After the epigraph, Emerson opens the essay with a question about "where we find ourselves." He uses an extended metaphor to answer this question, and as the metaphor goes on, it becomes clear that the essay itself is an allegory for human experience:
WHERE do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday.
Emerson compares the human experience to waking up partway up a staircase. Although there seems to be no way we could have reached this point on the staircase without climbing up it, we don't remember doing so. We also don't know where the staircase started. The "old belief" many people have is that a "Genius"—maybe God, but maybe some other source of power—ushered us onto the staircase to start our human lives. This "Genius" stands at the bottom of the stairs and gives each person a potion, "lethe," to make them forget the eternity their soul is leaving behind by embarking on earthly life. But the potion is strong enough that from moment to moment, we still struggle to get our bearings. Even "at noonday," (i.e. in the middle of life), Emerson argues that "we cannot shake off the lethargy." He seems to be saying that we can never really take stock of where we have been and how each moment in our life has led us up the staircase to the place we are now.
Emerson's metaphor is strange and a bit difficult to grasp. This is not poor writing, but rather an allegorical attempt to invite the reader into the feeling Emerson himself is grappling with. The central idea of the essay is that we all have a subjective version of reality that is made up of the way our experiences collect like beads on the wire of our temperament. Each new "bead" is like another step up the staircase. We can never know what is really happening around us, nor can we know what anyone else's staircase looks like. At the same time, Emerson imagines that we can try our best to brush up as close as possible to others' reality and thus try to orient ourselves just a little better on our own staircase. Emerson gives his reader the disorienting experience of entering the essay in the middle of a thought to mimic the sense of waking up on the staircase with incomplete context and a vague sense that we have missed something. As he goes on, there are hopefully little pieces of the extended metaphor that resonate for the reader, giving them a better sense of where they are walking. As opposed to a cohesive argument with a clear starting and ending point, the essay itself is a "series" of ideas that Emerson presents as points of orientation for the reader. By reading the essay, the reader can hopefully return to their own subjective reality with a slightly broadened perspective.
