"Essays 1st Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

shall make me feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the
Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have described that
goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events and
experiences; -- his own form and features by their exalted
intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in him the
Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold; the Apples of Knowledge;
the Argonautic Expedition; the calling of Abraham; the building of
the Temple; the Advent of Christ; Dark Ages; the Revival of Letters;
the Reformation; the discovery of new lands; the opening of new
sciences, and new regions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and
bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars
and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all
I have written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we
know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot
strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold
our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the
lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log.
What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of
life? As old as the Caucasian man, -- perhaps older, -- these
creatures have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record
of any word or sign that has passed from one to the other. What
connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty chemical
elements, and the historical eras? Nay, what does history yet record
of the metaphysical annals of man? What light does it shed on those
mysteries which we hide under the names Death and Immortality? Yet
every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range
of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to
see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many
times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does
Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to
these neighbouring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or
succour have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in
his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, -- from an ethical
reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative
conscience, -- if we would trulier express our central and
wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness
and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day
exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science
and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian,
the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by
which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.



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