"Emerson, Ralph W. - The Amereican Scholar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

_An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at
Cambridge, August 31, 1837_

Mr. President and Gentlemen,
I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our
anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do

not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of
histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for
parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the
advancement of science, like our cotemporaries in the British and
European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly
sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy
to give to letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of
an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, when
it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard
intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and
fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better
than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our
long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.
The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be
fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise,
that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that
poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the
constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers
announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?

In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but the
nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day, -- the
AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year, we come up hither to read one more
chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and
events have thrown on his character, and his hopes.

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity,
convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning,
divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just
as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that
there is One Man, -- present to all particular men only partially, or
through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find
the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer,
but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and
producer, and soldier. In the _divided_ or social state, these
functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do
his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The
fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must
sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other