Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essay on Self Reliance

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he 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....

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun.

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Emerson was one of my "gurus" growing up. I found that his essays on self-reliance spoke to me. I also found the writings of Eric Slaone reverberated with me ... especially in his book, "Reverence for Wood." Here is an excerpt from that book:

"They don't build them like that now," said Harley as he tapped his wrecking bar against one of the old pegged joints. I was above on a ladder, ready to tackle the roof. It seemed wrong to destroy such symmetry. The ancient shingles lay haphazardly like matted grass on a hill, but from my vantage point, the wooden roof pattern stretched away with a mathematical grace that first became part of the local landscape, then of the distant horizon. Sighting along the peak I could see wavy contours that indicated the position of each rafter underneath. Old barn roofs always have a lively style and no two will settle in the same way. The long tobacco barns of Connecticut, after a century of weather, begin to slouch comfortably into the contours of the land upon which they rest. The stone barns of Pennsylvania have rigid walls, which support their roof peaks in a fairly straight posture for a number of years; then, after a brief period of picturesque decay, the middle rafters weaken, and under the weight of wet snow one certain winter night, the whole covering falls at once.

Eric Sloane

Though it is a book about the importance of wood, his prose is liberally sprinkled with thoughts about self-reliance:

Those days, when the nation was struggling to be born, were perhaps our most poignant times, for it was an era when each man was forced to live with piercing intensity and perception. Two centuries later, when an American turns on the water and the lights in his apartment, he has little awareness of where these things come from; the greatest pity, however, is that he says, "Who cares where it comes from, as long as it keeps on coming?" In 1765 everything a man owned was made more valuable by the fact that he had made it himself or knew exactly from where it had come.