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

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to
you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs
the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church,
contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either
for the government or against it, spread your table like base
housekeepers, -- under all these screens I have difficulty to detect
the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn
from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do
your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider
what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your
sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his
text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his
church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new
and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation
of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such
thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but
at one side, -- the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish
minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are
the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with
one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of
these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false
in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all
particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not
the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they
say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.
Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the
party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and
figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.
There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail
to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face
of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do
not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest
us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low
usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with
the most disagreeable sensation.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.
And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The
by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the
friend's parlour. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and
resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad
countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet
faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows
and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more
formidable than that of the senate and the college. It is easy
enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the
cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are
timid as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their
feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the
ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force