(《纽约客》上的书评，标题还不知道如何翻译为佳，望大家指点）
BIG DEAD WHITE MALE
by JOHN UPDIKE
Ralph Waldo Emerson turns two hundred.
The observances this year of the two-hundredth anniversary of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birth, in 1803, have been measured but widespread: conferences were scheduled in the great man’s adopted home town of Concord, Massachusetts, and, this fall, in Beijing and Rome. The year’s issue of the Journal of Unitarian Universalist History is devoted to Emerson; a bicentennial exhibition ran at Harvard’s Houghton Library from March to June; and in his birth month of May it was possible in Concord to mingle with actors playing the roles of such friends as Henry David Thoreau and the Alcott sisters and such significant relatives as his eldest daughter, Ellen, and his redoubtable aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. There were many newspaper editorials, including one in the Times that credited Emerson with formulating the “pernicious, and currently thriving, philosophy of American individualism run amok—call it American self-absorption.” The Republican tax cut, tilted toward the rich, and the Administration’s us-first, go-it-alone foreign policy, not to mention the financial rapacity of Enron and Tyco executives and Wall Street mis-advisers, were all traced by the Times to Emerson’s gospel of self-reliance.
今年，庆祝拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生（生于1803年）诞辰200周年的纪念活动显得有条不紊却流行甚广：这个秋天，在为人接受的这个伟人的故乡马萨诸塞洲的康科德（Concord）以及北京和罗马都安排有研讨会。“一位论－普救派历史学刊”（Journal of Unitarian Universalist History）今年专刊讨论爱默生；一个两百周年纪念展在哈佛雷顿图书馆（Houghton Library）从三月一直延续到七月；在他的出生月五月，在康科德极有可能一些人扮成他的朋友梭罗、奥尔科克姐妹和那些他的重要亲人比如他的大女儿埃伦和他的可怕的姑妈玛丽·穆迪·爱默生，混在演员当中。许多报纸的专栏，包括“时代”上的一个专栏，都认为爱默生阐明了“美国的个人主义哲学已经变成可怕的却至今活力十足的杀人狂——美国式的自我陷溺”。给富人加冕的联邦减税、政府的“美国优先”和单干的外交，更别提安然和泰科执行官与华尔街的不法顾问的经济贪婪，都被“时代”追溯到爱默生的“自己靠自己”的真理。
In the world of books—the world that preserves Emerson’s memory and message, now that his hypnotic baritone voice and reassuring platform presence are no more—the celebration has been restrained. The Boston firm of David R. Godine has issued a pleasing anthology, “A Year with Emerson,” edited by Richard Grossman, and with typically fine engravings by Barry Moser ($26.95). Emerson, a disbeliever in “foolish consistency” who customarily assembled his lectures from thoughts and sentences written in journals that he began keeping as a Harvard undergraduate, has always lent himself well to being excerpted. His published essays—refined and expanded versions of the lectures—can seem unduly long and, once read, slippery in the mind. The three hundred and sixty-five items assembled in this “Daybook” are drawn from letters and poems as well as from the canonized prose; while it is hard to imagine even the most devout Emersonian undertaking the pious discipline of a daily reading, Grossman’s arranged and annotated progress through the year hops about in lively fashion and often surprises us. Surprise was an aesthetic effect Emerson cherished, as we read in the journal entry titled “Good Writing”:
在书的世界里——收藏着爱默生的回忆和讯息的世界，虽然再也听不到他那使人睡觉的男中音嗓音，看不到他在讲台上自信的表现——庆祝显得有节制。波士顿的David R. Godine公司出版了一本令人愉悦的文选：《爱默生的一年》，由理查德·格罗斯曼编辑，并配以巴里·摩斯的极富特色的精美雕版画。不相信“愚蠢的忠诚”的爱默生，一个经常在他的演说中引用从他作为哈佛本科生以来就开始收集的学刊里的思想和句子的人，也总是可以使自己恰如其分地被人引用。他出版的文集——讲演的精华和普及版——显得过于的冗长拖沓，阅读起来思绪却很流畅。在这本《日记本》里，选录了三百六十五则他的书信、诗歌，还有人们推崇的散文；虽然我们很难把甚至是最虔诚的爱默生的作品想像成每日必读的虔诚信条，但格罗斯曼安排并评注的一年阅读步骤还是跳跃着鲜活的时代精神，并经常使我们感到惊奇。惊奇是爱默生钟爱的美学效果，正如我们在阅读标题为“好的写作”的日志时感觉到的：
All writing should be selection in order to drop every dead word. Why do you not save out of your speech or thinking only the vital things—the spirited mot which amused or warmed you when you spoke it—because of its luck & newness. I have just been reading, in this careful book of a most intelligent & learned man, a number of flat conventional words & sentences. If a man would learn to read his own manuscript severely—becoming really a third person, & search only for what interested him, he would blot to purpose—& how every page would gain! Then all the words will be sprightly, & every sentence a surprise.
“所有的文章都应该精挑细选以刨除任何一个没有活力的词语。你为什么不从你的讲话或思考中就清理出那些幸运且新奇的最重要的东西呢——那些当你开口说话时令你愉悦或警惕的富有激情的警句。我一直都在阅读这本非常睿智博学的人的谨慎之作中许多平实而传统的词语和句子。如果有人能够认真地阅读他的原稿——成为一个真正的旁观者，仅仅搜寻那些使他感兴趣的东西，他的意图将会受阻——如何得到每页原稿呢。如果那样，所有的词语将是轻快的，每个句子都是一个惊奇。”
The passage sets out, in small, Emerson’s priorities—spontaneity over convention, vitality over formality, luck and newness over system. Out with what is dead! But keep, along with the spirited mot, a third-person detachment. Though he averred, “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim,” he was a scrupulous and patient reviser, who extensively reworked most of his lectures for their appearance in print.
从小处着眼，书中的章节陈述了爱默生的优先性——自发性优于传统性，活力优于拘泥，幸运和新奇优于体制。其他的都是死气沉沉的！但是，连同富有激情的警句，你务必保持住旁观者的超然。虽然他声称：“我只是一时兴起在门楣上写字，”但他是一个谨慎耐心的校订者，大面积地修改了爱默生的大多数付诸出版的演说的面貌。
Also this spring, Princeton issued a slim volume, “Understanding Emerson: ‘The American Scholar’ and His Struggle for Self-Reliance,” by Kenneth S. Sacks ($29.95). Sacks, a professor of history at Brown, describes the heated intellectual context in which Emerson delivered, on August 31, 1837, the annual address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, a speech afterward titled “The American Scholar” and destined to become, according to Sacks, “the most famous in American academic history.” It, and Emerson’s address to the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School the following July, staked out his turf and made his name. Both addresses were, beneath their flowers of rhetoric, inflammatorily hostile to the host institution, from which Emerson had graduated in 1821, thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Harvard, in Professor Sacks’s analysis, was a bastion of Unitarianism, which had become the religion of the ruling élite of Boston. Unitarianism, which in 1819 was called “the half-way house to infidelity” by a professor at the rival Andover Theological Seminary, and is now seen, with its sister the Universalist Church, as the ultimate in liberal Protestantism, by 1837 had acquired an aristocratic and conservative bias that disdained populist revivalism and, closer to home, so-called Transcendentalism, an intellectual movement derived from the mystic streak in Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle. Emerson praised such writers for being “blood-warm” and for perceiving “the worth of the vulgar”; these were fighting words, as was his insistence on the great value of the individual person’s subjectivity. According to Sacks:
同样，今春，普林斯顿出版了一个肯尼斯·萨克斯的小册子：《解读爱默生：<美国学者>和他对自我依靠的追求》。萨克斯，布朗大学的历史学教授，描述了1837年8月31日爱默生在哈佛美国大学生联谊会上所作的年度演讲的激烈的学术背景，那个演讲后来被命名为《美国学者》，而且它注定成为萨克斯所说的“美国学术史上最著名的演讲”。它，连同爱默生在接下来的给哈佛神学院的高年级学生所作的五月演讲，使他在学术中占据了一席之地并名声鹊起。在它们的华丽辞藻的下面，两个演讲都煽动着对哈佛大学的敌对情绪，1821年爱默生作为一个59人班级的第30名毕业于哈佛大学。萨克斯教授的分析认为，哈佛是上帝一位论——它已经成为波士顿的统治精英的宗教信仰——的堡垒。上帝一位论，1819年安多弗（Andover）神学院的一个反对派教授称之为“几乎是不忠诚行为的集会”，现在与它的姐妹普世主义教派一起被视为自由新教伦理的最高理论，到1837年，它已经取得了贵族和保守主义者的偏爱，这些人蔑视民粹主义的复兴，更进一步，也鄙视知识分子运动源自歌德、华尔华兹、科尔里奇和卡莱尔的神秘主义的所谓的先验主义。爱默生赞扬那些“热血”的、感知“世俗的价值”的作家；这些都是战斗的文字，就如他坚持主张作为个性的人的主观性的伟大价值。萨克斯认为：
Harvard-Unitarian culture found spiritual and intellectual confirmation in empirical proof, scientific progress, and material success. Emerson acknowledged understanding derived from observation of external phenomena, but believed that the more important truths are eternal and intuitive, emerging from within. Ostensibly a struggle between the schools of Locke and Kant, after 2200 years it still pretty much came down to Aristotle versus Plato. But Emerson’s scholar wasn’t the elite Guardian of Plato’s Republic; it was instead Socrates, son of a stone mason.
“哈佛一神论文化在经验的根据、科学的进步和物质的发展中找到了精神上和学术上的认同。爱默生承认认识源自对外部现象的观察，但他认为更为重要的真相是永恒的、直觉的，它从内部涌现出来。表现上看是洛克学派和康德学派之间的争斗在2200年之后依然可以追溯到亚里斯多德与柏拉图之争。但是，爱默生的学者不是伯拉图的《共和国》，而是苏格拉底——一个泥石匠的儿子——的精英卫道士。”
European Romanticism, rephrased for the American democracy, posed a revolutionary threat to a rationalist élite. At the same time, it upset Christian orthodoxy, even the attenuated Unitarian form. Emerson’s Divinity School address, amid its offenses, reduced Jesus to a sublimely typical man, one who was “true to what is in you and me,” alive to the “daily miracle” of “man’s life,” and manifesting not miracles and an impossible sanctity but “a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.” To the future ministers, Emerson, having vividly sketched the dismal state of the contemporary church—“It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good, and the fear of the bad”—said, “Cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.” He admonished them “to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.” That the terrain to which his auditors are released is dauntingly featureless did not curb Emerson’s own delight in solitary freedom. His father, a dry conforming Unitarian clergyman, had died early, leaving little legacy of affection in his seven-yearold son’s memory, and Emerson had liberated himself from a parish minister’s duties, including the personally distasteful one of administering the Lord’s Supper, before the age of thirty. Yet he continued supply preaching throughout the eighteen-thirties, and called his public lectures “lay sermons.” His two aggressively large-minded Harvard addresses advanced his burgeoning career as a lyceum speaker, a free-ranging secular prophet.
欧洲的浪漫主义——美国民主的另一表述——对理性主义的精英构成了革命性的威胁。同时，它颠覆了基督教的正统，甚至日益衰落的一神论的形式。在它的攻击中，爱默生在神学院的演讲中将耶稣还原为一个象征高尚的人，他“在你我的心里是真实的”，对“每日的奇迹”和“人的生命”是敏感的，不但代表着奇迹和难以达到的圣洁，而且代表着“一种美好的、天然的美德，一种你我都有、能引导你我形成和栽培这种美德的美德”。爱默生在生动地勾勒出当代教派的低沉状态——“它已经失去了对美德的爱和对恶性的怕的领悟”——之后，对于未来的部长们，他说：“把所有的陈规都抛到后面吧，直接告诉人们神的存在。”他告诫他们要“单独前行，拒绝所有的好的典范，甚至那些在人们的想像中是神圣的人，敢于不需要任何中保或掩饰地去爱上帝”。他的听众被指引去的地方是令人畏惧、毫无特色的，但这并没有束缚住爱默生在孤独的自由中享有的喜悦。他的父亲，同样是一个一神论老牧师，很早就死了，在他的七岁儿子的记忆里，几乎没有遗传下多少的仁爱，在三十岁之前，爱默生靠着在一个教区牧师底下的工作，包括他个人很讨厌的管理圣餐工作，自力更生。但是，从十八岁到三十岁，他开始连续做辅助讲道工作，因此他称他的公开演说为“布道”。他的两个进攻性的有魄力的哈佛演讲促生了他作为一个学术讲堂演说家——一个自由的世俗先验家——的职业的萌芽。
Proper Boston resisted his message. Attending a Harvard ceremony not long after giving the Divinity School address, he noted in his journal, “The young people & the mature hint at odium, & aversion of faces to be presently encountered in society. I say no: I fear it not.” Sacks relates how one Convers Francis, taking tea with a “family belonging to the straitest sect of Boston conservatism,” found that his hosts “abhor & abominate R. W. Emerson as a sort of mad dog: & when I defended that pure and angelic spirit . . . they laughed at me with amazement.” By this light, Emerson’s Transcendentalism, with its claims in these two addresses that “all men have sublime thoughts,” that “the active soul” is something “every man is entitled to,” and that, “if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him,” formed part of the Jacksonian revolution whereby the democracy’s yeomen sought to take power and responsibility from an élite of merchants and planters.
严格意义上说，波士顿拒绝了他的训诫。在哈佛神学院做了演讲后不久，他参加了哈佛的一个典礼，他在他的日记中写到：“年轻人和成年人都显得不耐烦，露出现在社会上可遇上的厌倦的面孔。我说不：我不怕它。”萨克斯说，在与一个属于波士顿保守主义的地方教派的家庭喝茶时，一个叫弗朗西斯的人发现他的主人“把爱默生当成一种疯狗而憎恶甚至痛恨：当我为这个纯洁似圣人的人辩护时，他们都惊愕地嘲笑我”。根据这点，爱默生的先验主义——在这两个演讲中宣称的“所有人都有高尚的思想”，“活跃的灵魂”是那种“每个人都有资格所有”的东西，“如果一个人可以依靠着他的本能坚强地成长，并且坚持不已，那么，他将拥有一个无限的世界”——构成了杰克逊革命的一个部分，在那场革命中，这个民主主义的自耕农从贸易商和种植园主那里寻求权力和职责。
The weightiest bicentennial volume thus far has been “Emerson,” by the Harvard professor Lawrence Buell (Harvard; $29.95). A three-hundred-and-thirty-four-page rumination in seven chapters, the book has the relaxed, sometimes personal air of a graduate-student seminar rather than the clarion tones of a lecture in an undergraduate survey course. We are assumed to know something about Emerson already. The biographical facts are swiftly sketched and subjected to skeptical inquiry; the patriotic “jingoism” of his stirring ceremonial hymn beginning “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,” for example, is minimized by Buell’s conclusion that “Emerson’s own concern was with values that stand the test of time and unite the world.” Buell’s repeatedly solicitous, corrective slant has the unintended effect of showing how thoroughly Emerson, who spoke to wake up the democratic masses to the powers within them, is now captive to the contentious, incestuous circles of academe. An endorsement on the back of the jacket, by Sacvan Bercovitch, the author of “The Puritan Origins of the American Self,” salutes Buell’s book as “the harvest of the past half-century of Emersonian revaluations and the harbinger, guide, and provocation for the next generations of Emerson scholars and critics”—as if Emerson scholars and critics, in their generations, are world enough. Buell rarely pitches his voice above classroom level. Saving type at the price of obscurity, he identifies many key quotations by their page numbers in “CW,” specified on page xi as “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols., Ed. Edward Waldo Emerson. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1903-1904,” leaving those who happen to lack that twelve-volume set from the outset of the last century to guess, often, what essay is being quoted. Such ill-equipped readers must guess, too, at the shadowy content of scholarly disputes that are second nature to the sixty-four-year-old Buell, who in his preface admits he has been mulling Emerson over since he was twenty-six.
到目前为为止，两百周年纪念的最厚重的书是哈佛教授劳伦斯·贝尔的《爱默生》。七个章节三百三十四页的沉思，毋宁说这本书回响着大学生概论课上老生常谈的号角声，不如说它流动着研究生研讨会上轻松的、有时候是个人的气息。这本书假设我们已经知道了关于爱默生的一些事情。传记部分被很快地勾画出来并且包含了尚未定论的疑问；比如，爱默生以“简陋的拱桥边下河水流淌”为肇始的礼仪赞美诗所激起的爱国“沙文主义”在贝尔的结论中被简化为“爱默生自己对经受住时间的考验和联合全世界的价值的担忧”。贝尔一再热切期待和矫正的姿态，无意中也彻底地显示出大声疾呼民主大众心中的力量觉醒的爱默生现在如何沉迷于好争斗的、混乱的学术圈。《美利坚本质的清教起源》的作者萨克万·伯克维奇在书的封页的评语中将贝尔的书敬为“过去半个世纪对爱默生再评价的成果和下一代爱默生学者和评论者的先驱、导向和动力”——好像爱默生学者和评论者在他们的年代中都会非常的实际。贝尔很少在课堂上口沫横飞。他以晦涩换取条理，在页码处统一了许多关键的引用语，在第11页指定为“《爱默生全集》，12卷，爱德华·沃尔多·爱默生责编。波士顿：豪顿－米弗林出版社，1903－1904”，省却那些从上个世纪开始就缺乏12卷本的人徒做什么文章被引用的猜测。贝尔在他的前言中承认自己从26岁开始就一直在琢磨爱默生，这些装备不足的人还要在学术辩论——64岁的贝尔的第二性——的晦涩内容里去猜测，
He makes an extensive case against “a present-day literary-Americanist standpoint” that, in his view, takes too seriously the concluding peroration of “The American Scholar” (“We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. . . . We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. . . . A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men”) and not seriously enough Emerson as a global intellectual shaped by European and Asian (Hindu, Buddhist, Persian Sufi) influences and influential, in turn, abroad, with declared admirers ranging from Matthew Arnold and Friedrich Nietzsche to such outriggers as the Cuban poet-revolutionary José Martí, the Australian Charles Harpur, the Jewish Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel, and—a great catch—Marcel Proust. But who is arguing? To someone of Emerson’s generation, European thought and writing was almost all there was; Puritan sermons, Benjamin Franklin’s blithe compositions, the Founding Fathers’ chiselled eloquence, Washington Irving’s sketches, and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales—all were easily overlookable by a serious American aspirant to high thought and poetry in the early nineteenth century. To Emerson, Poe, his only peer as a homegrown critical and creative mind, was “the jingle man.”
贝尔做了广泛的研究反对“当今研究美国文学的人的一个观点”，在他看来，它过于看重《美国学者》的带有总结性的结尾（“我们聆听欧洲的庄严的沉思已经太久了。……我们将走自己的路；我们将用自己的双手来创造；我们将表达自己的想法……一个人类的民族将首次真正地出现，因为他们每个人都相信自己被神灵所鼓舞，它也鼓舞着所有的人”），却对于一个被欧洲和亚洲（印度教徒、儒家和波斯苏菲派）的学者塑造成一个全球的学者的爱默生，以及他在国外的影响——他的公开的崇拜者从马修·阿诺德、弗里德里希·尼采到古巴的革命诗人约塞·马帝、澳大利亚的查理斯·哈柏、犹太教的印度诗人伊扎基尔和一个伟大的崇拜者普鲁斯特——不够重视。但是，谁会在为此争辩呢？对于一个爱默生的同代人，欧洲思想和文学几乎无处不在；新教伦理、本杰明·富兰克林的幽默小品文、国父们的精辟雄辩、华盛顿·埃尔文的见闻录和詹姆斯·费尼莫·库珀的皮袜子故事集——在十九世纪早期，所有的这些都很容易被一个认真追求高尚思想和诗歌的美国抱负所忽视。对于爱默生，爱伦·坡作为惟一一个在国内可以与他平起平坐的犀利而有创新的人，也就是个“摇着铃当的人”。
In the heavily politicized world of contemporary American academic studies, nuances of emphasis loom with the menace of frontal assaults. Buell frequently sounds defensive, admitting that “Emerson’s significance as a force in U.S. literary history has shrunk since the ethnic renaissances of the twentieth century, the late-century expansion of the American canon, and increasing disenchantment with the whole idea of literary canonicity.” The category of “canonicity,” of practical concern mostly to textbook manufacturers, distracts the celebrant from his own aesthetic reactions and evaluations. The “so-called new Americanist criticism of the last two decades,” we read, “tends to see the tensions between margin and center (in particular of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality) as more central to U.S. cultural history than any supposed aesthetic mainstream. . . . No longer does it seem so self-evident that Emerson and Transcendentalism were the gateway to U.S. literary emergence.” When was it self-evident? It wasn’t to his contemporaries Melville and Hawthorne, who both took a satiric and suspect view of Emerson’s soul-talk. “This Plato who talks thro’ his nose,” Melville called him, adding, “To one who has weathered Cape Horn as a common sailor what stuff all this is.”
在当今严重政治化的美国学术研究界，在前沿攻击的危险中，强调重点的细微差别越来越明显。贝尔经常看起来很中肯的，他承认“爱默生作为美国文学历史上一支力量的重要性自二十世纪的种族复兴、最近一个世纪美国宗教的扩张和整个文学‘正典’思想的日益觉醒以来已经衰弱”。“正典”的范畴——多数是教科书编撰者的实际考虑——转移了主流学者对美学反应和评价的关注。我们看到：“所谓过去二十年里美国问题的新批评倾向于透视边缘和主流（特别是在种族、人种、性别、阶级和性方面）的紧张状态，它比任何可以想像的美学主流都接近美国的文化史……爱默生和先验主义是美国文学涌现的通道的说法看起来不再那么顺理成章。”那它什么时候顺理成章呢？对于他的同时代人梅尔维尔和霍桑，它不是那么顺理成章，他们都对爱默生的与灵魂对话持讽刺和怀疑的态度。梅尔维尔称他为“用鼻子说话的柏拉图”，她还补充说“对于一个曾作为普通水手经历过合恩角风风雨雨的人来说，所有这些又算什么东西”。
Professor Buell, while trying to give Emerson the benefit of his forty years of close and fond attention, gives evidence of having weathered many storms of political correctness. He seems, within his discourse, distracted by hectoring students and fractious fellow-faculty. Of Emerson’s reluctance to join the militant abolitionists, it has to be explained that he had “initial scruples about joining what today seems a far more self-evidently righteous cause than it did to the great majority of nineteenth-century northern whites in the 1840s and 1850s.” Buell pleads that “overall, Emerson’s racism was certainly no greater than that of most northern white abolitionists, and far less than the average northern white.” Again, Buell confides, “Nor, despite his awareness of and support for American diversity, did he cease to think of Englishness as the dominant ethnic influence in the making of America and especially of New England”—as if in 1850 any other view were possible. Bows are awkwardly made to severer theorists:
当贝尔教授试图阐释他四十年的密切喜好地关注的成果时，他也在展示爱默生经受住政治正义性的诸多风暴的事实。在他的论述里，他似乎受到了浮夸的学生和倔强的学院同仁的影响。关于爱默生拒绝加入好战的废奴主义者，通常的解释是他“最初对于参加在今天看来比在十九世纪四十年代到五十年代看来对绝大多数的十九世纪北方白人还要明显是一场正义事业时显得有些犹豫”。贝尔辩解说：“总之，爱默生的种族主义显然不会强于大多数的北方废奴白人，也远远弱于北方白人的平均水平。”贝尔还说：“虽然他意识到并支持美国的多样性，但他没有停止将英格兰风格作为缔造美国特别是新英格兰的占主导地位的种族影响力来思考。”——就像在1850年，任何不同的观点都是可能存在的。
Myra Jehlen argues that Emerson’s vision of man coming into his godship through the conquest of nature reads suspiciously like an apology for westward expansion. Christopher Newfield argues that Emerson’s appeal to transpersonal authorities like aboriginal self and the “orphic poet” who says the last words in Nature implies a forfeiture of individualism and acquiescence to dominant cultural forces that make for a parallel between Emerson’s life course and the rise of corporatism in nineteenth-century America.
迈拉•杰伦认为爱默生构想的通过征服自然而达到神性的男人读起来让人怀疑是对西进扩张的愧疚。克里斯托弗•纽菲尔德认为，爱默生对类似于原始人的超人权威和那个在《论自然》里说出最后的话语的“俄尔普斯诗人”的呼吁，意味着一种个人主义的丧失和对主流文化势力的默认，从而，在十九世纪的美国，爱默生的生命历程就一直伴随着社团主义的兴起。
Buell’s account of Emerson’s responsiveness to intellectual women like Margaret Fuller, who believed that his “model of personal transformation” opened “the door to female liberation,” is accompanied by the gratuitous disclaimer “though admiration was apt to be tinged with lingering misogynistic judgmentalism.” On the matter of theistic belief, Buell smilingly enlists in a collegial infidelity, with a frown for today’s zealots: Emerson’s frequent mention of God “is hardly calculated to appeal to the majority of university researchers who presently dominate Emerson studies. For the most part, we are a thoroughly secularized lot, all the more skeptical of God-talk given the rise of fervid evangelical power blocks at home and abroad.”
贝尔对爱默生对女性知识分子——比如马格丽特•福勒，她认为爱默生的“人的转化模式”打开了“女性解放的大门”——的回应实际上带有廉价的承诺，“虽然对她们的赞美总是弥漫着挥之不去的厌恶女人的先验主义”。在对神的信仰方面，贝尔反对当今的狂热者，乐于陷入学院的不虔诚：爱默生对神的经常提及“很难归纳为是现在统治着爱默生研究的绝大多数大学研究人员的要求。在很大程度上，我们都是彻底的世俗化的生命，而且，对与神交流的怀疑造成了国内外狂热的反福音派势力的兴起”。
A hundred years after Emerson’s centennial was declared a school holiday in Concord and marked by an oration by William James and a public prayer that the spirit of Emerson inspire all present, he is put forward gingerly, apologetically, as a devalued stock on which we might still want to take a flyer. Buell was quoted in the Boston Globe (which reviewed his book as “scholarly natterings”) as saying, “If you’re looking for strong guidance, look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for the courage to maintain sanity and resolution when the rest of society seems to have gone mad, Emerson may be your man.” The endorsement seems excessively hedged, linking the sage’s value to a presumed madness in society. Emerson was too much a realist, I think, to dismiss the workings of a society as mad, even a society like his own, passionately riven antebellum America. He pitched his palace of the Ideal on the particularities and rationale of what existed. One of Buell’s few wholehearted sentences exclaims, “How many of the great essays end by propelling the reader out into the world!” Yes; Emerson wanted to encourage us, to make us fit for the world.
在被宣布为康科德的学校假期，并以威廉•詹姆斯的一篇演说和一个“爱默生的精神激励着所有的人”的公开祷告而闻名的爱默生的百年庆典过去一百年之后，爱默生作为一个我们仍然要做孤注一掷的冒险的贬值筹码被小心谨慎且满怀歉意地请了出来。波士顿环球报（它将贝尔的书称为“学者的唠叨瞎扯”）引用了贝尔的名言：“如果你要寻找坚强的向导，那么到别的地方去找。但如果当社会上其他的人似乎都发疯了，你要寻找保持清醒和决心的勇气时，爱默生或许是你要找的人。”把圣人的价值与假定的社会疯狂联系起来，评语看起来过于的拐弯抹角。我认为，爱默生是一个地地道道的现实主义者，他不会去拆散一个疯狂运转的社会，甚至那个他自己的、支离破碎的南北战争前的美国社会。他把他的理想王国建立在既存现实的特性和理性之上。贝尔的一个极少数的诚恳的句子高呼：“那么多伟大的文章以强迫读者进入世俗世界而结尾！”是的，爱默生就是要鼓励我们，使我们适合生存于现实世界。
So is there anything left to say, outside the classroom, about the Sage of Concord? Some of his disciples still do excite non-academic interest: Whitman, who credited Emerson with bringing him to a boil, and who received from him a handsome endorsement, triumphantly survives, as a revolutionary versifier and celebrant of his American self. Thoreau is still read without being assigned, and lives as a patron saint of ecologists. Though Emerson extolled Nature, centering his testament “Nature” on its manifestations and opening his Divinity School address with a lyrical evocation of the summer in progress, he was not a naturalist. He wrote about people, people in their stressed psychic anatomies, and, as he aged, people in history and society. These later, more worldly writings better suit our modern taste—more concrete, less high-flown. Mark Van Doren, in assembling the Viking Portable Emerson back in 1946, leaned heavily upon “English Traits” and the short biographies and omitted many of the relatively youthful philosophical essays. “For he was at his best,” Van Doren wrote, “not when he was basic, not when he was trying to understand the man he was, but when he was being that man, when he was applying the ideas which that man had furnished him. He needed matter to illuminate.”
那么，在课堂之外，还有什么关于这个康科德的圣人的东西没有说吗？他的一些信徒依然确实对非学术的爱好兴奋不已：惠特曼认为爱默生“把他带向顶峰”并从爱默生那里得到一个不错的赞誉，他作为一个革命诗人和他所谓的美利坚本质的倡导者是成功的。梭罗仍然被自由地阅读，并且作为生态主义者的守护神而活着。虽然爱默生赞美自然，在他的遗嘱中表现出以“自然”为中心，并且以对活动着的夏天充满诗情的呼唤开始他的神学院演讲，但是他不是一个自然主义者。他写那些处在紧张精神状态中的人，成年后写历史和社会中的人。后来这些写作变得更为世俗，更适合我们现代的品味——形象具体而不抽象形而上。马克·范·道伦在1946年后从事编辑《爱默生文选》，他很大程度上倾向于“英国特性”和短传记的作品，而忽视了许多相关的早期的哲学作品。范·道伦写到：“因为这个时候他处在最佳状态，而不是他年轻的时候，不是他试图去发现自我的时候，而是他就是那个他要发现的自我的时候，他发挥那个自我给他配备的思想的时候。他需要东西来引导自己。”
Yet the later, more material and genially circumstantial Emerson is not the one whose bicentennial we celebrate. Were his surviving writings confined to those after, say, 1850, they would be remembered the way Washington Irving’s travel and historical writings are, and Emerson as another Unitarian clergyman turned literary intellectual, like George Ripley. Emerson won his high place in American esteem as the founder and proponent of a religion, one of many offshoots and modifications of Christianity—Mormonism, Shakerism, the Millerites—that flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century as Calvinism, with its baleful predestinarian God, lost its hold. Emerson’s inspiriting stroke of genius was to rephrase and reëmphasize the dualism of Christianity in palatable terms adapted from German philosophy and European Romanticism. On the second page of his first book, “Nature,” published in 1836 and based, we learn from Buell, on ideas in an early sermon, we read:
但是，后来，一个更为具体、在各种情况下都很亲切的爱默生却不是我们要庆祝的二百周年的爱默生。比如说，人们纪念他现存的作品被限制在了1850年以后人们纪念华盛顿·埃尔文的旅游和历史作品那样的方式里；就如乔治·瑞普利，爱默生作为又一个信仰上帝一位论的牧师，转变成了一个文学作家。作为一种信仰，一种当加尔文派伴随着它的恶毒的命定之神丧失诱惑力之后，在十九世纪上半时期活跃的基督教的分支和修订——摩门教、震荡派和耶稣再临派——的创建者和推进者，爱默生在美国享有很高的荣誉。爱默生引用德国哲学和欧洲浪漫主义的优美词汇鼓舞人心的天才一笔，重新解释和强调了基督教的二元性。从贝尔处得知，在他1836年出版的基于他早期的布道思想的第一本书《论自然》中，我们可以读到：
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.
“从哲学上考虑，宇宙是由自然和灵魂构成的。因此，严格地说，所有我们身外的东西，所有哲学区别为非我的东西，即自然和艺术，所有其他的人和我们自己，都必须皈依到‘自然’这个名字之下。”
A year later, in “The American Scholar,” the “not me” becomes the “other me,” and a relation between the two entities is drawn: “The world,—this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself.” In “Nature”’s seventh chapter, titled “Spirit,” an intermediary element had appeared, on both sides of the cleavage: “The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.” The universal spirit, a striver, would seem to be God, clad in transparent robes of Kantian idealism: “Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. . . . Yet, if it only deny the existence of matter, it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of me.” The word “spirit” bounces from the me to the not-me and back again, yet amid this legerdemain Emerson formulates a profound and primitive fact about the human condition—“the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world’s being.” Consciousness creates duality. We exist, to ourselves, non-phenomenally. Our subjective existence is absolute, though indescribable. “The soul is,” Emerson says in the essay “Compensation.” “Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts and times within itself.”
一年之后，在《美国学者》中，“非我”变成了“另我”，二者之间的关系是：“这个世界——灵魂或另我的庇护，无处不在。它的吸引力在于它是打开思想的钥匙，使我熟知了我自己。”在《论自然》中名为“论精神”的第七章里，在分裂的两边出现了一个调和的因素：“自然最高贵的那一面游荡着上帝的幽灵。它是原灵体(Universal Spirit)向个人传言、拯救个人回到原灵体的载体。”原灵体，一个抗争者，似乎是一个穿着康德的理想主义的透明外衣的上帝：“理想主义认为：问题是一种现象，而不是物质……但是，如果它只是否定了问题的存在，它就满足不了精神的需求。它使得上帝离我而去。”“精神”这个词从“我”到“非我”又反弹了回来，但是，在这个变戏法过程中，爱默生阐明了一个关于人的条件的抽象而原始的事实——“我们自我本质的根据与世界本质的根据之间的完全不一致”。直觉创造二元性。对于我们自己，我们不是作为一种现象存在。主观上，我们的存在是绝对的，虽然难以描述。“灵魂是一种补偿。”爱默生在文章“论补偿”中如是说。“在潮涨潮落却保持平衡的永远变化的现象下面，是‘真实的人’的原始深渊。本质，或者上帝，不是关系，也不是部分，而是全部。存在是一种巨大的肯定，不是否定，它自我平衡，包含了所有的关系、部分和时间在里面。”
From the absoluteness of the “me” a great deal of religious consolation can be spun. The self is pitted against the vast physical universe as if the two were equal. From “Compensation”: “The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism. . . . In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of condition.” The doctrine is tailor-made for Americans. Emerson’s America was also Hawthorne’s, which Henry James famously described in a cascade of negatives: “No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army . . . no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors,” and so on. In a New World so bare and barren, and faced with an overweening Nature such as the species has not encountered since prehistoric migrations, what does a person have? A self. And that is plenty, Emerson assures us. “In all my lectures,” he stated in his journals, “I have taught one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man.” Possessing his own infinity, a man has nothing to fear, not even (though Emerson treads light on the thin ice of personal immortality) death itself.
从绝对的“我”中，可以编织出许多宗教的慰藉。突出自我是为了反对巨大的物质世界，就像它们俩是平等的实体。从“论补偿”篇中，我们得知，“灵魂拒绝束缚，总是认定一种乐观，永远不是悲观……对于条件的不平等的补偿就存在于灵魂的本质里。”这种教条是为美国人特制的。爱默生的美国也是霍桑的，亨利•詹姆斯用一连串的否定极为响亮的形容为：“没有君主，没有法庭，没有个人忠诚，没有贵族，没有教堂，没有牧师，没有军队……没有乡村绅士，没有宫廷，没有城堡，也没有庄园”等等。在一个如此空虚荒凉的世界，面对一个自史前迁徙以来所有的物种没有遇见的骄傲自负的自然，一个人具备什么呢？那就是自我。这就足够了，爱默生要我们这么相信。他在他的日记中记到：“在我的所有演讲中，我就教导一种信条，即一个人的无限。”拥有他的无限，一个人就无所惧，甚至不怕死亡本身（虽然在个人的不朽方面爱默生如履薄冰）。
In essay after essay, waving aside evil as “merely privative,” Emerson justifies optimism and declares a holiday for the hard-pressed American soul. Like most faiths, his makes light of the world and its usual trials. His most pessimistic essay, “Experience”—that in which he declares, “I have set my heart on honesty”—proclaims the transience and shallowness of grief and love: “The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. . . . We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.” Elsewhere he expresses a brusque impatience with charity and the clamor of worthy causes. “I must be myself,” he tells us. “I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you.” How well this suits our native bent! In this country, the self is not dissolved in Oriental group-think, or subordinated within medieval hierarchy. Our spiritual essence, it may be, is selfishness; certainly our art, from Whitman to the Abstract Expressionists, flaunts the naked self with a boldness rarely seen in other national cultures. Emerson is matched only by his hero Montaigne, who confessed, “The world always looks outward, I turn my gaze inward; there I fix it, and there I keep it busy. Everyone looks before him; I look within. I have no business but with myself.”
在一篇又一篇的文章中，爱默生将罪恶作为“仅仅是私人的”而置之不理，证明了乐观的合理性，并为高度压抑的美国人的灵魂放了一个假期。像大多数的信仰，他轻视了世界和它的通常考验。他的最悲观的文章“论经验”——在文章中，他宣布：“我的心灵置于诚实之上。”——说明了痛苦和爱的短暂和肤浅：“伟大和不断发展的自我植根于纯粹的自然，代替了所有相关的存在，摧毁了必会消亡的友谊和爱的王国……我们相信自己，就如我们不相信其他的人。我们相信赋予自己的所有东西和他人身上我们称之为罪恶的东西对于我们都是考验。”在其他的地方，他表达了对仁慈的粗暴的不耐烦和对有价值的事业的强烈要求。他告诉我们：“我必须是我自己。我不能再为了你毁了自己，你也不能。”这是多么符合我们的天性啊！在这个国家，自我不是融解在了东方的集体思想中，也不是从属于中世纪的等级制度。我们精神的实质应该是自私自利；当然，我们的艺术，从惠特曼到抽象表现主义，大胆地标榜着在其他的民族文化中才可以见到的赤裸裸的自我。只有他的偶像蒙塔涅才和爱默生匹配，蒙塔涅承认：“这个世界总是外向的，我总是向内看；这样我就抓住了它，使得它忙个不停。每个人都向前看，我只看自己的身体。我只忙活我自己的事情。”
A country imposed on a wilderness needs strong selves. Whether American self-assertiveness fits into today’s crammed and touchy world can be debated. But Emerson, with a cobbled-together mythology, in melodious accents that sincerely feigned the old Christian reassurances, sought to instill confidence and courage in his democratic audience, and it is for this, rather than for his mellowed powers of observation and wit, that he is honored, if honored more than read. His relative neglect, a decline from a heyday of gilt-edged uniform editions and soul-stirring fireside perusal, he would have regarded philosophically. He knew how the world eats at our attention. “Experience” ends:
一个置于荒凉上的国家需要坚强的自我。美国的自我定位是否合适今天紧张而暴躁的世界，我们尚需探讨。但是，爱默生用他拼凑的神话，以一种虚伪地装成古老的基督徒的虔诚的优美嗓音，试图将自信和勇气注入给他的民主听众，正是这一点，而不是他的臻于完美的洞察力和睿智，使得他誉满天下，如果他得到的荣誉比他被阅读要多的话。从他的镶着金边的统一的版本和刺激灵魂的炉边熟读的全盛期逐渐开始走下坡路，他本应该辩证地看待他的这种相对衰落。他知道世界在我们的关注之下是如何地腐蚀掉。“论经验”如此结语：
We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!
“我们修理我们的花园，吃我们的筵席，和我们的妻子聊家常，这些事情都不会留下影像，下个星期就会被忘掉；但是在一个每个人都会回归的孤寂中，他得到一种清醒和启发，在他通往一个新的世界的途中他将随身携带着这些。不要在意嘲笑，不要在意失败：继续向上吧，古老的心灵！”
