Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string . … We but halfexpress ourselves and we are ashamed of that divine idea which eachof us represents. … God will not have his work made manifest bycowards. … Whoso would be a man must needs be a non-conformist.… To be great is to be misunderstood.Or, again, from his essay On Character:The people know that they need in their representative much morethan talent, namely, the power to make his talent trusted. They cannot come at their ends by sending to Congress a learned, acute andfluent speaker, if he be not one who (before he was elected) was appointedby Almighty God to stand for a fact—invincibly persuaded ofthat fact in himself—so that the most confident and the most violentpersons learn that here is a resistance on which both independenceand terror are wasted, namely faith in a fact.Henry David Thoreau, Emerson’s friend and partner in many conversationsthat plumbed the depths and heights of human experience, viewedthe universe from the narrow geographic confines of New England, wherehe spent his entire life, but his thoughts rayed out to kindred spirits likeTolstoi, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and today still illumine the darkclouds that have hung over Eastern Europe with a challenging and courageouslight. In his famous essay On Civil Disobedience, which was not evenpublished until some time after his death, Thoreau wrote:Oh for a man who is a man, and as my neighbor says, has a bone inhis back which you cannot pass your hand through. … Action fromprinciple; the perception and the performance of right, changesthings and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does notconsist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides statesand churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual,separating the diabolical in him from the divine.And again,Morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in me. Moral reformis the effort to throw off sleep. … To be awake is to be alive. We mustlearn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanicalmeans, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn. … I know of no269