For Ralph Waldo Emerson, beauty, genius, and wisdom are your native state, held captive only by the ramparts of conventionality, insecurity and the insincerity that pour forth as you seek the favorable opinions of others at the expense of the true expression of your rightful self.

Like many great men before him, Emerson too earned a badge of condemnation and was called a “poisoner of young minds”. He was even banned from Harvard for 30 years following an address he gave to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School in 1838. But, Emerson exemplified the bravery of thought that he hoped you might find within yourself. His wisdom changed our world through men like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, both inspired partly by Emerson’s transcendentalism movement.

I find it best to take Emerson in doses. I have called this “Part 1″ so that from time to time I might be able to add to this. In the excerpts below I’ve added italics to emphasize important points, the emphasis is not original to the writing.

Emerson’s “Introduction”:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also…

Several excerpts from Emerson’s essay titled “Self-Reliance”:

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your 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 every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

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 plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without pre-established harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

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. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny…

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

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.

More:
Wikipedia
Google Books – Full Text of “Self Reliance”

09-19-2006

Hey Sweetie,

I keep thinking about that movie last night.

I am curious about the writer or director of that movie.  I felt that he did a good job of splitting the various sides of ones personality into several pieces and then bringing those pieces to life in a compelling way through the characters of the movie.  We watch the drama of  “the innocent child”, the “depressed rebellious teen”, the rejected suicidal academician, the driven, success seeking “Winner”, the regretful old man who wishes he could do it all over again, and the woman who has to hold them all together as a family…  The characters are all so wildly different from each other, and yet I could identify with them all.  It is as if the writer took each stage of his own life and created a character to represent it.

I really think that the whole movie was intended as a Nietzsche-esque morality tale.  Of course, through Dwayne’s character  Nietzsche is mentioned and his book “Thus Spake Zarathustra” was displayed.  The “Moral of the story” given near the end of the movie is similar to one of Nietzsche’s teachings, which is “to embrace suffering“.  I believe it is Frank who argues that those times of suffering are the best times, the important times. Nietzsche felt that suffering was the most authentic human experience, and also one that human nature sets out to deny it self of.  And in denying itself, it inflicts it upon one another, and on the innocent.

Each character in the movie is discovering that the things they pursue are not only illusive, but ultimately meaningless.  They are what Nietzsche called “the tawdry baubles of a distracted life”.  The grandpa is reflecting on his life regretting that he didn’t pursue his passions more when he had the chance.  The father is desperately pursuing fame and success which seems to remain always out of his grasp.  Frank, the brother, has pursued a love and a career that have ultimately betrayed him.  The son has already abandoned all his dreams in life save one, his quest to be a test pilot.  Then life swoops down and strips him of his last and final hope when he realizes that he is colorblind – and thus ineligible for flight.  The daughter seeks in vain to be a beauty queen; a quest that is so transparently harmful, meaningless and futile, and so obviously destined to cause her to cast aside her own natural authentic self in exchange for the generic plasticity that the pageant encourages.  All this ultimately sets the stage for the entire cast of characters to have to question not just the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant, but the pageant of their own lives as well.  As Duane says near the end of the film, “life is just one beauty pageant after another”.   The only character who seems to be outside of this struggle is the mother.  Who in a way acts as the hub of the wheel without whom all the spokes would simply fly apart.

The Little Miss Sunshine Pageant serves as the vehicle for the process of group realization.  The palpable absurdity of watching Olive trying to win (or even compete) in this ridiculous pageant, and the sadness of seeing her tempted to exchange her own authentic beauty for the imitation of beauty the pageant rewards, helps the group to see that their own life pursuits have been absurd and inauthentic theatre pieces as well.  As they watch the little girl innocently striving towards something that will ultimately crush her, the group together comes to appreciate that those “tawdry baubles” which we seem so willing to trade our authentic selves for are actually rather meaningless and absurd.

Nietzsche wrote that it is that moment of discovery, when life has essentially defeated you and utterly destroyed you, that you are finally able to reflect honestly and realize that you have willingly exchanged your own authenticity for the “welter of mere conventionality, mere opinion, and the stock beliefs and phrases of a narcotized, self hypnotized population”.  It is in that moment that the only result must be a kind of “self loathing, the torture of mistrust, and the misery of him who is overcome.”  This becomes ones moment of awakening, and finally gives one the inner will to cast meaninglessness aside and embrace Authenticity.  Nietzsche felt that it is Suffering that is the path to Authenticity, and is why he felt that one should seek Suffering as a goal.

I agree with the spirit of this philosophy, but I disagree that one has to be destroyed in order to become authentic. I think that a better way to look at it is that if one chooses to place their hope and security in the inauthentic things, one will ultimately suffer and feel destroyed as a result.

Just a thought. I would like to see it again sometime.

Love, me

Click to enlarge image

More Little Miss Sunshine:

IMDb

04-03-2009
Addendum: I should add that I am not an expert on Friedrich Nietzsche (and certainly don’t claim to be).  At the time I saw the movie, I had been listening to (and inspired by) a lecture titled “Nietzsche at the Twilight” by Daniel Robinson (I highly recommend this series by the way).  It is quite possible that the quotes above may at times be my paraphrases of Professor Robinson’s paraphrases of Nietzsche’s work.  As this was a casual email , I was writing casually.  So please read it in this context.

The study participants were all dying of cancer, which means they had the somewhat unique experience of knowing, at least roughly, when they would die.  That must be a psychologically stressful experience for many.  After all, death is a rather big transition (understatement).  For the devout, death is a precursor to judgment as well.  I doubt many talked much about that, but it must be on their minds.  The fact is, death is a bigger deal to the devout than to the atheist whose expecting little else than lysis of the cellular membranes followed by the spilling of intracellular contents once  their biologically sustaining functions have ceased, and then, nothing.

I relate to the devout, I was once a devout fundamentalist Christian.  My purpose in life was the avoidance of sin, the conversion of others and the constant study of scripture.  But I can also relate to the atheist because I was raised by my parents to be an atheist. I am at neither extreme now, but having spent much of my life at the extremes, I empathize with the experience of both groups and I did not find the researchers outcome to be surprising.

For an atheist, or at least for this atheist, the love of life was undermined by a deep sense of meaninglessness.   I think the full scope of this is hard for many to grasp.  The ultimate purposelessness of life and the universe is so weighty as to render all relative meaning and purpose as inconsequential.  As a result, depression becomes a natural outcome, and even seems quite rational to the atheist.  I was deeply depressed throughout my childhood. I have come to believe it was the black hole inside me, left by the absence of spirituality.  It is no wonder that the atheist does not pursue drastic end of life measures.

I converted to Christianity at 19 and the pendulum swung full arc.  Ultimately, despite my youth, I became an important leader in my church.  As such I taught bible studies and counseled other members on a weekly basis.  I came to the realization that many deeply devout practitioners had become that way, at least in part, due to an overwhelming fear of death; a fear which propelled their devotion.  Others among the most devoted were reacting to a deeply painful sense of guilt and worthlessness.  Such a negative self worth appears humble and  righteous when expressed religiously.  It is not paradoxical to imagine such people taking extraordinary measures to extend their final hours.  I left my church five years later and since that time I have never fit nicely into any religious description (you might say I am post-denominational).

Ultimately, as Shakespeare once mused, death is that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.  It’s presence in our minds, whether ominous or victorious, gives weight to our lives.  The finite length of a lifetime imparts an immeasurable, if earthly, value to our final moments; and perhaps an infinite value to our souls.

Reference:
JAMA
Economist