26. Your conformity explains nothing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson "Self-Reliance" (1841)
Last week:
Emily Dickinson, ““Hope’ is the thing with feathers (c. 1861)
This week:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), philosopher poet, first published “Self Reliance,” a short essay that has moved so many readers, in 1841 as part of Essays: First Series. (I love that title as it presumes its sequel, “Essays, Second Series” — which came out three years later.)
His composition method speaks to the themes we find in “Self- Reliance”: his essays would begin with a journal entry about a conversation, idea, or experience. He called these journals his “savings bank” of ideas.
He arranged these ideas rhetorically as public lectures, whose notes were reprinted in pamphlets and newspapers. (This is how he made his living once he quit the ministry, from ticket sales and printings, though to be honest our friend also lived comfortably off of his wife’s inheritance). I would have loved to see him lecture live.
Finally, the printed copies were revised as essays in bound format. The essays are inspiring, contradictory, circular. They are also filled with one-liners to live by. In class we call this “bumpersticker Emerson” or “throwpillow Emerson.” We had a whole class in graduate school just on Emerson’s essays. I once attended 2-hour seminar classes on these treacherous lines:
Are they my poor?
And
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Twisting and turning, these are demanding essays — and in writing them in this format, Emerson insures that future readers would have the interpretive role of holding it all in his (or her) mind and generating new meaning with it, in the context of their own time and place. If you do not understand him, well, he has a note for you too:
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Emerson started journaling as a student at Harvard Divinity school, and this was his tool for discovering what he thought about events, lectures, his reading and his friends. He entitled that first volume, “The Wide World,” and in it he vowed to never write anything imitative or not his own. To do so was to attempt to locate the voice of the contemporary moment and to record the gleam of his intuition.
To believe our own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,--and our first thought, is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
In some ways, the journals themselves are a testament to the ideas in “Self-Reliance,” which tells us to stop trying to conform to others or to elders, and to think on our own two feet. This is generally styled in literature classes as “Individualism” or a self- trust so complete as “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true…” This concept is generally taught as motivating for American power and ideology, for good and bad. When Emerson writes that what is true for him is true “…for all men,” he makes a stinker of a universalizing gesture that he would later walk back (in Second Series).
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
I started journaling to know my own mind and to locate what was mine, in my late teens. I write my way through at least 3 journals a year, and in them I decide and evaluate, I record my intellectual life, and I ask myself for help, which sounds a little strange once I write it out loud. I ask myself for discipline, for patience, for bravery, for creativity and for forgiveness, right there in these pages between my notes from my reading and my grocery list.
These journals, filled to the brim with disconnected, half-believed ideas and complaints, are a gift to me because they are containers that do not leak. I know that the words laid there were put down with my most genuine intention to be honest and clear with myself. To open these journals and reread my scrawling handwriting is to revisit all the hundred tacks that led me to both this moment and to the intellectual environment that, for good or not, I must carry around with me.
There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.
Basically, I think he says that if you look from enough distance, your actions will all be justified, harmonious, and clearly aligned to a universal truth. It takes a lot of faith to believe this could possibly be true. I mean, come on.
But that is where I think the magic of this essay’s message lies. He insisted that each of us must make the journey inwards, forgive the inconsistencies and mistakes, and find our own alignment. Then, he promised, CAPITAL- T - TRUTH will be “rendered back to us” in a form we can understand, because it will be expressed in the vernacular of our own minds.
I’ll come back to Emerson for a discussion of Nature someday, for how could we skip the transcendental eyeball? and perhaps “Experience,” too. In the meantime, I hope you will join me in journalling a little this weekend.