"SCHOLAR" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the
ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the
dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its
fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So
much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness
have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my
dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his
nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It
is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity,
exasperation, want, are instructers in eloquence and wisdom. The
true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss
of power.

It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her
splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which experience
is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into
satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours.

The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now
matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the
air. Not so with our recent actions, -- with the business which we
now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our
affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it,
than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The
new deed is yet a part of life, -- remains for a time immersed in our
unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, it detaches itself
from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind.
Instantly, it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on
incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its
origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of
antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot
shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the
selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom.
So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall
not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us
by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy,
school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the
love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once
filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative,
profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also
soar and sing.

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit
actions, has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself
out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot,
there to hunger and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single
faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards,
who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses,
and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the
mountain to find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the