Self-Reliance

Self-Reliance

*Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841*

A man at his desk in Concord

Picture a study in a modest white house in Concord, Massachusetts, in the late 1830s. Pine furniture, a small fireplace, books in piles. The window faces a meadow that runs down to a stand of trees, and just beyond it, the Old Manse where Hawthorne will soon write. The man at the desk is in his mid-thirties. He has buried his first wife, Ellen, when she was nineteen. He has resigned from the pulpit of Boston's Second Church because he could not bring himself, in good conscience, to administer the Lord's Supper. He has crossed the Atlantic, met Coleridge in his cluttered London rooms, met an aging Wordsworth in the Lake District, met Carlyle on a Scottish farm. He has come home with no church, no salary, and no clear plan, and he has decided to make his living by talking to American audiences about what he actually believes.

He is reading a poem written by another man, an eminent painter. Something in it lights him up. Then it stings him. The thought in the poem is one he himself had thought, weeks ago, and dismissed as too odd, too small, too his. Now it comes back to him "with a certain alienated majesty," wearing another man's name. He writes the sentence down. It will become the most famous diagnosis in American letters: "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

He keeps writing. He writes about a young child playing in the parlor, sovereign in his own mood, courting nobody. He writes about the boy in the playhouse pit who passes verdicts on the people walking past, and means them. He writes that society is a joint stock company in which the members agree, for the price of bread, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. He writes the line that will outlive him by two centuries: "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." He puts the sheets in a drawer. A few years later, in 1841, they will go into a slim volume titled *Essays*. The piece is called "Self-Reliance." It is a little over fifteen thousand words long. It will not let American readers alone for the next hundred and eighty years.