“Do your thing and I shall know you.”

A Year with Emerson edited by Richard Grossman REVIEW

“Do your thing and I shall know you.”

This is a book of short pithy statements uttered in the course of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writing life. They are merely soundings into his varied, changing, and creative mind. In some respects, they capture the essence of Transcendentalism. In other respects, they capture only Emerson. But perhaps I repeat myself.  

Emerson’s ideology is not an ideology but a method leading to many. Emerson’s world is as polytheistic as the population and there are as many scriptures as there are people who can write and find paper. Lets just start with the basics.

“The highest revelation is that God is in every man . . . Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation.”

To Emerson, we are all just too close to divinity to live lives undivine.

“So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can!”

This is why men must declare themselves without feeling that they must prove themselves. “I delight in telling what I think,” Emerson writes, “but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men.”

Seeing makes a man a Torah scholar – nay a Torah giver. This affects everything that Emerson talks about from the writing of history to the purposes of education to the value of a religion. IF God is in every man, and in every man equally …

Here is how it affects the way we should think about history:

“The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.”

“The great value of Biography consists in the perfect sympathy that exists between like minds. Space & time are an absolute nullity to this principle. An action of Luther’s that I heartily approve do I adopt also. We are imprisoned in life in the company of persons painfully unlike us or so little congenial to our highest tendencies & so congenial to our lowest that their influence is noxious & only now and then comes by us some commissioned spirit that speaks as with the word of a prophet to the languishing nigh dead faith in the bottom of the heart & passes by & we forget what manner of men we are. It may be that there are very few persons at any one time in the world who can address with any effect the higher wants of men. This defect is compensated by the recorded teaching & acting of this class of men. Socrates, St. Paul, Antoninus, Luther, Milton have lived for us as much as for their contemporaries if by books or by tradition their life & words come to my ear. We recognize with delight a strict likeness between their noblest impulses & our own. We are tried in their trial. By our cordial approval we conquer in their victory. We participate in their act by our thorough understanding of it.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about education:

“The aim of a true teacher now would be to bring men back to a trust in God and destroy before their eyes these idolatrous propositions : to teach the doctrine of the perpetual revelation.”

"I have been writing and speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves.  I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me?—they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence."

“I advise teachers to cherish mother-wit. I assume that you will keep the grammar, reading, writing and arithmetic in order; ‘t is easy and of course you will. 

But smuggle in a little contraband wit, fancy, imagination, thought. 

If you have a taste which you have suppressed because it is not shared by those about you, tell them that. Set this law up, whatever becomes of the rules of the school: they must not whisper, much less talk; but if one of the young people says a wise thing, greet it, and let all the children clap their hands. 

They shall have no book but school-books in the room; but if one has brought in a Plutarch or Shakespeare or Don Quixote or Goldsmith or any other good book, and understands what he reads, put him at once at the head of the class. 

Nobody shall be disorderly, or leave his desk without permission, but if a boy runs from his bench, or a girl, because the fire falls, or to check some injury that a little dastard is inflicting behind his desk on some helpless sufferer, take away the medal from the head of the class and give it on the instant to the brave rescuer. 

If a child happens to show that he knows any fact about astronomy, or plants, or birds, or rocks, or history, that interests him and you, hush all the classes and encourage him to tell it so that all may hear. 

Then you have made your school-room like the world. 

Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

To whatsoever upright mind, to whatsoever beating heart I speak, to you it is committed to educate men.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about what and how we read:

“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about church:

“Are you not scared by seeing the Gypsies are more attractive to us than the Apostles?  For though we love goodness and not stealing, yet also we love freedom and not preaching.”

“The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.”

“The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life,--life passed through the fire of thought.”

“People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.”

"A good scholar will find Aristophanes & Hafiz & Rabelais full of American history"”

“The unbelief of the age is attested by the loud condemnation of trifles. Look at our silly religious papers. Let a minister wear a cane, or a white hat, go to a theatre, or avoid a Sunday School, let a school-book with a Calvinistic sentence or a Sunday School book without one be heard of, and instantly all the old grannies squeak and gibber and do what they call 'sounding an alarm,' from Bangor to Mobile. Alike nice and squeamish is its ear. You must on no account say 'stink' or 'Damn.'”

“When I attended church, and the man in the pulpit was all clay and not of tuneable metal, I thought that if men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would

say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about heroes:

“The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about friendship:

“I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about writing:

“I think I have material enough to serve my countrymen with thought and music, if only it was not scraps. But men do not want handfuls of gold dust but ingots."

“There is a pleasure in the thought that the particular tone of my mind at this moment may be new in the universe”

“Only what is private, and yours, and essential, should ever be printed or spoken. I will buy the suppressed part of the author's mind, — you are welcome to all he published”

“I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.”

“Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That, which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign, — is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; — and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.”

 “All writing should be selection in order to drop every dead word. Why do you not save out of your speech or thinking only the vital things—the spirited mot which amused or warmed you when you spoke it—because of its luck & newness. I have just been reading, in this careful book of a most intelligent & learned man, a number of flat conventional words & sentences. If a man would learn to read his own manuscript severely—becoming really a third person, & search only for what interested him, he would blot to purpose—& how every page would gain! Then all the words will be sprightly, & every sentence a surprise.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about purpose:

“If you have no talent for scolding, do not scold; if none for explaining, do not explain; if none for giving parties, do not give parties, however graceful or needful these acts may appear in others.”

“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.”

“We are always getting ready to live but never living”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about consistency:

“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 his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.”

“Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”

“And I learn from the photograph & daguerre men, that almost all faces and forms which come to their shops to be copied, are irregular and unsymmetrical, have one blue eye & one grey, [that] the nose is not straight, & one shoulder is higher than the other. The man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from his good & bad ancestors,—a misfit from the start.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about scholarship:

“These being [the scholar’s] functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, — happy enough, if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly.”

“Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.”

“The scholar on the contrary is sure of his point, is fast-rooted, & can surely predict the hour when all this roaring multitude shall roar for him.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about invention and change:

“Old age begins in the nursery, and before the young American is put into jacket and trowsers, he says, "I want something which I never saw before" and "I wish I was not I."

Emerson’s great contribution to America (or his great curse) is to give us all permission to stop seeking and forcing each other to live by some common operating system. He sprains his ankle and within a day he has multiple cures. “On Wachusett, I sprained my foot,” he says,

“It was slow to heal, and I went to the doctors. Dr. Henry Bigelow said, 'Splint and absolute rest.' Dr. Russell said, 'Rest, yes; but a splint, no.' Dr. Bartlett said, 'Neither splint nor rest, but go and walk.' Dr. Russell said, 'Pour water on the foot, but it must be warm.' Dr. Jackson said, 'Stand in a trout brook all day.'”

He is the ultimate relativist, even unto himself. Not only will he not make you agree with him today, he will not even make himself agree with his yesterday’s self. He sees some danger in this, to be sure, but shrugs it off as inevitable. “The child, the infant, is a transcendentalist, and charms us all;” he writes, “we try to be, and instantly run in debt, lie, steal, commit adultery, go mad, and die.” He notes that we must bring some sort of meaning to the particulars of the life we observe but, insists that it be a meaning original to ourselves. “We can never be at peace when we exist in a myriad of facts,” he insists. But we will never be at peace in someone else’s construct.

And among these principle themes, he drops pearls of insight that demonstrate what he means by living life awake.

“Passion though a bad regulator is a powerful spring.”

 “Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.”

 “How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.”

“There are always two parties; the party of the past and the party of the future”

 “A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.”

“The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yet accredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax.”

I think it is this celebration of the divine uniqueness of every individual that makes him particularly sad for the loss of his wife, Ellen. He understood that there was no replacing her. There was no getting back what the world lost when it lost her. Though we are all gods, we are all the one and only kind of god like us.

“There is that which passes away & never returns. This miserable apathy, I know, may wear off. I almost fear when it will. Old duties will present themselves with no more repulsive face. I shall go again among my friends with a tranquil countenance. Again I shall be amused, I shall stoop again to little hopes and little fears and forget the graveyard. But will the dead be restored to me? Will the eye that was closed on Tuesday ever beam again in the fulness of love on me? Shall I ever again be able to connect the face of outward nature, the mists of the morn, the star of eve, the flowers, & all poetry, with the heart and life of an enchanting friend ? No. There is one birth & one baptism & one first love and the affections cannot keep their youth any more than men."

(Written five days after the death of Emerson’s first wife Ellen.)

Question for Comment: Do you think we have been made happier as a consequence of this tendency to think of ourselves as the authors of new systems of thought?

Comments

[T.E. Michigan]

Not at all. Most of us want to fit in and conform to our surroundings. The alternative is pure loneliness and frustration at the shallowness of your fellow man. Unless of course everyone shared the same freedom to think. We couldn't even get everyone to boycott baseball after the strike so good luck with that one.

Emerson's view of "new systems of thought" would drive most bosses nuts as they tend to want everyone to think like themselves and get on the same page.

My favorite clips are these:

“We are always getting ready to live but never living”

“Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”

I need to read those two again and again.