The Three Great Virtues - Three Essays by Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson

1 1 - Self-Reliance Part 1 31:15

Self-Reliance.

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Self-reliance, part one quote, nite quesiveris extra, and quote, quote, man is his own star, and the soul that can render an honest and perfect man commands all light, all influence, all fate. Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune.

Cast the bantling on the rocks, Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat, Wintered with hawk and fox, Power and speed, Be hands and feet. Self-reliance. 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. 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, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment.

Familiar as the fair voice of the mind is to each, The highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they sat at nought books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. 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 dismissed 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, than most when the cry of voices is on the other side.

Else tomorrow 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. 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. 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. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes such impression on him and another none.

This sculpture in the memory is not without pre-established harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed, of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issue, so it be faithfully imparted. But God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best. But what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt, his genius deserts him. No muse befriends him. No invention, no hope.

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, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age. Betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being, and we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny. And not miners and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors obeying the almighty effort and advancing on chaos and the dark.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text. In the face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes. That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment, because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose. These have not. Their mind being whole, Their eye is yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody. All conform to it. So that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious, and its claims not to be put by. If it will, stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me.

Hark! In the next room, his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary. The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say ought to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse, independent, irresponsible, Looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by. He tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, About interests.

He gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him. He does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his own consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with Eclat, he is a committed person. Watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no leave for this, that he could pass again into his neutrality, who could thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again, From the same unaffected, unbiased, unbridgeable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men and put them In fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company. In which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. 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. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. 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. I remember an answer, which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued advisor who was wont to impartune me with the dear old doctrines of the church, on my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions if I live wholly from within?

My friend suggested, but these impulses may be from below, not from above.

I replied, They do not seem to me to be such. But if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this. The only right is what is after my constitution, The only wrong, what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral, but he.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions, Every decadent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbados, why should I not say to him, Go love thy infant, thy wood-chopper, be good-natured and modest, have that grace, and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition With this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.

Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and winds. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, whim. I hope it is somewhat better than Wim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me, and to whom I do not belong.

There is a class of persons to whom, by all spiritual affinity, I am bought and sold. For them I will go to prison, if need be. But your miscellaneous popular charities, the education at College of Fools, the building of meeting-houses to the vain end which many now stand, alms to Sots, and the Thousand-fold Relief Societies, Though I confess with shame, I sometimes succumb and give the dollar. It is a wicked dollar which, by and by, I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is a man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, as invalids and the insane pay a higher board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself, and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it may be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions.

I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony. What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because 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 our own.

But the great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, Spread your table like base housekeepers. Under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are, and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind man's bluff is this game of conformity.

If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce, for his text and topic, the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word. Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he has pledged to himself not to look but at one side, the permitted side, Not as a man, but as a parish minister. He is a retained attorney, and these heirs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, 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. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four. So that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime, nature is not slow to equip us in the prison uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest, asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in general history. I mean, quote, the foolish face of praise, and quote, the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us.

The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low, usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

For nonconformity, the world whips you with its displeasure, and therefore a man must know Had to estimate a sour face. The bystanders look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance, like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance. But the sour face of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the Senate and the College. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable themselves.

But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow. It needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment. The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency, a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others Have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts. We are loath to disappoint them. But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place?

Suppose you should contradict yourself. What, then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics, you have denied personality to the deity. Yet, when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory as Joseph left his coat in the hand of the harlot and flee. 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 tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Robert Scott, mojomove411.com, m-o-j-o-m-o-v-e-4-1-1.com. August 8, 2007.

2 2 - Self-Reliance Part 2 43:57

Self-reliance, part two. I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himalaya are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him, A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza. Read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record, day by day, my honest thought without prospect or retrospect. And I cannot doubt it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also.

We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions So they be, each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of a ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions.

Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly. And what you have already done singly will justify you now. If it can be firm enough to-day to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this, what makes the majesty of the heroes of the Senate and of the field, which so fills the imagination. The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed a united light on the advancing actor. He is attended by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adam's eye.

Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today. We love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent Self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person. I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of going for dinner, Let us hear a whistle from the spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him. I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true.

Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible thinker and actor working wherever a man works. That a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events. Ordinarily, everybody in society reminds us of someone else, or of some other person, Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else. It takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age.

Requires infinite spaces, and numbers, and time, Fully to accomplish his design, and posterity seemed to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man's Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man, as monachism of the hermit Antony, the reformation of Luther, Quakerism of Fox, Methodism of Wesley, Abolition of Clarkson, Scipio Milton called The height of Rome, and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet.

Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity boy, A bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself, which corresponds to the force, which built a tower, or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book Have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say, like that, Who are you, sir?

Yet they all are his suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties, that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict, It is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the Duke's house, washed and dressed, and laid in the Duke's bed, and on his waking, Treated with all obsequious ceremony like the Duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince. Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic.

In history, our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than Private John and Edward in a small house and common day's work. But the things of life are the same to both. The sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Skandenberg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous. Did they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act today as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due From man to man. The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with honor. and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.

The magnetism which all original actions exerts is explained When we inquire the reason of self-trust, who is the trustee? What is the aboriginal self on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star? Without parallax, without calculable elements, Which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear. The ingenuity leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call spontaneity or instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as intuition, whilst all latter teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact beyond which analysis cannot go. All things find their common origin.

For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse From things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceeded. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterward see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we had shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and origins of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves but allow a passage to its beams.

If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, All philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My willful actions and accusations are but roving. The idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people, Contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily, for they do not distinguish between perception and notion.

They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing, but perception is not whimsical but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time all mankind, although it may chance that no one has seen it before me, for my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun. The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure That it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh, he should communicate not one thing, but all things, should fill the world with his voice, should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the center of the present thought. And new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away.

Means, teachers, texts, temples fall. It lives now and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their center by their cause, and in the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, And carries you backward to the phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another world. Believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak, which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child, into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.

Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes. But the soul is light. Where it is, is day. Where it was, is night. And history is an impertinence and an injury if it be anything more than a cheerful apology or parable of my being and becoming. Man is timid and apologetic. He is no longer upright. He dares not say, I think, I am. but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones. They are for what they are. They exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose. It is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts.

In the full-blown flower there is no more. In the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature In all moments alike. 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. This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of, I know not what, David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke, Afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and are willing to let the words go.

For at any time they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong as it is for the weak to be weak. We have new perception. We shall gladly disturb the memory of its hoarded treasures and old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

And now, at last, the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid. Probably cannot be said, for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way. You shall not discern the footprints of any other. You shall not see the face of man. You shall not hear any name. The way, the thought, the good shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope.

In the hour of vision there is nothing that can be called gratitude. Nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and external causation, perceives the self-existence of truth and right, and claims itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea, Long intervals of time, years, centuries are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is called life and what is called death. Life only avails, not the having lived, 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.

This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes, for that forever degrades the past. Turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why, then, do we prat of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power, not confident, but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he shall not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is height, and that a man or company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature, must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who, Are not.

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed One. Self-existence is the attribute of the supreme cause, and it constitutes the measure of good, By the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so, by so much virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, wailing, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect, as examples of its presence, and impure action. I see the same law working in nature for conservation and growth. Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet Its poise and orbit, the bending tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul.

Thus all concentrates. Let us not rove. Let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them. And our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches. But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home. To put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching.

How far off, how cool, how chaste the person looks, Begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary. So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual. That is, must be elevation. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closed door and say, Come out unto us.

But keep thy state, come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. What we love, that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations. Let us enter into the state of war and wake Thor and Odin. Courage and constancy in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O Father, O Mother, O Wife, O Brother, O Friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truths. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of my wife, but these relations I must fill After a new and unprecedented way.

I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you. If you are not, I will not hurt you and myself. By hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions. I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, To live in truth.

Does this sound harsh today? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine. If we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. But so, may you give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and power. to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason. When they look out into the region of absolute truth, then will they justify me and do the same thing. The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard. and mere antinomianism, and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other, of which we must be shriven.

You may fulfill your round of duties, by clearing yourself in the direct or the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog. Whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one imagines that this law is lax, Let Him keep its commandment one day.

And truly it demands something godlike in Him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust Himself for a taskmaster. High be His heart, faithful His will, clear His insight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others.

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, He will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant. Our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us.

We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate where strength is born. If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, It seems to his friends, and to himself, that he is right in being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, Goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth. In successive years, and always like a cat, falls on his feet.

Is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not studying a profession. For he does not postpone his life. But lives already. He is not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows. But can and must detach themselves, that with the exercise of self-trust new powers shall appear. That a man is the Word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations. That he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts for himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and custom out of the window, we pity him no more. But thank and revere him, and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and make his name dear to all history.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men, in their religion, In their education, in their pursuits, their modes of living, their association, in their property, in their speculative views.

End of self-reliance. Part Two. Recording by Robert Scott. Mojo Move. Four. One. One. Dot. Com. M.O. J.O. M-O-V-E-411.com.

August 9, 2007.

3 3 - Self-Reliance Part 3 30:00

Self Reliance. Part Three.

One. In what prayers do men allow themselves? That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition, To come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the Spirit of God pronouncing His works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and It supposes a dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness.

As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action, the prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, The prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Karatok, in Fletcher's Banduka, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies, His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors. Our valors are our best gods.

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance. It is infirmity of will. Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer. If not, attend your own work. And already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, Putting them once more in communion with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, All eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it.

We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him.

To the preserving mortal, said Zoroaster. The blessed immortals are swift.

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, Let God not speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.

Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables Merely of his brothers or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men. and, lo, a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind, acting on the elemental thought of duty and man's relation to the highest.

Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating everything to the new terminology as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized. Past for the end, and not for speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eyes in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe. The luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their masters built. They cannot imagine How you aliens have any right to see. How you can see.

It must be somehow that you stole the light from us. They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile, and call it their own. If they are honest, and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too straight and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish. And the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, Will beam over the universe as on the first morning. Two. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of traveling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans, They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth.

In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveler. The wise man stays at home, and when his necessities His duties on any occasion call him from his house or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men Like a sovereign, not like an interloper or a valet. I have no curlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things.

In Thebes, in Palmyra, His will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins. Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples. And there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Three, but the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond. And our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay home. We imitate, and what is imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste. Our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments. Our opinions Our tastes, our faculties lean and follow the past and the distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the doric or gothic model?

Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any. And if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, Considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

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. That which each can do best, none but his maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique The Scipianism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

There is at this moment for you An utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phaedas, or Trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself. But if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice. For the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life. Obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce The Foreworld again. Four. As our religion, our education, our art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes. It is barbarous. It is civilized. It is Christianized. It is rich. It is scientific. But this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under. But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength.

If the traveler tell us truly, Strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal, As if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white man to his grave. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, But he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so, being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe. The equinox he knows as little. And the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind.

His notebooks impair his memory. His libraries overload his wit. The insurance office increases the number of accidents. And it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber, Whether we have not lost by refinement some energy by a Christianity entrenched in establishments, and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic, but in Christendom, where is the Christian? There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the First and of the Last Ages. Nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater man than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago.

Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn the founder of a sect. The arts are inventions of each period, and are only its costume, and do not invigorate them. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Bering accomplished so much in their fishing-boats as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, Discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any other since. Columbus found the new world in an undecked boat.

It is curious to see the periodical disuses and perishing of means and machinery which were introduced with loud laudation A few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of any aids. The emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Lascais, without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, Grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself.

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The person who makes up a nation today next year dies, and their experience with them. And so the reliance on property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves at things so long That they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he sees that it is accidental, came to him by inheritance or gift or crime. Then he feels that it is not having. It does not belong to him. has not root in him, and merely lies there because no revolution or robber takes it away. But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire. And what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, Or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. Thy lot or portion of life, says the Kalfi Ali, is seeking after thee. Therefore be at rest from seeking after it.

Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous conventions. The greater the concourse, and with each new uproar of announcement, the delegation from Essex, the Democrats from New Hampshire, the Whigs of Maine, The young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner, the reformers summon conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! Will the god deign to enter and inhabit you? but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner.

Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and, in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, And so, perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles. Just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head. So use all that is called fortune. Most men gamble with her and gain all, and lose all as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with cause and effect, the chancellors of God.

In the will, work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits. And you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

End of the Essay on Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson Recording by Robert Scott. Mojo Move 411.com. Mojo Move 411.com. August 9, 2007.

4 4 - Love Part 1 22:01

Love. Part One.

I was a gem concealed, Me, my burning ray revealed.

The Koran.

Love. Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments. Each of its joys ripens into a new want. Nature Uncontainable, flowing, forelooking in the first sentiment of kindness, anticipates already a benevolence which shall lose all particular regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity is in a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of human life, which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period and works a revolution in his mind and body, unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, Opens the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes, establishes marriage, and gives permanence to human society.

The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the blood seems to require that in order to portray it in vivid tints, Whichever youth and maid should confess to be true to their throbbing experience, one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth reject the least savour of a mature philosophy as chilling with age and pendentry their purple bloom. And therefore I know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose the court and parliament of love. But from these formidable censors I shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that the passion of which we speak, though it begin with the young, Yet forsake not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly its servant to grow old, but makes the aged participators of it no less than the tender maiden, though in a different and nobler sort.

For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom Caught from a wandering spark, out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the world and all nature with its generous flames. It matters not, therefore, whether we attempt to describe the Passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He who paints it at the first period will lose some of its latter, he who paints it at the last some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that by Patience and the Muse's aid, We may attain to that inward view of the law which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so central that it shall commend itself to the eye at whatever angle beholden.

And the first condition is that we must leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts. And study the sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in history. For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man is not to his imagination. Each man sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment. He will shrink and moan. Alas! I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter a mature life the remembrances of budding joy, and cover every beloved name. Everything is beautiful, seen from the point of the intellect or as truth, but all is sour if seen as experience.

Details are melancholy. The plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world, the painful kingdom of time and place dwell care and canker and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing, but grief cleaves to names and persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday. The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we wish to know of any worthy person so much as how he has sped in the history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries circulate? How we glow over the novels of passion? When the story is told with any spark of truth and nature, and what fastens attention in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties.

Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again, but we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion. And we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature's most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls about the schoolhouse door, but to-day he comes running into the entry and meets one fair child disposing her satchel. He holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him As if she removed herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct.

Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him, and these two little neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned to respect each other's personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls, who go into the country shops to buy a skine of silk or a sheet of paper and talk half an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the village they are on perfect equality, Which love delights in, and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most agreeable.

Confiding relations with what their fun and their earnest about Edgar and Jonas and Elmira, and who was invited to the party, and who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school would begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By-and-by, that boy wants a wife. And very truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men.

I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold. to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love. Without being tempted to unsay, As treasonable to nature, ought derogatory to the social instincts. For though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison, and putting us quite beside ourselves, We can seldom see after thirty years. Yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is wreath of flowers to the oldest brows.

But here, in a strange fact, it may seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft. Surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances, In looking backward, they may find that several things which, were not the charm, have more reality to this grouping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them. But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain. which created all things anew, which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art, which made the face of nature radiant with purple light.

The morning and the night varied enchantments, when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound with the most trivial circumstance Associated with one form is put in the amber of memory. When he became all I when one was present, and all memory when one was gone. When the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage, When no place is too solitary and none too silent for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts than any old friend's, though best and purest can give him. For the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other images, Written in water, but as Plutarch said, enameled in fire, and make the study of midnight.

Thou art not gone being gone. Where'er thou art, thou leavest in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart.

In the noon and the afternoon of life, we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear, for he touched the secret of the matter who said of love, All other pleasures are not worth its pains.

And when the day was not long enough, but the night, too, must be consumed in keen recollections, when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on, when the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song, When all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets mere pictures. The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass, and the peeping flowers have grown intelligent, and he almost fears to trust them, With the secret which they seem to invite, yet nature soothes and sympathizes.

In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men.

Fountainheads and pathless groves, places which pale passion loves, moonlight walks, when all the fowls are safely housed. Save bats and owls. A midnight bell, a passing groan, these are the sounds we feed upon.

Behold there, in the wood, the fine madman. He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights. He dilates. He is twice a man. He walks with arms akimbo. He soliloquizes. He accosts the grass and the trees. He feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and the lily in his veins. And he talks with the brook that wets his foot. The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made him love music and verse. It is a fact often observed that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under any other circumstances. The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the sentiment. It makes the clown gentle, and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object.

In giving him to another, it still more gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new perceptions, New and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer appertain to his family and society. He is somewhat. He is a person. He is a soul. And here, let us examine a little nearer The nature of that influence which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun, wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for itself.

And she teaches his eye why beauty was pictured with lovers and grace attending her steps. Her existence makes the world rich, though she extrudes all other persons from his attention as cheap and unworthy. She indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all select. Things and virtues. For that reason, the lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother or her sisters or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

5 5 - Love Part 2 23:11

Love, Part Two.

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Love, Part Two. The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue, who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one another face and form. We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization, nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society. But as it seems to me, to quite other and unattainable sphere, To relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshadow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline-doves-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent.

Herein it resembles the most excellent things. Which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify when he said to music, Away, away, Thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not found and shall not find.

The same fluency may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring wand. But demands an active imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act of doing. The God or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses to that which is not. Then, first, it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting and poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it, Landor inquires, whether it is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and existence.

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming, and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end, when it becomes a story without an end, when it suggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions, when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness, when he cannot feel his right to it. Though he were Caesar, he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset. Hence arose the saying, If I love you, What is that to you?

We say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself, and can never know. This agrees well with that high philosophy of beauty which the ancient writers delighted in, for they said that the soul of man embodied here on earth went roaming up and down in quest of that other world, of its own, out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than those of this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore, the deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and fair, And the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is within the beauty and the cause of The beauty.

If, however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow. Body being unable to fulfill the promise which beauty holds out, But if, accepting the hint of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through the body and falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, Then they pass to the true palace of beauty. More and more inflame their love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection. As the sun puts out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By conversation with that which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, Lowly and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them.

Then he passes from loving them in one to loving them in all. And so is the one beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate, he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint, which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy, that they are now able, Without offense, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing the same, and beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which it has contracted, In the world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls.

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch, Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo, and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world. Whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar, so that its gravest discourse has a savour of hams and powdering tubs. Worse, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing But a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim. But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play.

In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circle ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the house and yard and passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance, on politics and geography and history. But things are ever grouping themselves according to higher and more interior laws. Neighborhood, size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul and the circumstance, The progressive idealizing instinct predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible.

Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms, with eyes so full of mutual intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled.

Her pure and eloquent blood spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctively wrought that one might almost say her body thought.

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more than Juliet, than Romeo, night, Day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are all contained in this form, full of soul, in this soul which is all form. The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards, when alone they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. Does that other see the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and adding up costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that Willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed.

But the lot of humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to all. Love prays. It makes covenants with eternal power in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus effected, and which adds a new value to every atom in nature, for it transmutes every thread throughout, the whole web of relation, into a golden ray. And bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element. Is yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart content the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last. from these endearments as toys, and puts on the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other.

Hence arise surprise, Expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue, and these signs are there however eclipsed. They appear and reappear and continue to attract, but the regard changes, quits the sign, and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties. To employ all the resources of each and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is the nature and end of this relation that they should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of woman, The person love does to us fit, like manna has the taste of all in it.

The world rolls, the circumstances vary every hour, the angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such. They confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. They resign each other without complaint to the good offices which man and woman are severely appointed to discharge in time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance. Whether present or absent, of each other's designs, at last they discover that all which at first drew them together, those once sacred features, that magical play of charms, was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which the house was built, And the purification of the intellect and the heart from year to year is the real marriage.

For seen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness, looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, Are shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years. I do not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from early infancy. At the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature and intellect and art Emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they bring to the epithalamium. Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and Wisdom.

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night, though slowly and with pain the objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons, but in health the mind is presently seen again. Its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable light, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us, As clouds must lose their infinite character and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose anything by the progress of the soul.

The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations Must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on, forever.

End of Love by Emerson.

Recording by Robert Scott.

July 6, 2007.

6 6 - Friendship Part 1 31:09

Friendship. A ruddy drop of manly blood, the surging sea outweighs. The world uncertain comes and goes, the lover rooted stays. I fancied he was fled, and after many a year glowed unexhausted kindliness like daily sunrise there. My careful heart was free again. O friend, my bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched, Through thee alone the rose is red. All things through thee take nobler form, And look beyond the earth. The mill round of our fate appears, A sun-path in thy worth. Me too, thy nobleness has taught, To master my despair, the fountains of my hidden life are through thy friendship fair.

Friendship. We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Mauger, all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love Like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us. How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with. Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth. The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in common speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others are likened to the material effects of fire, so swift Or much more swift, more active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations.

From the highest degree of passionate love to the lowest degree of goodwill, they make the sweetness of life. Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression. But it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, and forthwith troops of gentle thought invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words. See, in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would welcome him.

The house is dusted, all things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good report is told by others. Only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversations with him. We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, Shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers.

But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last, and the best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension, are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner, but the throbbing of the heart and the communications of the soul no more. What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world for me again? What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling, how beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and true.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed. There is no winter and no night. All tragedies, all annuies vanish, all duties even. Nothing fills the preceding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone, for a thousand years.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time. Nor is nature so poor But she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations. And as many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation. And no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe.

My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather, not I, but the deity in me, In them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths. And enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the first bard, poetry without stop. Hymn, ode, and epic, poetry still flowing. Apollo and the muses chanting still. Will these two separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not, for my relation to them is so pure that we hold by simple affinity, and the genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost dangerous to me to, "'crush the sweet poison of misused wine,' and of the affections. A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons, which have given me delicious hours. But the joy ends in the day. It yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it. My action is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We overestimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less.

Everything that is he, his name, his form, His dress, books and instruments, fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth. Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships, and in the golden hour of friendship we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does not respect men as it respects itself.

In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who stands united with his thought conceives magnificently of himself.

He is conscious of a universal success, even though bought by uniform particular failures. No advantage, no powers, no gold or force can be any match for him. I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on your wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles. The planet has a faint moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts and tried temper of the party you praise But I see well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity. Thee also Compared with whom all else is shadow.

Though art not being as truth is and justice is, thou art not my soul, but a picture and an effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently by the germination of new buds extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature is alternation forevermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude, and it goes alone for a season that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase.

Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, He might write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love. Dear Friend, if I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise. My moods are quite attainable, and I respect thy genius. It is to me as yet unfathomed. Yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment. Thine ever or never. Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity and not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb and not cloth.

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them in a texture of wine and dreams, Instead of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a hidden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God. which many summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain we are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play. and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to meat.

All association must be a compromise, and what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower, of each of the beautiful natures, disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted. After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirit. In the heyday of friendship and thought, our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude. I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how many friends I have, and what content I can find in conversing with each. If there be one to whom I am not equal.

If I have shrunk unequal from one contest, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself if then I made my other friends my asylum.

The valiant warrior, famous for fight, After a hundred victories once foiled, is from the book of honor raised quite, and all the rest forgot for which he toiled.

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk, In which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the natural Langsamkeit, which hardens the ruby in a million years. And works in duration in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth. Let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.

The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common. So much is this purer, And nothing is so much divine. I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, What do we know of nature or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men.

But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace which I draw from this alliance with my brother's soul is the nut itself, whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend. It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor Its law. He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games where the firstborn of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contest where time, want, danger are in the lists. And he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these.

The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may Think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth as having none above it to court or conform unto.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, Hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who, under a certain religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this course He attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms.

But every man was constrained by so much sincerity To the like plain dealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us, society shows us not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity. Is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility, requires to be humored. He has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part.

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I, who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form, so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

End of friendship, part one, recording by Robert Scott. August the seventh, two thousand and seven.

7 7 - Friendship Part 2 30:07

Friendship. Part 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.

Friendship.

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle. But we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me, and I have touched the goal of fortune, I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says, I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those who I effectually am, and tender myself least to him To whom I am the most devoted.

I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen before it is quite a cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans. It is a good neighbor. It watches with the sick. It holds the pall at the funeral, and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, We cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity, and pity.

I have the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle and dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce, the most strictly and homely, that can be joined. More strict than any of which we have experienced. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare. Shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion.

We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom, and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery. Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well-tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced. Open, For even in that particular a poet says love demands that the parties are altogether paired.

That its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart. Betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women, variously related to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one-to-one peremptory from conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad You shall have very useful and cheering discourses at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word.

Two may talk, and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company, there is never such discourse between two across the table as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul, exactly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondness of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this conversation which good sense demands destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

No two men but being left alone with each other enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines which two shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other, will never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation. No more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence. He cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame The insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue.

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness that picks each with the presence of power and of Consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine is that the not mine is mine. I hated where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition with which friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts.

There must be very two before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld Mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which, between these disparities, unites them.

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous, who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy, Who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, But friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course, he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside. Give those merits room. Let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of his thought?

To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near to the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit. Let us buy our inheritance to this guild by a long probation. Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit, a message, A thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news nor pottage.

I can get politics and chat and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that standard, the great defying eye, That scornful beauty of his main and action, do not pick yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities. Wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee, for ever, a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside.

The hues of opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself. As it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good. Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We must be our own before we can be another's. There it is at least this satisfaction in crime according to the Latin proverb.

You can speak to your accomplice on even terms. Crimen quos inquinat, a quat. To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of self-possession vitates, in my judgment, the entire relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until in their dialogue each stands for the whole world. What is so great as friendship? Let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere, who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say anything to such. No matter how ingenious, no matter how grateful and bland, there are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous.

Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you. Until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue. The only way to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer to a man by getting into his house. If unlike, His soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall never catch a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off, and they repel us. Why should we intrude? Late, very late, we perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society Would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with them as we desire, but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same degree is in them.

Then shall we meet as water with water, and if we should not meet them then, we shall not want them. For we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul. The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world, friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, That elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us and which we can love.

We may congratulate ourselves that the period of non-age, of follies, of blunders and of shame, is past in solitude. And when we are finished, men, we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons. Where no friendship can be, our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances. which no god attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the firstborn of the world, those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two Wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely.

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love, Whatever correction of our popular views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and, though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater. Let us feel, if we will, the absolute insulation of man. We are sure that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read books, in the instinctive faith, that these will call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we, the Europe An old faded garment of dead persons, the books, their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them saying, Who are you?

Unhand me. I will be dependent no more. Ah, seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each others, because we are more our own. A friend is Janus-faced. He looks to the past and to the future. He is the child of all foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days, presentments hover before me in the firmament. I ought, then, to dedicate myself to them. I go in that way I may seize them. I go out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own.

It would, indeed, give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you, But then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects. Then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind. and wish you were by my side again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions, not with yourself, but with your lustres, and I shall not be able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse, I will receive from them not what they have, but what they are.

They shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less subtle and pure. We will meet as though we met not. And part as though we parted not. It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew to carry a friendship greatly on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of its rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space. And only a small part of the reflecting planet let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away. But thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms.

Dost soar and burn with the gods of the Empyrean. It is though a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal. And when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth and feels its independency the surer. Yet these things may heartily be said Without a sort of treachery to the relation, the essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify. Both.

End of friendship.

queue_music Chapters 7