EMERSON AND SELF-RELIANCE

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803 - 1882

One of my oldest possessions is a two-volume set of the collected essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  From the first serious reading of those essays as a college freshman, I knew that I had discovered a friend to whom I could always turn when searching for guidance on issues of ultimate importance.  Now, more than five decades later, my admiration and respect for Emerson remain the same.  His observations on the nature and potential of mankind are as relevant today as they were in the nineteenth century.  As philosopher and writer Jacob Needleman states in The Spiritual Emerson, a new compendium of seven of Emerson's essays —

Reading Emerson can awaken a part of the psyche that our culture has suppressed.  And when this part of our human nature makes itself known to us, we are, for that moment, no longer hypnotized by the black dream of a dead universe or the hellish dream of a vain and angry God.  Nor, for that moment, are we under the spell of sudden illusions or arrogant fantasies about what human beings are and what they can become: illusions that deny the true metaphysical nobility of man; fantasies that blind us to how far we actually are from that nobility.

In keeping with what has almost become an annual ritual, I have been re-reading some the Emerson essays that influenced me as a young man seeking liberation from the stifling conformity of my southern background.  These essays inspire me now as they always have, and I would like to share some of Emerson's thinking with you on my blog, beginning today with some excerpts from "Self-Reliance."  As I read this wisdom, I continue to ask myself if there is anyone writing today who not only possesses such a penetrating mind, but who also has the power to summon us to our better natures.

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.  Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost . . .

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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. 

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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 or 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.

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Trust thyself:  every heart vibrates to that iron string.  Accept the place the divine providence has found for you . . .

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The virtue in most request is conformity.  Self-reliance is its aversion.  It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. . . . Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.

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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. 

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I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

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Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

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You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.  With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

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To be great is to be misunderstood.

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These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exists with God today.  There is not time to them.  There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. . . . But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.  He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

* * * * *

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

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Insist on yourself; never imitate.  Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

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Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart . . .

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Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.  Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Emerson's Study