How Emerson Can Help You Become a Stoic Nonconformist
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Summary
When we think about Stoic philosophers, we typically think about the thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But my guest, Mark Matusik, says there was an incredibly insightful Stoic philosopher who lived on the American continent in more modern times, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Today, on the show, he shares how Stoic philosophy and transcendentalism overlap, and how you can use Emerson s philosophy to become a non-conformist.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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When we think about Stoic philosophers, we typically think about the thinkers of ancient
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Greece and Rome, like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But my guest, Mark Matusik, says
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there was an incredibly insightful Stoic philosopher who lived on the American continent
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in more modern times, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Matusik is the author of Lessons from an American
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Stoic, How Emerson Can Change Your Life. Today on the show, he shares how Stoicism and
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Transcendentalism overlap, and how you can use Emerson's Stoic philosophy to become a
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non-conformist. We discuss the lessons you can learn from Emerson on developing self-reliance,
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embracing the strengths of your weaknesses, trusting your own genius instead of imitating
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others, gaining confidence from nature, compensating for the difficulties of relationships through the
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joy of deeper connections, living with greater courage, and more. After the show's over, check
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out our show notes at aum.is slash Emerson. All right, Mark Matusik, welcome to the show.
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So you got a new book out called Lessons from an American Stoic, How Emerson Can Change Your
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Life. And this is about the great American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I'm curious,
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how did you discover Ralph Waldo Emerson, and how did he change your life?
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I was in the first year of graduate school, and I was having a very bad time in my life. I couldn't
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find my direction. I felt lost in academia. I was fairly depressed and anxious a lot of the time.
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And I happened to fall into a job as a research assistant for a professor who was writing a book
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about Ralph Waldo Emerson. And I barely knew his work. Just from high school, I had read a couple
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of essays, but it didn't really mean anything to me. And you know how when the student is ready,
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the teacher shows up. And when I started to read his work, something resonated in me that I hadn't
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encountered before. He was the first transcendental writer I had ever come across. He had a vision of
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human potential that was much bigger than anything I had ever encountered before. And it cut through my
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depression in a way that nothing else really had. The beauty of the writing, the expansiveness of his
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vision, and the sense of self-reliance, which is something that I had never understood deeply before
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coming across Emerson, really shifted how I looked at myself and the world. I stopped blaming other
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people for my problems. I started looking inside myself for answers. I realized that even though I
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considered myself an agnostic, an atheist, that I really did have a deep sense of spirituality in me.
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It wasn't an organized religious kind of spirituality, but there was definitely a sense
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of something bigger than myself and being connected to something larger that I had been longing for my
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whole life and didn't even realize it. So the book is called Lessons from an American Stoic. I've
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never thought of Emerson as a Stoic before. You said in the book that he was called America's original
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Stoic. Why is that? You know, people don't realize what a Stoic Emerson was. So much of
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transcendental philosophy overlaps with Stoicism. They both share this idea that we all create our
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own reality and that how we see is how we live. They all talked about, Remerson as well as the
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ancient Stoics talked about the fact that nothing can really harm you except with your own permission,
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you know, that how we interpret our lives has everything to do with our experience.
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They both talked about obstacles being opportunities, virtue as a path of happiness.
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The Stoics, as well as Emerson, shared this belief that character is destiny, that how you think,
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what you believe is who you become. And that's what unfolds as your destiny in life.
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Also, the Stoics believe, you know, God is in everything, like the universe. He's there
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all over the place. And like transcendentalism had a similar idea.
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That's exactly it. Yeah. That the God in you connects to the God in all things. That non-dual
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metaphysical belief was very much present with the Stoics. And it was Emerson's whole life.
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His entire life's work was about helping people recognize that they have, that we all have in
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ourselves access to a bigger mind, what he called the over soul or the over mind. We all have access to
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that. And the Stoics believe that as well. And that when we tap into that deep wisdom in ourselves,
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we know much more than we're aware of. And we're much more powerful than we give ourselves credit
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for. So Emerson is famous for his essay called Self-Reliance. It's all about being an individual.
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I think everyone's probably read that at some point, maybe in high school and college.
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What did Emerson mean exactly by self-reliance? And what do you think people get wrong about his
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idea of self-reliance? This is huge. This may be the biggest takeaway from my book is that we have
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misunderstood what he meant by self-reliance. Self-reliance has so often been misinterpreted
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as isolationism, arrogance, egotism. But Emerson said that there is nothing so weak as an egotist and
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that self-reliance is reliance on God. Now, whether we think of God as being God up in the sky of
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traditional religion or just spirit, realizing that self-reliance is a reliance on the thing
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in us that's bigger than our personality. And when you get that, it takes you out of the victim's
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seat. So many of us live our lives putting our power outside of ourselves, feeling like we're
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victims of circumstance. And self-reliance is the antithesis of that. It says that we can take back
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our power by recognizing that we have a choice in how we respond to circumstances. We have a choice
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in how we see ourselves and the world. And when you develop what psychologists call an internal locus
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of control instead of an external locus of control, it shifts the way you live. You start to look inside
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for guidance instead of always seeking authority outside yourself. And you also learn to know yourself
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and to think for yourself. You know, of course, the first premise of all philosophy is to know
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thyself. And that's very much at the heart of self-reliance. Without self-knowledge, we can't
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live empowered lives. So what you've done in your book, Lessons from an American Stoic, is I think you
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did a great job. As you looked at all of Emerson's work, his essays, his letters that he wrote to
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various friends, his journals, and extracted lessons on how we can become more self-reliant in an
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Emersonian sort of way. And you developed, created 12 lessons. I want to talk about some of these
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lessons today and how we can become more self-reliant. And the first one, you mentioned
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character is destiny, or you called it character is everything. And in this section, you talked about
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Emerson's idea of compensation. How can Emerson's idea of compensation help us discover our character?
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Compensation basically says that for every sweet, there is a sour, that for every weakness,
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there is a strength. And understanding that there's a duality in human life that we need to
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make space for if we want to be whole people. That means incorporating what we call the shadow
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into our self-awareness and into our self-acceptance. So compensation means accepting your own
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contradictions and understanding that, as he said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
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minds. That when we're constantly aspiring to be consistent, monolithic, that leads to conformity
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and it leads to a very unrealistic expectation of who we are. The fact is we're all mixed bags and
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that's what makes us unique. That's what gives us our originality. There's nothing wrong with that.
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The problem is that we spend so much of our lives judging ourselves for the things that we
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can't accept or that we wish were different and pushing them away.
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So what Emerson is all about embracing all of who we are and then using that mixed bag,
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that motley crew of characters inside ourselves, using all of that to become as unique and particular
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and original as we can be in our lives. So it's not about smoothing out the rough edges and it's not
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about hiding the things in us that we're ashamed of. It's about owning them and seeing how they can
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inform us. Because another thing he said and compensation is about is understanding that
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our faults, our losses, our disappointments are also teachers.
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Yeah, I think that's a really useful idea of understanding even personal weaknesses you might
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have. It might be the source of your strength. Someone who might think, well, I'm just not
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very extroverted, right? I can't put myself out there and be sort of like the life of the party.
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Well, then Emerson would say, well, what sorts of good things come from that? Like what does
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allow you? Maybe you're a little bit more introspective. Maybe you are able to connect
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better on a more intimate level, one-on-one with people. So I like that idea. And you see in Emerson's
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writing, like he struggled with that. He was always pointing out his flaws and he'd often compare
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himself maybe to Thoreau, right? He said, well, Thoreau's out there living the ideas of transcendentalism
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better than I am. But I think one of the strengths that Emerson had, Thoreau was out there
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looking at bullfrogs and building sheds. But Emerson was a great writer. He was a good public
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speaker. So even though he wasn't really good at the hands-on, you know, self-reliance of
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transcendentalism, it was a strength because he was able to be a great speaker and spread these ideas
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of transcendentalism. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And he was very hard on himself. He had been
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a really insecure little boy. Nobody was expected very much of him. He had these very popular,
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good-looking brothers who were outgoing. And he was this chubby, introverted little guy who
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nobody expected much of. So from the time he was a little boy, he had an inferiority complex and
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problems with self-esteem. And he struggled with that throughout his life. And it's part of what
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made him such a great writer is that he was able to be so candid about himself and so human with
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himself. And as you said, there were many things that he couldn't do well. He couldn't build a shed
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on his own land that he loaned to Thoreau to build the shed at Walden Pond. He couldn't do that. And
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he did envy Thoreau for a lot of his hands-on abilities. But Emerson was a far greater writer.
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He was a much deeper thinker. And Thoreau took many of his ideas from Emerson. So this isn't to take
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anything away from Thoreau. He was a unique and powerful soul. But Thoreau also had, of course,
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his many, many flaws, not being able to connect with other people, not being willing to put his
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work into the world in a way that was satisfying to him. There were ways that Thoreau felt like a
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failure as well. And what Emerson is saying is that trying to be someone else's idea of what a powerful,
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strong, successful person looks like is a disaster. He said that imitation is suicide and that you reach a
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certain point in your life that you realize that if you don't start to follow your own genius,
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that voice of guidance inside yourself, you're never going to reach the destination that is meant for
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you. All right. So another lesson is you are how you see. And this is all about perspective.
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How did Emerson expand his perspective on himself and in his life?
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Through self-inquiry, that really was his primary means of self-discovery. And it's also the path of
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self-reliance is understanding oneself. One way that he did that was through journal writing.
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He turned inward as did the ancient Stoics in his journal and exploring his inner life,
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asking himself the kinds of deep questions that we don't often ask in the everyday conversation.
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Who am I? What am I doing here? What do I mean? What is this life for? Those are the kinds of
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questions that he explored in his journal. And it gave him a deeper sense of who he was. And he came
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to see that, as he put it, people do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a
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confession of their character. He came to see that the way he was seeing the world said more about him
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than it did the outside world. And he said, what is life but the angle of vision? So it's all
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about questioning our angle of vision, questioning our perspective in an ongoing way. Because of
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course, what's true for you today may not be true for you next week. And that's why self-inquiry,
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particularly journal writing, is a practice. We're always starting over. And that's why you can sit and
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ask the same questions week after week, month after month, and get different answers. Because we are
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constantly changing, and our needs are changing, and who we are shifts. As Emerson said, the same world
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is a hell and a heaven, depending on how we look at it. And that goes back to that law of compensation,
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understanding that everything has both sides to it, depending on the way you frame it, and what it
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Yeah, the journal writing, that was really important to Emerson. He called his journal
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the wide world. And then one of the first things he did when he met Thoreau, he said, are you keeping
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a journal? And Thoreau at the time wasn't keeping a journal. And Emerson was like, you should keep a
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journal. And because Thoreau started keeping a journal, we have all this great writing because of that.
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And that's another common thing with Emerson and the Stoics. A lot of people have probably read
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Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Those are basically, those are journal entries. Those were for himself.
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They weren't meant to be public writings. They were just him writing in a journal, telling him to
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get his act together. And so there's another Stoic connection right there.
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Yeah, it's absolutely true. We wouldn't have the Meditations if Marcus Aurelius hadn't kept a
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journal. We wouldn't have Walden if Thoreau hadn't kept a journal when he was at Walden Ponds. A lot of
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what later became the book Walden were journal entries. So this is really about understanding that we
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have this tool at our disposal, this tool of self-inquiry. And you don't have to be a great writer to do
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that. It's not about creating beautiful prose. It's about having the willingness to ask deep
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questions and tell the truth. And that's something, of course, we don't often do. You know, we think that
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we do. We go through our lives being mostly honest people trying to, you know, do the right thing. But the
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fact is that we all dissemble and lie every day of our lives in subtle and not so subtle ways.
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And what journal writing helps you to do is cut through that. Because, of course, you can't lie
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to yourself in quite the same way as you do to other people. And that's the beauty of self-inquiry,
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is that you challenge your own narratives. And because, of course, we are story-making animals.
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That's what we do. It's how we survive in the world. We create interpretations of our experience.
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But the interpretation is not the truth. You know, what happened is not your idea about what
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happened. So what journal writing helps you do is get between those two things and tweak them apart.
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So you see, ah, this is what happened. And that's what I told myself about what happened.
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And when you can disidentify from the story, that's when you begin to awaken to what is true.
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And a different, a more authentic way of being in the world.
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So another lesson is build your own world. And this is all about becoming a non-conformist.
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Transcendentalists were big on this idea of non-conformity. What did Emerson mean by
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non-conformity? Because that's a word people throw around a lot. Well, I'm a non-conformist. But
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He did. And it goes to what we've been saying about trusting this voice inside us. We all have
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what he called genius. That comes from the Romans were the first to use the word genius. And what
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they mean by that is our muse or the tutelary deity that we come into life with that is unique to us.
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And the only purpose of your genius, it's also called the daemon by the Greeks, is to guide you
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toward your own fruition. And so the non-conformist is devoted to listening to the voice of their own
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genius and trusting their own intuition and their own inner guidance. Emerson said,
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to be yourself in a world that's constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest
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accomplishment. We have to swim against the tide because, of course, society doesn't want a
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citizenry of non-conformist. Society survives by people coloring inside the lines, doing what they're
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told to do, and being socialized. And of course, we need to be socialized as social animals. We need to
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cooperate. That's all true. But when it comes to making the deep decisions in our own lives and
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the choices that matter to us, it's a disaster to try to follow someone else's daemon, someone else's
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muse. We end up living somebody else's life. Emerson says that society is not your friend,
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and it's really important to remember that. So it doesn't mean being antisocial necessarily,
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but it means understanding where your power lies. Your power lies in yourself. As Emerson said,
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my authority comes from my non-conformity. We don't want to be living according to other people's
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standards of goodness and thereby becoming hypocritical, which is what happens a lot.
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Folks live outwardly one way, but inside there's something else. He's trying to unify the inside with
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the outside so that we are whole, and it heals the division and the conflict that comes up when we
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are trying to impersonate other people. Yeah, Emerson called that double consciousness.
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And in that chapter about non-conformity, you make the case that both Thoreau and Emerson were examples
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of non-conformity in their own way. Thoreau, he really embraced this idea of non-conformity in a way
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that even Emerson, and we were talking about this earlier, how Emerson kind of envied Thoreau.
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And there's this great quote that Emerson said about Thoreau's embrace of transcendentalism.
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Thoreau gives me in flesh and blood my own ethics. He is far more real in daily practically obeying them
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than I. And then Emerson also said this of Thoreau, he walked abreast with his days and felt no shame
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in not studying a profession. For he does not postpone his life, but lives already.
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But Emerson could be a non-conformist in his own way. When he was a minister, his thoughts on God
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started to change. And then he gave this address to the Harvard Divinity School,
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where he said some stuff that upset a lot of people. He said some things that people thought
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were heretical. And so he was denounced. But even though he was denounced, he never replied to the
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criticism. He just let his word stand. And I mean, he wasn't invited back to speak at Harvard again,
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I think it was like for something like 30 years. So that took some chutzpah too.
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Oh, it absolutely did. No, he was not a coward. Thoreau was an extreme. Thoreau was somebody who
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truly lived outside the margins of what you would call normality in a way that Emerson didn't. Emerson
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was a pretty solid bourgeois. He was married, he had children, he lived in the same house.
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Thoreau rejected many of the things we associate with a civilization. But Emerson was a very brave
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man. He was a seventh generation minister. He had this amazing job at 28 as the head of the second
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church in Boston, a very prestigious job. And he gave up the pulpit. He walked away from it. And
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that was, you know, that was a scandal that he did that people called him a pagan and a pantheist,
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but he didn't care. So it wasn't that he backed away from other people's judgment. It's that he was a
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more self-conscious soul than Thoreau. He was more circumspect. So they had a different kind of courage.
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But that's important too, because one thing that Emerson says is never try to imitate another person's
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courage, that we all have our own version of what brave looks like. So we need not try to imitate
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other people's way of being in the world. We're going to take a quick break for a word from our
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sponsors. And now back to the show. So another lesson, one of my favorites was, without confidence,
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the universe is against me. What did Emerson mean by confidence?
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You know, confidence comes from the root word for with faith. And for him, confidence was having faith
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in that thing in us that knows, that genius, that voice of guidance, which is connected to the divine,
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however you think of the divine. So for him, confidence had to do with tapping into the thing
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in us that's bigger than our personality. He talked about us having a giant within us,
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and that when we discover that giant, it frees us of so many of our fears. And also when you have
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confidence, as I'm sure you've seen in your own life, when you, as he said, once you make a decision,
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the universe conspires to make it happen. So confidence has charisma connected to it. Confidence
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has a kind of a magnetism. And it means being rooted in what is true for you, which is something
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that's always changing. So that's why consistency is an overrated virtue, according to Emerson,
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because what you care about today isn't what you're going to care about in a couple of weeks.
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And confidence comes from being true to your own changes and your own changeability and being
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connected to that internal locus of control that I was talking about earlier. Instead of feeling like
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life is happening to us, it's more like life is happening through us. And we are not the victims
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of circumstance. We can always shift our relationship to our circumstances and gauge our responses. And
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this, of course, is the heart of Stoicism, is learning to gauge your responses to the outside world and to
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external conditions. And then you realize that external conditions aren't running your life. Your mind is
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running your life. And how you respond to those conditions is what determines your well-being.
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And you also talk at the beginning of that chapter how Emerson's idea of confidence was also tied up
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with this idea of enthusiasm. But it's the Greek idea of enthusiasm. What is that idea?
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Well, the Greek word root for enthusiasm means with God. It means filled with God. So once again,
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it's connected to spirit, whatever a person calls spirit. Many people are allergic to the G word.
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They can't stand religion. That's fine. Enthusiasm is connected to passion and spirit, the thing that
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enlarges us, that takes us beyond what we're capable of. Enthusiasm is a real joy in living and connecting
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to the power that's bigger than we are. And that's, of course, connected to nature. Nature is one of our
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primary means of tapping into that higher form of energy. And that's what enthusiasm is. That's what
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confidence is. And that's why, of course, he, like Thoreau, talks so much about learning from nature,
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spending time in nature, remembering that you are nature, seeing the lessons that nature can teach
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you. He talks about watching ants on the ground and learning from their industriousness,
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or learning tranquility from the clear blue sky, or learning durability and stamina from the way
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the water hits a rock and the rock can just bear the water hitting it over and over and over. We learn
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from nature. We learn these lessons about how to be a whole human being from connecting to the natural
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world. And one of his sacrilegious ideas was saying that we are nature. And that since nature is God
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on earth or the representation of the divine on earth, we also are divine. And that was blasphemy
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for him to say that. But it's really the root of Emerson's wisdom is that as parts of nature,
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we share all the qualities of nature. And that includes the ability to free ourselves and to adapt
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and the resilience and the ability to regenerate and recreate ourselves. All of these are visible in the
00:25:28.180
natural world. And when you connect to that, it gives you enormous vitality and confidence and
00:25:33.580
enthusiasm. Okay. So confidence was required to live a self-reliant life and confidence required
00:25:41.300
enthusiasm or vitality. And you have a whole chapter about vitality. It's called a stream of power runs
00:25:47.760
through you. And that's that whole idea of life is streaming. We're part of nature. We can tap into that.
00:25:53.000
But what's interesting about Emerson's life, he wrote these just really inspiring prose about
00:25:59.180
vitality and confidence. One of my wife's and I's favorite quotes from Emerson is,
00:26:05.000
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. It's very bracing and very stirring.
00:26:09.920
But if you look at his personal life, his private life, it seemed like this idea of confidence,
00:26:15.060
enthusiasm, and vitality was something that he struggled with. What did that look like in his life?
00:26:19.740
Well, first of all, physical vitality was a struggle for him. He was never a strong man
00:26:26.240
physically. He had tuberculosis from the time he was a young boy. He used to envy the vitality of the
00:26:33.100
people around him. He had to measure out his energy very carefully to do the work that he wanted to do.
00:26:40.160
And he was constantly lamenting his lack of animal power, he used to call it. His animal forces were weak.
00:26:47.560
And yet he recognized that that vitality is something that's streaming through us.
00:26:55.080
As he said, man is a conductor of a whole stream of electricity. So we are electric beings. And this,
00:27:02.020
of course, reminds you of Whitman and singing the body electric. This was very much an idea in the air
00:27:08.120
at that time. And vitality is that force that through the green fuse drives the flower,
00:27:14.980
as Dylan Thomas put it, is something that we all have access to, and we need to learn to husband it.
00:27:20.820
And that's something Emerson talks about a lot. That goes to nonconformity as well, because we can't
00:27:25.980
fritter our energies away trying to imitate other people. We need to be clear about how our own
00:27:32.400
stream of electricity operates. And his was intermittent, and it was not as strong as it might have been.
00:27:40.260
So he had to be very careful about it, feeding himself well, physically, spiritually, and
00:27:46.460
intellectually in order to strengthen himself, because it was something that didn't come easily
00:27:53.980
I think that's interesting about Emerson, how he lacked that physical vitality. And as a consequence,
00:27:57.920
he may have realized the importance. You know how important something is when you lack it,
00:28:02.720
right? And so he understood the importance of vitality.
00:28:05.100
And I think also, I think he was trying to perhaps transfer, kind of bring up this idea of not just
00:28:10.860
physical vitality, but also spiritual vitality. Like, if you can't be vital in your physical life,
00:28:17.160
you can live a strenuous, vital life spiritually. And what's interesting, Friedrich Nietzsche was an
00:28:23.260
admirer of Emerson. And what's interesting about Nietzsche's work is, you know, he's known for the
00:28:28.200
Ubermensch and the Overman, and it's all very bracing and vital sort of prose. But like Emerson,
00:28:34.300
Nietzsche, he was frail, he was sick, like he spent most of his life just traveling to different
00:28:39.540
places to different sanatoriums and hotels to recuperate from different illnesses. Nietzsche
00:28:44.260
realized he lacked physical vitality. So he admired it. But I think he also was trying to come with this
00:28:52.580
Yeah, that's true. You know, Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century German mystic, talks about
00:28:58.040
viriditas, that green force that flows through us and that animates the universe.
00:29:03.760
It's also the force of eros. And that's what we're talking about. So there's physical vitality. Do you
00:29:09.760
have a strong body or a weak body? And what's your physiology? And then there's this spiritual vitality
00:29:15.380
that we all partake of. And regardless of the state of your body, that can be extremely strong.
00:29:23.880
And it was in Emerson. His spiritual vitality never wavered. It was his physical vitality that he
00:29:30.120
worried about and that was such a struggle for him. But learning to nurture that viriditas,
00:29:36.260
that green force in us, that erotic force in us, has a lot to do with how effectively we live
00:29:43.800
and the joy we're able to feel and how much we're able to connect with other people, how engaged we
00:29:49.980
are. Without that, it's very difficult to be in the world in a way that matters without having that
00:29:58.240
spiritual vitality, which has to do with attention. It has to do with compassion and empathy.
00:30:04.340
And it also has to do with interest. The thing I love about Emerson is he was so interested in life
00:30:11.560
and learning. And you see that with most people who have that kind of vitality we're talking about.
00:30:17.060
They may not be physically strong, but when they have that enthusiasm, that vitality that's connected
00:30:22.700
to spirit, it can go a long way to making up for whatever debility there is in the body.
00:30:29.580
Yeah. We have one of our mottos in our house, in our family is don't be a potato head.
00:30:34.940
And basically it's, we don't want, like, I don't want to be that way. And we don't want our kids to
00:30:39.400
be the sort of type of person. You're in a class and someone's giving a lecture on some topic where you
00:30:45.880
just disengage and you're just kind of looking at the person's slack jawed and not really paying
00:30:50.400
attention. I want them to be like engaged with it. Like there's, there's an opportunity to like
00:30:54.140
learn something. So yeah, I think you can take away that from Emerson. He wasn't a spiritual potato
00:30:58.560
head. He was not a spiritual potato head, not at all. He was fascinated by life. He was fascinated
00:31:05.120
by people and he was a keen observer of things. Outwardly, you had this well-brought up, you know,
00:31:11.900
Yankee, you know, Boston Brahmin, but inside he was a passionate man with dramatic emotions and big
00:31:19.760
upheavals and big joys and big sorrows. And that aliveness comes through in his work and it comes
00:31:25.760
through in his understanding of human nature. You have a lesson on relationships called
00:31:30.580
thorn in my flesh and Emerson, if you read his writings, he had a very, he had high ideals for
00:31:37.280
relationships, but it seemed like he struggled with them for most of his life. What did Emerson
00:31:42.060
struggle with when it came to relationships? You know, this really was his tragic flaw. If you look at it
00:31:49.120
from the sort of old heroic Greek way, his tragic flaw was his inability to be intimate. You know,
00:31:56.880
he had tremendous difficulty connecting emotionally with other people. And he had a lot of grief over
00:32:05.480
that. He said, the love you withhold is the pain that you carry. And he carried a lot of pain around his
00:32:12.640
withholding of love, even from the people he cared about most. At one point in the journal, he says,
00:32:18.540
even at home, he looks at the people in his own house as across an abyss. So he was profoundly
00:32:27.120
alienated in a part of himself and very withdrawn and shy. And so for him, relationships were an ongoing
00:32:37.040
mystery and challenge. He had a very close relationship with Margaret Fuller, who was
00:32:43.100
many people thought the most learned woman of her day. And it was a tortured, difficult relationship.
00:32:49.740
And he, they pined for each other and they had these intense, long intellectual conversations. And he,
00:32:55.800
he worshiped her. He idolized her in certain ways, but then he could be in the same room with her and
00:33:01.140
he'd feel himself being repulsed. And part of it was that she had the hots for him and she was constantly
00:33:07.400
trying to seduce him. And he was a married man and he was not attracted to her. But part of it was
00:33:13.780
this discomfort with emotion and connection and something around that, that he could do it in his
00:33:22.060
mind and he could do it in the abstract. But when it came to actually expressing it to the individual,
00:33:28.380
showing his own vulnerabilities, that was very, very hard for him. And he thanked Margaret
00:33:34.560
afterward. He had to finally pull back from the friendship, though he never stopped loving her.
00:33:39.460
He had to pull back from the friendship, but he thanked her after that for starting to crack through
00:33:45.200
his resistance. He said to her, I'll never go quite back to my old Arctic ways. So he knew how chilly he
00:33:52.640
could be and he didn't want to be that way, but that was his, in certain ways, his temperament and his,
00:33:58.000
his nature. And he was always trying to open up more and overcome that, that distance that he felt
00:34:05.720
from other people. Well, him and Thoreau, they had a really close friendship, but it was often
00:34:10.140
strained. What was that like? That was a very strained relationship. Yeah. He, he loved Henry
00:34:16.120
and Henry loved him. And there was a lot of tension between them because they were very critical of one
00:34:26.240
another for all the reasons that we've been talking about. You know, there are ways that Emerson didn't
00:34:31.360
think that Thoreau was living up to his potential. And there are ways that, that Thoreau thought that
00:34:36.320
Emerson was a prig and couldn't loosen up and needed to break free of his bourgeois, you know, lifestyle.
00:34:44.840
They judged each other. They had a very contentious relationship.
00:34:48.140
But Emerson was at the end of the day, Thoreau's real mentor. You know, he was seven years older
00:34:55.260
than Thoreau. They weren't quite contemporaries. So they admired each other tremendously. And then
00:35:01.560
they would get into the kind of emotional confusion and haggling that a lot of close friends do. You
00:35:08.140
know, everyone is imperfect. And the closer you get to them, the bigger their imperfections become,
00:35:13.420
the more obvious they become. And he was very aware of the ways that Henry was unkind and the ways that
00:35:22.000
he refused to, to join in. You know, Henry would never join in with other people, even when it would
00:35:29.240
have benefited him and them. So Henry, Henry could be a bit withholding in a way that Emerson wasn't.
00:35:36.580
Emerson was generous spiritually. He couldn't always be generous emotionally, but he was generous
00:35:41.660
spiritually. Henry was not. And he was cantankerous and very, very judgmental. And he had a way of
00:35:49.600
kind of finding the fault and the flaw in everything that annoyed Emerson. You know, Emerson was somebody
00:35:57.160
who tried to look for the good and the true and the beautiful. Henry was somebody who looked for
00:36:01.920
the faulty, the hypocritical, and the problematic. So they were very different temperamentally that way.
00:36:08.680
And it became an issue very often in their friendship, which was kind of off and on. They were always in
00:36:13.900
each other's lives, but they were not always as close as they might have been.
00:36:19.960
So what lessons do you think we take from Emerson on developing good relationships?
00:36:25.460
The one that speaks to me most is the importance of intellectual connection. That doesn't mean that all
00:36:32.640
relationships have to be intellectual. But for him, for example, having deep conversation in a relationship
00:36:38.920
was the highest ideal. It was his drug of choice, you could say. He loved conversation. He wanted to
00:36:46.760
know what people he cared about thought, what they struggled with, what their ideals were, the places
00:36:53.400
that scared them. He wanted to know people in a very deep way. And that didn't always mean that he could
00:37:00.880
be as emotionally demonstrative as he wanted to be. But he really wanted to know, he cared about the
00:37:07.020
inner life of the other person. And that's something that we in our relationships don't always focus as
00:37:14.100
much on as we might. In friendships, we tend to, because friends are connected, because they tend to
00:37:20.420
be connected, because they share mutual interests. But for example, in intimate relationships with a lover
00:37:25.800
or a spouse, you know, to remember to care about the other person's inner life, you know, who are you
00:37:32.200
today? What do you believe in? What really means something to you? He was always encouraging us to
00:37:39.420
engage on that level. And that's really useful to remember, particularly these days in the age of ADD,
00:37:48.520
when we don't often give the people in our lives the attention that they deserve or that relationships
00:37:53.540
require to deepen. You know, something Emerson always talked about is that relationships take
00:37:58.200
time to deepen and to form. And they were always looking for instant gratification. He really cared
00:38:04.580
about the deeper values of a relationship that's based on knowing the other person, knowing them
00:38:11.380
the way we know as seekers, you know, we understand what really makes the other person tick.
00:38:19.060
So another lesson is death of fear. It's all about courage. And in this chapter, you recount
00:38:23.440
a moment in Emerson's life that would change him profoundly. His first wife, Ellen died. And then
00:38:29.520
it put Emerson in this deep, deep depression that lasted over a year. But then he did something to get
00:38:35.840
him out of that funk. What did Emerson do to get out of his depression?
00:38:39.700
This was shocking. He couldn't pull out of it. He was having suicidal thoughts. Nobody could help him.
00:38:46.600
And one day he realized that he had to shake himself out of this state that he was in,
00:38:52.020
in this frozen state. And so he went to the, without telling anyone, he went to the cemetery
00:38:58.360
where Ellen was entombed. And he opened her coffin to look at her face. He realized that he needed to
00:39:06.800
face his greatest fear, which was seeing her dead body and really getting that she was gone.
00:39:12.420
She had been the love of his life. She died when she was 19, after they were married only a year and a half.
00:39:19.120
He nursed her through tuberculosis. It was a horrible thing. And he needed to face the horror.
00:39:25.320
And when he did that, it shook him up. He changed profoundly. He didn't tell anyone about this.
00:39:31.780
And there's a very short mention of it in his journal. But after that, he quit the ministry.
00:39:36.820
He went to Europe. He met some of his great literary heroes. And he started to publish.
00:39:43.100
And his life shifted profoundly. And as Robert Richardson, his biographer said, after that fall
00:39:51.680
into depression, he would never again forget the unregarded epiphanies of every blessed day.
00:39:58.440
He realized that life had even deeper value than he had realized before this grief drowned him in it.
00:40:05.360
And so it shook him up. It shook him back to life. And it was the best thing he could have done for
00:40:13.060
himself. So what can we learn from that experience on facing our fears to become more courageous?
00:40:19.080
Moving toward our fears head on and not avoiding them as much as possible. What we do and why fear
00:40:26.960
gets bigger is that we resist it and we try to avoid it. And the more we do that, the bigger it gets,
00:40:33.480
the more powerful the fears become. So as Emerson said, knowledge is the antidote to fear.
00:40:39.840
So the more we know about our fears, the less control they have over us. So for him, for example,
00:40:46.880
he needed to know what Ellen's body looked like then. What was this thing that he was grieving?
00:40:53.780
And when he did that, it kind of cut his fear off at the knees. And that's something that we can all do
00:41:01.240
is when instead of when a fear comes up, instead of running away from it, we can look at it directly
00:41:07.920
and say, what are you? You know, when you do that, the fear diminishes immediately.
00:41:14.600
The spiritual teacher Ram Dass used to say that fears are like, instead of running away from our
00:41:20.280
fears and turning them into these gigantic, you know, these gigantic monsters, we can just see that
00:41:25.520
they're little schmooze and we can invite them in for tea. You know, so instead of giving them all
00:41:30.880
this power, we can say, oh, you're not, you're not all that. Come here, come in, sit down, let's have
00:41:36.360
some tea. And so we defang our fears that way. That's how, how we reduce our fears. So it's important
00:41:43.060
to face our fears and it's important to understand that they don't have to define us. Emerson was very
00:41:48.460
big on the idea that what happens to us is the external life. And so grief, for example, he had
00:41:56.080
a lot of grief in his life, but he realized that grief belongs to the external life. So things happen
00:42:02.260
to us and they pass and whatever is impermanent doesn't have a last, the lasting ability to disempower
00:42:11.340
us or to take away our joy for living. So understanding that fear is out there and it
00:42:17.880
doesn't have to run us was a huge insight for him personally and in his teaching.
00:42:25.180
And he got that from his, an aunt, Aunt Mary. She was this really staunch Protestant and she would
00:42:32.400
always tell her nephew to always, always, always, always, always do what you are afraid to do all the
00:42:38.220
time. And I guess Emerson embraced that. Yes. And Mary Moody Emerson was a piece of work.
00:42:43.680
She was a strict Calvinist. She was a religious fanatic by any estimation. She used to travel in
00:42:52.160
a burial shroud. So in case she died, she could go right to her maker. She slept in a bed that was
00:42:57.620
shaped like a coffin. You know, she was a real eccentric, but one of her strengths was her
00:43:03.700
fearlessness and her ability to really push her nephews to confront the things that scared them
00:43:10.800
the most. And she was his biggest influence when he was growing up. She lived with the family
00:43:14.960
and she was his great spiritual tutor, you know, as well as his tutor in life in many ways. And she,
00:43:22.760
she lived fearlessly. She also was a woman in that age who lived in many ways like a man and couldn't
00:43:29.780
care less about the conventions of the time and what a woman was supposed to do or not allowed to
00:43:36.040
do. So she was a role model for him around originality and fearlessness. And here again,
00:43:43.300
Emerson said to be really strong, we must adhere to our own means and not attempt to adopt another's
00:43:48.900
courage. So while he could admire his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, he was not his aunt. He needed to find
00:43:56.780
his own courage and find the thing, the ways, his own path to self-empowerment. And this was an
00:44:03.500
ongoing process. He sometimes fell short and he would recriminate himself for his perceived failures.
00:44:11.080
And then he would try harder next time. So he was a work in progress like all of us.
00:44:16.220
Yeah. I love that idea of there's different types of courage based on your character. And he said,
00:44:20.520
this is great quote. There is a courage of manners in private assemblies and another in public
00:44:25.420
assemblies. A courage, which enables one man to speak masterly to a hostile company whilst another
00:44:30.760
man who can easily face a cannon's mouth, dares not open his own. And he said like, those are all
00:44:35.600
different types of courage you can have. You got to find what your courage is good at and lean into
00:44:39.780
that. Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:44:43.340
and your work? Thanks. It's wonderful to talk to you. Well, people can go to my website, which is
00:44:48.240
markmatusik.com and check out my work there. I also have a global online community for self-inquiry,
00:44:56.580
which is called the Seekers Forum. So people can go to theseekersforum.com and learn more about what
00:45:02.260
we do there. Fantastic. Well, Mark Matusik, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:45:07.580
My guest is Mark Matusik. He's the author of the book, Lessons from an American Stoic. It's available
00:45:11.980
on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about Mark's work at his
00:45:15.820
website, markmatusik.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash Emerson. We find links to
00:45:21.060
resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the
00:45:31.920
AOM podcast. The Art of Manly's podcast hosts guests from a wide range of fields. So you can
00:45:36.220
learn more about a wide range of topics. In the same week, we might discuss the rise and fall of
00:45:40.440
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