On Leaving

In his essay "Compensation," Emerson makes a surprising claim: "Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house."Branka Arsi#263 unpacks Emerson's repeated assertion that our reality and our minds are in constant flux. Arsi#263's readings of a broad range of Emerson's writingsthe Early Lectures, Journals and Notebooks, the Later Lecturesare guided by a central question: what does it really mean to maintain that everything fluctuates, is relational, and so changes its identity?Reading Emerson through this lens, Arsi#263 asks: How is the leaving of one's own consciousness actually to be performed? What kind of relationship is predicated on the necessity of leaving? What does it mean for our system of values, our ethics and our political allegiances, and even our personal identities to be on the move? The bold new understanding of Emerson that results redefines inherited concepts of the Emersonian individual as all-composed, willful, appropriative, and self-reliant. In its place, Arsi#263 reveals an Emersonian individual whose ideal being is founded in mutability.