Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sad is this continual postponement of life. I refuse sympathy & intimacy with people as if in view of some better sympathy & intimacy to come. But whence & when? I am already thirtyfour years old. Already my friends & fellow workers are dying from me. Scarcely can I say but I see any new men or women approaching me; I am too old to regard fashion; too old to expect patronage of any greater or more powerful. Let me suck the sweetness of those affections & consuetudes that grow near me,—that the Divine Providence offers me. These old shoes are easy to the feet. But no, not for mine, if they have an ill savor. I was made a hermit & am content with my lot. I pluck golden fruit from rare meetings with wise men. I can well abide alone in the intervals, and the fruit of my own tree shall have a better flavor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:322

I see with joy the visits of heat & moisture to my trees & please myself with this new property. I strangely mix myself with Nature & the Universal God works, buds, & blooms in my grove & parterre. I seem to myself an enchanter who by some rune or dumb gesture compels the service of superior beings. But the instant I separate my own from the tree & the potato field, it loses this piquancy. I presently see that I also am but an instrument like the tree, a reagent. The tree was to grow; I was to transplant & water it, not for me, not for it, but for all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:321

Trust your nature, the common mind. Fear not to sound its depths to ejaculate its grander emotions. Fear not how men shall take it. See you not they are following your thought & emotion because it leads them deeper into their own? I see with joy I am speaking their word, fulfilling their nature when I saw the word & nature most my own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:305

I learn evermore. In smooth water I discover the motion of my boat by the motion of trees & houses on shore, so the progress of my mind is proved by the perpetual change in the persons & things I daily behold.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:302

Mine Asia grudges the time she is called away from her babe because he grows so fast that each look is new & each is never to be repeated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:300

We live with those who help us not & so degrade us. We do not know it until a clear soul passes by & the incongruity betwixt our good & our bad angel is manifest. Best amputate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:298

In life all finding is not that thing we sought, but something else. The lover on being accepted, misses the wildest charm of the maid he dared not hope to call his own. The husband loses the wife in the cares of the household. Later, he cannot rejoice with her in the babe for by becoming a mother she ceases yet more to be a wife. With the growth of children the relation of the pair becomes yet feebler from the demands children make, until at last nothing remains of the original passion all these parricidal fruits proceeded; and they die because they are superfluous.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:297

How little of the man see we in his person. The man Minot who busies himself all the year round under my windows writes out his nature in a hundred works, in drawing water, hewing wood, building fence, feeding his cows, haymaking & a few times in the year he goes into the woods. Thus his human spirit unites itself with nature. Why need I ever hear him speak articulate words?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:296