Book Review: Nature By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature isn’t easy to read and understand if you think the words separately. It is more like a flow of idea you have to follow, and then maybe you will understand what his truth is. That we are all part of nature and nature isn’t different from the divine or us. It is something we experience and through it, we come alive. He writes that it is a shame how we don’t fully understand nature’s beauty. That we live apart from it and according to the rules society has imposed us, thus we don’t experience life’s fullness. And through solitude and going into nature, we engage the world and the fullness.

I don’t think I would have understood Nature if I haven’t experienced what he speaks of. How nature and walk in the woods make me feel whole, part of this world, and more at peace with myself. But when I get back to the so-called world, society, I feel alien and alone. Which is an oxymoron if you think the solitude of the walk in the woods and the crowds of people around me here at the concrete jungle. If Emerson thought we humans were too alienated from nature back when he wrote Nature, 1836, then he would be tormented by our modern life and our connectedness through social media.

Nature is poetry, a flow of thought, and a request for humans to see the beauty in our world. When I’m in nature, I feel more alive, and I see the world is more alive than here among people who pursue worthless things and has lost what is real and what not. I would be a fool to say that order and violence wasn’t part of nature that it was all “pure” and beautiful, but at least is honest.

“Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity.”