Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

by Evan Puschak

It’s amazing how different a class becomes when you’re not spending all your time scrawling notes, trying to sort out what will or won’t be relevant to some future exam. I recommend it. Take nothing to class but yourself. Listen, ask questions, absorb, have fun.

Discovering a love of learning felt like a rebirth. That nagging sense of pointlessness yielded to a promise of substance in every direction.

The world lit up with questions, and questions generated questions. It’s an exhilarating and terrifying experience to walk the road of your ignorance. Learning, you learn, is not really a process of expanding your mind, but of watching it shrink against all there is to know.

The danger of received wisdom is a fundamental theme of Emerson’s early work. In “The American Scholar,” he explains how ancient insights get corrupted over time, how “the love of the hero corrupts into the worship of his statue.”

The purpose of books, he says, is to inspire our own ideas, not to demand fealty to theirs.

It affirmed the essential beauty of all things, a harmony between humanity and nature. You don’t need faith to feel a oneness with the universe. Emerson, it seemed to me, emphasized the vital things about spirituality, while discarding all its outworn trappings.

Intuition often fails us, especially when coupled with ignorance, or when we take our experience to be representative of all experience. While I do believe that in many cases, the deeper we descend into our own minds, the more universal it gets, I also know that is not true in many cases.

There are ways Emerson’s exaltation of the self goes too far, but it’s also an essential message, made all the more essential for the beauty of its articulation.

In Emerson, I saw someone unafraid of naked sincerity, willing to brave the severe light of judgment to express himself with the fire he had within.

There’s obviously a place for philosophical systems, but what makes them rigorous also makes them rigid. A flaw threatens the whole structure.

I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.

Experience should teach us something. Wisdom should be the compensation for failure and loss: “To know a little, would be worth the expense of this world.”

Any attempt to explain the texture of human experience is certain to be flawed, so Emerson creates that texture instead.

Literature overflows with magicians of articulation, from Homer to Shakespeare to Toni Morrison. Each has their own tricks, their own subject matter, but all have the same goal: to say something true, to find “a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”

Ironically, this goalless self-schooling proved far more useful than the system that prioritized use above all.

“The man is only half himself,” he writes in “The Poet,” “the other half is his expression.” More than a decade ago, Emerson helped me with the first part. The second is his work in progress.

Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place IRL again.

The modern world is built to obliterate restraint, and technology enthusiastically leads the charge.

In 2005, British Petroleum popularized the term “carbon footprint” to divert the public’s attention away from BP’s role in climate change and toward individual responsibility.

It testifies to the reality of the problem. Companies don’t voluntarily admit to the damage they cause.

Even as I followed the thread of Cats commentary—checking tweets, reading headlines, cross-referencing videos, seeking a consensus—it felt like viewing, not doing, like floating downstream.