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

who enters the lists, but we are frivolous and volatile, and by low
aims and ill example do what we can to defeat this hope. Then these
youths bring us a rough but effectual aid. By their unconcealed
dissatisfaction, they expose our poverty, and the insignificance of
man to man. A man is a poor limitary benefactor. He ought to be a
shower of benefits -- a great influence, which should never let his
brother go, but should refresh old merits continually with new ones;
so that, though absent, he should never be out of my mind, his name
never far from my lips; but if the earth should open at my side, or
my last hour were come, his name should be the prayer I should utter
to the Universe. But in our experience, man is cheap, and friendship
wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their
absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they
let us go. These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There
is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this
one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely
exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist
in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible
friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and
what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without
service to the race of man.

With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it
cannot be wondered at, that they are repelled by vulgarity and
frivolity in people. They say to themselves, It is better to be
alone than in bad company. And it is really a wish to be met, -- the
wish to find society for their hope and religion, -- which prompts
them to shun what is called society. They feel that they are never
so fit for friendship, as when they have quitted mankind, and taken
themselves to friend. A picture, a book, a favorite spot in the
hills or the woods, which they can people with the fair and worthy
creation of the fancy, can give them often forms so vivid, that these
for the time shall seem real, and society the illusion.

But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw
them from the conversation, but from the labors of the world; they
are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they
bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not
willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious
rites, in the enterprises of education, of missions foreign or
domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance
society. They do not even like to vote. The philanthropists inquire
whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear
that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for
then is he paralyzed, and can never do anything for humanity. What
right, cries the good world, has the man of genius to retreat from
work, and indulge himself? The popular literary creed seems to be,
`I am a sublime genius; I ought not therefore to labor.' But genius
is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius:
exalt it. The good, the illuminated, sit apart from the rest,