RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND THE EVER-EVOLVING ART OF ...

“And must I go & do some what if I would learn new secrets of Selfreliance? for my
chapter is not finished. But selfreliance is precisely that secret, —to make your supposed
deficiency redundancy. If I am true, the theory is, the very want of action, my very
impotency shall become a greater excellency than all skill & toil” (Emerson, Journals
VII: 521). What emerges in the published essay is the assertion that “envy is ignorance;
that imitation is suicide; that [the self-reliant individual] must take himself for better, for
worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of
nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
which is given to him to till” (Emerson SR 121). As such, self-reliance is not an exercise
is perfectionism. Instead, it is about embracing your deficiencies and realizing that facing
individual limitations while obeying instinct is infinitely better than mimicking the
example of another. Endemic in personal shortcoming is the pith of individuality, the
particularized raw material with which the subject can make her mark upon the world.
Self-reliance, then, is partially dependent upon personal deficiency, and Emerson
found that the best way to exorcize those deficiencies lies in the process of reading,
which was an endeavor in which he was perennially captivated. As an understudied
component of self-reliance, Emersonian reading rests on—what appears to be—a
foundational paradox. How is it that an essential element of cultivating self-trust waits in
the careful study of other people and phenomena? Henry James is among those who
have identified this paradox, and James suggests that the paradox “was because the
independence that he had in his eye was an independence without ill-nature, without
rudeness (though he likes that word), and full gentle amiabilities, curiosities, and
tolerances” (James “Emerson” 622). James ultimately aligns this paradox as evidence
vii