Self-Reliance (Notes In Class)
Paragraph 1:
→ We can be shame from our opinion so you just use someone else opinion and taking credit for it.
Poem:
"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."
→ This means that we have the power and speed from nature and we can use our hands and feet to do so.
Paragraph 4:
"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."
→ Someone is strong, but not that bright. Emerson thinks that babes, children, and roots are wise because they aren't worry about what they think. The baby got the power from the adults.
Paragraph 6:
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist."
→ Emerson is writing this for the adults, but he isn't really telling about it. He is becoming a wake up call to the people that are reading it. This is also mean that people don't want to be alone because they want to fit in.
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
→ When you are alone, you be connected to yourself from your mind from what you arguing about of what you want to do, or say.
"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."
→ Emerson was thinking about someone that they said you can think above from the devil. You can live from the devil from being a bad person because it is your choice from the way you live. He want to try to set someone free because it was not right to murder someone. The next time your can say something different like you don't like, but you can still be friends.
"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."
→ Instead of caring about other problems outside of our town. I want to ask why aren't you nice to the people who you love and the people in your community
"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."
→ At school there are a bunch of fools, or bunch of bad people.
Paragraph 7:
"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."
→ People think that they did something wrong, but they keep thinking that they need to do it right. Emerson wish he can live a life that you don't feel that you are doing something wrong. He doesn't want to do be famous that you do something stupid and have go into drama because he wants to live a normal life that you feel equality.
Paragraph 9:
"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."
→ If you just going to church and just saying you are going to church. It's hard to see who you truly are.
"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."
→People are getting paid to have an opinion about business, or family law. When people don't speak truly, they will have a hard time to begin where to help them.
Paragraph 10:
"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;"
→ Doesn't fit the shape that means that you get to choose to be beautiful and you don't have to worry what the other person is thinking even though they will be thinking what you look like.
"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."
→ When people are crying about something, he called them a feminine. People that are supporting the president are people that don't have education, people that are rich so they can protect him, and people that just don't care so they don't really think.
"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."
→ If you are doubting yourself that is starting to break is starting to be bad and that means you don't trust yourself at all. If you do the same thing that you used to do, you can be scared. if someone is judging from the past, how will you make yourself more power.
Paragraph 12:
"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."
→When ideas come and when your spirit is falling for idea, or a person you should go towards it and be confident.
Paragraph 13:
"With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall."
→ If you are told what to all day, you have to think if anything. You can just be sitting there just looking at the wall. If you have woke up, you have no where to go, you have nothing to plan. You can wake up with a plan means you have the opportunity which means that's what we all have to do.
"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."
→ Learning means to change your mind about something even though you learn new information everyday.
"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."
→ They are the people that started to think something different which is their own opinion and looking new information about the world from the past into day as the present.
Paragraph 15:
"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."
→ Things will be fr enough better even though you have a lot of difference. If you have something to say even you have something different, it doesn't mean that you are different.
Paragraph 16:
"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."
→ We want to be everything to be okay. We don't address those things that need improvement even though people are afraid to speak out. He wanted people to be honest about their opinion. Every get thing, revolution, or idea that is cause from a person that makes other people looked up to.
Paragraph 26:
"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."
→ High school students mostly focus on the A-G requirements which means that they also think through for our grades, too. If someone is insulting another someone else, which means people don't really care about their opinion.
"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."
→ You need to find yourself of who you want to be. The practice of religions make stories for their followers of what to do whats right.
Paragraph 27:
"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."
→ Don't think that you have bad, or good luck which makes us feel good, or not. You don't need to depend on your luck because no one is always lucky, or unlucky. You need depend of how make your own choices of how you want to feel. Nothing that you should say about yourself because you are going to believe yourself no matter.
Vocabulary:
Nonchalance means that you don't care. (Paragraph 6)
Eclat means to have spirit, or displace of spirit. For example, leadership to force something and have pressure coming into you. (Paragraph 6)
Formidable means someone that is strong. (Paragraph 6)
Nonconformist means to do the same thing from the people around you, or a trend. (Paragraph 7)
Integrity means the thoughts, speech, and actions are all in line, or all together. (Paragraph 7)
Philanthropist means to give wealth to charity. (Paragraph 7)
Bigot means a person who is intolerant toward those holding different opinions. (Paragraph 7)
Arduous means a difficult task. (Paragraph 9)
Askance means to go sideways. (Paragraph 11)
Caliph Ali means a chief professor of Mohammad. (Paragraph 26)
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