When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
-Walt Whitman
In addition to people’s tendency to overly obsess with their ambitions that impose severe challenges on discovering the meaning, the complex nature of life renders fruitless the human efforts to define its meaning with one of its small aspects. In 1836, Ralph Emerson and other New England scholars formed the organization called the Transcendental Club in order to promote transcendentalism, the idea that humans should isolate themselves from the civilization and live in the nature since they are inherently virtuous. Many transcendentalists poetry, such as When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman underlines the role that nature plays in humans’ search for the meaning by emphasizing its beauty with vivid imagery. For instance, Whitman expressed his appreciation of the tranquility of nature by describing how he looked at “the mystical moist night-air” in “perfect silence” in his poem while Thoreau represented transcendentalists’ penchant for the nature by saying “For I’d rather be thy child / And pupil, in the forest wild, / Than be the king of men elsewhere,…” While the nature is indeed an integral component of life that could offer significant clues to its significance, transcendentalists’ dogmatic claim that one can attain satisfaction only by isolating himself from civilization disregards the fact that life comprises of so many aspects that nature cannot provide its complete meaning. Various Utopian movements in the 19th century of America further illustrates that one will always fail to discover the significance of life without assuming an open-minded attitude. Each Utopian movement has endeavored to create the perfect world by promoting rather unconventional ideas, without realizing that the world cannot be restored to the previous perfect state since “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) For example, Shakers obstinately claimed that sex is the root of all evils, in the direct contrast with Oneida Colony that promoted the concept of free love in which all men are encouraged to have sexual relationship with all the other women in the town on the grounds that sex is a sanctified act. Many other movements such as Brook Farm and fruit lands, instead of holistically considering various components of life in their attempts to find how to lead a “perfect” life, focused excessively on limited aspects of life and therefore miserably fell short, successfully proving the impossibility of finding the meaning without comprehensively taking many factors into account.