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

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor
the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace
which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said
of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes
to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable
self. All literature writes the character of the wise man. Books,
monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds
the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him
and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal
allusions. A true aspirant, therefore, never needs look for
allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the
commendation, not of himself, but more sweet, of that character he
seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea, further,
in every fact and circumstance, -- in the running river and the
rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows from
mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us
use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not
passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.
Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to
those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any
man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a
remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper
sense than what he is doing to-day.

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no
age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there
is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a
wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to
him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person.
He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by
kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography
and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of
view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and
London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court,
and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him, he will try the
case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must attain and
maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and
poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose
of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations
of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of
facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact.
Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are passing
already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in
Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the
fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven
an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same
way. "What is History," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?"