Topic

Emotions

The philosophical center of this collection is Plato's description of old age as a great sense of calm and freedom — the passions relax their hold and you may have escaped, not a master, but many masters. Wilde's counter is characteristically sharp: the emotions of people you've ceased to love are always ridiculous, a remark that cuts the person making it as much as its ostensible target. Byron's moment of ceasing to be a boy, one of the heaviest feelings in his life, gives the collection its adolescent anchor: the transition from unexamined feeling to self-consciousness is irreversible. Lincoln's moral thermometer — good action, good feeling; bad action, bad feeling — is the simplest account of emotion and ethics ever recorded. Emerson on the gift of oneself, and Saint Bernard on providing a resting place for those who love us, carry the collection toward its most generous register. What the collection as a whole resists is the reduction of emotion to obstacle or excess. Emotions are not problems to be managed. They are, for most of the writers here, the medium in which life actually takes place.