Where I Am At

WARNING - The following entry is long. Those with limited attention spans should go elsewhere.



I have crafted an approach with Mr. Emerson.

I have decided to read his essays here and there. Right after this, just before that, whenever the mood and opportunity strikes me.

Today I chose Self-Reliance.

Holy Christ do I have my hands full with this dude. And do I ever love him.

The central theme of this essay, if I may be so bold as to attempt to boil it down to one message (22 pages) is to trust yourself. Believe in yourself. Consider yourself as great as any genius and approach your life in that manner. Do not concern yourself with the past, do not lose the present with concerns over the future, do not sacrifice your soul to the whims of the mob.

Recognize your uniqueness and celebrate it regardless of the opposition you will inevitably run into.

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius."

He references eminent philosophers and says that they did not reflect the thought of the time. They had the courage to express their own thoughts.

"A man should learn to detect 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 it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated 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 tomorrow 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."

We can learn from philosophers but do not adopt their thoughts as your own. Use them as fuel to fire up your own perspective.

"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."

Do not bend to the will of society. "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." From society's perspective "the virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion."

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

He talks about how mankind acts virtuously out of the need to create a perception; not out of the deeply held conviction of the heart. Think of all the pious, phony fools you know who attend church and preach boisterously, but live as liars and hypocrites.

If you give yourself over, blindly, to any institution or mode of thought, you lose yourself.

I love this one - "There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean 'the foolish face of praise,' the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low usurping willfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, with the most disagreeable sensation."

Don't be chained to your past. It is OK to contradict today what you said yesterday. Do not allow society's image of you formed by past actions to prevent you from changing.

"Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow think what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. ___'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' ___"Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."

You should not stand before great art and be humbled by it. Interpret it to your own liking. "The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise."

You are only alive when you live. The past means nothing. "Life only avails, not the having lived."

"I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching." Pretty much self explanatory.

He says that at some point in your life you have to let those that you love know that you must live your life in your own way.

".........................I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife - but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way.  ..........I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions."

"We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death and afraid of each other."

"Insist on yourself; never imitate."

He ends the essay with "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can you bring you peace but the triumph of principles."

Along with all the prescient philosophy, Emerson wallops you with boffo sentences. Like "Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic."

Wow. Truthfully I know what sycophantic means. I had to look up mendicant. It means "pertaining to or characteristic of a beggar."

I have done little but quote Ralph Waldo Emerson's text. What the hell did you expect? The man is a lot smarter than me.

Wait a minute - I don't think I learned a goddamn thing.

(Editor's note: I am running a great and terrible risk. The book I am actually "reading" right now is titled "Twilight of The Elites - America After Meritocracy", by Chris Hayes. By flipping back and forth between Twilight and Emerson it is quite possible my brain will melt down into a puddle of gelatinous goo. Or...................it might grow some muscle.)