Emerson is my favorite 19th
century writer so I thought I’d reread an excerpt from Self-Reliance and see if it applied to today. Self-Reliance says a
lot of the same things as Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Much madness is Divinest
Sense”. One quote that I love from this excerpt is
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul
has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the
wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what
to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said
to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then,
to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and
Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit
that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
This echo’s Dickinson’s poem by
saying that to be great is to be misunderstood. In her poem “Much madness is
Divinest Sense”, she says that people who don’t conform have great ideas and
are successful and that society doesn’t understand them. They are considered
“mad” and society tries to control them. Emerson highlights several important
people that were great and misunderstood, and I think that there are many more.
link to actual work:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm
In addition to the people that Emerson mentioned, there are many people from today that show how true his statement is. People from today that are non-conformists and are "great" are Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. Does anyone have any other people they would like to add?
ReplyDelete@whereiswalden - Your comment from "Much Madness is Divinest Sense" should go here too:
ReplyDeleteI agree, many of the greatest thinkers of our time were non-conformists. The same thing goes for many revolutionary leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the founding fathers of our country. They did almost the exact opposite of what society wanted them to do. Events like the civil war happened because people changed their opinions from the “normal” opinions. Events like Occupy Wall Street keep the issue of non-conformism present in the minds of people today.