self reliance and other essays by ralph waldo emerson pdf

• Project Gutenberg
• 73,607 free eBooks
• 29 by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Read now or download (free!)

Similar books, about this ebook.

• Privacy policy
• About Project Gutenberg
• Terms of Use
• Contact Information

Self-Reliance and Other Essays

About this ebook, ratings and reviews.

• Flag inappropriate

About the author

Rate this ebook, reading information, more by ralph waldo emerson.

Similar ebooks

A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Self-Reliance’ is an influential 1841 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson argues that we should get to know our true selves rather than looking to other people to fashion our individual thoughts and ideas for us. Among other things, Emerson’s essay is a powerful rallying cry against the lure of conformity and groupthink.

Emerson prefaces his essay with several epigraphs, the first of which is a Latin phrase which translates as: ‘Do not seek yourself outside yourself.’ This axiom summarises the thrust of Emerson’s argument, which concerns the cultivation of one’s own opinions and thoughts, even if they are at odds with those of the people around us (including family members).

This explains the title of his essay: ‘Self-Reliance’ is about relying on one’s own sense of oneself, and having confidence in one’s ideas and opinions. In a famous quotation, Emerson asserts: ‘In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.’

But if we reject those thoughts when they come to us, we must suffer the pangs of envy of seeing the same thoughts we had (or began to have) in works of art produced by the greatest minds. This is a bit like the phenomenon known as ‘I wish I’d thought of that!’, only, Emerson argues, we did think of it, or something similar. But we never followed through on those thoughts because we weren’t interested in examining or developing our own ideas that we have all the time.

In ‘Self-Reliance’, then, Emerson wants us to cultivate our own minds rather than looking to others to dictate our minds for us. ‘Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,’ he argues. For Emerson, our own minds are even more worthy of respect than actual religion.

Knowing our own minds is far more valuable and important than simply letting our minds be swayed or influenced by other people. ‘It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion’, Emerson argues, and ‘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.’

In other words, most people are weak and think they know themselves, but can easily abandon all of their principles and beliefs and be swept up by the ideas of the mob. But the great man is the one who can hold to his own principles and ideas even when he is the one in the minority .

Emerson continues to explore this theme of conformity:

A man must consider what a blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, – the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister?

He goes on:

This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

Emerson then argues that consistency for its own sake is a foolish idea. He declares, in a famous quotation, ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’

Instead, great men change and refine their opinions from one day to the next, as new evidence or new ideas come to light. Although this inconsistency may lead us to be misunderstood, Emerson thinks there are worse things to be. After all, great thinkers such as Pythagoras, Socrates, and even Jesus were all misunderstood by some people.

Emerson also argues that, just because we belong to the same social group as other people, this doesn’t mean we have to follow the same opinions. In a memorable image, he asserts that he likes ‘the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching’: that moment when everyone can have their own individual thoughts, before they are brought together by the priest and are told to believe the same thing.

Similarly, just because we share blood with our relatives, that doesn’t mean we have to believe what other family members believe. Rather than following their ‘customs’, ‘petulance’, or ‘folly’, we must be ourselves first and foremost.

The same is true of travel. We may say that ‘travel broadens the mind’, but for Emerson, if we do not have a sense of ourselves before he pack our bags and head off to new places, we will still be the same foolish person when we arrive at our destination:

Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Emerson concludes ‘Self-Reliance’ by urging his readers, ‘Insist on yourself; never imitate.’ If you borrow ‘the adopted talent’ of someone else, you will only ever be in ‘half possession’ of it, whereas you will be able to wield your own ‘gift’ if you take the time and effort to cultivate and develop it.

Although some aspects of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s argument in ‘Self-Reliance’ may strike us as self-evident or mere common sense, he does take issue with several established views on the self in the course of his essay. For example, although it is often argued that travel broadens the mind, to Emerson our travels mean nothing if we have not prepared our own minds to respond appropriately to what we see.

And although many people might argue that consistency is important in one’s thoughts and opinions, Emerson argues the opposite, asserting that it is right and proper to change our opinions from one day to the next, if that is what our hearts and minds dictate.

Similarly, Emerson also implies, at one point in ‘Self-Reliance’, that listening to one’s own thoughts should take precedence over listening to the preacher in church.

It is not that he did not believe Christian teachings to be valuable, but that such preachments would have less impact on us if we do not take the effort to know our own minds first. We need to locate who we truly are inside ourselves first, before we can adequately respond to the world around us.

In these and several other respects, ‘Self-Reliance’ remains as relevant to our own age as it was to Emerson’s original readers in the 1840s. Indeed, perhaps it is even more so in the age of social media, in which young people take selfies of their travels but have little sense of what those places and landmarks really mean to them.

Similarly, Emerson’s argument against conformity may strike us as eerily pertinent to the era of social media, with its echo chambers and cultivation of a hive mind or herd mentality.

In the last analysis, ‘Self-Reliance’ comes down to trust in oneself as much as it does reliance on oneself. Emerson thinks we should trust the authority of our own thoughts, opinions, and beliefs over the beliefs of the herd.

Of course, one can counter such a statement by pointing out that Emerson is not pig-headedly defending the right of the individual to be loudly and volubly wrong. We should still seek out the opinions of others in order to sharpen and test our own. But it is important that we are first capable of having our own thoughts. Before we go out into the world we must know ourselves , and our own minds. The two-word axiom which was written at the site of the Delphic Oracle in ancient Greece had it right: ‘Know Thyself.’

Amazon Prime includes:

Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.

• Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
• Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
• Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
• A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
• Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
• Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access

Important:  Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.

Buy new: .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } $5.00 $ 5 . 00 FREE delivery Friday, May 31 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35 Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

Return this item for free.

Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select the return method

Save with Used - Very Good .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } $1.00 $ 1 . 00 $3.98 delivery Tuesday, June 4 Ships from: glenthebookseller Sold by: glenthebookseller

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Follow the authors

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Self-Reliance and Other Essays (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy) Paperback – Unabridged, October 13, 1993

Purchase options and add-ons.

Essayist, poet, and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) propounded a transcendental idealism emphasizing self-reliance, self-culture, and individual expression. The six essays and one address included in this volume, selected from Essays, First Series (1841) and Essays, Second Series (1844), offer a representative sampling of his views outlining that moral idealism as well as a hint of the later skepticism that colored his thought. In addition to the celebrated title essay, the others included here are "History," "Friendship," "The Over-Soul," "The Poet," and "Experience," plus the well-known and frequently read Harvard Divinity School Address.

• Print length 128 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Dover Publications
• Publication date October 13, 1993
• Reading age 14 years and up
• Dimensions 5.2 x 0.34 x 8.27 inches
• ISBN-10 0486277909
• ISBN-13 978-0486277905
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Similar items that may deliver to you quickly

From the brand

Debuting in 1990, the Thrift Editions library of classic literature is a top choice for teachers, students, librarians, and recreational readers around the world. Dover’s longstanding mission of exceptional value has consistently offered excellence in classic fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry.

Dover Thrift Editions are low priced, compact (5"x8"), complete and unabridged.

Are there any collections of stories or poetry in the Dover Thrift Editions?

In addition to single title books, Dover offers books of anthologies in fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Check out our Thrift Editions of short stories, literary collections, poetry, gothic and horror, SciFi/Fantasy, crime/mystery/thrillers and more. Happy Reading!

What formats are the Thrift Editions available in?

All are available in an easy to carry paperback version and most titles are available for the Kindle e-reader.

American History/History

Visit the Store

Black History

Biography and Autobiography

Classic Novels

Crime, Mystery and Thrillers

Gothic and Horror

Literary Collections

Political Science

SciFi and Fantasy

Short Stories

Speeches and Quotations

From the publisher.

Essayist, poet, and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson propounded a transcendental idealism emphasizing self-reliance, self-culture, and individual expression.

This volume outline the great transcendentalist's moral idealism as well as hinting at the later scepticism that colored his thought.

• Self-Reliance
• The Over-soul

“Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.”

Editorial Reviews

From the back cover, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Dover Publications; Unabridged edition (October 13, 1993)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0486277909
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0486277905
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.34 x 8.27 inches
• #15 in Transcendentalism Philosophy
• #81 in American Fiction Anthologies
• #228 in Essays (Books)

About the authors

Ralph waldo emerson.

There are few people as quoted and quotable as Ralph Waldo Emerson, founder of the transcendental movement and author of classic essays as Self-Reliance, Nature, and The American Scholar. Emerson began his career as a Unitarian minister and later put those oratory skills to move us toward a better society. More remains written on him than by him.

American Renaissance Books

American Renaissance is a series of classic books designed and published by ST Book Arts. Visit TorodeDesign.com to see more.

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Eyeball and Over-Soul: Biographer James Marcus on the Infinitude of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Marcus (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an overflowing font of words: essays, lectures, poems, and one of the most monumental journals in American letters. A public intellectual who preached the infinitude of private man, he befriended some of the leading literary lights of his day, abandoned the pulpit, and delivered 1,500 lectures across the country on a dizzying array of topics, from abolition to the philosophy of history. But who was the man who became the Sage of Concord, and what can his journey from spiritual seeker to transcendentalist figurehead teach us about the America we inhabit today—an America Emerson helped write into being?

In Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Princeton, 2024), author James Marcus sets aside the strictures and pieties of a strict cradle-to-grave biography to deliver a fresh perspective on the writer of “Self-Reliance.” Borrowing Emerson’s own tendency toward the discursive, the associative, and the obliquely interconnected, Marcus pairs a deeply researched account of Ralph Waldo’s life with close readings of his greatest works, deep dives into the pivotal moments of his career, and illuminating personal asides. “His Emerson is a marvel,” writes critic (and former LOA LIVE panelist ) Merve Emre, “a skeptic and an apostle, a creature of flawed feelings and novel ideals, a lover, a mourner, a wit, and a visionary.”

Below, Marcus discusses his Emersonian odyssey, from browsing “Circles” late at night in search of emotional sustenance to finding the light amid his subject’s “bumper-to-bumper” sentences.

LOA: You seem to have a connection to Emerson that goes beyond just academic interest. Can you talk about the genesis of this book and what initially drew you to him ?

James Marcus: I began to read Emerson intently twenty-five years ago, during a very challenging interval of my own life. I had a demanding job, a wife who was chronically ill, a child who was having problems — and at night, after they’d gone to sleep, I would find myself picking up a paperback of Emerson’s essays and reading a few pages of “Circles” or “Self-Reliance” or “Experience.”

I didn’t know much about Emerson, and at the beginning of my encounter with him, I found some of his work vexing, as many people do. It’s an old-fashioned idiom, he doesn’t bare his wounds very much, and the actual texture of his prose is not immediately familiar to a reader in 2024. But I must have been responding to something there, because I kept returning.

The next step was to learn more about the person, so I started reading biographies, and then, crucially, his journals and letters. Because he can be quite distant and starchy and elevated, I feel that the lovable part of his personality does not always spring out at a casual reader. But as you get used to his voice, there is something disarming and vulnerable that emerges.

1857 daguerrotype of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Josiah Johnson Hawes (Public Domain)

LOA: Even though Emerson’s essays famously wend in these discursive or even contradictory directions, what core ideas seem consistent throughout his life? Are there recurring preoccupations and interests despite his free-roving nature?

JM: I don’t really think of Emerson as a philosopher. His thinking is so anti-systematic that he would be shooting torpedoes into the hull of whatever philosophical system he tried to erect. To an extent, he thought that most philosophical and religious systems were straitjackets and the idea was to get out of them, not to make one for yourself and then for other people.

But despite that, there are ideas you find in almost all his writing. One of them has to do with what he called “the infinitude of the private man,” meaning that the individual, the subjective and intuitive self, could do all the heavy lifting in life and in your understanding of the universe. It was the self-reliant credo of: Do not turn to the church, do not turn to the old books or purveyors of wisdom, do not turn to the state. You should look at reality as if it has never been seen before. Examine it with your own eyes. Describe it in your own words. Rely on your instinct.

To me, that’s a beautiful thought. Still, there can be a downside to individualism and self-reliance, which is that it tends to shatter the bonds of community. In his life, Emerson came to understand that you were, in fact, inextricable from other people. But on an abstract and argumentative basis, through most of his career, he was advocating for the supremacy of the individual.

Illustration of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” by Christopher Pearse Cranch, c. 1837–1839 (Harvard University / Public Domain)

His kicking over of the confinements of organized Christianity is part of the same impulse. He came from seven generations of ministers, and after about three years as minister of the Second Church in Boston—a very prestigious Unitarian pulpit—he couldn’t stand it anymore. He was already feeling that Christianity as practiced was dead. It was a calcified institution with calcified rites and a calcified understanding of the world. So he left.

His thought was not always anti-Christian in a virulent way, but it was no longer Christian. He had strenuously argued that God was not out there as a sort of celestial supervisory presence, that God was in the individual human being. A great power had been relocated into the interior of every human soul.

LOA: There’s obviously a long thread in American self-conception about individualism, as well as the feeling of reinvention, looking for the new, throwing off old systems. What are your thoughts on Emerson’s Americanness? Does he speak to something foundational in the nation’s identity?

JM: His Americanness is very deep. He was one of the first writers to really ponder the question of what it meant to be an American—specifically an American writer, but also how being an American represented a rupture with being a European. His stress on individualism we can trace partly to his upbringing and to his own neuroses, but there’s something historical and cultural about it, too. This gospel that you can make yourself up from scratch was for many people the allure of coming to America in the first place. You could escape a rigorously class-bound society and reinvent yourself in a way that wasn’t possible in England or France, the nearest points of reference for Emerson and his peers.

I just imagine him walking around late at night, all the lights are on, he’s in his boxers (if they were even invented then). There is a hilarious and very human way in which he doesn’t conform to his own principles about life.

When Emerson went to England in 1847 to lecture and collect material for what would become his book English Traits , he was struck by the sense that everything was finished. The landscape had been manicured and husbanded and used up, and all was locked into place except for the amazing juggernaut of the British economy. He felt that England, as glorious as it was, might be reaching a kind of imperial senescence — that it would soon be going downhill. Whereas in America, everything was newness and possibility.

Emerson was partly shaped by these perceptions, but then he expressed them so eloquently and for so long that his notion of Americanness seeped back into the culture. Some aspects of that thinking—the idea that the United States was essentially an empty playground of natural resources to be claimed by white settlers—were wrong and strike many readers as offensive today. But the mythological feeling is certainly still very common in America now.

Photo of Emerson’s study in Concord, MA, c. 1888 (Library of Congress)

LOA: One of the great narratives of Emerson’s life is his evolving relationship to the question of slavery. Could you talk about this movement, which begins with him being more politically aloof or even disdainful of some of the more radical figures he encountered, and ends with him speaking so powerfully against the evils of slavery?

JM: Emerson’s record on slavery and abolition is fascinating and contradictory. In the early 1830s, abolitionism was still a fringe belief, and Emerson was aligned with many of his contemporaries in feeling that slavery was wrong, but not having any idea how to get rid of it.

By 1844, though, he had really pivoted. A key moment was a speech he delivered that year at a tenth anniversary celebration of emancipation in the British West Indies. For the first time he read deeply in the literature of abolition, particularly British literature of abolition, and it finally connected. He delivered a fantastic, detailed, scorching denunciation of slavery. From there until the dawn of the Civil War, he had an increasing commitment to the cause. He gave a series of speeches, many of them very strong. He raised money, after the war broke out, for the Massachusetts 54th, among the first federal all-Black regiments.

He never became a full-time activist. Just temperamentally, the mosh pit of politics was not designed for him. But he recognized that a great communal effort would be required to solve the problem of slavery.

There’s a beautiful moment, toward the end of the Civil War, where he says that the emblem of the United States should be not the bald eagle holding its quiver of antagonistic arrows. It should be, he said, “the Negro soldier lying in the trenches by the Potomac with his spelling book in one hand and his musket in the other.” He was essentially saying: That is the best of America, that should represent us to the world. It’s also very Emersonian to note the dual emancipation going on: one was the literal breaking of the chains with the musket, the other was learning to read and having your consciousness liberated.

LOA: Could you talk about Emerson’s friendships—or maybe frenemy-ships—with Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller? Who were his peers and how did they influence each other?

JM: Emerson was a withdrawn, sometimes very socially awkward person. He himself once adverted to what he called “the porcupine impossibility of contact” with other human beings. Of course, there’s a wonderful consistency in feeling that way and then arguing that solitude is the purest condition of human life. If you don’t play well with others, that’s maybe a natural conclusion.

But Emerson was embedded in the social world of Concord, where he moved in 1836 after his marriage to Lydia Jackson, and he lived there until he died in 1882. Robert Gross wrote a wonderful book, The Transcendentalists and Their World , where he made that argument with an almost forensic reconstruction of life in Concord at that time.

Friendship was a fraught thing for him. He wrote an entire essay about it, which conveyed both his exalted feelings about it and also his fear that it would always disappoint him. He set the bar very high for transcendental friendship, almost guaranteeing it would fail.

Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller (Public Domain)

And yet you did have these people, like Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, with whom he had very intense and convoluted friendships, more akin to romances than regular friendships. There was an enormous power of attachment, an enormous capacity to hurt each other. That’s not a person who’s a hermit. That’s a person whose life was immensely enriched and complicated by other people.

There’s a funny note in the journals. It’s a February day and Emerson’s family has gone away for the weekend. He’s spent the past few years preaching the infinitude of private man, trying to escape into nature. And yet he writes, “Solitude is fearsome and heavy-hearted. I have never known a man who had so much good accumulated upon him as I have. Reason, health, wife, child, friends, competence, reputation, the power to inspire and the power to please. Yet leave me alone a few days and I creep about as if in expectation of a calamity.”

He’s literally falling apart with no one in the house. I just imagine him walking around late at night, all the lights are on, he’s in his boxers (if they were even invented then). There is a hilarious and very human way in which he doesn’t conform to his own principles about life, and friendship is very much an example of that. He was a social creature despite preaching the opposite much of the time.

LOA: You refer to Emerson’s journals as “an open pit mine,” where his rhetorical concepts were deposited and refined over time. What emerges in the journals that you don’t get from the published works?

JM: The journals are a literary monument of American culture. If Emerson had never published a word in his lifetime, and then some archivist unearthed his journals and published them in 1950, he would still be one of the greatest American writers of the nineteenth century.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1820–1842

I just read a book by Lawrence Rosenwald called Emerson and the Art of the Diary , which makes that very argument: the journal was the literary form that Emerson discovered for himself and where he really did his work. For Rosenwald, the published essays and lectures are derivative products of the journals. When you read an edition of the journals like the Harvard one, which is very copiously annotated, you’re constantly coming across notes at the bottom of the page saying, “a vertical pencil line drawn through this paragraph.” And then you’ll find the paragraph in “Nature” or “Self-Reliance.” Emerson was constantly shunting material out of the journals into his published work.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1841–1877

It wasn’t necessarily a one-way process. He would recopy bits from a lecture back into a later version of the journal to redo them, or draw repeatedly on one part of the journal and parcel it out into different things. You have this real-time logging of his thoughts, with the ever-present option to go backward or forward and reuse or revisit any of it.

Not everyone is going to buy these sixteen volumes of the journal, but there are wonderful selections. The two Library of America volumes , edited by Rosenwald, are great. There is a vivacity to them and a sense of Emerson’s personality that has been pruned out of the essays. There are boring moments, but sometimes a terribly quotidian thing becomes really interesting. You see him acting out what he said in “Circles” about the importance of taking yourself by surprise: “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and do something without knowing how or why.”

Excerpts from Emerson’s journals (Harvard University)

LOA: I’m glad you mentioned surprise. In all your reading of Emerson, can you think of a detail of his life or an aspect of his writing that surprised you most? Something that made you say, “That’s not who I thought Emerson was.”

JM: Discovering his method of composition was revolutionary. He not only created this monument of a journal, decade after decade, but he rigorously indexed it. There were hundreds of pages of indexing, and what that meant was when it was time to write, say, an essay on friendship, he could go to the index, look up friendship, and find all the sentences he’d ever written about it, coded according to which notebook they were in. Then he would take them all out and splice them together.

Once I realized that, it was incredibly liberating. I was familiar with the sensation in the essays of being bogged down by bumper-to-bumper sentences, and suddenly I thought, “Well, that’s what they are .” The thing to do, then, was just keep moving until another electrifying sentence lit up your brain. Emerson licenses you to take away what you want, to make a mini-anthology out of his anthology.

Reading about his two marriages was also terribly humanizing. Marriage number one was to Ellen Tucker, who was sixteen when Emerson met her, seventeen when they got engaged, eighteen when they got married, and nineteen when she died of tuberculosis. The imminence of her death hung over their entire marriage. Emerson was eight years older, but he was utterly infatuated with her, and her death was a catastrophe for him. He felt that he would not marry again. He said, “There is one baptism, one birth, one first love.”

And yet a few years later he married Lydia Jackson, who was a little older than him, a person of enormous theological and literary and spiritual curiosity. That was a very different sort of marriage. It wasn’t the doomed, infatuated first-timer. Instead you had a person who was very much Emerson’s equal, and who had to deal with the very bitter pill of discovering, a few years into their marriage, that her husband was not really a Christian. They both had been practicing a sort of eclectic, do-it-yourself form of Christianity, but the difference was that Emerson was trending away from it altogether, whereas Lidian, as he called her, was still a traditional Christian. That overshadowed their life.

Daguerreotype of Lidian Jackson Emerson and son Edward Waldo Emerson, c. 1850 (Public Domain)

Being married to Emerson was not always easy, I’m sure. Yet they stayed married for forty-six years, and when you read their letters, you see—along with some of the impatience and intolerance that will grow out of a long marriage—a lot of affection and mutual understanding.

Finally, I was surprised to learn more about the dementia, quite possibly the Alzheimer’s, that enveloped the last decade of Emerson’s life. This wasn’t hidden by other biographies, but sometimes they skated over it. He was one of the first really famous people to be observed retreating into the mists of this kind of dementia. He continued to lecture when he could no longer write, reading from pages that his daughter Ellen sewed together so that if he dropped them, they wouldn’t be scattered and impossible for him to reassemble.

Emerson was aware he was losing his memory, and like any dementia patient in the earlier phases, he would come up with workarounds. He called his dressing gown “the red chandelier.” He called the umbrella “the thing that is always taken away.” Seeing someone who was a worshipper of language his entire life struggle with this subtraction of language is very touching to me.

LOA: For those who come to Emerson for the first time through your book, or who haven’t read him since school, where would you recommend they start with his work?

JM: A great place to start is with his essay “The Transcendentalist,” which is not as celebrated as some of the others but is a rare instance of Emerson actually trying to explain something with maximum clarity. He’s not simply letting the Over-soul descend into him and speak. For that reason, it’s a really fun read. He gets down to the nub of it, but it’s also quite humorous.

Any of the anthologies or selections of his journals are a great place to start as well. I’m not suggesting people pick them up and read them front to back. Just flip around. They’re a browser’s delight because they’re so full of the spectacle of Emerson surprising himself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures

For the stouter hearts who’d like to march into the more challenging essays, “Circles” is a very beautiful one, and it’s not impenetrable. It has a central idea that the circle is the great organizing metaphor of human life, and he lays it out in some very beautiful language. “Self-Reliance” is a key text for Emerson, but also for America and American culture, and I think it’s pretty damn readable.

But for me, his greatest single essay might be “Experience,” the one he wrote in the wake of his son’s death. It is shot through with terrible grief and a kind of sleepy, hallucinatory, depressed feeling. The topic makes him wrestle with some philosophical dilemmas, but a lot of it is about grief and survivor’s guilt. There’s a very complicated set of metaphors operating there, and it’s a very dense piece of writing. You just have to stay with it.

The philosopher and Emersonian Stanley Cavell said that in an Emerson essay, every sentence can be the topic sentence. I know exactly what he means: the sense that the center is everywhere and nowhere. “Experience” makes you feel like the thought and feeling and spiritual investigation of a four-hundred-page book has been compressed like coal into diamonds.

Based on my own experience, I would advise people to learn a little about Emerson, too. Sometimes this orphic voice issuing out of the skies can be very beautiful and exhilarating, but it seems unanchored to a human being. To know that he was a living, breathing, suffering, laughing person puts flesh on the bones of his sentences.

The home of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, MA, c. 1883 (Library of Congress)

James Marcus is an editor, translator, and critic who has written and lectured widely on Emerson. His essays and criticism have appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker , the Times Literary Supplement , and Harper’s Magazine . He is the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.com Juggernaut .

Related News & Views

“You Want to Possess the Words”: Jay Parini on Why We Can’t Stop Reading Robert Frost

“Away from the Crowd”: Dan Barry on the Iconoclastic Genius of Jimmy Breslin

Commitment, Capacity, Compassion: Kim E. Nielsen on American Icon Helen Keller

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.

Sign up for our monthly e-newsletter and receive a coupon for 10% off your first LOA purchase. Discount offer available for first-time customers only.

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Benefits of Using Safe Crypto Casinos. One of the most captivating reasons people drift towards Australian casinos online-casino-au com is the promise of anonymity. Safe platforms guarantee that your identity remains a secret. Quick Payouts and Minimal Fees. No one likes waiting, especially for winnings. Safe crypto casinos ensure that payouts are swift and the fees minimal, if not non-existent.

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come. Ozwin Casino offers an exciting array of top-notch slots that cater to every player's preferences. From classic fruit machines to cutting-edge video slots, Ozwin Casino Real Money collection has it all. With stunning graphics, immersive themes, and seamless gameplay, these slots deliver an unparalleled gaming experience. Some popular titles include Mega Moolah, Gonzo's Quest, and Starburst, known for their massive jackpots and thrilling bonus features. Ozwin Casino's slots are not just about luck; they offer hours of entertainment and the chance to win big, making it a must-visit for slot enthusiasts.

Self-Reliance

Publisher description.

"Self-Reliance" is an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a prominent American philosopher and essayist from the 19th century. Published in 1841, the essay explores the concept of individualism and the importance of trusting one's own instincts and beliefs. Emerson advocates for the rejection of conformity and societal expectations, encouraging readers to rely on their own intuition and inner convictions. The essay is a powerful call to embrace self-reliance as a means of personal growth and fulfillment, promoting the idea that true wisdom arises from individual experience and authenticity."

More Books by Ralph Waldo Emerson

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

The Essay on Self-reliance

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

15,325 Views

15 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

For users with print-disabilities

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by Unknown on March 2, 2009

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)