Self-Reliance
Updated: Aug 8
At best, I would describe my relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson as lukewarm. I’m sure I’ve said this elsewhere, but, like his fellow Transcendentalist traveler, Henry David Thoreau, I love the idea of Emerson but am often disappointed in the results. This, in part, has to do with Emerson’s often impenetrable writing (as is, I find, nearly all philosophical writing) and, in part, with the general manner of the writing of his time. Leave it then to artists and designers Jessica Helfand and Jarrett Fuller to assemble a version of the book that intrigued me, first and foremost, as a designer. Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover.
Self-Reliance is, arguably, Emerson’s most famous essay. It’s easy to see why: Who, in America especially, and especially at the time of its writing in 1841, just 40 years after the Louisiana Purchase and seven years before America would fulfill its Manifest Destiny and extend its borders to the West Coast, did not want to embody self-reliance? The mythology of America was built on that idea(l) and from the Marlboro Man to our current age of toxic patriarchal energy (thanks to Sturgill Simpson for the phrase) embodied in the likes of President Donald Trump, who would not argue that, like religion, it has not done more harm than good?
All good things, taken to extremes, can be corrupted. Faith can be life-giving even while fundamentalist religion can be destructive. Self-reliance can be empowering, a tool for growth and consciousness, but it can also be dangerous in the wrong hands and justified for the wrong reasons. Right now, we are seeing just how dangerous it can be, and I hesitate to recommend Emerson’s essay to anyone who might grasp it only for its sensationalist clickbait headlines rather than for the marrow found in the deep cuts of its pages. Self-Reliance is not a religious text, but like any religious text, not everything is to be taken, or should be taken, literally. Think parables, not literal truth.
That’s where Jessica Helfand’s essays come in: They help frame and ground Emerson’s text. She warns that “a cursory glance may chafe on the sensitive reader” but that “a closer read reveals something far more meaningful and relevant … a meditation on what it means to be human, to have an imagination, and to use it.” And that, it turns out, is the particular lens of this volume, which I didn’t realize going in, and didn’t even grasp, here, at the close of her introduction. While Self-Reliance may be for anyone and everyone, this one—featuring a dozen Helfand-penned essays originally published on Design Observer in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic—is for creatives. While the time-capsuleness (if I can coin a phrase) may too specifically place this book in a particular moment in time, the loneliness and isolation many felt during Covid (and that many have yet to recover from) in many ways mirrors the loneliness and isolation that creatives often feel as part of their practice (I know I do), paradoxically bestowing a timelessness to the essays that, in turn, reflect the timelessness of Emerson’s words.
Helfand’s essays don’t specifically speak to Self-Reliance. That is, they aren’t essays examining various portions of the text. Rather they use the text as a jumping off point, as a prompt to explore a panoply of themes: gravity, closure, loneliness, character, uncertainty, magnaminity, love, alchemy, chance, authenticity, individualism, narrative. Tinged with the poetic, they are emboldening, empowering, inspiring. As someone who has, by and large I’d like to think, lived the best of Emerson’s words— without even knowing it and even as it estranged me from my family early on—I found much to be comforted by and much to be hopeful for. St. Francis of Assisi said, “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” As dark times descend upon us, as those in power work to crush the individual spirit and attempt to instill a bland homogeneity, to demand fealty to conformity, this book is a candle in the darkness.
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