Return
to Jay Clayton's Home Page Return
to English 234 - Syllabus Return
to Vanderbilt English Department Page Return
to Vanderbilt University Main Page
Professor Jay Clayton
Fall, 1996 - MWF 9:10-10:00
Calhoun 109
A quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self Reliance":
And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;---- the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. . . .
Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue. . . .
The entire text of Emerson's essay:
Return
to Jay Clayton's Home Page Return
to English 234 - Syllabus
Return
to Vanderbilt English Department Page Return
to Vanderbilt University Main Page
last modified 12/6/96