In “Experience,” Emerson compares the individual’s experience of life to a “string of beads,” which he says act like “many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue.” Instead of reality being something stable—like, for example, the space-time of physics—human beings can only ever experience reality through the filter of their own subjective viewpoint. Experience is therefore filtered through a person’s individual, subjective moods. These moods change according to the natural human tendency to change: the individual’s experience of life changes as he or she goes through life, moving from one mood to another as if going from bead to bead on the string. Motion and variation is therefore an important connotation of the “string of beads.” But just as it implies change, so does it imply some basic stability and organization in the form of the string. Emerson suggests that the “iron wire” on which the beads are strung is temperament, a slightly mysterious but fundamentally important disposition or attitude that each person receives at birth. (Renaissance writers, like Montaigne, referred to temperament as complexion.) The image of the “string of beads,” and particularly the “iron wire,” recalls Emerson’s famous metaphor of the “iron string” in his essay on “Self-Reliance,” which is a figure for the individual character at the core of each individual.
The String of Beads Quotes in Experience
Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus....We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
Power keeps quite another road than the turnpikes of choice and will, namely, the subterranean and invisible tunnels and channels and life. It is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doctors, and considerate people: there are no dupes like these. Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. […] All good conversation, manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes the moment great Nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties.
It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions,—subjects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of them. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast.
The String of Beads Symbol Timeline in Experience
