Self-reliance 笔记整理

This paragraph come from Emerson's Self-Reliance. The excerpt paragragh tells the romantic idea of individualism. In it, the author calls on people to reply on oneself rather than on established society or other's conformity. In Self-reliance, Emerson express the idea of individualism with an emphasis on being self-sufficient. Every individual possesses a unique genius, Emerson argues that one can only be revealed when that individual has the courage to trust his or her own thoughts, attitudes, and inclinations against all public disapproval. It contains the most solid statement of one of Emerson's repeating themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instinct and ideas. Even if these ideas can't be understood by others, it doesn't matter because all that great people in history such as Socrates, Jesus, etc. were always misunderstood and their ideas still remain popular today. From this paragraph, we can see Emerson's one notable characteristics of writing style. The language he adopts is easy and simple which is much easier for readers to understood. He also uses comparison on his discussion. Obviously, his writing styles are not the points I mentioned above. Besides, we also can see them from the whole, such as frequent use of figurative language to make a point frequent allusions to historical and literary figures, and coinage of memorable statements of principle or aphorisms, and so on.