More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.

What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm.

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.