Among the cascade of extended and deep vocabulary, within both Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson and The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, that’ll have you frantically Google searching every third word to actually be able to completely understand what you’re reading, you’ll find a meaning. This meaning is quite apparent as between all the brilliant words lies a valid point, whether that be Emerson telling us to become one with the nature he so adores obsessively or Du Bois’s call for a rally to change amongst his fellow “problems”. This is the easy way out. The way to be able to raise your hand and answer the question we already had the answer to. You have to look deeper to find the needle within the literary haystack thrown at you by two prolific writers.
It began with Emerson whose fascination with transcendentalism in Nature almost distracts you entirely away from the reading itself and makes you ask yourself the question, “How high was this man while writing this?”. Emerson states in his introduction that, “…all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.”, which is completely correct as philosophers believe that nature is everything that exists externally away from one’s self. Emerson believes that we appreciate nature in our youth because our lack of understanding as children leads us to being both vexed and fascinated about simple things such as stars. We lose this fascination after maturing and understanding what we’re witnessing unless the occurrence is rare as stated when Emerson writes, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!” Even Plato, millennia ago, recognized the curiosity of children that allows them to have such a deep interest in things they don’t understand like children’s stories such as when he said “Don’t you realize that we start by telling children stories which are, by and large, untrue, though they contain elements of the truth?” (Republic, Plato, pg. 49) After opening up to us, Emerson reaches his main point: we’re all blind to true “nature” as he says “few adult persons can see nature.” According to him, barely any of us understand nature as we haven’t ever fully immersed ourselves inside of it to figure out its complexities and the only people that understand nature are poets. It’s because unlike the farmer who seeks to reap the benefits of nature for his worldly gains, the poets look beyond the physical and transcend the boundary that exists between Soul and Nature, later becoming one with it entirely. This understanding leads Emerson to say that the poets actually own the land and no “warranty-deeds” can take that away from them. Finding the vision of Emerson’s true “nature” is all the freedom that a could ever want.
Completely on the other side of the spectrum is Du Bois with The Souls of Black Folk. While Emerson called for people to find an understanding of nature to become one with it, Du Bois would rather his people to focus on themselves, their souls, to achieve the freedom that they so strongly desire. He describes his fellow blacks as “A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems.” Du Bois’s people don’t have TIME to be searching to “nature” for the answer to their issues as their issues are real and in dire need of a solution. Although the similarities between Du Bois and Emerson are few and far between, one major similarity is that they want people to see not with their eyes, but with their souls! Du Bois argues that black people don’t look past the obvious as they believed “The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him.”, but he later argues that just because they lawfully gained freedom doesn’t mean that they’re actually free to live normally such as the introduction of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, voter fraud, etc. This blindness is what Du Bois believes holds black people back and he calls for the unification of his people by saying, “Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race”. Instead of the one by one race to success, a unified approach that allows them to finally see with their souls.
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