{"id":149750,"date":"2021-01-01T13:00:25","date_gmt":"2021-01-01T18:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=149750"},"modified":"2020-12-11T17:02:37","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T22:02:37","slug":"the-myth-of-self-reliance-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/01\/01\/the-myth-of-self-reliance-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of Self-Reliance"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2020. Enjoy your holiday!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Caspar David Friedrich, Woman before the Rising Sun<\/em>, 1818<\/p><\/div>\n


\n<\/em>There\u2019s a treacherously placed bookstore in my neighborhood. To go almost anywhere from my apartment, I have to pass Walden Pond Books, and it\u2019s next door to my usual coffee shop, so even if I didn\u2019t decide to go in on the first pass, I probably will on the second. Many of the references in my own book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy<\/em>, are ones that I encountered here, in books like Braiding Sweetgrass<\/em>, Spell of the Sensuous<\/em>, and The Genius of Birds<\/em>. The influence is so strong that when I see my book at Walden Pond, I think of it as a mushroom that grew in the store.<\/p>\n

This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson\u2019s Essays<\/em>. Not having read much Emerson before, even as an English major, I was quickly drawn into his writing about time and perception: nature was a \u201cmutable cloud, which is always and never the same,\u201d and the task was to \u201c[detect] through the fly, through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species, through many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type, through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.\u201d There was an acid-trip quality to it that I both recognized and admired.<\/p>\n

Reading Emerson\u2019s essays did not feel like reading other books. Later, when I tried to describe the experience to a friend, I asked, \u201cHave you ever read a book that made you feel, like, drunk?\u201d Emerson\u2019s aphorisms are forceful, his cadences dizzying, his appeal to individual will seductive. Normally I am an orderly, chapter-per-day kind of reader, using up a pack of Post-it flags and then typing up the important quotes later. But my copy of Emerson\u2019s Essays<\/em> has only one Post-it flag, in the introduction by Douglas Crase (an Emerson quote: \u201cIt seems the one lesson which this miraculous world has to teach us, to the sacred, to stand aloof, and suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to intrude upon us and bereave us of our infinitude\u201d). After that, I lost my bearings. I was always just somewhere in the book, underlining and circling, hunched over, my face too close to the page.<\/p>\n

I had been primed for Emerson\u2019s vision of transcendence. A month earlier, I\u2019d taken my yearly trip to the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, just north of Monterey, California. My ostensible purpose was to see the migrating shorebirds\u2014including the sandpipers whose murmurous flocks contain more than a little of the transcendental\u2014but it was also just to recover and hear myself think. I had never been much of a public person, and I\u2019d been caught off-guard by the publicity around How to Do Nothing.<\/em> I was soon buried under the pile of obligations and opinions that followed. At times, it felt like I no longer knew what my book was about, or what it was that I actually thought. I felt desperate for some kind of clarity.<\/p>\n

Read more >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jenny Odell on an encounter with Emerson\u2019s \u2018Essays\u2028\u2028.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1746,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68282],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2020"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Myth of Self-Reliance by Jenny Odell<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Jenny Odell on an encounter with Emerson\u2019s \u2018Essays\u2028\u2028.\u2019\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/01\/01\/the-myth-of-self-reliance-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" 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