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January 17, 2025
from “Montaigne”
in Representative Men
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“...the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
In his last book, Three Roads Back, Robert D. Richardson, a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, wrote about the way grief led Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James to insights about their common theme, resilience. “What all three writers and thinkers teach, through their lives as much as their writing is how to recover from losses, how to get up after being knocked down, and how to construct prosperity out of the wreckage of disaster.”
Our Paragraph of the Week is from Emerson’s essay “Montaigne” and the commentary is from the postscript to Richardson’s book. Taken together, they provide the solace of the long view when society appears to have taken another calamitous course.
[Note: We made slight changes in the formatting of the original Richardson commentary to fit our two-paragraph format.]
Paragraph of the Week
The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one thing and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral, the result is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and by knaves as by martyrs the just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Commentary
There is a lot of resilience hidden in that word “somehow.” Resilience is not in general quirky or unusual, nor is it a resource available only to those of iron will who can alter their views or transcend their feelings. Resilience is built into us and into things. Of the persons treated in this book, Emerson had the most profound and nuanced understanding of the real nature of resilience, and of the extent to which we, and all of nature, are caught up in it. Emerson called the process “compensation.” That is the title of the third essay in his Essays First Series (1841). The subject had fascinated him since childhood, he tells us, and he began to seriously work up the subject for a series of lectures he gave in 1837. In 1839, the year his daughter Ellen was born, he was still working on it. Coming right after “History” and “Self-Reliance,” “Compensation" remains a crucial leg of Emerson's thought, and the best single statement of how the resilience we sometimes feel in ourselves is in truth a universal law or force, discernable anywhere one looks. Resilience is part of the nature of things.
—Robert D. Richardson
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