Emerson's essay begins with the death of his young son, which he cannot feel properly, and spirals into a meditation on the obstacles to experience itself: illusion, temperament, succession, surface. The prose is darker than Nature, more honest about limitation. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Emerson refused easy consolation; experience defeats our theories. The essay has been called his greatest. It is certainly his most unsettling. The lords of life appear; they mock our pretensions. We are not strong enough to face what is real. We face it anyway.