They Should Have Blogged: Ralph Waldo Emerson

“One man must be willing to see the thing he loves disappear, and yet keep loving it”; how many times I have held to this sentence, facing thing after thing that my fellow humans have considered no longer necessary!

(Note: I paraphrase because the Emerson book from which the quote’s been extracted is in Spanish, and it is also a weird compilation, so I couldn’t track down the original quote).

It is easy to see that sentences like this, with all their motivational oomph, would do very good not only as blog posts, but even as very powerful Twitter snippets. No wonder Emerson quotes are to be found everywhere in the Net.

But isolated fragments can’t give a full idea of what a complete Emerson text can do to your brain. It makes you think of a carefully calculated time bomb.

It starts slowly, logical, now and then even a bit predictable to let your mind have rest periods.

And then, once it’s grabbed you, it speeds up, it starts skipping steps, and gradually appeals less to your rational side and more to intuition, passion…

At a certain moment, towards the end, words even cease to exist. The result is that you arrive to the other side of the text in a state of high exaltation, refilled with the proud of being a human, and the need to do, to try out, to strive.

For things like this, I know that, at some point, I’ll set myself to read the complete Emerson.

And then, when I’m done, I think I’ll move on to the complete Lake and the complete Palmer.

OK, the joke is perhaps a bit dumb, but it allows me to address what I consider Emerson’s biggest flaw: an absolute lack of humor. He takes himself and everything he says too seriously. There is something biblical in his style. Telling us his truth is not enough, he has to YELL it. He is so convinced that he is right, that he advances like a Panzer, one triumphal sentence at a time, to make sure that we all get to know.

Facing such ruthless march, the reader is left with only two options: a) 100% surrendering -with the undeniable advantages mentioned above-, or b) getting out of the bloody way.

There is a lot to learn from every Emerson book, but you feel that he is a guy you couldn’t have a conversation with. Books are written by people, and that stuff very often shows. And sometimes you are not in the mood for that kind of ‘tough love’, no matter how superb the quality.

For any other occasion, though, when you feel like your plant could use some more growth, then do yourself a favor and get yourself some Emerson. Because growing, against common belief, always implies some effort; especially when you aim to grow in the right direction.