I’m reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance. I’d heard of the book before, back in the old days, with a negative connotation, but I can honestly say that this is going to be something I go back to again and again. To try to explain the wisdom I’ve found in it would lessen its power. I have a feeling there will be many passages included in future entries. Here’s number one:
“No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser – the secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.”
RWE, Self Reliance
Sha-pow! 
I’m not an Emerson fan generally, but he wrote an address turned essay on love that was superb. For all my dislike of Self Reliance, that essay on love seemed a short but powerful corrective. I think Barnes and Noble issued a small volume of Emerson that actually contains both works.
Emerson was influenced very heavily by Stoic writers. He borrowed freely from Seneca so you might want to take a look at a few of his works in the future if you haven’t before. I just happened to have been reading both authors at the same time and saw the affinity of one for the other.
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Fantastic, kinda awesome subject. I am going to write about it as well!!
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