…on a purely self-indulgent post

It is no secret that I love Ralph Waldo Emerson and on this day, 214 years ago, my favourite writer was born, and his genius is an abiding and immutable begetter of illumination and happiness for me, as is unceasing capacity to — in his own words — “astonish and fire.”

To honour him, the three passages I cherish above all:

To ever remind me of the worth of my own intellection, thought and written and spoken word:

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his own thought because it is his.” (from Self Reliance)

The esteem in which I hope he would hold my facility for the visual arts:

“All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. The love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.” (from Nature)

And for capturing with his wondrous words, my feelings for my Gethyn, even after (just shy of!) 20 years of marriage:

“…and when the day was not long enough, but the night, too, must be consumed in keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song; when all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures.” (from Love)

HAPPY DAY!