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

the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue
yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned
hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to
work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the
sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments
and modes of action.

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by
books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be
comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to
raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He
plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed
and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars
with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and
useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory,
cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as
yet no man has thought of as such, -- watching days and months,
sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; -- must
relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his
preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in
popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him
aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living
for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, -- how often! poverty and
solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road,
accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he
takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the
self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss
of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the
self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in
which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated
society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find
consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He
is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes
and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye.
He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that
retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic
sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions
of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies,
in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of
actions, -- these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new
verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men
and events of to-day, -- this he shall hear and promulgate.

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all
confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and
he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest
appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some
ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and