Among the plethora of thoughts that drift and spin and glimmer and coalesce in and out of consciousness, on the trail over the past few days I’ve some several times had the desire to revisit Emerson’s Self-Reliance, born at seeing a book of his on John Muir’s shelf earlier in the month. I first read the essay two years ago at Trident Cafe in Boston and remember it had a profound effect then.

This time, over snail-speed WiFi at Kennedy Meadows — halfway from Lake Tahoe to Yosemite along the PCT — it brought tears to my eyes within the opening paragraphs.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.