Seven Emerson Essays in One Korean Edition

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803 and entered Harvard at fourteen. He went on to write essays and poems, give lectures and become a central figure in American transcendentalism.

Several ideas associated with that movement help explain why Emerson can move from an account of a person’s judgment to an observation about a field or a tree.

• People can learn to distrust their own judgment under social pressure.
• Intuition and lived experience can disclose things that reasoning alone leaves out.
• Spiritual experience can belong to an individual outside an organized institution.
• Nature deserves to be regarded in its own right.

I read two Korean volumes titled after Self-Reliance. This one uses Confidence for the title and places the essay alongside six others.

What this edition gathers

Emerson wrote essays and also spent years as a lecturer. Self-Reliance first appeared in print in his 1841 Essays. The Korean collection gives it a different set of neighbors, including material from other parts of his career.

The seven essays are followed by a selection of his observations and a biographical section.

• Self-Reliance
• Experience
• Compensation
• Nature
• Politics
• History
• The Over-Soul

Emerson and the land at Walden Pond

Emerson was a friend of Henry David Thoreau. Both had studied at Harvard. The small cabin in which Thoreau lived at Walden Pond was built on land Emerson owned.

Their friendship also helps explain a world in which books, conversations and ideas about nature circulated together. Thoreau’s Walden gave me another way to notice the American transcendentalists’ reading in Asian thought.

Emerson provided a place for Thoreau to work, and their exchanges formed part of the intellectual life around the pond. Walden makes its own use of what Thoreau read and observed there.

Reading “Compensation”

I was struck by how much Emerson asks a short observation to carry. An idea about what happens to one person can turn into a proposition about the way a society works.

“Compensation,” for instance, keeps looking for relationships among things we tend to treat as separate. I took one of its observations this way.

• The world is connected even when people act as if each life proceeds on its own.

What weakness can teach

The essay also asks what weakness can make possible. I liked the fact that Emerson considers what changes after a difficulty forces a person to pay attention.

• “Our strength grows out of our weakness.”
• Comfort can put a person to sleep. Being pushed, defeated or made to improvise can reveal what they did not yet know and what they are able to learn.

Reading history through experience

In “History,” Emerson asks what makes the past intelligible to a person living now. A fact on the page begins to mean more when you can connect it to an experience or question of your own.

I took that as another reason he spends so much time on individual experience. He wants to know what happens when a reader brings a whole life to the work of understanding.

A passage from “The Over-Soul”

In “The Over-Soul,” I paused over a passage about preparing for something you may never get to do.

• You can apply yourself to work you think worth doing and still be prepared to accept that events might keep you from doing it.

I read that as a measure of how you hold a plan. The work of preparing can have value even when the outcome is beyond you.

A few observations from the end of the book

The Korean volume ends with short observations attributed to Emerson. Here are a few of the ones that stayed with me, in paraphrase.

• Hope has room to act when the future is uncertain.
• If you want a friend, begin by being one.
• Today can look like the wrong day to decide until you notice how much depends on it.
• It is easy to romanticize the ship you are not sailing on.
• A thought needs to change an action before it changes a life.
• A belief we now reject may once have carried the weight of truth for its believers.
• Education begins by treating the pupil with respect.
• Three habits of reading
  • Give a book time after publication.
  • Pay attention to books that have earned a readership.
  • Keep reading books you love.

Book details

Confidence (a Korean collection titled for Self-Reliance)

Author

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Korean edition published

October 22, 2009

ISBN-13

9788996327707

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