Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Essays von Ralph Waldo Emerson
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers who love ideas that argue with them, aphorisms, and reflections on nature, friendship and self-trust. It suits students of American thought and anyone weighing conformity against their own judgment.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote essays that shaped American thought. This work gathers his best-known pieces, drawn mainly from two volumes of Essays, the First Series of 1841 and the Second Series of 1844. Emerson was a former Unitarian minister who left the pulpit and became a lecturer. Most of these essays began as talks given to audiences across New England and beyond.
The essays share one conviction. Each person holds a spark of the divine, and each can learn more from his own mind and from nature than from inherited creeds and customs. Emerson wrote in short, bright bursts, closer to a string of sharp observations than a step-by-step proof. He wanted to wake readers up, not to hand them a system.
In this summary you will meet his central ideas in the order he builds them. They include trust in yourself, the unity of human life, the law of balance, the power of friendship and love, the place of the poet, and the habit of seeing nature as more than a stock of goods. Let us begin with the idea that made him famous: self-reliance.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1Trust yourself before the crowdFree
- 2Consistency is a small mind's habit
- 3One Over-Soul unites all people
- 4Every gain has a price
- 5Friendship and love need honest distance
- 6History lives inside each person
- 7The poet sees and names truth
- 8Nature is more than a resource
- 9Why the essays still divide readers
Punkt 1 von 9
Trust yourself before the crowd
The essay Self-Reliance is the heart of the collection. Emerson claims that every person must trust his own thought, because what is true in your private heart is true for all people. He says that great works of art and thought speak to us mainly because they return our own rejected ideas to us, now with a certain alienated majesty.
He warns that society works against this trust. It is, in his view, a joint-stock company in which members agree to give up the liberty and culture of each eater for the sake of a safer bread. The price of safety is conformity, and conformity quietly drains a person of character.
He asks the reader to look at children and animals. They act from present feeling and do not fret over how they will look. Emerson wants adults to recover that directness and to live from their own impulse, not from habit or from the opinion of neighbors.
This is not a license for selfishness. He asks that you be honest and that you do the work that is truly yours, even when family, church or friends disapprove. A person who does so, he says, gains a calm that the crowd cannot give or take away.
For a reader today, the lesson is practical. Before you follow a path because others expect it, ask whether it belongs to you. Emerson gives no map, but he gives courage to ask the question.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
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About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 94,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 6 h 15 min
- Listening time10 h 30 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 12 other languages
Questions about Essays von Ralph Waldo Emerson
What are Emerson's essays about?
They cover self-trust, nature, friendship, history, poetry and the spirit. The shared theme is that each person can find truth within, and should live by it instead of following custom or borrowed belief.
What does a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds mean?
Emerson means that sticking to old opinions only to appear steady is a petty habit. A thinker should follow the truth as he sees it now, even if it contradicts earlier words.
What is Transcendentalism in Emerson's essays?
It is a New England movement of the 1830s and 1840s. It held that intuition and direct experience of nature reveal truth, and that each person shares in a universal spirit, not only in church teaching.
Which Emerson essays should I read first?
Most readers begin with Self-Reliance, then move to The Over-Soul, Compensation, Friendship and The Poet. Together they give the main shape of his thought in the First and Second Series.
Is Emerson hard to read?
His sentences are short and vivid. Reading a few pages at a time, and pausing on striking lines, makes him much easier to follow.