Emerson’s “Experience” is a philosophical essay about the way human beings experience the world. The essay first concentrates on the subjective, individual, and essentially lonely nature of experience: a person, Emerson claims, can never actually make contact with reality, and remains always isolated within the scope of his or her own mind. Then, Emerson changes his tone and offers ways to overcome, or to begin overcoming, the gap between individual and reality.
The essay begins with a long poetic epigraph. The poem’s speaker describes the “lords of life,” the forces that determine the nature of individual experience. These are “Use,” or habit, which occupies most of one’s time and determines most of one’s activity in the world. Habit is interrupted by “Surprise,” since human beings have only limited knowledge of the workings of reality, and hence are never able to make accurate predictions about what will occur. Indeed, what people engage with is really just “Surface,” the appearances of things, which means that human experience has the character of a “Dream,” a “Succession swift” of appearances and moods. Emerson compares this succession of feelings to a string of beads, each of which acts as a lens through which humans see the world. Since reality is only ever an appearance, all harm and misfortune that people experience is only “Spectral Wrong,” because it does not actually affect the human spirit. The primary example of this that Emerson discusses is the death of his young son, Waldo. Although experience seems to be objective—to be of the world as it is—it is instead always shaped by a person’s inborn “Temperament,” his or her natural predisposition to see and feel certain things. The final “lord of life,” the force that governs the others, is “the inventor of the game,” a divine creative force.
Emerson describes humans as essentially unable to make contact with the world or with each other. The divine creative energy of nature is out of their reach. Human life seems trivial and, in a way, it is. Emerson urges the reader to moderate his or her desires, and to temper his or her experience of misfortune with the awareness that, because the human subject is essentially isolated from the world, misfortune is nothing more than an “inconvenience.”
Despite the essential gulf between the subject and reality—what Emerson describes as “an innavigable sea” that “washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at”—Emerson’s essay takes a hopeful turn and explores the ways in which someone might begin to bridge this gap and make contact with things as they really are. Emerson encourages the reader to follow his lead and not to “craze yourself with thinking” and “husband” each and every moment of life. Instead of spending one’s time and energy thinking about the past or the future, and trying to make one’s life add up to some whole greater than the sum of its parts, Emerson enjoins the reader to “fill the hour” and to “find the journey’s end in every step of the road.” By anchoring oneself in experience, rather than thinking critically about it, one can perhaps begin to reintegrate the thinking subject into the objective world of reality by essentially forgetting that the two were divided in the first place. The essay’s movement from the morose and analytical to the poetic and optimistic enacts this change of perspective, and Emerson concludes what was initially an essay about the smallness of human life with a hopeful call to transcendence.
