I read "Self-Reliance" for the first time a long time ago, and I loved it. Ever since I was 13 or 14 my favorite quote has been, "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion." I was writing it on all my notebooks and posting it on my aim profile. Really, for a 13 year old girl-that quote is a life-saver. That's just the time in my life, when I was trying to figure myself out. All the 7th grade girls want the same book bags, shoes, clothes, boy. Thinking about college, I guess there's quite a few girls who haven't grown out of that. Well, they didn't have Emerson like I did. SUICIDE. Emerson called imitation suicide, and I knew he was right. Also, around this time in my life I had stumbled upon a clip of someone reading Mark Twain on my computer's Encarta Encyclopedia. My brother and I used to play it multiple times a day, because we thought it was the funniest thing we'd ever heard. I still catch myself saying it: "It was the first time in my life I had to decide betwixt to things, and I knowed it." Ha! I still laugh. I just laughed writing it, but in all seriousness that was the point in my life when I was deciding between "suicide" or individuality. ("And I knowed it")
Anyway, one new point we brought up this week in our class discussion about self-reliance is the question of intuition. Suzanne asked us what the relationship was between our intuition and imagination, passion, reason, and superstition. Well, I believe that our imagination get's the best of us, when we have what I like to call those "epicly bad feelings" otherwise known as intuition. When I get those feelings, I know that something bad will happen. I never know exactly what it is, though most times I can guess. That's where the imagination comes in. The relationship between our imagination and our intution is a dangerous one, because with intution-our reason is abandoned. At least, mine is. November 15, I think four years ago- I got one of these epicly bad feelings. I told my mother that I didn't want to leave the house that day, which to her didn't seem reasonable at all. I didn't really care about reason at that point. That feeling overpowered everything else. Nevertheless, she forced me to go with her, because she said we needed to visit my grandparents. It was raining. About 5 minutes down the road, the car in the other lane driving toward us hydroplaned and came into our lane. I was sure I was going to die. The car swerved into the ditch just inches away. I wondered why I'd even had such a terrible feeling. What good had my intution done? I was still forced to get into the car, and more importantly, I didn't die. It's not like I'm complaining, but it really made me wonder what the point was in my intuition. I could sense danger, but It wasn't up to me to avoid it. All it really did for me was turn my imagination against me causing me to dream up every insanely unlikely way I could die or be injured that day. Almost like how I feel after I finish watching a "Final Destination" movie.
So, what throws off intuition?? Maybe fate. I don't think we can avoid any of the things we foresee, or fore"feel." Whatever it is. It's like the Mothman. It let's us know something bad will happen, but there's no way we can stop it-and it's just creepy as hell. So, those are my thoughts on intuition.
Here are some of my other favorite quotes from "Self-Reliance":
"Who has more soul than I, masters me, though he should not raise a finger."
"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think."
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind."
As a middle childhood major I love the reference to the impact Emerson had on you in middle school. Young adolescence is really a time in life when we all struggle with the decision to conform or to break free. I think ultimately we all want to individually conform. We want to be our own unique person so that we are accepted. We don’t want to be boring and “normal” but we don’t want to step so far out of the box that we ostracize ourselves. I think this is where Emerson took the idea of self reliance too far. It is one thing to be your own person but a whole other thing to drop all other people. There is a reason that we all live in the same world and are not each in our own individual bubble…we were meant to be together.
ReplyDeleteIt is very important to note that "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion." But we must not let this realization remove us from the comfort ant the value of living our lives with others and caring for them and allowing them to care for us.