Read With Me! "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Two years before I retired from teaching to focus on writing, I had the Advanced Junior English class dumped in my lap literally one day before the school year began (because the teacher who was supposed to teach it and many other classes decided to not show up for the school year, so when I say it literally fell on my shoulders one day before the year began, it quite literally did." At the time, I was not happy about this at all because I lost an elective class I enjoyed teaching to teach a core class that I had absolutely nothing planned for. 

However, it turned out to be a class I really enjoyed teaching and that I wish I'd taught for many years. A small part of that was because I enjoyed the students in the class, I'll admit to that, but the main reason I really liked teaching it was because it was a class about American Literature.

In staying one step ahead of the students as I read through the textbook and decided which sections I wanted to focus upon (you can never cover everything in a textbook in a year -- well, not if you want the students to be able to keep up and for them actually to learn anything, that is), I found myself blown away by the section dealing with the Transcendental era led by Emerson. Sadly, until two years ago, I don't believe I'd ever been introduced to him. I had heard of him, of course, but I don't think I'd read any of his work.

I definitely had touched on works by other Transcendentalists through my long ago years of study at UNL because I know Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman, but I was never shown them together, and I just don't recall ever really learning about these great thinkers and writers. What I found when I began really reading them two years ago were my intellectual kindred spirits. I saw my own philosophies reflected in the words of writers who are long dead. I also realized why the movie "Dead Poets' Society" has always been so meaningful to me -- it is chock full of Transcendental quotes and philosophies.

"Walden" by Henry David Thoreau rocked my world when I first read it, and I continue to glean nuggets of wisdom each time I reread it, but today I want to look at the essay that Ralph Waldo Emerson is perhaps best known for -- "Self-Reliance."

The title alone tells you a lot, but it's what is inside the essay that makes a person really pause and think. The overriding point is to be a non-conformist. In the world I see reflected through the media and the few online social platforms I use, I wish more people would read Emerson's essays and really think about what they say and then apply those thoughts to their own lives. It's the "really think" part that I fear so many people shy away from doing anymore, but if high school juniors could do it and embrace this essay and others along with the entire text of "Walden," then literate grown adults also can.

I find the entire essay to be revelatory, but I won't share it all here. I will, though, share a few quotes from it in the order in which they are found within the essay.

1. "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 lot of ground which is given to him to till."

2. "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."  -- This is one of the most often quoted lines from this essay and rightfully so. We must believe in ourselves if we ever hope to accomplish something meaningful to ourselves.

3. "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." -- This would apply to being a woman, too. To being your own person. If you blindly follow what others are doing, why are you even here? What are you accomplishing with your life? Now, I don't promote anarchy or rule breaking for the simple act of breaking rules to show you're a nonconformist, but I do promote thinking before you act and deciding if what you are doing is true to who you really are. If it isn't, then why are you doing it? 

4. "I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it 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. My life should be unique."  -- That final sentence says it all for me.

5. This one is my favorite: "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." -- It was the Transcendental focus on solitude that really drew me into their world because I believe in the power and beauty of solitude. I wrote a poem called "Solitude" a long, long time ago which is about the wisdom we can draw from solitude, and I included it in my book State of Georgia . . . and Other Writings.

6. "For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure." -- Can you say "cancel culture?" Emerson lived in the 1800s. I wonder what he would think of our world today? 

7. "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."

-- as Phoebe says on Friends, "Oh, my God, he's not even appreciated in his own time. I'd give anything to not be appreciated in my own time." If you get it, you get it.

8. "Your genuine action will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing."

9. "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." 

10. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles." -- I believe that if more people had real principles and stuck to them, society and the world would be better for it. So many people wish for world peace; perhaps this could actually bring it.

In my retirement, I am focusing on my writing, but I am also focusing on me. One of the things I do each day, or at least a few times each week, is to read from Emerson's essays and other writings. When I have made my way through them, I will then turn to rereading Walden by Thoreau and some of his other writings. Then, it will be Whitman's turn as well as Dickinson's. Then, I'll probably simply start over because with each passing day, month, year of my life, my own wisdom grows and my perceptions of things change a bit. 

One thing I do know now is that two years ago I had an English class dumped in my lap, and it turned out to be one of the most enlightening experiences of my life. I hope you'll consider reading some of Emerson yourself if you never have or if it's been a long time since you last did.