...Hot Spring National Park k Arkjnn, A The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards...depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. RALPH WALDO EMERSON Circles Preface COLLECTING MAY BE CONSIDERED A CULTURAL ADDICTION, BUT IN MY CASE,...

...prova . . . every end is a beginning. . . . life ... is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. — Ralph Waldo Emerson CONTENTS I Home 2004 James Street 3 My Mother's Wedding Day 33 Zio Filippo...

...Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, the life of a man 'is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles'. Inherent in this idea is the possibility of different outcomes. As Emerson explains: The extent to...

..."Circles." "The life of man," Emerson writes there, is an ever-expanding circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards...depends on the force or truth of the individual soul . . . Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series . . . There is no outside, no enclosing...

...limited. As mapped out by "Circles," "The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end" (CollW, 2:180). Here, Emerson's space expands outward from the individual. It is, in a sense, infinitely...

..."Depending on the force" of the individual, one's life is more or less "a selfevolving circle, which . . . rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end" (RWE, 404). More than any American novelist in recent decades, Roth has answered Emerson's audacious...

...is a remarkable line from "Circles": The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards...depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. (CW2, 180) I have italicized the phrase "wheel without wheel" because it invokes Ezekiel 1:15-22, verses...

...common usage. But that is not all, and precisely because of the inertia of habit. Recall "Circles": "It is the inert effort of each thought having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance ... to heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify, and hem in the life" (CW2, 181). In husbanding a...