Emerson suggests that grief can alter a person’s sense of reality. After a profound loss, the ordinary world may feel less solid, immediate or convincing than it did before. In this sense, grief can make someone an “idealist” by weakening the apparent certainty of material experience and drawing attention to the role of consciousness in shaping what feels real.

Within Experience, the statement forms part of Emerson’s wider examination of perception, loss and the difficulty of fully possessing experience. His reflections were shaped in part by the death of his young son, and the essay repeatedly considers the distance that can arise between events and one’s emotional response to them. The quotation does not present grief as desirable or claim that suffering necessarily produces philosophical insight. Rather, it observes that loss can unsettle familiar assumptions and change how a person experiences the world.