Through this digging, I had discovered a surprising fact: When the term “empathy” was first introduced by English-speaking psychologists in 1908 as a translation of the German Einfühlung (literally, “in-feeling”), it meant something very different than the “empathy” we understand today. Rather than a means for understanding another person’s experience, empathy’s original meaning entailed the aesthetic ability to animate forms with one’s own feelings and movements. One “felt into” forms of art, sculpture, and the natural world. While gazing at a mountain in the distance, for instance, one unconsciously transferred the stretch of one’s neck muscles or an imagined upward striving to the mountain itself, thereby feeling its majestic height. Aesthetic empathy made it possible to weave our minds in and through the natural world.

The English term “empathy” had not yet been invented in Emerson’s time, and he employed the older term “sympathy” to connote a way to commune with matter. On the night of May 11, 1838, the sublime light of the moon called him outside, where he transformed into “a moist, cold element”:

Frogs pipe; waters far off tinkle; dry leaves hiss; grass bends and rustles, and I have died out of the human world and come to feel a strange cold, aqueous, terraqueous, aerial, ethereal sympathy and existence. (Journals, 128–29).

On another occasion, Emerson moved from “too much sitting, too much talking” to working outside in his garden. He took a hoe in hand to smooth out the ground, with a “little venom” at first, but then, he writes, “I smooth my temper; by extracting the long roots of the piper-grass, I draw out my own splinters; and in a short time I can hear the bobolink’s song and see the blessed deluge of light and colour that rolls around me” (June 12, 1839, Journals, 143).

Could I extract my own splinters while empathizing with a pine tree or the setting sun? Could I, too, learn to make friends with matter?

On one of my daily walks around Fresh Pond, just steps from my home, I set out to empathize with the trees and water. The reservoir stands on one side of a small highway in Cambridge, Massachusetts, faced by a line of stacked, three-family houses. It is ringed by a chain-link fence, put there to protect the water, which is processed for drinking. If the pond bears the marks of city life, I take heart in Emerson’s counsel that it is not necessary to travel to the Alleghenies, but it is enough to look, locally, at the “first hillock,” for “beauty breaks in everywhere” (“Nature,” 315).

Some days I walk with a friend, but more often I walk alone. Emerson suggests that walking alone is not a solitary task, as “we receive glances from the heavenly bodies” (“Nature,” 312). When I begin walking, my thoughts revolve rapidly in an inner din. I eye the rust-colored ground and the granite pebbles but do not register the shapes of the dark trees aligning the path. I make a deliberate effort to raise my head and see the white slashes of light reflected on the water. Now I can hear the susurration of the breezes and feel the crumple of gravel and leaves underfoot. It is early autumn and gold glitter shines on the trees arrayed against the crisp blue sky.

By the time I traverse the two-mile sweep of the pond, it is nearly dusk. I round the final bend and catch the sun hovering for an extended moment over the spangled water. I feel an inner pull toward the orange sky. My mind spreads outward as the light, soft on the water, travels inward. “The point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth,” wrote Emerson, and I see what he means (“Nature,” 314). The sun’s magnificent rays draw me beyond my thoughts. Below the chatter, a throughway yawns to the self’s sublime core. I feel myself into the trees and hear the quiet wisdom uttered by a leaning pine, the cheerful sounds spoken by the clementine maple leaves. Emerson reminds me: “Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form” (“Nature,” 325).

I first read Emerson’s essays when I was a student at Harvard Divinity School in the early 1990s, in a course on religious experience taught by the theologian Richard Niebuhr. Niebuhr was part of an esteemed family—his uncle Reinhold was a famed public theologian who had taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and written Moral Man and Immoral Society. He had also penned the serenity prayer, later made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous. Richard Niebuhr taught with a quiet authority, speaking slowly and deliberately. The gravity of his oratory was leavened by the sartorial flair of his cowboy boots peeking out from under his suit pants, which made us students, gathered in a small proscenium theater, slightly more attentive.

In 1836, Emerson published his first series of essays, Nature, which brought him the beginnings of renown as a lecturer and essayist. Only a few years earlier, he had rejected his vocation as a Unitarian minister and had begun writing and speaking as a transcendentalist. Transcendentalists elevated what Emerson called the “intuition of the inner moral sentiment” to a central place in spiritual life.

In 1838, Emerson famously addressed the graduates of Harvard Divinity School. Rather than celebrating their entry into the Unitarian church, he admonished the institution for missing out on life’s animating principle. He spoke with disdain of one minister, later identified as Barzillai Frost, the assistant minister in Concord, who never touched upon his own personal hurt, chagrin, or joy in his sermons.² A sermon, Emerson explained, should model for listeners how to alchemically transform raw experience into truth. While sitting in his pew, Emerson felt his gaze riveted to the “beautiful meteor of the snow” glimpsed through the church window—a more compelling meditation for him than the minister’s exhortations (Address, 55).

When I began to reread Emerson’s essays, I rummaged through boxes of papers and course materials in my attic and found a stack of spiral notebooks. One thin black-and-white-speckled notebook contained my notes from Niebuhr’s class, illumined with commentaries and doodles. I discovered my crude sketch of Niebuhr’s profile as he looked down while lecturing, with an image of my motorcycle boot resting on my knee. I remember sitting in that class with a fluid attention: my mind wandered as I listened, drew, and took notes.

“It is not instruction, but provocation that I can receive from another soul,” I found inscribed in the notebook. Professor Niebuhr reminded us that Emerson sought an immediate form of religious experience, not an interpretation of codified texts nor a scholarly debate on the nature of biblical miracles. Religious truth struck the heart and was not learned second-hand. So, too, in our class, Niebuhr strove for provocation; he quietly but penetratingly intended to stir us up, to awaken us.

If provocation came from another soul, it also came from things in the world and from nature itself. But this meant seeing nature as active and animate. If it seemed obvious to me that consciousness and materiality were startlingly different, Emerson’s challenge was to imagine them as one thing: “Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties” (“Nature,” 317). For Emerson, the natural world was not dense, inert, or unthinking. Mind pervaded everything and was active “in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool” (Address, 33). Emerson’s monism painted a world in which everything was mutable and could become something else:

Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. (“Nature,” 325).

We empathize with the natural world by sharing in its changing essence. A thought can become a thing; a thing can dissipate into a thought. It is simply impossible to cleave the spiritual from the material.

At the age of 67, Emerson was still writing about this interplay: “What at first scares the Spiritualist in the experiments of Natural Science—as if thought were only finer chyle, fine to aroma—now redounds to the credit of matter, which, it appears, is impregnated with thought and heaven” (February 10, 1871, Journals, 330). Reading him again, I realized that to empathize with nature was not to see ourselves in our familiar shape or recognizable body. Rather, as Emerson put it, we had to see “man crystallized, man vegetative.”

On another walk, this time on a beach a few miles south of Boston, I join a gaggle of family members—cousins, nephews, sister-in-law, and my daughter—for a few days in late summer just before my daughter is to depart for her gap year. I am fretfully counting the few days remaining before she sets out to travel more than 3,000 miles from home to live and work in Sigsig, a small Ecuadoran town.

The water is icy, the beach rocky, the air warm. Family members wander in ever-shifting groups. While treading on the hard sand, I look down for brightly colored shells and catch sight of a heart-shaped rock. And then another. I pick up two, announcing, “Wow, these rocks are shaped like hearts!” My nephew’s friend, training to be a dentist, is walking next to me. He looks over at the rocks in my hand, and says, “Those could be any shape at all, really.”

Even so, I put them in my pocket.

A few months later, a friend invites me to hear a lecture by Agnès Varda, the French New Wave filmmaker, then 89 years old. Varda peers out from under her bowlish haircut, gray at the top, bright red at the ends, and shows clips from her 2000 film The Gleaners and I. In the film, Varda traveled across France to show how gleaners scuttle into the fields after the harvest to find the remnants of wheat, grapes, and apples left to rot. She visits a potato farm where the machinery is primed to select only small potatoes to sell at the markets. The huge, green, and misshapen potatoes are stacked in a truck and dumped in the fields.

The gleaners watch the trucks depart then sneak into the field to collect the oversized potatoes in buckets. Varda joins them, and, glancing over a large pile of potatoes, she spots a potato with two connecting bulges. With delight she exclaims that it is a heart. She collects a dozen or more of these potatoes, totes them home, and places them on her kitchen counter. Later in the film we see the heart-shaped potatoes rotting, but with green tendrils growing out of the crusty lumps.

In the shortening days of late November, I forgo my walks at Fresh Pond to travel the few miles to Walden Pond. The splendid colored leaves of early autumn have given way to darker greens and the variegated browns of spindly fir trunks. I return to Emerson’s journals and discover his entry of October 16, 1837: “A lovely afternoon and I went to Walden Water, and read Goethe on the bank” (Journals, 116). Emerson trekked to Walden Pond nearly every day, sometimes to walk, sometimes to read. A collapse of years or a wrinkle in time might reveal to me a man with a rumpled hat and frockcoat disappearing around the next bend.

At the bookshop at Walden Pond, amid the T-shirts and silver jewelry, I find Robert Richardson’s biography of Emerson. Richardson reveals the peculiar mechanics of Emerson’s method of writing: he laboriously indexed his 263 volumes of journals, and then used these indices to cull material, sometimes verbatim, for his many lectures and essays. Emerson was a voracious reader and listed all the books he read in his journals declaring, “There is creative reading as well as creative writing” (October 29, 1836, Journals, 105). Emerson’s writing, Richardson explains, is not beholden to narrative but to flashes of insight. It operates at the level of the sentence—each connected only obliquely to the next. Emerson’s genre might be called a catalog of epiphanies.

It strikes me that Emerson’s 1838 critique of the minister Frost revealed not only his reason for leaving the church but also his own preferred method of writing, lecturing, and living. He stuffed all raw materials of his experience into a cornucopia from which he drew out revelations. Emerson mined for nuggets of truth in nature, on the page and in his experience. On August 4, 1837, he wrote: “After raffling all day in Plutarch’s morals, or shall I say angling there, for such fish as I might find, I sallied out this fine afternoon through the woods to Walden water” (Journals, 112).

One night, staying up late reading Emerson’s biography, I spot on my wooden shelf Megan Marshall’s biography of Margaret Fuller. Fuller was a foreign correspondent in Rome for the New York Tribune during the 1848 Italian revolution. She was a friend of Emerson and the editor of The Dial, the transcendentalist journal. For years, her biography, for which Marshall won a Pulitzer, has sat on my shelf, waiting. Now it beckons.

I slide the volume off the shelf and open the cover to find a short inscription in my mother’s hand, dated May 6, 2013. She thanks me for my gift of the book and she is now giving it to me. A gift returned as a gift. Her lucid wish and steady letters on the page startle me, as earlier that day, I’d visited a memory-support facility to which I planned to move her in the next few weeks. Her script is now shaky, her mind cloudy and confused. But her message of seven years past reaches me at that moment, guiding me to continue my exploration of transcendentalism.

I remain standing at the shelves, the book open in my hands. My 17-year-old son, immersed in video games, looks up from his well-worn spot on the couch in the adjacent living room. He walks over to me and asks if I am all right. When I show him his grandmother’s note, I feel the generations knit together. Later I read Emerson’s words in “Experience”: “Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium” (249).

Richard Niebuhr told us in class that Emerson’s signature concept of self-reliance was often misunderstood. Self-reliance did not mean championing individual ambition, or mightily forging one’s own way against obstacles. Rather, it entailed a deep listening to oneself. “Trust to that prompting within you,” Emerson wrote on April 3, 1831 (Journals, 48).

Again and again, Emerson turned toward the inner voice that revealed oneself to oneself. When one aligned with one’s infinite soul, all of nature conspired to assist. At the end of his European tour in 1833, after the death of his first wife, Ellen, Emerson boarded a vessel from Liverpool back to New York. En route home he wrote, “The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself.” Only then was it possible “to [live] to the real future by living to the real present” (September 8, 1833, Journals, 79).

One cloudy day, after the season’s first snow, I make my way again to Walden, determined not only to walk but to read Emerson’s “Nature” as I circle the pond. It is quiet; only a few couples meander on the path, and one or two black-wetsuit-clad swimmers move through the chilly water in the weak sun angling through the clouds. I set out with my white paperback in hand, declaiming Emerson’s words as I traverse the shoreline, looking down occasionally to make sure I don’t slip on the receding snow at the water’s edge. I read loudly, with jubilance, and wonder if the trees will respond, or if the landscape will slide open a secret channel as the words pour out like talismans. With my eyes on the text, I am startled out of my recitation when a stray branch brushes across my forehead. I raise my head and laugh. It feels like the touch of a friend.

As Emerson grew older, he never relinquished his belief in the intimate colloquy of mind and matter. He continued to revise his lecture “Natural History of Intellect” up until his death in 1882.³ If Emerson anthropomorphized nature—“From whatever side we look at Nature we seem to be exploring the figure of a disguised man”—he also vegetized the human: “The idea of vegetation is irresistible in considering mental activity. Man seems a higher plant” (“Natural History of Intellect,” 23, 24). To see nature as human was also to see ourselves as plants. At Walden, this is not hard to do, standing on the snowy sand with the trees at my back.

Each time I circuit Walden Pond, I greet the tree that leans like an old man over the water, his splintery branches reaching upward. This simulacrum of Emerson beckons to me as he spans sky and water. And when I see the purple haze of layered clouds moving higher, I feel an inner lightening.

Susan Lanzoni, MTS ’94, received a PhD in the history of the modern mind sciences from Harvard University in 2001. Her book Empathy: A History was published by Yale University Press in 2018. Learn more at her website: susanlanzoni.com.