Emerson: The Mind on Fire IV

I'm up to 1844, when Emerson reached the age of 41. His first child, Waldo, was born in 1836 but died in 1842. This had a devastating effect on the family that lasted for some time. He also had a daughter, Ellen (1839-1909), named after his first wife, another daughter, Edith (1841- 1929), and another son, Edward (1844-1930). He seemed to have a good relationship with his wife, Lidian, and she dutifully cared for the children and household and the stream of visitors invited by Emerson, which must have been a strain, because they often stayed for four or five days. Some of them were eccentric, such as the poet Jones Very. Two new women, Anna Barker and Caroline Sturgis, entered the circle, and Emerson seems to have been attracted to both of them physically and emotionally, though nothing came of it. He fretted about this for some time, as Richardson describes:

In August of 1841 Emerson was still protesting that "it is not in the plan or prospect of the soul, this fast union of one to one." In September of 1841 he repeated that "plainly marriage should be a temporary relation, it should have a natural birth, climax and decay, without violence of any kind,—violence to bind or violence to rend." The same year, he made a note, "I marry you for better, not for worse." In 1843 he was still upset by what he called "the vitriolic acid of marriage," and in 1852, after his trip to England, he was still thinking (as he wrote) that "everything is free but marriage." 

There was a similar tension with Margaret Fuller, though he seems to have been less attracted to her. She became the editor and a contributor to their new publication, The Dial, in 1840. This was a transcendentalist publication, and other contributors included Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and W.E. Channing, a preacher. The Dial was never popular and it ceased publication in 1844.

In 1840, his friend, George Ripley, invited the Emersons to live at his newly-formed commune called Brook Farm, which opened in 1841. The commune had been carefully planned and was organized on principles from Charles Fourier. After mulling this over for some time, he declined, because it had an intricate collectivist social structure that would conflict with his independence. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there briefly. In any case, Brook Farm was never financially viable, and it closed in 1847.

In 1841, Emerson took an interest in Plotinus:

Emerson was particularly struck by two Neoplatonic teachings: the idea of the world as emanation and the idea of the ecstatic union with the One. For Plotinus everything emanates, or flows out, from the One, the ultimate power and unity of things. The first emanation is thought or mind, meaning the whole range of ideas from which in turn the whole range of tangible things and beings emanate. In a piece of visionary writing of this year Emerson says:

As the river flows, and the plant flows (or emits odors), and the sun flows (or radiates), and the mind is a stream of thoughts, so was the universe an emanation of God. Everything is an emanation, and from every emanation is a new emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also. If anything could stand still, it would be instantly crushed and dissipated by the torrent which it resisted.

When I see language like this, I begin to think "Where's Waldo?" To me, this is not serious writing, though I can accept the ideas obliquely in poetic form, such as in the poems of Emily Dickinson. 

In 1843, Emerson's friend, Bronson Alcott, started a transcendentalist-themed commune called Fruitlands. That lasted for less than a year. In 1844, Emerson became an active opponent of slavery. In modern terms, he seemed to have a hodgepodge of ideas that would not cohere well today. For example, he supported capitalism though that is usually seen as inconsistent with most religious sentiments. So, I'm not exactly in awe of Emerson as a thinker at this point but will save my conclusions until after I've finished the last two hundred pages.