Emerson opens Prudence where Shakespeare left off asking what right he has to write on prudence when his own is mostly negative. The world of the senses is a world of shows with symbolic character; true prudence knows its office is subaltern, surface not center. Three classes appear: those who live to utility and call health and wealth final goods; poets and scientists who live to the beauty of the symbol; and rare wise men who see the thing signified. Common sense, taste, spiritual perception. Spurious prudence worships matter and asks only, Will it bake bread? True prudence admits an internal world and reads primary lessons from sun, moon, climate, hunger, and debt.
Daily life teaches the northerner what the islander's mat cannot: time is slit into painted doors, locks, taxes, and awkward words that eat the hours. Yet the domestic man who loves his kitchen clock finds solaces others never dream of; packing firewood well is as much method as a Peninsular campaign. Emerson demands perpendicularity in the picture of life: figures firm on their feet, hands that grasp, eyes on the right spot, facts not dreams, call a spade a spade. Dr. Johnson would whip the child who looked out of the wrong window; unpunctuality and confusion are holes and dens.
Yet poetry and prudence should be coincident, and now they seem irreconcilably parted. Genius converted to money dines well tomorrow; society is officered by men of parts, not divine men. Tasso and the scholar shame us with bifold life: Caesar at noon, Job by evening, opium-eaters glorious in the shop and pitiful all day, giants slaughtered by pins. Goethe's tragedy is not Richard's murders but two men apparently right who wrong each other because one lives by the world's maxims and the other grasps divine sentiment while refusing the law of the senses.
Emerson answers with higher prudence: accept nature's first mortifications as hints; let the night be night; read wisdom on every coin; husband little strokes of the tool. Iron rusts, beer sours, money depreciates unless kept in motion; in skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed. Frankness is the best tactic; courage faces the feared object; Grim is afraid of you too. Love is not a hood but eye-water widening common ground. Do not wait for better intimacy tomorrow; these old shoes are easy to the feet. All virtues range on prudence's side because manners and actions are one stuff. The essay closes as Circles begins: the eye is the first circle, the horizon the second, and every end is a beginning.
Coming Up in Chapter 10
In 'Circles,' Emerson reveals how every achievement, every boundary, every limit we think is permanent can actually be transcended. He explores the revolutionary idea that nothing in life is fixed, and what this means for how we should live..
