As many of you know, I’m reading my way through Harvard slow and steady. Right now, I’m in the thick of Emerson’s Essays and English Traits.

The American Scholar seems to be the kind of article all American scholars should read as it hits on nearly every major point of anxiety they may come across in their academic careers. Ralphy says things like:

The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle [of nature] most engages.

And:

Books are the best of things, well-used; abused, among the worst.

And better still:

Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.

Among other wonderful nuggets.

For now, I want to focus on his argument, since I feel it simultaneously compelling and schizophrenic. He makes an argument that, among other things, nature, works of the past (like old books), physical labor, living life well, the poor, and the unity of design between both the near and the far all fill up the scholar until he becomes a “university of knowledges.”

But Emerson also says elsewhere that a good scholar/writer/man who transcends his age will reject all influences. No book, no relationship can give you what you need. This shows up in his article on Self-reliance, in his coining of “self-help,” and in the modern repetition of his phrase “believe in yourself” that shows up especially in cinema. I’ll hopefully deal with this more as we go on to other articles, but I want to deal with his idea of genius. His student Thoreau picked up on this even more in Walden, which heavily influenced Upstream Color. Thoreau moved out to Walden to live a simple life. But the inconsistency is clear.

See Thoreau got the idea from Emerson, his mentor, and was encouraged in it by those who lived in Walden. Emerson himself pulled the idea out of his study of nature, old books, life and the rest – and expected his readers to follow his influence concerning the idea. Clearly by these inconsistencies in Emerson’s own life (and Thoreau’s), we are not self-sufficient but we are unique individuals. I would tweak Emerson’s ideas to say we are the unique genius sitting at the intersection of our relational selves. No one but you can relate to the people in your life the way you do, not even an identical twin. That makes you unique, yet in need of help and love – interdependent as some say.

I think that tweak would then illuminate the following from The American Scholar:

Books are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system…. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind stop with some past utterance of genius…. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation bears me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.

A satellite instead of a system. The imagery assumes other planetary bodies one way or the other, rather than a lone body in space. Wouldn’t it be better, then, to say our genius is made true through the unique offerings we bring back to our influences? What we can bring to the table that no one else can?

This is closer to genius, I think.

How do you process through your own unique genius?

— Lancelot