Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson

Habit is a thing of compound character which forges chains for human nature at the same time that it announces its consistency & independence. It is a thorough & perfect servitude, but man voluntarily imposed it upon himself. It is a noble foresight which at once determines upon actions that will be perpetually proper, and makes one resolution answer for a thousand, and once made, minds with divine force.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 1:128

We complain of change and vicissitude. Say rather, there pursues us always an eternal sameness, an unchanging identity. Did not Caesar and the men of Rome see the same stars, suffer from the same storms, feel the same infirmities? Were they not chilled, wet, and warmed by the same variations of weather, were they not hungry, athirst, ragged & unfortunate, like the men of this month? Our common conversation but translates theirs, just as we apply to ourselves their addresses to the elements or the feelings. The world, the universe is just the same; only, each man’s mind undergoes a perpetual change, and the vainglorious dreamer attributes to Nature and Fortune the alteration which transpires within himself alone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 1:112

Never mistake yourself to be great, or designed for greatness, because you have been visited by an indistinct and shadowy hope that something is reserved for you beyond the common lot. It is easier to aspire than to do the deeds. The very idleness which leaves you leisure to dream of honour is the insurmountable obstacle between you and it.Those who are fitly furnished for the weary passage from mediocrity to greatness seldom find time or appetite to indulge that hungry and boisterous importunity for excitement which weaker intellects are prone to display.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 1:100

“Mixing with the thousand pursuits & passions & objects of the world as personified by Imagination is profitable & entertaining.”

Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 1:3

It’s with those words that Ralph Waldo Emerson begins his journal, the book called Wide World, on January 25, 1820. Who would pay attention to the words of a seventeen year old boy if we didn’t know who he would become? His early journals are full of promise, but are also those of a naive youth, trying to stake out his path to genius. He may have hoped that he would attain something, but at that age, such hope is little more than blind faith in the future. Yet as you read the early journals, in spite of the excessive language and florid prose, you can spot a hint of what is to come.

Lawrence Rosenwald, editor of the two Library of America volumes of Emerson’s journals, is interviewed by the Library of America about the journals, his choices, and about Emerson as a writer.

There are some interesting nuggets in this brief interview, but anyone truly interested in the journals should look up Rosenwald’s Emerson and the Art of the Diary, as well as the two volumes of journals that Rosenwald edited for the Library of America: Selected Journals 1820-1842 and Selected Journals 1841-1877.