Troy Southgate

Dec 29, 2024

RALPH Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), in one of his lectures, contends that there is just “One Man” and that he can only be fully encountered when society functions as a whole. This all-encompassing figure is not an individual farmer or professor, but someone who is tantamount to the entirety of the community.

I suppose this means that the worst among us tend to cramp our combined style, or that the best of all flatter us to the extent that we disproportionately acquire the mantle of the deeply pious, the surprisingly witty and the eternally successful. This, regardless whether we actually deserve it or not.

For Emerson, however, things are less optimistic than they seem and he believes that man’s original unity is so fragmented that each of us has become nothing more than a mere finger or toe, and that we have tragically lost sight of our former collectivity.

Perhaps, in some allegorical twist of fate, this paragraph will bathe Emerson in the temporary light of social media, allowing him to reflect that same luminosity that we might recall how he has been wantonly amputated from the domain of American literature with the result that his modern countrymen are now collectively impoverished.