Emerson wrote in his essay “Self-Reliance.”4 Walt Whitman’s democratic hero “walks at his ease through and out of that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not.” Whitman goes on: “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead … nor feed on the specters in books.” To live authentically, Norman Mailer would write a century later, one has to “divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”
