I feel a cabinet in my mind unlocked by each of these new interests

How graceful & lively a spectacle is a squirrel on a bough cracking a nut! how sylvan beautiful a stag bounding through Plymouth Woods! how like a smile of the earth is the first violet we meet in spring! Well, It was meant that I should see these & partake this agreeable emotion. Was it not? And was it not further designed that I should thereby be prompted to ask the relation of these natures to my own, & so the great word Comparative Anatomy has now leaped out of the womb of the Unconscious. I feel a cabinet in my mind unlocked by each of these new interests. Wherever I go, the related objects crowd on my Sense & I explore backward & wonder how the same things looked to me before my attention had been aroused.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:427

Posted in: Journals on June 1, 2012 | 1 Comment »
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One Comment
  1. On March 10, 2013 at 6:16 am Judith Dopak Said:

    You will never be bored if you maintain that sense of wonder. There are so many good things, so many interesting things, so many rich things – I am never bored.

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