Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last night at 11 o’clock, a son was born to me. Blessed child! a lovely wonder to me, and which makes the Universe look friendly to me. How remote from my knowledge, how alien, yet how kind does it make the Cause of Causes appear! This stimulated curiosity of the father sees the graces & instincts which exist, indeed, in every babe, but unnoticed in others; the right to see all, know all, to examine nearly, distinguishes this relation, & endears this sweet child. Otherwise I see nothing in it of mine; I am no conscious party to any feature, any function, any perfection I behold in it. I seem to be merely a brute occasion of its being & nowise attaining to the dignity even of a second cause no more than I taught it to suck the breast.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:234

If one man gave me a loadstone & another taught me its property of turning to the north when suspended, I think I should owe more to him who showed me its properties, than to him who gave me the mineral.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:233

There is one advantage which every man finds in setting himself a literary task as these my lectures, that it gives him the high pleasure of reading which does not in other circumstances attain all its zest. When the mind is braced by the weighty expectations of a prepared work, the page of whatever book we read, becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant & the sense of our author is as broad as the world. There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:233

The world is the gymnasium on which the youth of the Universe are trained to strength & skill. When they have become masters of strength & skill, who cares what becomes of the masts & bars & ropes on which they strained their muscle?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:229

The very highest praise we think of any writer, painter, sculptor, or builder is that he actually possessed the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:226

The individual is always dying. The Universal is life. As much truth & goodness as enters into me so much I live. As much error & sin so much death is in me.

Yet Reason never informs us how the world was made. I suppose my friends have some relation to my mind. Perhaps they are its thoughts, taking form & outness though in a region above my will & that in that fact, my plastic nature, I have a pledge of their restoration: that is again, hereafter, I shall be able to get my thoughts Outness & enjoy myself in persons again.

‘Tis very strange how much we owe the perception of the absolute solitude of the Spirit to the affections. I still love & cannot arouse myself to thought, I go & sit with my friend & in the endeavor to explain my thought to him or her, I lay bare the awful mystery to myself as never before & start at the total loneliness & infinity of one man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:223

I rejoice in human riches when I see how manifold are the gifts of men. He is the rich man who can see and avail himself of all their faculties. What should I know of the world but that one man is forever rubbing glass, grinding lenses, cutting with diamonds &c; another would always be mixing colors; another is a hunter, & puts his dog’s nose into every thicket & knows what the partridge & the musquash are doing; another mines for coal; another makes almanacks; another traverses Iceland; another prints the book; & so I in my country farmhouse for 1500 dollars can have the good of all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:223

The brilliant & warm day let me out this morn. into the wood & to Goose Pond. Amid the many colored trees I thought what principles I might lay down as the foundations of this Course of Lectures I shall read to my fellow citizens.

1. There is a relation between man & nature so that whatever is in matter is in mind.

2. It is a necessity of the human nature that it should express itself outwardly & embody its thought.

As all creatures are allured to reproduce themselves, so must the thought be imparted in Speech. The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. What is in will out. Action is as great a pleasure & cannot be forborne.

3. It is the constant endeavor of the mind to idealize the actual, to accommodate the shows of things to the desires of the mind. Hence architecture & all art.

4. It is the constant tendency of the mind to Unify all it beholds, or to reduce the remotest facts to a single law. Hence all endeavors at classification.

5. There is a parallel tendency / corresponding Unity in nature which makes this just, as in the composition of the compound shell, or leaf, or animal from few elements.

6. There is a tendency in the mind to separate particulars & in magnifying them to lose sight of the connexion of the object with the Whole. Hence all false views, Sects;

7. Underneath all Appearances & causing all appearances are certain eternal laws which we call the Nature of Things.

8. There is one Mind common to all individual men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:221