The Reflective Eclectic

Looking for My Father in Emerson’s Essays

The Author’s Father, Ray Wilson, South Pacific, 1944

I recently opened for the first time, a volume of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson from the collection of old books in my library that I have never read. I was surprised to find that my father, whom I must’ve gotten the book from, noted on the title page that he had read it three times in his adolescence. I started to study the book, not to discover what…