Emerson the man was deeply and permanently affected by the deaths of his wife Ellen, his brother Charles, and his son Waldo. He prized his living family all the more. He kept himself close to his other children. He had a strong playful streak, and had pet names for everybody, calling Ellen Ellinelli, Aunt Mary Tnamurya, and Lidian Asia. It even got into his reading. Xenophones is Zenny in Emerson’s notes. His spelling was shaky for words with e and i together. He disliked letters about sickness and he hated sickness itself as “a pale screaming wailing distracted phantom, absolutely selfish.” As a lecturer he loved the exhilaration of having an audience respond to his voice. He loved the noise and energy of huge crowds. He was fascinated by volcanoes. He once said he was never on a coach that went fast enough for him.

More than anyone else Emerson made Concord a major precinct in the American imagination, a sort of Yankee Weimar, a New World Athens of high thinking and plain living, albeit with high humidity and difficult, gloomy winters. Concord is one of the symbolic centers of American culture, and Emerson is its epicenter, the immediate source of what is perhaps the strongest antimaterialistic current in the modern American tradition. His appeal, however, is concrete and practical. Emily Dickinson said of one of Emerson’s books (Representative Men), that it was “a little granite book you can lean on.” Henry Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, William James, John Dewey, Robert Frost, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and many others have built on the granite foundation of Emersonian idealism, also known as Transcendentalism.

American Transcendentalism takes its name from Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. It can also be thought of as American Idealism, but neither label satisfactorily suggests the strength of thought or the practical accessibility of the movement that is personified and centered in Emerson. Emersonian individualism is a protest against social conformity, but not against society. It is a protest on behalf of the autonomous, unalienated human being. There comes a time in everyone’s education, he says, when one “arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion.” Emerson’s self-reliant individual is a person who understands that his own consciousness is his only window on the world, a person who is interested in self-rule—in autarchy not anarchy, a person who acknowledges his equality, and his necessary connection, with others.

Emersonian individualism is not a blueprint for selfishness, self-aggrandizement, or social Darwinism, nor is it a coded manifesto for the subjection of other persons or viewpoints. A person interested solely in personal liberation can find a useful text in Emerson’s “nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” But Emerson says more than this. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that,” says Emerson, “is genius.” At the deepest, most important level, we must believe that what is good for us individually is good for us all. If we require freedom, love, and meaningful work for ourselves, then we can deny these things to none.