Ralph Waldo Emerson ranks high on any list of frequently quoted American sages. He has a special way of rendering human experience palpable.
Among his many essays, I’ve especially liked “Compensation,” which I first read as a young graduate student in an American Lit class.
Undoubtedly a residue of his exploration of Eastern thought, this essay has journeyed a lifetime with me in its karma undertones, buoying me up in its harbinger of moral recompense for life’s myriad inequities.
But on occasion, Emerson fumbled, as when he wrote that “money represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses” (“Nominalist and Realist,” Essays: Second Series, 1844).
Critics were quick to pounce, Marxists in particular seeing it as capitulating to capitalism. Emerson probably meant that the pecuniary is an integral component of the natural order.
Still, it seems a passage one wants to expunge like disturbing phlegm.
I like Saul Bellow’s correction: “Uch! How they love money, thought Wilhelm. They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money! It was getting so that people were feeble-minded about everything except money. While if you didn’t have it you were a dummy, a dummy! You had to excuse yourself from the face of the earth!” (“Seize the Day”).
But let me also share psychologist and poet Pamela Joyce Shapiro’s response to Emerson’s remark. Her poem speaks for me and perhaps for you:
If money is the prose of life
as beautiful as roses,
poetry it seems must be
the soil and sun of infinity,
without which surely nothing grows.
I see the pleasures each might bring,
when flourishing in abundant spring.
Though stocks and petals tend to fall
in drought or storm or just because,
poetry survives it all.
What losses can define what loss is?
Waning wealth or stolen roses?
Forget the till and till the mind,
plant poetry and praise the sky.
rj
Brimmings: up from the well 