Lessons from Emerson Part 1

For my fellow thinkers:

I revisit this text (Self-Reliance) about once per year. My eleventh grade English teacher, Mr. McDowell,  assigned it to us. It was the right text at the right time. Though the middle gets a little convoluted and odd, the beginning and end have a lot to sink your teeth into. I shall include some of my favorite lines and a Joyce Translation. 

"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 instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. 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..."

Joyce Translation: We are attracted to what is real and original, and expresses a thought that we have but have never heard put so well. We wish we spoke like that, and realize that wish and ability when we hear others speak what we've thought but not said with that frank, authentic style. They make others feel comfortable, inspired, etc. 

"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. 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, to-morrow 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."

Joyce Translation: We all have thoughts like that--ingenious thoughts. We often dismiss them because we are having them, but if we spoke them aloud, many people would agree. We should learn to detect when such thoughts occur to us, and seize them. Otherwise, someone else will say it, and we will think it's genius when we had the opportunity to say the same thing, but rejected or discounted the opinion, because it was ours. 

"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, for worse, as his portion"

Joyce Translation: Envying another means we are ignoring our own talents. Attempting to do something like another can make our own strengths unknown to us. We kill what makes us unique in trying to be like someone else, write like someone else, dress like someone else etc. 

"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so..."

Joyce Translation: Don't shirk from your own greatness. Trust yourself, and the spot that God has for you in the world, whatever it may be.  Accept it. Work hard, and spread good where you have an opportunity to do so.