerson wonders what we would do if the stars came out one night in a thousand years, how we would believe and adore, then reminds us they come out every night and we have stopped looking up. Read it and you start looking again.