BRUCE writes:

That is a wonderful essay from Jim Kalb on Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This was beautifully observed by Kalb:

 [Emerson] could not, however, escape the contrast between inspiration and the everyday that dominated his own experience. “The astonishment of life, is, the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice of life.”[32] His response to the difficulty was to demand inconceivably high standards that he himself could not begin to meet. He envisioned what he called “poetry” or “scholarship,” the realization of the ideal in daily life, as a task for all, and the poet or scholar as a combination of Christ and Uebermensch. No one and nothing was good enough to meet such demands. Milton and Homer fell short; “all literature is yet to be written.”[33] The absolute unattainability of his standards could not refute them for him because he could not do without them. Only unimaginable genius and heroism could transform, as he required, things actually present in a man’s life into a substitute for the transcendent.

This chimes with my own attempt, over several years of concentration, to get to the bottom of Emerson and apply him in my own life. I hit exactly this paradox: that I must become the greatest ‘poet’ – yet this was impossible.

At a much lower level of discussion I came across the same thing recently in a book by Walker Percy called Lost in the Cosmos – he termed it the re-entry problem of creative artists – coming back from the world of art (or indeed of high science) into the mundane. He sees this insoluble problem as having driven the drug and alchohol use of the romantics and bohemians; but comments that a few great scientists (like Einstein) solved it: they lived almost wholly inside science.

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