"Emerson, Ralph W. - The Method of Nature" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

to put things in favorable lights; in him is the light, from him all
things are illuminated, to their centre. What patron shall he ask
for employment and reward? Hereto was he born, to deliver the
thought of his heart from the universe to the universe, to do an
office which nature could not forego, nor he be discharged from
rendering, and then immerge again into the holy silence and eternity
out of which as a man he arose. God is rich, and many more men than
one he harbors in his bosom, biding their time and the needs and the
beauty of all. Is not this the theory of every man's genius or
faculty? Why then goest thou as some Boswell or listening worshipper
to this saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art
thou with whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou
think meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite
his ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?

Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health
and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits
influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his
genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the
current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man's
wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must
be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in
him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his
agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the
human with the divine. I conceive a man as always spoken to from
behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker. In all the
millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face. As
children in their play run behind each other, and seize one by the
ears and make him walk before them, so is the spirit our unseen
pilot. That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all
men, and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will
exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer
separate it from himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, he
shall be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater
wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is
borne away as with a flood, he becomes careless of his food and of
his house, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But
if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that
is still taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done,
then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears.
His health and greatness consist in his being the channel through
which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fulness in which an
ecstatical state takes place in him. It is pitiful to be an artist,
when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels filled with
the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of omniscience
and omnipresence. Are there not moments in the history of heaven
when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the
Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform
benefit? It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust of
imparting as from _us_, this desire to be loved, the wish to be