In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay From Nature, what makes it so embracing is the harmony that exists between the natural world and human beings. Emerson describes true solitude as going out into nature and leaving behind all activities as well as society. When a man gazes at the stars, he becomes aware of his own separateness from the material world.
The stars were made to allow him to perceive the “perpetual presence of the sublime.” Unlike children, most adults have lost the ability to see the world in this way. In order to experience it in the presence of nature, we need to approach it with a balance between our inner and our outer senses. To sum up Emerson’s essay he says that we should act more like children to see the real beauty of nature and not be distracted by the suffocating life we live in.
I feel like in this day and age we do take nature for granted, we do spend most of our time indoors and isolate ourselves from nature and another. My mom actually made me go outside for periods of time. So I do agree with him when he talks about us kids not getting the same childhood or being able to play in dirt and get messy, but at the same time after the stranger danger epidemic came around we became more safe and less about the fairies in our garden.
Emerson points out the capacity of natural beauty to stimulate the human intellect, which uses nature to grasp the divine order of the universe. I feel like in this day and age we do take nature for granted, we do spend most of our time indoors and isolate ourselves from nature and another. The amount of people going out and doing things is going down by a bunch, because we don’t see why we need to go out. We also don’t get the opportunity from society because we are surrounded by buildings and new things. If we really wanted to go see nature we would have to drive hours away to be completely immersed in it.
Another one of his main points is that man has to learn how to express himself. That being yourself will help solve problems in our lives.