rwe category archive

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.”– Walt Whitman
A while back, a coworker lent me a book called Self-Reliance, “The Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Inspiration for Daily Living.” Edited and introduced by Richard Whelan, who says that he loves Emerson’s essays and has read them many times over the years but found eventually he could get the same and even better experience by just reading the many sections he had underlined over the years. He writes:

I came to think of the essays as gardens in which the underlined passages were magnificent flowers — and all the rest a rampant and choking growth of nineteenth-century rhetorical weeds and vines that were best rooted out and cut back. It was then

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How to Write?

Some people say you should be assertive. Don’t be wishy-washy. Don’t use watered-down language (”it kind of seems like…”). Don’t be afraid to own your opinion. Blah blah blah. I think this is good advice. (Although I don’t think Brenda Ueland would approve of the negative tone.) I like reading people who sound like they know what they’re talking about and aren’t afraid to stake out a position, even if unpopular.

But what if you don’t know what you’re talking about? What if you’re afraid of looking back on your published opinions with regret? What if even though you’re in your mid-thirties, …