Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Where did that come from? Emerson? Yes, that was it. That stupid essay, “Self-Reliance.” Theo had been required to read it for a seminar on American Idealism. He’d written an angry screed in response, arguing that individualism to an almost infantile extreme was America’s great weakness. He asserted that Emerson’s insistence on allegiance only to himself and those like him, his characterization of alms to those unlike as “a wicked dollar,” was the kind of thinking that underpinned the country’s yawning divisions. He’d drawn a sharp
...more
