For a human to have lost almost everything and still trudge on life is simply super-human. This is no cinematic style line or an eremitical segue into philosophy to begin our first weekly post, but something that truly defines the mark of a human - that you are more!
In July 1833, a man who had lost everything - his wife to the grave, his brothers to disease, his vocation to a crisis of conscience and his health to the damp Boston air, stood inside the Jardin de Plantes in Paris. To the casual tourist, it was a museum of dead things. To him, it was a revelation.
He walked through the Cabinet d’Anatomie, surrounded by the skeletal architecture of the world. There, preserved in glass and formaldehyde was the cold evidence of the biological machine. But as he moved past the jars, something shifted. He wasn’t looking at a collection of specimens; he was looking into a mirror.
He witnessed the ‘occult relation’ between the grain of the wood, the curve of the shell and the pulse of his own wrist. This man was not merely a man of ‘visions’. He was more.
The Morbid Clarity
A year prior, in the biting cold of March 1832, he walked to his wife’s tomb and opened her coffin. He did not do this out of madness or a thirst for the macabre. He did it because he had a clinical obsession with what was real. He refused to let his mind settle for the ghostly memory of a lost love. He forced himself to stare at the physical reality of decay.
This is truly a cornerstone to the restless modern human, hiding behind the sticky blue light of a screen, this act is a terrifying reminder: you cannot find meaning if you are too afraid to look at the bone.
The Merit of the Exile
A few years later, this man walked into Harvard, the ultimate institution of his day and delivered a speech that called their traditions “corpse cold”. He did not seek consensus. He spoke with the authority of a man who had already fired his ‘masters’. Harvard responded by banning him for thirty years. He did not apologize. He went home to Concord and built his own empire of thought outside the walls o the establishment. He proved that merit is its own platform. If the gilded halls won’’t have you, you build your own hall in the woods.
One can almost imagine how many others, in their own varying human experience tread the world, with their own struggles, with their own battles, some lucky to have their stories told while most become a dream.
This was the birth of the ‘Over-soul’ for the world, truly. It was not a feeling or a soft religious sentiment for him. It was rugged, technical realization of sovereignty. He understood that if the same intelligence that moves the stars also moves the blood in a man’s veins, then that man is never truly a victim of his circumstances.
This one is for Ralph Waldo Emerson because he is the architect of our name.
He reminds us that the Machine of the modern world only wins when we forget that our strength is rooted in the same Great Thought that built it.
The Oversoul Inc. (theoversoulinc.com and theoversoulinc.press) is an independent literary press and narrative studio based in India. We are not affiliated, associated, or in any way officially connected with any other company or website operating under the Oversoul name.