"Emerson,_Ralph_Waldo_-_The_Transcendentalist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and
the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical
way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify
their separation. They hold themselves aloof: they feel the
disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them, and
they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the
degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can
propose to them. They are striking work, and crying out for somewhat
worthy to do! What they do, is done only because they are
overpowered by the humanities that speak on all sides; and they
consent to such labor as is open to them, though to their lofty dream
the writing of Iliads or Hamlets, or the building of cities or
empires seems drudgery.

Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and
these must. The question, which a wise man and a student of modern
history will ask, is, what that kind is? And truly, as in
ecclesiastical history we take so much pains to know what the
Gnostics, what the Essenes, what the Manichees, and what the
Reformers believed, it would not misbecome us to inquire nearer home,
what these companions and contemporaries of ours think and do, at
least so far as these thoughts and actions appear to be not
accidental and personal, but common to many, and the inevitable
flower of the Tree of Time. Our American literature and spiritual
history are, we confess, in the optative mood; but whoso knows these
seething brains, these admirable radicals, these unsocial
worshippers, these talkers who talk the sun and moon away, will
believe that this heresy cannot pass away without leaving its mark.

They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation
is lonely; they repel influences; they shun general society; they
incline to shut themselves in their chamber in the house, to live in
the country rather than in the town, and to find their tasks and
amusements in solitude. Society, to be sure, does not like this very
well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he
declareth all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil,
nay, insulting; Society will retaliate. Meantime, this retirement
does not proceed from any whim on the part of these separators; but
if any one will take pains to talk with them, he will find that this
part is chosen both from temperament and from principle; with some
unwillingness, too, and as a choice of the less of two evils; for
these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial, --
they are not stockish or brute, -- but joyous; susceptible,
affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be
loved. Like the young Mozart, they are rather ready to cry ten times
a day, "But are you sure you love me?" Nay, if they tell you their
whole thought, they will own that love seems to them the last and
highest gift of nature; that there are persons whom in their hearts
they daily thank for existing, -- persons whose faces are perhaps
unknown to them, but whose fame and spirit have penetrated their