In Defense of Emerson
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24 January 2010
A backlash against Emerson? Say it isn’t so. I reserve a great fondness for Ralph Waldo, great bard of Self-Trust. I’ve always found his philosophy of how to read — widely, freely, somewhat predatorily, taking what you can, discarding the rest, not getting bogged down by reverence for a static canon but approaching the canon with an “active soul” — particularly helpful and relevant in this Age of Information.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul…
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
-from “The American Scholar”