"Emerson, Ralph W. - Representative Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good without
breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and
our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child
of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system;
and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies and
hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields there is room:
here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.

I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and
for thoughts; I like rough and smooth, "Scourges of God," and
"Darlings of the human race." I like the first Caesar; and Charles
V, of Spain; and Charles XII, of Sweden; Richard Plantagenet; and
Bonaparte, in France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal
to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing
firm on legs of iron, wellborn, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded
with advantages, drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and
supporters of his power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or
staff-like, carry on the work of the world. But I find him greater
when he can abolish himself and all heroes, by letting in this element
of reason, irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresistible
upward force, into our thought, destroying individualism; the power so
great that the potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives
a constitution to his people; a pontiff who preaches the equality of
souls and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an
emperor who can spare his empire.

But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three
points of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe, but
wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her
poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully
through life, ignorant of the ruin and incapable of seeing it,
though all the world point their finger at it every day. The worthless
and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest,
invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and
never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness
of their contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not
only in heroes and archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not
a rare contrivance that lodged the due inertia in every creature,
the conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed?
Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each is the
pride of opinion, the security that we are right. Not the feeblest
grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and
faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the
absurdities of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of
absurdity. Not one has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright
thought that made things cohere with this bitumen, fastest of cements?
But, in the midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure
goes by which Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that
should marshal us the way we were going. There is no end to his aid.
Without Plato we should almost lose our faith in the possibility of