On this day in 1882, writer Ralph Waldo Emerson breathed his last.
Emerson's transcendentalist worldview is not without its pitfalls, but it is *alive*. Few wrote about the possibilities of human achievement with more brilliance.
A thread of my favorite Emerson quotes:
15. "God will not have his work made manifest by cowards...
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."
~Emerson, Self-Reliance
14. "Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation...
That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him."
To celebrate, a thread of every Shakespeare play, with the most memorable lines from each:
1. Romeo and Juliet
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet..." (II.ii)
2. Macbeth
"...Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing." (V.v)
Instead of doom-scrolling, log off and read one of these Good Friday-inspired works of literature.
Thread: 🪡 👇
10. The Dream of the Rood
This 7th-century Old English poem tells the story of the Crucifixion from the perspective of the Cross itself ("Rood" is Old English for "pole" or crucifix), blending Christian themes with Anglo-Saxon warrior culture.
A fascinating work.
9. East Coker, from The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
One of the most arrestingly beautiful meditations on the meaning of the Passion.
It's Eliot at his best, grappling with the modern world while reaching for the transcendent.
On this day, in 1708, Jonathan Swift, years before publishing Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal, inflicted one of the first public April Fools hoaxes on his readers.
It was as brutal as you'd expect from him.
A thread: 🧵👇
In Swift's day, Almanacs were all the rage.
Today, we think of them like Ben Franklin's Poor Richard -- collections of pithy witticisms paired with weather forecasts for farmers.
But back then, they were horoscopes with an agenda.
The most popular was John Partridge's. 2/
Partridge was a cobbler by trade who, in the heady days of Restoration-era England, remade himself as a man of (pseudo-)science.
Declaring himself an expert astrologer (and all *other* astrologers frauds) and a "Physician to the King," he started publishing horoscopes. 3/