DIY Horizons

Do we ever stop to consider what the implications are of living within walls for most of our lives? We’re shackled to our home physically and financially, we spend most of our lives inside, chained to the office or a screen. But there is a massive wild world beyond these walls. This must, we assume, affect us somehow. Maybe Emerson is saying that the walls we have built and willingly surround ourselves with are killing our vision and choking our vitality.

With 19^th century philosophy, we often find the body implicated in thought and vice versa. Nietzsche preached about feeding the body the right way to feed the mind. Emerson is talking about our literal and metaphorical line of sight here. And what else is vision but what occurs within a horizon? Standing in the wild, or in the plains, or on a mountain, our vision reaches far—much farther than we can. And this allows us to think farther than our immediate constraints- our minds can go where our feet cannot immediately follow. Our philosophical horizons are directly caused by our perceptual horizons. But we do need limits, of course. We are finite, mortal, and limited bodies—with an infinite soul and an infinite mind, if we can see far enough, we’re never boxed in.

This dynamic is common in Emerson’s writings. He wants us to think deeply about the relationship of our physical limitation and our philosophical reflections. By drawing in the dimension of a horizon, he is striking at both elements of our being. Yes, we are physically constrained—in other words, we have horizons. But “we are never tired” insofar as we can “see far enough.” The horizons that we impose upon ourselves in our houses or in our restaurants or workplaces are far more limited than what is naturally capable of the human eye. Could it be, then, that our constant occupation in such places constrains our imagination? It is telling that the most limited horizons are the ones that are directly imposed by us in the form of construction. Another way of reading Emerson’s statement here is that if our horizons are built by us, they are limited by us. But if our horizons far exceed our immediate capacities, our imagination can stretch its legs and wings and can go much farther than we might expect.