The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics — John Shaqi
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
There is no danger of repetition, if the thought be deep. Superior
insight will always sufficiently astonish, will always be novel in its
place. The more simple the method, the more wonderful every result. Men
are shut, as if by a wall of adamant, from all that is yet beyond their
sympathy. My neighbor is immersed in planting, building, and the new
road. Beside him, companion only in air and sunshine, walks one who has
no ocular adjustment for these atoms; his thought overleaps them in
starting, and is wholly beyond. The end of vision for a practical eye is
beginning of clairvoyance. To the road-maker, man is a maker of roads;
he cracks his nuts and his jokes unconscious, while the ground opens and
the world heaves with revolutions of thought. Ask him in vain what
Webster means by "Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill"; what Channing
sees in the Dignity of Man, or Edwards in the Sweetness of Divine Love;
ask him in vain what is the "Fate" of Aeschylus, the "Compensation" of
Emerson, Carlyle's "Conflux of Eternities," the "Conjunction" of
Swedenborg, the "Newness" of Fox, the "Morning Red" of Behmen, the
"Renunciation" of Goethe, the "Comforter" of Jesus, the "Justification"
of Paul.
For the dull, this mystery of existence is not even a mystery; they are
shut below the firmament of wonder. When the vulgar come with their
definite gain and good, their circle of immediate ends, we feel the
house contract, the sky descend,--we shrivel, our pores close, the skull
hardens on the brain. The positive, who exactly knows, is a skeleton at
the feast; that exactness is numbness, and chills every expansive guest.
Dogma is a stoppage quite short of the nearest beginning; the liberal
habit a beginning of all that has no end. Sense is a wall very near the
eye, and when that is penetrated all lies open beyond; we see only
paths, seas, and vistas. Wisdom explores and never concludes. The
explanations of centuries are idle tales: my explanations are not so to
be forestalled. We forget the shallow answers to shallow questions, when
now we have deeper genuine questions to ask. The great are happy babes
of Beauty and Good. Truth returns in a fresh suspicion, and all are
welcome who wear on the brows that soft commingled light and shadow of
an advancing, sweet, inexplicable Fate. Our hope is no house, but a
wing; no roof can be endured but the blue one. What method have we yet
to serve the spontaneous or spiritual being? what culture, art, society,
worship, in which his need and power are so much as recognized? There is
indefinable certainty of Nature beyond Nature, man beyond man. Genius
opens all doors, the earth-doors, the sky-doors,--throws down the
horizon and the heaven, to come into open air. All paths lead out to the
sea, where a day's voyage may teach that the receding circle bounds our
sight alone, and not the deep. We look out not on chaos and darkness,
but on order too large for the brain, and light, for which as owls we
have yet no capacious eye.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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