I take this evanesence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch the hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.Notice his use of “unhandsome,” which rings a certain bell of Zuhandenheit (un-hand-some)...
Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Then the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom, shows that the world is all outside; it has no inside.Emerson talks ontic givenness and how there is a rift between this and the deep structure of things. It's about how we co-exist in lacking a world (in the language of The Ecological Thought). That humans aren't that different from nonhumans, not because we are embedded in a lifeworld, but because we aren't.
There is a certain magic about [a man’s] properest action, with stupefies your powers of observation, so that though it is done before you, you wist not of it. The art of life has a pudency, and will not be exposed.Causality floats in front of objects like a magical display. (I”m ignoring that Emerson is only talking about “men” here.)
Life has no memory.The fact of retroactive positing means that the significance of an event is always in the future, to-come. This is what gives beings the feeling of temporal flow.
HT Cary Wolfe for putting me onto this essay.
