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

censuring their dulness and vices, as if they thought that, by
sitting very grand in their chairs, the very brokers, attorneys, and
congressmen would see the error of their ways, and flock to them.
But the good and wise must learn to act, and carry salvation to the
combatants and demagogues in the dusty arena below.

On the part of these children, it is replied, that life and
their faculty seem to them gifts too rich to be squandered on such
trifles as you propose to them. What you call your fundamental
institutions, your great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses,
and, when nearly seen, paltry matters. Each `Cause,' as it is
called, -- say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism,
-- becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have
been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into
portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to
suit purchasers. You make very free use of these words `great' and
`holy,' but few things appear to them such. Few persons have any
magnificence of nature to inspire enthusiasm, and the philanthropies
and charities have a certain air of quackery. As to the general
course of living, and the daily employments of men, they cannot see
much virtue in these, since they are parts of this vicious circle;
and, as no great ends are answered by the men, there is nothing noble
in the arts by which they are maintained. Nay, they have made the
experiment, and found that, from the liberal professions to the
coarsest manual labor, and from the courtesies of the academy and the
college to the conventions of the cotillon-room and the morning call,
there is a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates
a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without
an aim.

Unless the action is necessary, unless it is adequate, I do not
wish to perform it. I do not wish to do one thing but once. I do
not love routine. Once possessed of the principle, it is equally
easy to make four or forty thousand applications of it. A great man
will be content to have indicated in any the slightest manner his
perception of the reigning Idea of his time, and will leave to those
who like it the multiplication of examples. When he has hit the
white, the rest may shatter the target. Every thing admonishes us
how needlessly long life is. Every moment of a hero so raises and
cheers us, that a twelve-month is an age. All that the brave Xanthus
brings home from his wars, is the recollection that, at the storming
of Samos, "in the heat of the battle, Pericles smiled on me, and
passed on to another detachment." It is the quality of the moment,
not the number of days, of events, or of actors, that imports.

New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if
you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of
the labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and
rust: but we do not like your work.