intellectual anarchist of rare and lovely type; few sweeter souls
ever lived, but he defied order.
Not that Emerson would have been any better if he had submitted to
the discipline of some church; he did what he felt impelled to do,
and left the world a precious legacy of ideas, of brilliant,
beautiful thoughts; but thoughts which are brilliant and beautiful
as the stars are, scattered jewels against the background of night
with no visible connection. Is it not possible that the gracious
discipline of an environment more conventional might have reduced
these thoughts to some sort of order, brought the stars into
constellations, and left suggestions for the ordering of life that
would be of greater force and more permanent value?
His wife relates that one day he was reading an old sermon in the
little room in the Follen mansion, when he stopped, and said,
"The passage which I have just read I do not believe, but it was
wrongly placed."
The circumstance illustrates the openness and frankness of his
mind, but it is also a commentary on the want of system in his
intellectual processes. His habit through life was to jot down
thoughts as they came to him; he kept note-books and journals all
his life; he dreamed in the pine woods by day and walked beneath
the stars by night; he sat by the still waters and wandered in the
green fields; and the dreams and the visions and the fancies of
the moment he faithfully recorded. These disjointed musings and
disconnected thoughts formed the raw material of all he ever said
and wrote. From the accumulated stores of years he would draw
whatever was necessary to meet the needs of the hour; and it did
not matter to him if thought did not dovetail into thought with
all the precision of good intellectual carpentry. His edifices
were filled with chinks and unfinished apartments.
He saw things in a big way, but did not always see them as through
crystal, clearly; nor did he always take his staff in hand and
courageously go about to see all sides of things. He never thought
to a finish. His philosophy never acquired form and substance. His
thoughts are not linked in chain, but are just so many precious
pearls lightly strung on a silken thread.
In 1852 he wrote in his journal, "I waked last night and bemoaned
myself because I had not thrown myself into this deplorable
question of slavery, which seems to want nothing so much as a few
Here's a piece of wisdom on driving or cute car quote to study:
The longest journey begins with a single step, not with a turn of the ignition key. ~Edward Abbey
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