{"id":49993,"date":"2026-09-24T15:27:42","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T15:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/emerson-on-how-to-trust-yourself\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T15:27:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T15:27:42","slug":"emerson-on-how-to-trust-yourself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/emerson-on-how-to-trust-yourself\/","title":{"rendered":"Emerson on How to Trust Yourself"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.\u201d<\/h3>\n
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<\/a>\u201cI felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way,\u201d the young Whitman wrote of his momentous critique-walk with his greatest literary hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson<\/strong> (May 25, 1803\u2013April 27, 1882) \u2014 the walk from which the young poet wrested his wisdom on how to keep criticism from sinking your soul<\/a>, for Emerson, who had inspired Leaves of Grass<\/em>, had just lashed upon one of its primary poem sequences \u201cargumentstatement, reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home, (like an army corps in order, artillery, cavalry, infantry,) of all that could be said against [it].\u201d<\/p>\n

But rather than offended, Emerson must have been pleased with Whitman\u2019s decision to stay his course \u2014 for Whitman was in many ways the embodiment of the spirit Emerson so fiercely celebrated against the tide of his time: a spirit animated by the central doctrine \u201ctrust thyself,\u201d<\/a> anchored in resolute resistance to the tyranny of opinion<\/a>, and rooted in the belief that had gotten Emerson banned from Harvard\u2019s campus for thirty years<\/a> when he was Whitman\u2019s age \u2014 the belief that divinity is to be found not in some outside deity, but in the human soul itself, in its fidelity to itself as a fractal of nature, a particle of the perfect totality of the universe, which Margaret Fuller \u2014 Emerson\u2019s greatest influence \u2014 called \u201cthe All.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by Violeta L\u00f3piz for At the Drop of a Cat<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Throughout Emerson\u2019s immense body of work, no question vibrates more resonantly than that of how to trust yourself. He takes it up in his essay \u201cCharacter,\u201d found in his indispensable Essays and Lectures<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a> | free ebook<\/em><\/a>):<\/p>\n

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What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world\u2019s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man*<\/a> is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In \u201cNature\u201d \u2014 perhaps his finest essay, for being the most all-encompassing and spiritually lucid \u2014 he considers what solitude actually means, refuting the common conception of it as a kind of self-isolation from other selves behind the walls of seclusion, for even the thinking mind, the writing mind, the creating mind is a symposium of outside voices when trapped within itself. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by David Byrne from his History of the World (in Dingbats)<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A century and a half before Wendell Berry observed that \u201ctrue solitude is found in the wild places, where\u2026 one\u2019s inner voices become audible,\u201d<\/a> Emerson writes:<\/p>\n

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To go into solitude, a man*<\/a> needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, \u2014 no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, \u2014 my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, \u2014 all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach<\/em>, 1931 \u2014 one of Hasui Kawase\u2019s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks<\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Complement with Emerson\u2019s young prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Thoreau on solitude and the salve for melancholy<\/a>, artist Rockwell Kent on wilderness, solitude, and creativity<\/a>, and Kahlil Gibran on silence, solitude, and the courage to know yourself<\/a>, then revisit Hermann Hesse on the wisdom of the inner voice<\/a> and Octavia Butler on the meaning of \u201cGod.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u201cIt is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.\u201d \u201cI felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way,\u201d the young Whitman wrote of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 12:55:21","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}