OBAMA!

2008!

A couple of things

• This is the 50th post.
  
• I am now twenty years old.
• Mollie and Milena had their cooperative birthday/end of the school year party today.
• Tomorrow, I'm off to Cozumel with my dad, step mom, and Devin for some Scuba :)

More like two couples, I suppose.

I've been thinking a little bit more about journalism as well, but this is somewhat of an unfounded pattern of thought since I've never had any sort of journalistic experience. Ah well.

So long!

Today is my first day

of summer. Sumer 2008. This is the summer that I need to set my life on its path. This is the summer that will jumpstart everything that will follow.

In five minutes, I will be writing.

Wish me luck.

When I typed in

"Cozumel Diving" into the Google Image Search, this is the first picture that came up.

Oh boy.

I'm in the position where I can

place a bet on myself (and all my qualities as a productive person) or on the definite (though small and usual) payoff. It's difficult, and the frustrating part is that my ego is just large enough (understatement, you say?) that I don't actually feel too unbelievably horrified in placing the bets on me.

I'm like a fair hand in poker. The world could be bluffing me. I can't really tell.

I've never been too good at poker. My granny and I always used to play for pennies.

I enjoy

the paintings of Manet, Van Gogh, Breugel, Picasso (some of them, anyway), and Goya. I'm partial to the sculptures of Bernini and Michelangelo.

Isn't it a little crazy

how quickly the last few weeks have whipped by? One day seemed to be the next and its next was as the three days later. I don't try to make sense, I try to make a feeling. It is late, later. I wrote two papers today, and with that have concluded my written assignments for this semester. By essay-writing standards, I am now a junior in college. Halfway gone. Half of it to come!

Exhaustion has been a common theme. Exhaustion and bad-for-me food. I want to get my hands on some cholesterol-lowering medication for its preemptive effects. It helps keep it down.

As per the Jasper Johns - I know it's kind of gimmicky, but I still think it would be cool to travel through all fifty states before I die. I'll have to put that on the list.

Good night.

Welcome

to the month of May.

I have enjoyed writing

since about the eighth grade. (Eighth is an odd one, isn't it?)

Mrs. Ellington, I believe, is the one who really set it off. Also, September 11, 2001 had its impact on my young mind. A growing dislike of mathematics figured in as well.

When I wrote things, Mrs. Ellington made it sound like it was the most brilliant thing she'd ever heard (or read) in her entire life. Having looked back over some of that old stuff, I know better, but she may never know the impact that she had on me - just little bursts of confidence that made me feel that people might care about what I had to say. Egotism galore. You've got to have it if you think anyone's going to give a damn about what you've got to say.

There are so many books around today. Perhaps there are too many. But I can't seem to quash this bug.

It's coming along.

When I was younger

I had a deep love for the sky and all the treasures it held. I decided to be an astronomer when I grew up.

Then I found out that they had to use complex math. I once again found myself without a career path.

But I still love looking.

It's a matter of

beauty and sensuality. The entire scene, bottles, guitars, humming and chirping, beautiful nighttime, beautiful dreaming nighttime and shivers.

Everybody, pay attention.

I'm two for two in outdoor napping for the last two days! Spring is finally here!!!

And even more exciting - Columbia has ripped up the lawn blankets on the two main lawns giving everyone more space to run and jump and play and, in my case, sleep. I smelled freshly cut grass today for the first time in months. Amazing how we can keep track of all that sensory input.

Amazing how spring is so great! And what timing - it's the weekend!

Just a few hours ago

I was sleeping on the landing strip in front of Butler. The weather was so lovely. The temperature was perfect - cool, but not cold. I could feel the sun on my face. The grass was gorgeous, and kept peering over the edge of the pages of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. The view from way down is incredible - green, spindly, a crazy swoop up into blue.

In spite of the beautiful weather

I feel that this is going to be a rather stinky sort of day.

I will miss you, outside.

If you brush your teeth

and leave the water on, you deserve to be deprived of the stuff, you wasteful bastard.

There's that pervasive sort of tiredness

that you can almost feel leaking into your bones. I'm not feeling it now, so I have to say that any attempt at describing it right now would not reach the level I would want it to reach. So I'll just throw it out there for now. There is that pervasive sort of tiredness.

I am happy that I have more time left, but I wish that I had more. I do not want to die. I would like to have enough time to do everything I wanted, and to do it without feeling that I'm doing it just so I can cross it off of some transcendental to-do list. I want to live and experience without constantly feeling that I'm doing it so that I can say that I am living and experiencing.

I am not dead

yet.

When you get an order

at 1 a.m. that's due at 8 a.m. and you haven't packed yet, you know you're in for a good night. :)

Not to mention the art hum paper that hasn't written itself like I thought it would, or the Italian presentation that hasn't even started invading my consciousness yet.

My customer's name is People222 apparently. I hate People222.

I will get back to your query just ever so shortly. If I didn't have this pile of junk sitting in front of me, I'd do it right now. But I'll do it.

And I still need to figure out exactly which books I'm bringing back with me... (AGH! Just remembered that I was going to pick up my copy of Grapes of Wrath from my dad's house - and I was there tonight! Dammit!) Thinking about my Faulkner anthology. Thinking about others. I just want to bring them all, even though I know I won't read them. Maybe though. I like for them to be around, always just in case.

Short pants

are glorious. And nice weather certainly makes me more libidinous.

I wrote a version of chapter one. It's not what I wanted it to be, but I am not defeated yet. There is time yet.

Still need to make the chapter outlines. I have no idea how many chapters I will end up having. Nervous about the whole project. Filled with doubt.

Haven't done any "work." Also haven't contacted stepmother. Dreading.....

Behold my glorious words!

Johnny Cash said it

I'm going to Jackson (end quote), where the current temperature is 65 F and the high is a crazy 77!

Still packing...whoops. (or not, I suppose)

I'm bringing some books that I've ruled out having the time to read so they can find room on the shelves at home, but I've also realized that I've got to return with a few as well - books that I've realized I can't properly function without.

I really like that sort of thrill.

I will write chapter one over break, so I will let you, dear blog o'mine, know how that goes.

One more

man.

Just a few more

of these days, and then home for a bit of sun and rest. It seems that the weather is going to be pleasant on arrival - high of 76, low of 60. Unheard of temperatures for this poor southern chap hibernating in the still blustery north. Today has been relatively nice, though. There was a particularly bright sun this morning literally bursting through the slats in my blinds, and while I stood watching children with swords do their strange dance around a makeshift star, I could feel the warmth of the sun on my cheek. Spring is coming, yes?

Well, I can't believe that I've got class in 20 minutes. And with the Barnard construction still going on, the necessity of navigating the winding and thin tunnels makes the trek quite long and annoying.

Then work.

Then work.

I like to think of myself as a usually happy-go-lucky kind of fellow. I don't often find myself being grated by external circumstances to the point that it affects my entire person. I may be grated, but it doesn't have to extend itself into the inner works, you dig?

But damn, when it comes on, it comes really fucking hard.

I had a day today that I'd say comes about once every six or seven months. Maybe not even that often. Maybe there's no way to give it cycle (that is, I sure haven't monitored it) - but damn.

There was a short period of time during which my throat felt like it was constricting, and I could feel the acid in the back of my mouth, and I just wanted to launch the apple on my desk against the hallway wall as hard as I could and yell out, "There's your exploding apple, mother fuckers!" But I didn't end up doing it exactly that way. I gave warning. I made sure to clean up. I can very easily imagine myself in more dramatic scenes than I will ever actually perform. I don't really tick that way. And it may be better if I did tick that way. Suppressing emotions leads to a great deal of neuronal breakdown and cell death.

So I don't know if I am over my funk just yet. I will probably not think about its causes for a while. It comes and goes, though I've noted that those persistent little bugs have been buzzing quite often behind my eyes, specking my views. But I'm just not good at doing things about what I'm feeling. I just don't feel that what I'm feeling is that important. I know that probably sounds oddly proud or self righteous, but I don't mean it to be. I just don't put a lot of stock in my own "emotions," which I can objectively say is odd since I put an amazing amount of stock in other people's emotions when I want to gauge how they might act. But I don't know what to do about it.

So, I was just sitting here a moment ago when all of a sudden an entire hour slipped out of existence. That was saddening.

Weather: It rained a lot today, especially up near Fordham when I met Clare for lunch. As it moved on toward evening, the rainfall decreased and the winds picked up. Howling at times, blowing me back. Skipping across the streets.

As per March 4th

http://www.newsweek.com/id/119010

When 2:30 a.m. rolls around

the thought crosses my mind that I will be waking up in less than seven hours, not only perpetuating this semi-functional, caffeine-dependent Will. It's not necessarily a bad Will. My ability to think is dulled, and I mind that to some degree, but there's also my inability (in this state) to freak out too much. And I don't mind that. I like to think of myself as a pretty chill individual, and I think that I've reached that point where things start to lose some of their import as I slip farther and farther away from the clutches of sleep. My sheets don't get too ruffled - I sleep stone.

And nightmares. None of those lately. In fact, I cannot remember the last time that I had a real nightmare. Lauren mentioned stress nightmares, and I think I know what type she was describing, but I haven't even had one of those in quite a while.

So strange. Sleep, dreams, the extents and extensions, man.

Weather: I think it was pretty humid today, and today's cold made me think of the cold back home. It's that sort of cold that doesn't need to register in the teens to make you fearful of the incredible blue or the wind to pierce every single pore straight into your bones, freezing the marrow. Blue.

Why can't I grow a beard? (A non-molester beard) :(

When I open my window at night, the chill rolls in and soaks my feet.

It's a bit past

my bedtime. Good night!

Sangria, or Mrs. Achey's Foremost Concoction

The train roared through the pristine New Jersey countryside (yep). We were on our way to Metuchen - my second time to the illustrious Casa di Carberry. Pretty sweet deal - friends, fun, and food - and that deal became all the sweeter when Mrs. Achey introduced me to her wickedly delicious sangria.





The recipe being saved from complete destruction by pure luck and curiosity, it was all the better savoring it, knowing that it could have been lost, that Mrs. Achey might have had to double spike the whip cream to get everyone as happy as she did. Luck, yes. Luck in liquid form.





Things quickly became funnier. I would never say that I got drunk, but it was the most alcohol I've ingested since my last run-in with the clear liquors which, believe me, did not go as planned. This time, though, with a little moderation and plenty of Ms. Carberry's wonderful treats around to keep the stomach full and the face happy, things went smoothly, and I enjoyed that little bit of loss, of hilarity.



There is a "Greatest of" list waiting to be compiled. There are also many hours of sleep gone forever, but I won't miss them. I was laughing so hard and so much my teeth started cutting through my cheeks. That's nice.

On a completely different note, the first read-through of the manuscript is finally over and Adam was right, "It could have been worse." It still wasn't good, but I've decided that there is just enough potential in it, and in the things to come, that I will continue to push forward with it. It's a massive project, and I don't really know what realistic time projections will look like. I've got a timeline in my head, but I don't know how loaded my summer will be - and I won't until I'm in it. A lot depends on how quickly I can start creating again - that is, after I go through the rough draft and totally scrap all the X-ed out words, paragraphs, pages of material that was just so bad as to make me want to stab my hands for writing it. But, that's the nature of the beast, I guess.

And summer - that's a good front. Things are really moving forward, or so I'm told. :) My voluntary LOA from Facebook has basically meant that all the housing plans have been moving forward without any sort of involvement on my part. And this is fine by me, at least for now, and I really appreciate Cathy's help with all of that. I'll be back in the game soon, and then I can start doing something a little more in the way of, you know, "helping."

Got a request from Melville House Publishing for an interview, but I don't think I'm going to do it. The position is unpaid, at a slightly smaller house than Arcade, and is in a remote part of Brooklyn that looks like it might prove difficult to access by subway. Plus I'm lazy and reluctant to enter the corporate world without someone to try to peg me as functionally illiterate. So, there ya go.

Life's pretty good. I'm looking forward to a break from school and warm weather, but I am in constant awe that this semester is so quickly moving past. I know that it will be summer in no time. And with it, new frontiers.

Weather: Surprisingly mild. I know I saw Jupiter tonight, so I'd say it's pretty clear, although I don't know if that's holding. Sunny day. Hard for me to distinguish it from other days. I missed about half of it. But I caught the very beginning as it floated in on bird song.

Goals, Aims, &c., &c.

I spoke to my dad tonight, and it was the same basic conversation we have each time. He asked how I was, I told him, he told me about his Spanish work, how work was going, told me that taxes suck, warned me to enjoy my stage of life. I assured him I would do just that, that I was doing just that.

Then he asked me if I still wanted to be a corporate lawyer. My first thought went across like this, "Corporate law? What the hell? Where'd that come from?" And then I remembered that I had called him about four months ago, excited beyond belief about the prospect of going to law school and becoming someone able to make a decent amount of scratch, and told him breathlessly that I'd found (out the name of) my life's work: corporate law! It was so fitting. After all, I was an English major at Columbia, destined for the corporate world, destined to be that suit-and-tie yuppie fighting for rich people's rights (as long as I got some of the riches myself - I shuddered at the idea of non-profit law, and even thought of how I might have to fib a little to get into law school - how base and disgusting).

I don't deny that I am interested in the law. I like it for what it is as a product of millions of thoughts, feelings, situations, hopes. I feel that it is a great sign of humanity's struggle to put something meaningfuland helpful into practice. It is a good thing. I suppose that's why CC is an appealing course for me - it has really opened my eyes to the theory behind the law, and I've been able to see how it's been shaped by all these great thinkers throwing in their few words on the matter; now look! It's everywhere, and it's still mutable and having to be fixed. I think that's fascinating.

But there's something else that I can't deny - my inability to act like I care about something I really don't. You know what I don't care about? Corporate mergers and acquisitions, big business deals, buyouts and pretty much everything else that comes with a dollar bill pasted on it. I may not be a rebellious guy, but I don't know if I can justify it to myself - serving the man all those years. I just don't see it. I get too caught up in the cyclical thought of "I've only got one life to lead. Do I want to spend it working for something that I don't care about?" I don't want to do it. That's what it comes down to for me.

Will I surrender though? That's what I'm afraid of. I like to think of myself as a pretty independent thinker, actor, author of my own destiny, etc. But my dad has way more sway on me than he realizes (probably even more than I realize). I love him and everything, but I have this irrational need to show him that I'm worthy of being his son. Why is that? If I could hazard a guess, I think it may be rooted in the fact that he and my mom were together for about seventeen years before I came along. They tried for something like nine years to have a kid. Then my mom had me. They lasted less than a year after I came along. It may be far-fetched, but am I so caught up in proving myself to my dad because I just want to see that wound between my parents healed (a wound which I see as caused by me)? Am I getting too Freudian? I have never read Freud, so I really don't know how I'll be able to tell. The point is, I have irrational behaviors every once in a while.

I ask the people who know me: Will I concede? Will I be sucked into that world? Will I succumb to the lure of "success" as its defined by a large part of society? Or will I do what I want?

Do I even know what I want?

I want the following things: To write, to raise a family, to teach in some capacity, to work for the common interest.

Is it coming down to the fact that I a selfish person? I don't know how to best go about doing what I need to do to keep other people happy while at the same time keeping myself happy. I have always prided myself on my ability to just go with the flow, but dammit, sometimes you've got to stand up for something, sometimes you've just go to stop flowing for a second and say, no, I'm quite all right just being here, doing this, thank you.

Can I do it?

I saw Toni Morrison

talk for like a million hours about something that I must not have been too interested in if my "fall asleep in my chair" count is worth anything. But there were some really good ones there tonight as well. McCullum, the Irish author, was a delight. Another lady whose name I cannot remember but who I know lived in Achebe's house and heard the literary spirits (just kidding) was also wonderful. Then, of course, the man himself. Chinua Achebe. It was awe-inspiring, seeing him up there in his wheelchair with just his three sheets of comments (compared to Morrison's book - no joke, a book!) for us to hear. His humble closing, "I won't take up any more of your time..." as if any of his audience members would not have killed to keep him up there. My favorite lines included, "The best books are the ones which speak with voices which we've been hearing our whole lives," by the Irishman. Then the literary ghosts one. And Achebe's for me: "I feel that I did not so much write this book as that this book wrote me." That's beautiful, and I really want to go read Things Fall Apart again. :)

If only it had not been scheduled for a Tuesday night... Homework woes hovered heavy over us the whole of the ceremony, as did the random outbursts from that odd gentlemen about three rows back.

Favorable news from Arcade Publishing today, and for Cathy as well! Delightful, delightful. I really must pursue Rebecca Evens to show her that I am in it to win it.

I really can't believe it - I will be living New York for the summer!

The things I don't learn

are so numerous.

However, there are billions of other people alive at this moment, and that's kind of interesting to think about. So many people that I will never meet - it makes me wonder: Would I care to meet all of them? I cannot say.

Weather: Quite brisk. Lovely crisp blue sky all day long, and temperatures wholly bearable around 3 p.m. (the point at which my stomach forced me from the law library in search of sustenance). The moon is waning now, and appears to be have some of its light being dimmed by a thin bunch of haze.

Just think, Will - after tomorrow, it'll be Tuesday. Then, it'll be Wednesday, then Thursday! The weekend will come swiftly, I say, and with it lots of happiness and time for creative self-expression.

If I had an unlimited amount of money, I wonder if I would ever produce anything ever again. I hope that I would. I hope that I want to do things because I want to do them, not because of something outside of them.

My paragraphs are long and flowing, just like my pubes.

The Salsa Mystery

Flishing, flossing, floob.

I would like to have the typewriter now, please. Thank you. (But I'm stuck until Monday at the earliest, and only then if it's meant to be, dammit.)

Paper progress: very little. A superbly rough rough draft; tomorrow will be delightful. I'm trying to think about breakfast, but not having much success thinking about anything.

Weather: Colder than yesterday, I think. Snow still on ground, fewer puddles, less slushy as well? Clear as far as I can tell now, but I know it also flurried earlier this morning.

Man, if I had worked a little harder, I could have allowed myself some time to edit this weekend. I was hoping to get to pg. 130. Maybe just a little tomorrow, in between papers and such. Bleh.

Now, I sleep.

Cab Ride through New Rochelle

This is destined to be a short story.

Trying to get home, mashed up with two other strangers hoping to do same, one cabbie with twelve hours driving for the day and numb legs from it. Soon to be iced over, everything iced. Whacked last week, sent all on the sidewalk, nearly killed him. Door had to be replaced, bad weatherstripping job, rubber hoses everywhere. Fourteen year old boy taken in a white van - day light, main road - less than half a mile off a ways, raped for two hours and let go. There's a tattoo on the man's thigh. If it had been the cabbie's kid, he'd be jumping at chance to get at that guy. Wants to pull a Charles Manson, dulled pencil into the neck as quick, as quick as he can. Do it while nobody's looking. Or maybe in the ear, straight to the brain, dead in a second, nobody's got to see it happen. You know what's waiting for him at prison - payback a thousand times over. Good Fellas, great movie, boy. Four-fifty, please. Good night, have a good one.

Damn. Good good good moments. Trying to pull the Hemingway on it. Need time for reflection on it. Oh yes.

So

As my confusion about what I'm actually writing about continues to increase, so also does my sense of reckless abandon! I couldn't really help it tonight - humongous snowflakes falling everywhere, campus so quiet and beautiful, Butler's acoustic secrets. Recipe for a pretty good night despite lack of scholarly success. But I've always heard that the times that we remember most are not the many nights we'll spend working, but the nights we just get out there and screw up, or hang around without thinking too much about the consequences. The late night conversations. The stupid feats of strength. Juggling on the quad at 4 in the morning.

So tonight, Kant beat me, but I am ultimately going to capture him in a simple snare, dump him into a sack, cinch up the top, and throw him off a bridge. Frigid waters, these.

Life is so delightful right now. There's a good mix of up and down right now, and time seems to be flowing smoothly - perhaps a little more quickly than it ought, but I won't complain about that as the future doesn't look too shabby from where I'm standing.

Sleep well.

Things that are on my mind right now...

1. Clare - Today is her birthday! Happy Birthday, love.

2. The election junk.

3. This damn CC paper.

4. Interview tomorrow with Arcade Publishing.

This is just something I made back in the day (in graphic design class) and I thought I'd share because I've always kind of liked it.

EDIT: The words are not my own - I believe it's a Chinese proverb. Really cool, I thought and think.

7:42 a.m.

I woke up this morning with a full bladder and a tinny bunch of notes floating through the crack in my window from the damaged speaker those funny little Tai Chi people use during their exercises. The time was 7:42. I decided to call it quits for reasons I can't remember now. But it has not been wholly wasted.

I began work on a short story that I've been thinking about for some small amount of time here and there (mainly there, in postmodernism class). I didn't exactly know how to go about it, and still don't, but right now I've got it set up as a sort of frame story in which these two cops come across the journal of one of the men that recently was taken out by lethal injection. Then they read the journal. It's a really detailed log of his thoughts in the months before he kills his nameless friend. He discusses the different ways he might go about it, weighing all the different aspects of each method, including the aesthetic value. I haven't thought of all the ways yet, but I want each of his descriptions of them to be very explicit and perhaps to reveal small details of his character and/or of the situation that he's in which hint at his motive, but will be easily missed if you get lost in the gory details.

Then there will be an ending frame featuring at least one of the cops, but I definitely have not gotten there yet.

It needs to be written.

Then, I want to write a poem called Moons. I know that sounds like a kiddie title, but it appeals to me for some reason and I want it to be good and long. Worthy of the name which sounds really cool when it's spoken and takes a little bit longer to say than it should.

Slipshod

Slipshod is a word that is always on my mind. I think few hundred neurons are continuously firing away and making me see that word in my head. Whenever I open my mouth and have nothing to say, the first shape my tongue makes is one that would easily allow "slipshod" to fall of my tongue in its two sloppy pieces.

I have never thought about it very much, just as I don't think about the lights underneath the Lerner ramps until one or two panels go out and my feet seem to sink more into them, like blue molten sand instead of a solid electric blue glass panel. Slipshod. Slipshod. I don't even much care for the word, and it's evident to me that I hardly ever type it; my fingers fumble on the keys when I go to it: Slipshod.

If I had synesthesia, I would hope it would deal with being able to have visual experiences elicited by auditory language experiences. In class the other day, Brigid Finn (who just had a baby, she says) read a journal entry by someone who had the synesthesia I'm thinking of - they said that they had gone to a fast food place and had difficulty concentrating on the attendant's words because all they could see was a river of charcoal and ash pouring down out of his mouth. I imagine that scene would distract anyone.

How cool though!

S is for slippery dildo, a phrase which Mike Molina embedded in my head forever even though I am not in on the joke.

L is for Lipton tea, the generic and gross brand of tea that I usually don't mind drinking if I don't know I'm drinking it.

I is for Ishmael, the kid who got shafted.

P is for Pynchon, whose book I have not finished and whose bio (Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937. His books include...) is succinct and delightful.

S is for sea cow, as in the funny-looking animal that always seems to be getting hit by swiftly moving watercraft.

H is for hope, which is a concept I wish weren't always being torn down by my father.

O is for obese, an adjective which I really don't want to ever have to apply to myself because I think it's way too funny to apply to myself right this instant.

D is for distilleries, because I imagine I'd get a kick of seeing one one of these days.

Slipshod.

On its way...

Soon to be appearing...on this desk!

Originally bid on a 1910 model last night, only to be horrendously outbid this morning (while I was skipping Italian) by some guy willing to pay $150 in the last two seconds.

Luckily, there was a 1923 (?maybe?) model being auctioned off later today. Bid on it, expecting the worse, but totally got it for $28!

When this 40 lbs. piece of metal gets here, I'm going to soup it up (maybe put some spinners on it), and take it for a crazy test-write. Just you wait. I will pound like never before!

Yo, narwhals are fucking scary.

Grandmother Robin

When I am unsure whether or not to speak, I usually end up not speaking. I cannot say that this has been an awful decision, all things considered. When I feel something (let's call it "anger") and think about speaking, I am usually pretty able to quell that without much to-do. Later, when I'm able to go over things I might have said, things I had really considered saying, I am usually grateful for not having said it, grateful that I had held my tongue. Vulgarity, rashness, blame.

Then there are the other times when I am unable to justify my inability to speak. My cheeks flare up angrily, a sign to me that I'm being cowardly, a sign to others that I'm a quiet, introverted, borderline asocial. I get disgusted with myself during those times. I want to leave. I think about the sea and how huge it is. I think about scrubbing my skin with steel wool (not really, but that image has been 0n my mind for a couple of minutes now).

I do not like having regrets, and I do not profess to having many. However, I wonder sometimes whether or not I have simply buried my regrets under words, renamings, warping them into something they are obviously not but could be (and can) in my head. Do I have regrets? Some, not many. Do I have other things which could also be called by the same name - I am a confusing person. To myself especially.

I think if I post

just this one more, then Emerson's ginormous ass will finally be off the page. Will it do the trick?

Wouldn't it be nice

if the system would allow me to write these posts on the actual page where I've got other posts lined up already? There's something about having a little beginning, a little foundation, a startup, jumpoff, gunshot, dashing, finish!

If only I had invented the internet - I'd be as cool as Mr. Gore. (Speaking of, I saw a picture of him on cnn.com - the ravages of age!) And things would be waaaay different. In a bad way.

Best EE Cummings Poem Ever Written

she being Brand



she being Brand

-new;and you
know consequently a
little stiff i was
careful of her and(having

thoroughly oiled the universal
joint tested my gas felt of
her radiator made sure her springs were O.

K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her

up,slipped the
clutch(and then somehow got into reverse she
kicked what
the hell)next
minute i was back in neutral tried and

again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg. ing(my

lev-er Right-
oh and her gears being in
A 1 shape passed
from low through
second-in-to-high like
greasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity

avenue i touched the accelerator and give

her the juice,good

(it

was the first ride and believe i we was
happy to see how nice she acted right up to
the last minute coming back down by the Public
Gardens i slammed on

the
internalexpanding
&
externalcontracting
brakes Bothatonce and

brought allofher tremB
-ling
to a:dead.

stand-
;Still)

sometimes I feel

this strange sort of guilt (that's not the exact feeling, naturally, but I'm limited in explaining myself) about things. How much more avoidant can I be?

Seriously though - some of the things I think about leave me with the feeling that I am way too calloused. For example, I find myself from time to time viewing things (let's say relatively simple human emotions) as simple evolutionary bi-products. And they may be - I'm not claiming to be the first to think about them in that way, for I know others have already done plenty of it. But when I do believe that (and it's a large portion of the time), I also feel this concurrent "guilt" about feeling that way. I cannot decide on its origin (religion seems to be too easy - and everything gets blamed on it these days). Do you think it could be because of the fact that my general attitude about things so contradicts my thoughts on the same things that there are really two (or two million) Wills inside of this one and that the "guilt" is really more of a feeling of being somewhat severed in two (or two million)?

I hate blogs. They are just there.

jeez.

Why, oh Internet, do you do this to me? Why do I allow it to be done?

Sunday has the cruellest night,
etc. etc. fragments. etc.

&c.

And why do I run out of things to say so very quickly?

I just gotta say

serious props to you if you actually read any of the essays, poems, or excerpts that I put up. If it were me, I wouldn't do it. I am one of those folks that really needs a paper copy in front of him in order to get through it. I like being able to touch and feel, caress, stroke...and so on.

Our language has so many deliciously sexual overtones. Which we have inserted. Delightful.

I wrote a post

and then deleted it. I am going to stop doing that.

Self-Reliance - An essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Ne te quæsiveris extra."

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
* * * * *
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. 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. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary. The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear. These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — "But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold. Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony. What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, — the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation. For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlour. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment. The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person. I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome"; and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, 'Who are you, Sir?' Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince. Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen. The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man. The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving; — the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for, they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time, all mankind, — although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun. The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming. Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them, and are willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn. And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea, — long intervals of time, years, centuries, — are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is called death. Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not. This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature for conservation and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul. Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches. But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, — 'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love." If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. — But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me, and do the same thing. The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbour, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day. And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others! If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born. If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history. It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views. 1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — any thing less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies, — "His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours;Our valors are our best gods." Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. "To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed Immortals are swift." As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, 'Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.' Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see, — how you can see; 'It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.' They do not yet perceive, that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning. 2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet. I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins. Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. 3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also. Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again. 4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves. 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. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave. 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. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian? There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats, as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas, "without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself." Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them. And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.