Why, even
in Boston, where he was born, they have no such memorial as that."
"He put it up himself," said the man.
That struck me as strange. It seemed somehow out of character with the
great philosopher. Also, I could not see why, if he did wish to raise a
memorial to himself, he had elected to fashion it in the form of a
bottle and put it on top of an office building.
"I suppose there is some sort of symbolism about it?" I suggested.
"Now you got it," approved the man.
I gazed at the tower for a while in thought. Then I said:
"Do you suppose that Emerson meant something like this: that human life
or, indeed, the soul, may be likened to the contents of a bottle; that
day by day we use up some portion of the contents--call it, if you like,
the nectar of existence--until the fluid of life runs low, and at last
is gone entirely, leaving only the husk, as it were--or, to make the
metaphor more perfect, the shell, or empty bottle: the container of what
Emerson himself called, if I recollect correctly, 'the soul that maketh
all'--do you suppose he meant to teach us some such thing as that?"
The man looked a little confused by this deep and beautiful thought.
"He _might_ of meant that," he said, somewhat dubiously. "But they tell
me Captain Emerson's a practical man, and I reckon what he _mainly_
meant was that he made his money out of this-here Bromo Seltzer, and he
was darn glad of it, so he thought he'd put him up a big Bromo Seltzer
bottle as a kind of cross between a monument and an ad.
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