"REP MEN" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service
rendered by those who introduce moral truths into the general mind?- I
am plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If
I work in my garden and prune an apple-tree, I am well enough
entertained, and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation.
But it comes to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this
precious nothing done. I go to Boston or New York and run up and
down on my affairs: they are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by
the recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling advantage. I
remember the peau d'ane on which whoso sat should have his desire, but
a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a convention of
philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock.
But if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows
little of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a
law that disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity
which checkmates every false player, bankrupts every self-seeker,
and apprises me of my independence on any conditions of country, or
time, or human body,- that man liberates me; I forget the clock. I
pass out of the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I
am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods.
Here is great competition of rich and poor. We live in a market, where
is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I have so much more,
every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good without
breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and
our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child
of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system;
and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies and
hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields there is room:
here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.
I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and
for thoughts; I like rough and smooth, "Scourges of God," and
"Darlings of the human race." I like the first Caesar; and Charles
V, of Spain; and Charles XII, of Sweden; Richard Plantagenet; and
Bonaparte, in France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal
to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing
firm on legs of iron, wellborn, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded
with advantages, drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and
supporters of his power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or
staff-like, carry on the work of the world. But I find him greater
when he can abolish himself and all heroes, by letting in this element
of reason, irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresistible
upward force, into our thought, destroying individualism; the power so
great that the potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives
a constitution to his people; a pontiff who preaches the equality of
souls and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an
emperor who can spare his empire.
But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three
points of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe, but
wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her
poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully