★★★★★ | Essays | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Ah, Ralph Waldo Emerson: what a treasure. I’ve read most of these essays before, but never so deeply, and never with such illumination. His wisdom is simple to understand, yet difficult to practice in a world of popular opinion and distracted thinking. Trust your own thoughts. Be yourself. Don’t try to impress or copy others. Cherish your friends. Most of all: be present. Life is here, now; life is not studying the people or times of long ago or so-called leaders preaching hate and divisiveness.
Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.
Self-Reliance is his most famous essay, and it reads as fresh today as in Emerson’s time. I enjoyed lesser-known Circles, which contends that all our knowledge and enthusiasms are temporary, soon to be replaced by even greater knowledge and better enthusiasms. To find truth, embrace change and nature. And Compensation, which celebrates the neutrality and balance of nature, even in grief:
The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.
Emerson wrote Compensation before the death of his five-year-old son Waldo. His take on grief would turn bitter in his follow-on essay, Experience.
Alongside these essays, I’m slowly reading through a collection of Emerson’s journals. It’s amazing to watch him shape his thinking as these roughshod ideas appear and evolve over time in his private musings.
Favorite Highlights
Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
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.
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. He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
Prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness.
People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
Always do what you are afraid to do.