I am loving my Emerson day book (A Year with Emerson) and wish I had written it. Maybe someday I will re-read Emerson and take notes and make a daybook of my own. That would be fun. In the meantime, I thought I’d share some Emerson words in case anyone who may have read my Emerson posts are missing him on Sundays.

Emerson has a conflict between wanting to be a man of action and wanting to be a man of the mind and it shows in this little bit from one of his journals:

I hate books, they are an usurpation & impertinence. I cannot once go home to truth & Nature for this perpetual clutter of words & dust of libraries. Yet take me at my word & burn my books &, like poor Petrarch, I might come to insanity for want of this fine wine of the gods.

And whoever says history is linear isn’t paying attention:

the general system of our trade…is a system of selfishness; it is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature; is not measured by the exact law of reciprocity, much less by the sentiments of love and heroism, but is a system of distrust, concealment, of superior keenness, not of giving but of taking advantage.