9 - The Remembering Wine

Summary

In a journal entry of 1859, Emerson expressed satisfaction at having successfully imbued would-be students with the doctrine of self-reliance: 'I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twentyfive or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. . . . This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence.' This passage offers a glimpse of a precursor's perspective on the problem of literary influence. Instead of expressing anxiety about receiving influence, or, for that matter, an anxious desire to be influential, Emerson boasts (albeit perhaps ambivalently) of having declined to exert a personal influence on others that might have warped them from their own orbits.