Self Reliance?i

Dear American Literati & colleagues

across the curriculum

(Borders without courses).

Sampling Emerson’s “Self Reliance.”

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.

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 whines.

I shun father and mother and wife

and brother, when my genius

calls me.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy

against the manhood of every one of

its members… The virtue in most

request is conformity. Self-reliance

is its aversion. [Society] loves not

realities and creators, but names

and customs.

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.

Noble words?  Or awful?  Good graduation speech

fodder (some of it)  if not so local food for thought.

Ayn Rand and Ann Coulter might salute, Glenn Beck  

and the Tea Baggers—them too.  And I don’t like

any of them. I admit it. Not at all.

Yet I love Emerson. Him and Thoreau: as radical

and fundamental  as I know. Inspiring.  Both of

them, self-help gurus I read to be refreshed,

revived. Resurrected:  recommending the

purposeful life. Liberal artists.   

But I’m perplexed at this moment. How can I love

an Emerson and hate a Beck-ian?  Celebrate

Thoreau and scoff at a Palen?  

Disingenuous?

Principles.

Convictions.

Belief systems.

Prejudices

Biases.

Do they govern me or do I govern them?

Where do they come from? Culture traps

or idiosyncratic invention? I’ve been

reading in the liberal arts forever and

have advanced degrees and am an

inquiring mind and ought to know

better.

Feel free to push reply or reply-to-all

if you can help me out. I’m always

just asking for it.

xxxooo, Sam.