Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

call of this period is for freedom. In June 1839 he writes in his journal, “Iwish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint but contrariwisethe wildest freedom.” In September, “Freedom boundless I wish. I willnot pledge myself not to drink wine, not to drink ink, not to lie, and not tocommit adultery, lest I hanker tomorrow to do these very things by reasonof my having tied my hands.” In November, ”Never was anything gainedby admitting the omnipotence of limitations, but all immortal action is anoverstepping of these busy rules. …”In Self-Reliance he declares that the way to the universal sense isnot through outer guides but through one’s own latent conviction, ”for theinmost in due time becomes the outmost.” No law written on stone is to beblindly followed. For “nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your ownmind.” Even if one is the Devil’s child, one’s freedom is to live out from theDevil within.Thus all concentrates [in center]: let us not rove [to periphery]; let ussit at home with the cause. … Bid the invaders take the shoes fromoff their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them,and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of natureand fortune beside our native riches.The poverty of nature is evident in that fox and deer, much less,rock and tree, rarely appear in Emerson’s expression privately or publiclyin these years. And the poverty of fortune?His journals reveal that Emerson is not free, but wishes to be free. InOctober 1840, deciding at the age of thirty-seven not to join Brook Farm, hewrites, “I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a littlelarger. I wish to break all prisons. I have not yet conquered my own house.It irks and repents me.” The plot of ground Emerson will till is not nature’searth, to work with other men and women, but his own soul. The groundhe must till is the figurative house that yet imprisons him. For the privateEmerson, outer, phenomenal nature transmutes into a new incarnation ofMaya, into metaphysical fortune, that which limits him.That which limits us takes various forms, some of which Emersonis bold enough in Self-Reliance to call “terrors.” One terror is society, which”everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”Only as non-conformist can a man be a man, without scattering hisforces in dead usages. Another terror is any foolish consistency that is but“the hobgoblin of little minds,” a hobgoblin anchoring one in a particular167