It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
It is a fundamental American ideal to believe in the inward self, and much of our language concerning the self comes to us through Emerson. To be sure he did not invent the American conception of the self, but he is our most vital prophet, and the prime influence upon American Poetry and Literature. For example, Walt Whitman was "simmering, simmering simmering,"and then read "Emerson and was consumed." Robert Frost is certainly the greatest disciple of Emerson, while Emily Dickenson almost certainly sought to evade Emerson where-ever possible. Allen Tate called Emerson "the devil." T.S. Elliott sought to erase Emersonian self Idolatry. Every American poet or mystic goes back to Emerson in some way even if they have never read him. Surely every American of every intellectual stripe can find resonance here:
A man should learn to detect and watch the gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty...I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, WHIM.
The lustres we behold in literature, art and philosophy are our own, though we have alienated them from ourselves. This gives us the freedom to appropriate that which we love and did not ourselves create. All American artforms from Poetry to Jazz are built upon this principle of the inward self and it's angst free ability to appropriate. For example: Charlie Parker's appropriation of Gershwin's "I've Got Rhythm" with his marvelous re-write "Anthropology" is a prime example. With-in Gershwin is Parker's own rejected thought re-worked. Emerson gives us the blueprint to owning intellectual property that is nor ours to possess. But what limit is there in Emerson upon the human capacity for appropriation? I have to confess I can find no limit whatsoever, and this is beautiful but should put us on moral guard.
Creeds are the disease of the intellect, our prayers the disease of the will.
This is a blueprint for the American Religion, which finds God with-in, and not anywhere else. Emerson is more explicit in his "Divinity School Address." (All of Emerson's Essays read to me like a Graduation ceremony address)
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets...the understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age. "This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man." The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes...Let me abmonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models.
This is misleadingly called Christianity by American churchgoers, ministers, and scholars who should probably know better. Yet the corruption of Christianity here is so pervasively American that it can hardly be separated from continental "creedal" forms of Protestantism and Catholicism. Creedless creeds that go inward to find truth make up the American Religion, and they form all of our mystical and liberal religious leanings.
At the same time there is a great triumphalism in Emerson. One must ask: How can a large group of people know truth if it can only be inwardly understood?
To be great is to be misunderstood.
American's are closest to the truth when they are alone and lonely. This is marvelous and deadly! Like John Milton, Emerson is a "sect of one." And he preaches being a sect of one to the masses. This shapes the American self like no other, since each of us believe ourselves to be correct and knowledgeable, and our neighbors to be media induced automatons, unable to think for themselves. Emerson speaks both to anti-establishment hippies, and the establishment itself, since nearly every American establishment wants to think of itself as an outsider. Emerson's essay's and particularly Self Reliance flatter us, and more importantly give us the traits upon which to flatter.
The essence of Emerson's writing is power and the self's relation to it. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard both wrote movingly of the emergence of the individual self, but it is Emerson who can express it in terms of American frontier-ism and our desire for space (Both inward and outward). "Space" is the prime word for the American psyche, and as we have run out of it in our cities, there has been more of a turn inwardly for it, and Emerson speaks to us regardless of our religion and politics.
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