Ralph Waldo Emerson |
FRIENDSHIP AS ELEVATING THE SOUL
Emerson (1803-1882) was an American philosopher, writer and poet, who was the leader of the Transcendentalist movement of the 19th century.
The following passage is adapted from Emerson’s essay “Friendship” (published in Essays: First Series in 1841). In this essay, Emerson presents a sublime vision of friendship – so sublime that it is almost impossible for humans to achieve it fully. True friendship is not for fun or convenience, but for spiritual inspiration. Friends are valuable not because they are somebody to chat with, but because they help elevate the soul. True friendship has little to do with practical matters and with everyday problems – it involves the higher part of ourselves. True friendship is a spiritual companionship.
I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine – wild, delicate, expressing his virtues. When he is praised, I feel as warmly as the lover when he hears praise about his beloved girl. […] We should give dignity to each other’s daily life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom, and unity. Daily life should never degenerate into something usual and established, but should be alert and inventive, and add meaning to what used to be dull work. […] Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why should you insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why should you go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why should he visit you at your house? Are these things relevant to your relations? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be a spirit to me. I want a message from him, a thought, a sincerity, a glance, but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly services from cheaper companions. Shouldn’t the company of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Should I feel that our connection is profane in comparison with this cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that waving grass that divides the stream? Let us not vilify it, but raise it to that standard. Do not try to reduce your friend’s great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his attitude and action, but rather fortify them and enhance them... Let him always be to you a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial convenience to be soon outgrown and thrown aside. […] Let us carry that which is so great as friendship with as much grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. […] The higher the standard we demand of friendship, the less easy it is to achieve it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends who are like those we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope always cheers the faithful heart, that elsewhere there are souls which can love us, and which we can love. […] I do with my friends as I do with my books. I leave them where I can find them, but I rarely use them… I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes me so great that I cannot lower myself to converse. In the great days, visions hover in front of me in the sky. I should then dedicate myself to them… Then, although I value my friend, I cannot afford to talk with him and study his visions, or else I would lose my own. […] The essence of friendship is entireness, a total greatness and trust. It must not suppose, or provide for weakness. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.
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RALPH WALDO EMERSON |
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THE OVER-SOUL Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being descends into us from we know not where. The most exact calculator cannot predict that something incalculable may not happen the very next moment. I am forced every moment to acknowledge a higher origin of events than the will which I call “mine.” We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime, within each person is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficient and perfect in every hour; furthermore, the act of seeing and the thing that is seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. […] |
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