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Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Similes
Explanation and Analysis—Lost Estate:
Early on in the essay, Emerson connects his philosophy on experience to his grief in the wake of his son Waldo's death two years earlier. He uses a simile comparing the loss to the loss of an estate:
In the death of my son [...] I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. [...] If to-morrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar.
Emerson's simile may at first seem somewhat callous. How can he compare his son's death to the loss of real estate? He claims that both the loss of a child and the loss of property leave him "neither better nor worse," simply "inconvenienced" for many years. But the fact that Emerson is left more or less the same despite the loss of his son is exactly the devastating reality that he is trying to reconcile. To call either grief or the loss of real estate an "inconvenience" is a vast understatement. Land speculation (gambling on the value of land) was popular and unregulated in the 19th century. People could get rich or lose everything by investing in real estate. Losing real estate could have disastrous consequences on a person's life, as it still can today. What Emerson means by an "inconvenience" that nonetheless "leave[s] me as it found me" is that his soul itself remains untouched by the material circumstances of his life. He could live in poverty and remain the same person at heart. This argument does not account for more modern sociological and psychological studies that have demonstrated the effects of material circumstances on a person's brain. Nonetheless, Emerson uses the simile to capture the heartbreaking reality that a child can die and life simply goes on.
Emerson is far from the first person to describe the loss of a loved one as something that "leaves no scar." The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus made a similar claim approximately 1700 years earlier. The way Emerson writes about his son's death and Stoic philosophy in the same passage is emblematic of the way he unites the personal and philosophical in this essay. He works through his feelings by working through his ideas about the world, and vice versa.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Eternal Meadow:
Emerson delineates between instant gratification (e.g. drinking water when thirsty or warming up by the fire when cold) and the gratification possible when reading or sitting with one's own thoughts. He uses a simile to describe how reading and contemplation can lead him gradually to "a new and excellent region of life":
By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals, and showed the approaching traveler the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze, and shepherds pipe and dance.
Emerson is not describing a literal journey to a beautiful new place. Instead, he is describing how "a new and excellent region of life" can open within his own mind when he broadens his internal perspective. Emerson is interested throughout the essay in how subjective reality is. He marvels here at how a mental exercise can help his entire frame of reality to grow more expansive without any change in his material circumstances.
At the same time, material circumstances and experiences are still important to Emerson. The place he describes finding within his mind is a pastoral paradise, with beautiful clouds, mountains, meadows, sheep, shepherds, song, and dance. He is borrowing this scene from pastoral literature, which has been popular at various points in history but which surged again during the industrial revolution. The idyllic notion of a place where shepherds can tend to spacious, wild land and have plenty of time for joyous singing and dancing cuts against the way capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization were changing the world. People wrote and read about these kinds of places as a kind of antidote to the way their lives were affected by the increasing sense that each minute had a dollar value. Emerson seems to be insisting that even if a pastoral idyll is physically inaccessible, there is nonetheless real value in taking the time away from more "productive" pursuits to let one's mind go there.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Geologist and Telescope:
Toward the end of the essay, Emerson addresses the sense of jealousy and inferiority many people feel when they encounter a very smart person. He uses a simile to reframe such an encounter as an opportunity, and he then refines the simile into a metaphor:
Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a traveling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction, is a telescope for the objects on which it is pointed.
Emerson suggests that instead of reflecting on our "poverty" of intellect when we come across ideas we could never have come up with ourselves, we should instead invite "the new comer" into our minds. He imagines this person as "a traveling geologist" who can point out the materials we already have with which to build our own ideas. We might have "good slate, or limestone, or anthracite" that we did not realize was there for us to use. Emerson is confident that we all have a high capacity for invention and imagination within ourselves, even though we are limited by our own spheres of existence. Obsessing over our shortcomings in the face of new ideas cuts us off from discovering that capacity. Emerson seems to note that we rarely understand everything that a "great mind" has written, but he argues that even "partial" ideas can act like a telescope allowing us to make our own new observations if we let them.
Related Themes:
