Emerson, Session 1: Ordinary Moments: Lessons from The Over-Soul
Emerson, like Aurelius, was a practical philosopher questioning the internal barriers to a life well lived.
Mahler’s ninety-minute Second Symphony is one of the most spectacular in the classical music canon, written for a large orchestra, vocal soloists, and chorus. The final twenty-minute movement is especially ethereal, and listening to it stills the mind. About 10 years ago, my wife and I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform this music.
As the final notes rang out and the conductor’s baton dropped, the audience rose to their feet with thunderous applause echoing in Boston’s venerable Symphony Hall, which opened in 1900. The conductor then began to acknowledge individual musicians in the orchestra.
As the piccolo player stood, from behind me, ringing out over the tumult, a man felt the need to call out to his companion, “The best piccolo I ever heard was at the end of the first movement of Shostakovich’s Tenth.”
Did his female companion find him boorish, or was she eager to be jolted back into the “real world” of constant analysis and opinion? Who knows?
The man caused me to pause. I received a lesson: Too often, what Emerson calls our calculating self, robs me of the present moment.
Emerson exposed our reliance on our calculating self—the part of our thinking preoccupied with comparing, evaluating, wanting, and designing our next move. In his The Over-Soul, Emerson described the calculating self and cautioned that it misrepresents who we truly are: “What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself.”
Today, we call that calculating self our ego—the insatiable, internal narrator exerting itself to direct our life and control the lives of others.
When we rely on our independent, separate, calculating self, Emerson warned, trouble begins: “And the blindness of the intellect begins, when it would be something of itself. The weakness of the will begins, when the individual would be something of himself.”
We are like a wave trying to control the ocean. Emerson would ask us to consider how futile and exhausting that effort is.