Emerson's Top Tips for a Transcendental Thanksgiving

Your quick guide to a nineteenth-century attitude of gratitude

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.

- Emily Dickinson

Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 12, 1836. Transcendentalism gets official with the Transcendental Club. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) are founding members As it turns out, Transcendentalism transcends itself pretty quick. The whole thing lasts fourteen years. In 1850, after the death of critic Margaret Fuller, Emerson decided the movement had entered the twilight years. As he wrote in his classic STEM major prose:

All that can be said is that she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation.

With a cool name and a few heavy hitting thinkers, Transcendentalism was one of the first philosophies homegrown from American soil instead of imported from Europe. It’s a school of thought centered on a trust in oneself above institutions and an appreciation for the divine nature of every day life. In a certain light, it’s the American answer to the Romanticism of English poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats. Both movements started as spiritual counteroffensives to scientific periods in history driven by relentless rationalism.

Both Transcendentalism and Romanticism dwell on the sublime beauty of nature and the depths of the soul, but do it in a different way. In Emerson’s Self-Reliance (1841), there’s a lot more self-affirmation and a lot less about the shared human spirit. That’s the big difference: Transcendentalism starts inside the individual and Romanticism starts outside the individual. The former is less about the Grand Tour and more about the Grand Armchair.

As we approach another Thanksgiving and reflect on what we’re grateful for, Transcendentalism can offer some helpful tips on how to start from the inside to find reasons for gratitude - especially at times when everything on the outside seems to be decidedly unromantic. That’s what makes Self-Reliance and Other Essays, a 2018 collection of Emerson’s works, an addictive to read: it’s a nonstop compilation of reassurance.

Here are Emerson’s top tips to be transcendental - and to be thankful, grateful, and optimistic this Thanksgiving:

1. Don’t Chase the World’s Opinion.

A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think… it is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion.

2. You’ll Only Find Meaning in Doing Things You Really Want to Do.

Your genuine action will expiate itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.

3. All Power is in the Present, Not Past.

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transit from a past to a new state… the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.

To fill the hour - that is happiness.

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.

4. Don’t Be Emo.

False prayers are our regrets.

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.

People give and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is... An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate - no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.

5. Haters are Lame.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual.

Even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience.

6. Inspiration is a Liquid, Not a Solid.

For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration.

The quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze.

We do not know to-day whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that ‘tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue.

7. Be Grateful for Every Disappointment.

I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing.

Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not.

The years teach much which the days never know.

8. Planning Ruins Poetry.

The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway.

We may climb in to the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation… Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirt, of poetry.

How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever these beautiful limits, and adjust ourselves, once and for all, to the perfect calculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect. In the street and in the newspapers, life appears so plain a business, that manly resolution and adherence to the multiplication-table through all weathers, will insure success.

9. Every Choice is a Mistake - and that’s OK.

The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other reasons as co-adjusters, quarreled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done... somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

10. Everything is Perspective.

Every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast.

People forget that it’s the eye which makes the horizon, and… which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.

We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us… The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the outside; in its quality, and its consequences.

11. Relationships are Planets.

There will be the same gulf between every me and thee, as between the original and the citrus. The universe is the bridge of the soul.

Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.

12. Trust Your Instinct, Let Go of Regret.

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch him, and if he give so much a leg or a finger, they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices.

We are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power of being really useful.

Do you feel like you’ve transcended yet? I hope so. So go forth and have an extremely healthy, grateful, and transcendental Thanksgiving!