"BUT I SHALL LIVE"-- EMERSON EXCERPT

“Like Ahab standing on the deck in the storm, Emerson takes on the universe: 'Who is he that shall control me? Why may not I act and speak and write and think with entire freedom? What am I to the universe, or, the universe, what is it to me? Who hath forged the chains of wrong and of right, of Opinion and of Custom? And must I wear them?' Accompanying his sense of detachment was a remarkable surge of power, a wonderful feeling of strength and liberation. 'I am solitary in the vast society of beings,' he wrote. 'I see the world, human, brute, and inanimate nature,--I am in the midst of them, but not of them; I hear the song of the storm... I see cities and nations and witness passions... but I partake it not … I disclaim them all.' “The outburst is not so much isolation as defiance, a redefining of what is center, and what is periphery. It reminds one of Thoreau's hawk, which was not lonely but made everything lonely beneath it. It is a feeling of absolute and unquestioned self-validation, an extraordinary self-assertion, a wild romantic cogito that answers Hume not by logic but by felt experience. No matter what else existed, Emerson knew he existed: 'I say to the universe, Mighty One! Thou art not my mother. Return to chaos if thou wilt. I shall still exist. I live. If I owe my being, it is to a destiny greater than thine. Star by star, world by world, system by system shall be crushed,--but I shall live!” EMERSON: THE MIND ON FIRE, A BIOGRAPHY, by Robert D. Richardson, Jr., (U. of California Press, Berkeley: 1995) P. 51