Fragments from Emerson\u2019s prose essay \u201cCircles\u201d (1841):<\/p>\n
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth
\nthat around every circle another
\ncan be drawn. There is no end in nature,
\nbut every end is a beginning.
\nThere is always another dawn risen
\non mid-noon, and under every deep
\na lower deep opens. The Greek sculpture
\nis all melted away. The Greek letters
\nlast a little longer, but are already
\npassing under the same sentence, tumbling
\ninto the inevitable pit which the
\ncreation of new thought opens for all
\nthat is old. The new continents are built
\nout of the ruins of an old planet.<\/p>\n
The man finishes his story, – how good!
\nhow final! how it puts a new face on
\nall things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the other side
\nrises also a man and draws a circle
\naround the circle we had just pronounced
\nthe outline of the sphere. Then already is
\nour first speaker not man, but only first
\nspeaker. His redress is forthwith to draw
\na circle outside of his antagonist.<\/p>\n
In common hours, society sits
\ncold and statuesque. Then cometh the god
\nand converts the statues into fiery men,
\nand by a flash of his eye burns up the veil
\nwhich shrouded all things, and the meaning of
\nthe very furniture, of cup and saucer,
\nor chair and clock and tester, is manifest.<\/p>\n
The natural world may be conceived of
\nas a system of concentric circles,
\nand we now and then detect in nature
\nslight dislocations which apprize us that
\nthis surface on which we stand is not fixed,
\nbut sliding.<\/p>\n
I am gladdened by beholding that no
\nevil is pure, nor hell itself without
\nits extreme satisfactions. But let me
\nremind the reader that I am only
\nan experimenter. Do not set the least
\nvalue on what I do, or the least discredit
\non what I do not, as if I pretended
\nto settle any thing as true or false.
\nI unsettle all things, an endless seeker
\nwith no Past at my back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fragments from Emerson\u2019s prose essay \u201cCircles\u201d (1841): Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn. There is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning. There is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. The Greek sculpture is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-verse-and-worse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7808"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7858,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7808\/revisions\/7858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}