Did Emerson Pee in the Shower?

People who pen their own obituaries have always struck me as comically self-absorbed or too closely adherent to Emerson's admonition regarding the unexamined life. Anyone who has spent much time with Ralph Waldo (say, for a still-bitterly-resented survey of 19th century American lit, just as an example) knows that the dean of American transcendentalism was a gasbag whose works linger on as pithy one-line aphorisms because their main body is less readable than Mao's Red Book. A particularly turgid example follows (from "The Over Soul"):

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

Not so this guy.