Having moved slow and steady through two readings of Nature, with nightly accompaniments of Librivox audio readings that would lull me away to sleep with visions of all the vast universal wonderments dancing in my head, it is now time to sift through my sporadic notes and swirling thoughts to try to make use of what I have come across, as I look to somehow apply to my life all that which Emerson teaches with his complexly simple essays as found in Nature.
However, as I consider such intellectual derring-do, I find myself drawn back to one of the first opportunities for learning the work provides me; one found in a most bold and faith-requiring passage from the introduction:
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy.
What a wonder of a statement – Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable.
What a brave, perhaps reckless even, proclamation – We must trust the perfection of creation…
Must we?
Do you believe that?
Undoubtedly – without any doubt?
Do I believe that?
As wonderful and bold as this passage may be, alas can it possibly be true?
Can it be possible that the order of things can satisfy completely my curiosity? Can this perfection answer all my questions, from those of the most simple and mundane to those of the most metaphysically profound?
And even if it can be possible, will it?
Only time will tell, I suppose.
Until then, for answers to all my seemingly unanswerable questions, I rely upon the only thing the perfection of creation presently allows me…
And that is my less than perfect Faith.