Essay: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas about resilience stand in potent contrast to our current cultural consensus on how to deal with suffering and loss. Instead of “self-care” and “healing,” he offers an aggressive affirmation of the will and of work.
Since the 19th century, Americans have looked to Ralph Waldo Emerson for wisdom on many subjects, from education to religion to politics. Today, surrounded by political storms and the sorrow and wreckage of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Emerson we need most is the prophet of resilience. Emerson’s ideas about resilience stand in potent contrast to our current cultural consensus on how to deal with suffering and loss.
Life compelled Emerson to become something of an expert on resilience. As a young man he lost the love of his life, his wife Ellen, to tuberculosis when she was just 19. His oldest son, Waldo—a joyful child who seemed to concentrate in himself what was most uninhibitedly life-loving in his father—died of scarlet fever when he was 5 years old.Emerson’s remedy for sorrow, grief and depression was not to stay still.
In the essay “Power,” Emerson writes that we carefully watch children to see if they possess “the recuperative force.” Those who instinctively retire to their rooms in sorrow when they’re slighted, miss the prize or lose the game will be at a serious disadvantage in adult life. “But,” Emerson continues, “if they have the buoyancy and resistance that preoccupies them with new interest in the new moment,—the wounds cicatrize, and the fiber is the tougher for the hurt.
Yet Emerson was soon up and moving again, tending to work and family—his two surviving children and his second wife, Lidian. He went back at life with all the brio he could muster. Two years after Waldo’s death, Emerson writes wonderingly about how he responded to his son’s passing. “In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.
The passage can freeze the blood on first reading—it seems so distanced, so detached from the tragedy. But it also attests to his ability to keep living and moving forward. Emerson’s resilience was shaped by his conviction that we are mortal and there is no other life than this. Nothing can redeem the time when you did not plunge forward and do what you had to do. The moral quality Emerson commends above all others isn’t love, faith or patriotism but a commitment to work.
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