By Frederick B. MacNeil

Much of my life I’ve spent wandering through the bustle of local and foreign streets, the alleyways and offramp drone blurring together into a cacophony of blistering light and noise. I would wander, weave, and bumble aimlessly through the thrall of society as if a lost gull circling for a nesting place on some pebble-ridden beachfront, only to be stopped by the marks and boundaries of real estate developers and McMansions. Disillusionment with industrialized society is not an issue unique to me, as many young thinkers, writers, and self-diagnosed philosophers have struggled with this same dulled sense of belonging in the post-industrial world. But, in my experience, no such literary piece better describes this feeling, or lack of feeling, than “Good-bye” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

 

“GOOD-BYE, proud world! I’m going home:

Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.

Long through thy weary crowds I roam;

A river-ark on the ocean brine,

Long I’ve been tossed like the driven foam;

But now, proud world! I’m going home.”

 

When Emerson speaks to the reader, asserting at once that there, in fact, is a home for men like him, a home far away from the bustle of commodified life, I find myself emblazoned with longing. It is as if he is reaching across time and space to pluck at my own heartstrings, beckoning his brothers and sisters in disillusionment to follow his steps to a home they have long forgotten. Waldo sets himself apart from the “proud” world, a world he has failed to proselytize himself to, a world which is as much his enemy as he is it.

 

“ Good-bye to Flattery’s fawning face;

To Grandeur with his wise grimace;

To upstart Wealth’s averted eye;

To supple Office, low and high;

To crowded halls, to court and street;

To frozen hearts and hasting feet;

To those who go, and those who come;

Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home.”

 

Though born much before me and my contemporary issues, Emerson displays a unique understanding of the emotional impact of societal pressure, the pressure to be valuable in some credible and material sense. Emerson doesn’t shy away from rejecting the concept of wealth, status, and showmanship, even if self-made; rather, he embraces a value based on a slow, warm appreciation for the world around him. Rather than just rushing through life with the stone-cold efficiency of a well-oiled machine. Emerson verbalizes his view of the modern world as one defined by falsities, flattery, and frigidness. A world in which people “come and go,” always rushing from one goal to another, never stopping or slowing to simply experience the gift of consciousness as a blessing in itself. But, Emerson does not allow his disillusionment with this reality to rob him of the excitement and gaiety of returning to a more divine way of life; rather, exclaiming and wishing a hearted goodbye to this reality without malice or ill intent.

 

“I am going to my own hearth-stone,

Bosomed in yon green hills alone,–

A secret nook in a pleasant land,

Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;

Where arches green, the livelong day,

Echo the blackbird’s roundelay,”

And vulgar feet have never trod

A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

 

Much of my own childhood was spent reading stories of fairies and ancient groves, daydreaming, and naively believing that one day I would be swept away by Peter Pan or Titania, gifted to some far-off magical world of joy and adventure. But as time passed, as time does, this world starkly departed from my heart and dreams as the reality of adult life became apparent. However, Emerson seems to have never lost faith in this magical world, believing it is as material as the dull march of the modern world he mentioned previously. I feel that Emerson does not mean this literally, but rather he is recounting this same dream, returning to a more pure form of living, one connected with nature and the simplicity of life, to a place in his own mind “that is sacred to thought and God”.

 

“O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,

I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;

And when I am stretched beneath the pines,

Where the evening star so holy shines,

I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,

At the sophist schools and the learned clan;

For what are they all, in their high conceit,

When man in the bush with God may meet?”

 

This final stanza really stands out to me, as the typical poetic romanticism lords over the value of sophic thought and the classical world as the ultimate form of man; Emerson rather rejects this. Valuing, above all else, one’s connection with nature. The simplest of connections, and one that is free from the barrier to entry of intellectualism or status. For him, the closest place to God is his natural kingdom—a kingdom ruled by parapets of moss, towers of wood, and ramparts of stone. When one spends nights lying down on the soft grass, listening to the sounds of the forest and watching the twinkling of the stars above, they, at least for a moment, are able to escape from the bustle of industrialized life that so prevalently leads to disillusionment.

“Good-bye” offers you a solution to man’s disillusionment, a solution which, at its very least, works nicely for me.