The astonishing thing is that even though we will never truly know what it is like to be another creature or another person or any configuration of chemistry and chance other than ourselves, we are made of the same matter as the granite that will mark our graves and share 98% of our DNA with the moss that will cover them. We share with them and with each other more than atoms — we share the wild luck of having drawn from the cosmic lottery this world of birdsong and waterfalls and lichen and spring, none of which had to exist, all of which could have been and can always be otherwise.
To know this, to place the firm hand of the mind on this banister of reality, is to steady yourself amid the daily shocks of living. To feel it is something else entirely — it is to press this perishable hand against the beating heart of the universe that made it and tremble with its pulse in your veins.
That is what Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) offers in an exquisite passage from his journals, penned after visiting Paris’s famous botanical garden just as its new mineralogy gallery was being built to house six hundred thousand stones, gems, and fossils.
A century after William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand, before William Henry Hudson saw “the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself” in a nautilus, before Charles Darwin invited us to see nature as a living library of “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” the thirty-year-old Emerson writes:
The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms — the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes, the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer, an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me, cayman, carp, eagle and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies.
To feel this universal kinship bestows upon us a kind of moral obligation to live our own lives as fully and rightly as possible — something Emerson would come to articulate nearly a decade later in his essay “Compensation”:
The universe is represented in everyone of its particles. Everything in nature contains all the powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff… Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity, — all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every act… The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point… Thus is the universe alive.
Couple with quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger on how to know the universe in you, then revisit Emerson on transcendence, authenticity, how to trust yourself.
