I just downloaded Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays, both first and second series. The former includes his most famous bit of writing, a screed titled Self-Reliance. Not including the feel-good quotes at the beginning, here is the fourth sentence...

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.

No Ralphy, beg to differ, dude. That is, more often than not, grotesque delusion. And this is by far the more generous of the judgments one could make of such a toweringly arrogant perspective. The harsher might include that this is the typical view of a self-appointed elite who see their deepest dearest fantasies as representing "the best" for everyone else as well. While this position usually grants itself special forms of "spiritual" insight, gunboat diplomacy is often needed to back it up in a crunch. And being white helps too. As in: That's real white of you, Waldo.

The fifth sentence reads...

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

...which mostly goes to prove, I guess, that when Rank Opinion goes out for a Sunday drive, it often takes Godly Bravado along for the ride. And you too, if you abdicate all notion of critical intelligence, as the solipsistically "self-reliant" New Agers who so love Emerson seem to have done en masse.

Just a thought.

OK, I'll grant you that it's maybe a measure of my sickness that I found this juxtaposition funny, but... it is funny, dammit! On several levels even, since Carlyle, as I may have mentioned here before: a) was best pals with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and b) once penned a jaunty little piece he titled Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question. A regular laugh riot, you could say. Moral force my ass.

There are many many people I owe mail to. Or, if you insist: to whom I owe mail. And since re-animating the EGR email list, now there are more than ever. I will never catch up. This has been happening ever since I wrote my bit of Cluetrain and said how easy it should be for CEOs to personally answer 100s of 1000s of emails from every Tom, Dick and Harry that might chose to send them random queries via the Astounding, Amazing, Heretofore-Never-Seen Internet (ta-da!) -- and then I realized it was impossible for me just to answer mail from my good friends. Bites. What can I say?

But I want to say hello here to Madame Levy, whom I have beastfully ignored of late -- Leslie, I plead the predations of paying work and the usual Holiday Horrors. And to Halley, whom I have missed talking to ever so much. And to of course Jeneane -- I've gotten your supercool phone msgs even though (mea maxima culprit) I have not called back. And of course there are others, but the intimate nature of our connection is such that I cannot in good conscience mention them here. Like Esther Dyson, for instance.

And just to ruin it all, I'm really writing this to see if I can use MarsEdit to post to Blogger (even though the images thing doesn't really work right) and make sure my new FeedBurner feed gets updated correctly (as it wasn't being) and thus shows up in NetNewsWire 2.0, and see if my little FeedBurner widget will post here as well.

As Robin says -- bless her pointy little head -- it's all too much for one man!