...summarizing prose leaves out is everything that makes the experience of reading the story exciting. "Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the...transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of a gulf, in the darting to an aim," writes Emerson in "Self-Reliance." I should say the power of this...

...toward unity. He asserts that "[p]ower ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the movement of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This is one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes" (146; Emerson's emphasis). In all aspects of human...

..."Life only avails," this Emerson famously states in "Self-Reliance," "not the having lived. Power . . . resides in the moment of transition from a past to...state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting of an aim" (EL 271). Mark Edmundson is mostly correct when he notes that "[t]he textual equivalent...

...soul." Emerson said much the same thing in "Self-Reliance," only he took aim at the dogmatic core: "This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to shame, confounds the saint...

...Vergangenheit erreicht worden sei, werde durch die Innovationen des menschlichen Geistes entwertet: „This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for, that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputations to shame, confounds the saint...

...lays down our road, however. "Power ceases in the instant of repose," we are told in "Self- Reliance"; "it resides in the moment of transition from a past...the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim" (CW2, 40). Without the coursing power of our genius, growth is hard to come by. But so too in reverse;...

...artist's "power," as Emerson, a contemporary of Simon Suggs and the original confidence man, phrases it, "ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the...moment of transition from a past to a new state." He is, therefore, a permanent "tramp and vagrant," his condition a suggestive echo of James's description...

...no individual (except perhaps Jesus) has ever remained in unity with the One, power is ephemeral and "resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state" (p. 64). Power destroys stasis, and this is why Emerson, to the dismay of modern critics, lauds war...