it is almost a tapestry of familiar quotations on the subject: “Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string.” “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Well-worn wisdom; still, it’s a mistake to think one has ever gotten to the bottom of Emerson. Settle into a comfortable familiarity with him, and you soon find yourself uncomfortably surprised. He may sound vaporously high-minded on occasion (especially if you’re not reading carefully), but he was acidly unsentimental and determinedly uncategorizable. In “Self-Reliance” he blasts bleeding hearts on one page: “Do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.” This sounds like a nineteenth-century version of Ayn Rand. Yet a few pages later: “A [wise] man hates what he has if he sees it is accidental — came to him by inheritance or gift ... then he feels that it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there because no revolution or robber” — or sensible estate tax, he might have added — “takes it away.” Likewise, in his journals — no less valuable than his essays — Emerson bursts out alarmingly: “I hate vulnerable people.” A Social Darwinist before his time? But only a few pages away: “Our good friend [the banker] speaks of ‘the solid portion of the community,’ meaning of course the sharpers. I feel, meantime, that those who succeed in ... civilized society are beasts of prey. It has always been so.”

Like Emerson, Thoreau was a theorist of nonconformism, of moral self-reliance; and he was even more of a practitioner, experimenting with a solitary life in the woods, going to jail rather than paying taxes to support a war he thought immoral, defending the race traitor John Brown. Probably everyone has read and thrilled to Walden as an adolescent (at least I hope so) and later condescended to it, along with most of his or her other youthful enthusiasms. It is well worth revisiting in one’s mellow maturity. For one thing, it takes a practiced ear to appreciate Thoreau’s prose style, in which apparent simplicity conceals art. Even more important, it takes a lot of unhappy experience before his seeming platitudes penetrate our thick heads. “Simplify, simplify” — but only very wise people know how much they can do without before wasting many years doing with. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Young people read this sentence, assent passionately, and forget; grown-ups are pierced to the quick. “If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his way lies.” More often than not, the still, small voice of our genius requires many decades to get our attention.