NE TE QUAESIVERIS EXTRA

The writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson are not to everyone’s taste, but I do like some of his essays as I find them inspiring. One in particular is a favourite – his essay on self-reliance. 

He states that ‘to believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men’.  Yes indeed; speak what is in your innermost core as basically it will be a universal thought. And to quote again ‘there is a time in the life of each of us when we arrive at the conviction that envy is ignorance’; and to add to this, that imitation of others is a type of suicide. 

We are what we are, for better or for worse as is our position. Although the universe is full of good, no lasting seed of nourishment can come to us unless we toil and work on our own ‘plot of land’ between our ears which is ours to make and use as we will. The power that lives in each of us is new and only we know what we can do with it – and we have to try. 

Finally, ‘trust yourself; every heart beats to that iron string’. We have to learn to accept the place that has been found for us, our society, our contemporaries and the way in which events connect with one another. Man has always done thus.

What now seems like centuries ago, I read a piece by two 17th century writers, Beaumont and Fletcher, entitled “The Honest Man’s Fortune” and the epilogue was:

“Man is his own star, and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man,

Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

Nothing to him falls early or too late.

Our acts our angels are, for good or ill,

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”

My view, in a very few words, is the title of this blog –

“Rely upon yourself first”

Until next time (with self reliance),

Peripatetic Scribe