<Love> by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2/10

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we wish to know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature's most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls about the school-house door;--but today he comes running into the entry, and meets one fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct.

 

bent : 소질, 취향 

usurp : (왕좌·권좌 등을) 빼앗다, 찬탈하다

sped : speed의 과거, 과거분사

intercourse : (사람들·국가들 등 사이의) 교류, 교제, 소통 

complacency : 현 상태에 만족함, 안주 

coarse : 거친 (↔smooth, soft) 

rustic : 투박한

disposing : 처리, 처분

satchel : (아이들이 어깨에 메는) 책가방 

precinct : 구역

 

 

Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him; and these two little neighbours, that were so close just now, have learned to respect each other's personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls who go into the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the village they are on a perfect equality, which love delights in, and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations, what with their fun and their earnest, about Edgar, and Jonas, and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school would begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men.

 

throng : 인파, 군중

skein : (실·털실의) 타래 

coquetry : 교태

affectionate : 다정한, 애정 어린 (= loving)

confiding : 신뢰를 나타내는, 은밀한 

coo : 속삭이다, 도란거리다

deplore : (특히 공개적으로) 개탄하다

 

 

I have been told, that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. For, though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison, and putting us quite beside ourselves, we can seldom see after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances.

 

reverence : 숭배

disparaging : 얕보는, 험담하는, 비난하는 

recount : 이야기하다, 말하다

treasonable : 반역의, 대역의, 배신의

derogatory : 경멸하는, 비판적인 (= insulting) 

rapture : 환희, 황홀

outlast : ~보다 더 오래 가다, 계속하다

brow : (언덕) 꼭대기, 등성이 

revise : 변경하다, 수정하다

contrive : 용케(어떻게든) ~하다 

 

 

In looking backward, they may find that several things which were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them. But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all things new; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows, and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitary, and none too silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts, than any old friends, though best and purest, can give him; for the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other images written in water, but, as Plutarch said, "enamelled in fire," and make the study of midnight.

 

groping : 손으로 더듬는, 암중모색하는 

embalm : 방부 처리를 하다

enchantment : 황홀감

amber : (보석류) 호박

studious : 공부를 열심히 하는, 학구적인 (= scholarly) 

solitary : 혼자 하는

enamelled : 에나멜을 씌운

 

 

 

 

 

※ 출처 : Essays, First Series (1841) 중 5장 LOVE by Ralph Waldo Emerson ※ 랄프 왈도 에머슨 (Ralph Waldo Emerson) : 미국 사상가 겸 시인. 자연과의 접촉에서 고독과 희열을 발견하고 자연의 효용으로서 실리(實利)·미(美)·언어(言語)·훈련(訓練)의 4종을 제시했다. 정신을 물질보다도 중시하고 직관에 의하여 진리를 알고, 자아의 소리와 진리를 깨달으며, 논리적인 모순을 관대히 보는 신비적 이상주의였다. 주요 저서에는《자연론》,《대표적 위인론》등이 있다.