In honor of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birthday, an excerpt from A Transcendental Journey about the first time I read Self-Reliance:
My Spencer Press edition of Emerson’s Essays mixed and matched from the two series of essays of 1841 and 1844. Emerson’s most famous essays were represented, including The Poet, The Over-Soul, and Self-Reliance.
In Sioux Falls that night, I flopped onto the jouncy mattress, switched on the small bedside lamp, and flipped through most of the book. Then I settled in to read the one essay I had heard of: Self-Reliance.
Self-Reliance starts with a Latin quote I couldn’t translate, then another few lines from a couple of Elizabethan playwrights whom I had never read, followed by a bit of obscure poetry about bantlings on the rocks. I wasn’t encouraged and almost stopped reading. But then Emerson relates a chatty anecdote:
“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 is of more value than any thought they may contain.”
He follows this friendly counsel with this phrase:
“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.”
I sat up and pulled the lamp closer to the bed, tilting the shade up to get more light. I had the odd impression that I was not reading an essay written 150 years earlier, but a letter written to me. I read the phrase again.
“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.”
I kept reading. Further down I came to this:
“I would write on the lintels of the door-post, ‘Whim’. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.”
Whim. Hope. Yes.
I kept reading and stopping, reading and stopping, the words detonating inside me. The prose was all roundhouse, fists flying in every phrase:
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”
“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
“I do not wish to expiate, but to live.”
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
“To be great is to be misunderstood.”
“Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age;”
Finally I came to the end and read:
“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
I closed the book, and set it on the bedtable.
Past roads were closed off.
No clear route lay ahead.
But in Ralph Waldo Emerson, I knew I had a found a guide into unfamiliar states.
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