In his essay "Compensation," Emerson makes a surprising claim: "Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house." Branka Arsic unpacks Emerson's repeated assertion that our reality and our minds are in constant flux. Arsic's readings of a broad range of Emerson's writings--the Early Lectures, Journals and Notebooks, and later lectures--are guided by a central question: what does...