The essay "Self-Reliance," from which an excerpt is presented here, is the clearest, most memorable example of Emerson's philosophy of individualism, an idea that is deeply embedded in American culture. His variety of individualism grows of the self's intuitive connection with the Over-Soul and is not simply a matter of self-centered assertion or immature narcissism Consider what Emerson Entries () Analytic Journal #1: Self- Reliance Self-Reliance is a transcendentalist essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The essay was published in during the transcendentalist movement. It was a way for writers to respond to or protest the An Essay: Emerson's Self-Reliance." Chautauquan 30 (March ): Klammer, Enno. "The Spiral Staircase in 'Self-Reliance.'" Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 47 (II Quarter ): Woodruff, Stuart. "Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' and 'Experience': A Comparison." Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 47 (II Quarter ): Also in Rountree. Anderson, Quentin. The Imperial Self: An Essay
EMERSON - ESSAYS - SELF-RELIANCE
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays, emerson essay self reliance, First Series[] Self-Reliance Study Materials. Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays, First Series[] Self-Reliance Study Materials "Ne te quæsiveris extra.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.
The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill emerson essay self reliance of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe our own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,--and our first thought, is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because emerson essay self reliance is his. In every work of genius we recognize majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this.
They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, emerson essay self reliance, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preëstablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.
It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, emerson essay self reliance, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, emerson essay self reliance, shall give him no peace.
It is a deliverance which does not deliver, emerson essay self reliance. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that emerson essay self reliance string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, emerson essay self reliance, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it, emerson essay self reliance.
So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emerson essay self reliance. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary. The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature.
A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, emerson essay self reliance, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the emerson essay self reliance, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict.
You must court him: he does emerson essay self reliance court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclathe is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account.
There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear, emerson essay self reliance.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible emerson essay self reliance we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.
The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names emerson essay self reliance customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church.
On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, emerson essay self reliance, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.
I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions, emerson essay self reliance. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right.
I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off.
Thy love afar is spite at home. Your goodness must have some edge to it,--else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the emerson essay self reliance of the doctrine of love when that pules and emerson essay self reliance. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-postWhim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.
Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations.
Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, emerson essay self reliance, that I grudge the dollar, emerson essay self reliance dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;--though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked Dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,--as invalids and the insane pay a high board.
Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiatebut to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it emerson essay self reliance be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions.
I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, emerson essay self reliance, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony. What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.
It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is emerson essay self reliance duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it emerson essay self reliance easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character, emerson essay self reliance. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, emerson essay self reliance with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers,--under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.
PNTV: Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson (#378)
, time: 14:38
The essay "Self-Reliance," from which an excerpt is presented here, is the clearest, most memorable example of Emerson's philosophy of individualism, an idea that is deeply embedded in American culture. His variety of individualism grows of the self's intuitive connection with the Over-Soul and is not simply a matter of self-centered assertion or immature narcissism Consider what Emerson Entries () Analytic Journal #1: Self- Reliance Self-Reliance is a transcendentalist essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The essay was published in during the transcendentalist movement. It was a way for writers to respond to or protest the An Essay: Emerson's Self-Reliance." Chautauquan 30 (March ): Klammer, Enno. "The Spiral Staircase in 'Self-Reliance.'" Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 47 (II Quarter ): Woodruff, Stuart. "Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' and 'Experience': A Comparison." Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 47 (II Quarter ): Also in Rountree. Anderson, Quentin. The Imperial Self: An Essay
No comments:
Post a Comment