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

they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the
actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These
varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height
of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best
ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a
sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average
tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain
your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act
singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.
Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to
do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to
defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn
appearances, and you always may. The force of character is
cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into
this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the
field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train
of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the
advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.
That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity
into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is
venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient
virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love
it and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and
homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old
immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.


I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and
consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the
Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is
coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that
he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and
though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront
and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the
times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the
fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great
responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a
true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of
things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you, and all men,
and all events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of
somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds
you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man
must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent.
Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite
spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; -- and
posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man
Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is
born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he
is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is