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

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of
transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of
the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the
product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any
means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely
exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or
write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all
respects, to a remote posterity, as to cotemporaries, or rather to
the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or
rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an
older period will not fit this.

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which
attaches to the act of creation, -- the act of thought, -- is
transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a
divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a
just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is
perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue.
Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The
sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the
incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received
this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged.
Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not
by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set
out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles.
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to
accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given,
forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in
libraries, when they wrote these books.

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. Hence, the restorers of
readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

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. This every man is
entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost
all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees
absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is
genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound
estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive. The book,
the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop
with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, -- let