I’ve been soul searching for the last fortnight, but to be honest, I’ve been soul searching since I was born.
So today, I went to a place that harboured many souls. Those buildings were built elsewhere, yet over the last few decades, they were deconstructed, then reconstructed at a site.
When you walk through this sculpted village, castle, and gardens, the melded histories take on a new character. It becomes its own unit. History and knowledge pervades.
To know what our ancestors have achieved, we can find inspiration. Then with our own insights and experience, we can regurgitate those ancient ideas and improve by making anew.
At one point, I sat and read some passages by Emerson. Reading his essay ‘The Transcendentalist’, I felt enlightened and improved.
There is the perfect line one should draw throughout their lives in which all decisions and choices made are perfect – is there not? Impossible to follow, perhaps, yet it exists and can be strived for.
Such a cord can transgress its current circumstances and lead to higher modes of existence.
It feels as though Emerson merely used the essay to criticise the notion of the transcendentalist. It reads like some sophisticated caricature.
So is it not up to the reader to complete Emerson’s line of thought?
Perhaps ideas were not advanced enough at the time to consider complete synthesis of the reclusive, sensible transcendental aesthete with their societies, with the systems and mechanisms they must exist within.
For we eat, drink, are borne of people, thus see relativity in all that moves and unmoved in our world.
This also gives us responsibility. To use our imaginations and our communication to envisage better worlds not just for us, but the whole world we are connected to.
A responsibility to envisage and follow – to the best of our ability and beyond – a golden tuft of unison between us and the world
Hoffwn I astudio Cymraeg
Taumu 