 OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation...  Essays, orations and lectures - Page 1by Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1848 - 385 pagesFull view - About this book
 | Jay Grossman - 2003 - 292 pages
...situation that comes into focus when we inquire on whose behalf Emerson calls for this "original relation"? Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres...we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? 2 5 This passage permits certain modes of mediation while refusing others. The "original," unmediated... | |
 | Bonnie Costello - 2003 - 252 pages
...country is continually "awakening" from the slumber of derivativeness. Emerson complains in 1836 that "the foregoing generations beheld God and nature face...also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" (Nature, I).1 Moore was herself a persistent critic of her culture's tendency, as she writes in "Poetry,"... | |
 | Richard E. Wentz - 476 pages
...expressed the typical American inability to comprehend the significance of tradition when he said, "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face...should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?"3 Of course, we do enjoy an original relation to the universe, but it is never absolute.... | |
 | Nathaniel Hawthorne - 2004 - 428 pages
..."critical" and "historical," and turned to the aesthetic impulse in humans to determine what is truth.] Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres...to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we have an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight... | |
 | Henry David Thoreau - 2004 - 276 pages
...the eyes of those earlier generations, as though God and Nature were no longer directly accessible. "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" he asked. "Why should not we have ... a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"... | |
 | Neil Baldwin - 2005 - 270 pages
...enriching" stimulus toward a new American culture and, eventually, a new American language and literature. "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes," Emerson wrote in the opening passages of Nature, seeking to express the birthright for his generation.... | |
 | Dave Smith - 2011 - 274 pages
...I could count on, truth that spoke to my heart, that registered in my brain, that made some sense? "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Emerson asked. "Why should not we have... a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"... | |
 | Patrick J. Keane - 2005 - 575 pages
...saying that our forefathers beheld God and nature "face to face; we, through their eyes," Emerson asks, "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" This "also" — as in the next assertion, that the "sun shines to-day also," which presupposes an earlier... | |
 | Richard S. Gilbert - 2005 - 118 pages
...role of the natural world order in religion. In his essay on "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? .... Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us and invite... | |
 | Karen Sánchez-Eppler - 2005 - 300 pages
...the sepulchers of the fathers," he asserts in the first lines of Nature, and famously goes on to ask "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" 32. Emerson, Journals, undated entry of September 1842. (7). Emerson's scorn for retrospect, sepulchers,... | |
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