Word: emerson
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...Emerson says, "I am weary of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine... why pretend life is so simple a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is?.. Why fancy that you have all the truth in your keeping? There is much to say on all sides...
...That is Emerson's point in his tribute to Montaigne, the magnificently sane 16th-century Frenchman who invented the modern essay and who managed to live an intelligent, humane life in the midst of a France tearing itself limb from limb in half a century of religious civil...
...Between the partisan extremes, Emerson writes, "there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground... the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong... He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance... You are both in extremes, he says... you are spinning like bubbles in a river... you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in illusions...
...will think this odd, or prissy, but trust me. Get hold of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Representative Men" - I'm serious - and read his essay entitled "Montaigne; Or, The Skeptic...
...There Emerson hits precisely upon an essential imbecility of our own time. Rabid partisanship, an overboil of conviction, damages sight, impairs understanding, and may even ruin the joy of life. You see the world with one eye, peering straight ahead through one stupid, dogmatic lens, and walk through the day, as if it were a tunnel, in a state of smug, inflamed, combative rage...