Victory Over Things

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, July, 1841: 

Facts. All is for thee; but thence results the inconvenience that all is against thee which thou dost not make thine own. Victory over things is the destiny of man; of course, until it be accomplished, it is the war and insult of things over him. He may have as much time as he pleases, as long as he likes to he a coward, and a disgraced person, so long as he may delay to fight, but there is no escape from the alternative. I may not read Schleiermacher or Plato, I may even rejoice that Germany and Greece are too far off in time and space than that they can insult over my ignorance of their works, I may even have a secret joy that the heroes and giants of intellectual labor, say, for instance, these very Platos and Schleiermachers are dead, and cannot taunt me with a look: my soul knows better: they are not dead, for the nature of things is alive, and that passes its fatal word to me that these men shall yet meet me and shall yet tax me line for line, fact for fact, with all my pusillanimity. 

All that we care for in a man is the tidings he gives us of our own faculty through the new conditions under which he exhibits the common soul. I would know how calm, how grand, how playful, how helpful, I can be. 

Yet we care for individuals, not for the waste universality. It is the same ocean everywhere. . . .