'What is Success?'
- BY Ralph Waldo Emerson
To laugh often and much
많이 그리고 자주 웃는 것.
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children
현명한 사람들에게 존경을 받고 아이들에게 애정을 받는 것.
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends
정직한 비평가로부터 좋은 평가를 얻고 잘못된 친구들의 배신을 견뎌내는 것.
To appreciate beauty
아름다움을 한 껏 느끼는 것.
To find the best in others
사람들 안에 있는 가장 좋은 점을 발견하는 것.
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch or a redeemed social condition
건강한 아이를 낳든, 작은 정원을 가꾸든, 사회 환경을 개선하든, 세상을 조금이라도 더 살기 좋은 곳으로 만들고 떠나는 것.
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived
당신이 살아 있음으로 단 한 명의 생명이라도 조금 더 쉽게 숨 쉴 수 있었다는 걸 아는 것.
This is to have succeeded.
이것이 바로 진정한 성공
American essayist, philosopher, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson was just shy of his eighth birthday when his father, the Reverend William Emerson, died from stomach cancer. Reverend Emerson had been one of Boston’s leading citizens, a liberal-minded minister who taught young Ralph his grammar and reading when the boy was just three years old. After the reverend’s death, Emerson’s mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson, took on the task of raising a large family as a Solo Mom. A practical, deeply religious woman, Ruth sold her husband’s library and took in boarders to provide for her six children.
Emerson’s aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, eventually came to live with the family to help with the children. She was an eccentric, well-read woman with an inquisitive nature, introducing her nephew to Hindu scriptures, Neoplatonism, and natural religion, even as she taught him the aphorisms he would rely on throughout his life: mandates such as “Despise trifles” informed the young Emerson’s values. Indeed, poverty was a constant specter for the family, and Emerson, who did not resent the situation, nevertheless learned early on to steer clear of frivolity and embrace earnest responsibility. The young Emerson had chores, including feeding the cow his mother kept on Boston Common, and these experiences arguably informed his views and the way he lived his life as an adult.
Despite financial hardship, Ruth prized education and worked hard to secure it for her children. Emerson attended the Boston Latin School, which offered the best education available at that time, and at age 14 he entered Harvard College. Though not an intellectual standout—Emerson graduated in the exact middle of his class of 59—he was a serious student (ever the hard worker!) and served as class poet.
In the years following his graduation, Emerson worked as a teacher and then as a minister. But when a short marriage to the love of his life, Ellen Tucker, ended in Tucker’s death from tuberculosis, Emerson began to face religious doubts. He left the ministry and toured as a lecturer, developing his ideas into essays and books that he began to publish in the 1840s. Pieces such as Self-Reliance, Spiritual Laws, Nature, and The Poet explore subjects including man’s inborn goodness and the joy inherent in nature. Though the tone of the essays is generally positive, Emerson acknowledges the realities of life: essays such as Compensation and Experience, for example, suggest how to navigate loss and human failing.
His work was considered controversial: Emerson’s 1838 graduation address at Harvard’s Divinity Hall, during which he discounted biblical miracles and declared that Jesus, while a great man, was not God, resulted in his being called an atheist and a poisoner of young men’s minds. (The address is now known as the “Divinity School Address,” and Emerson was not invited back to speak at Harvard for 30 years.) Even his aunt called his essay Self-Reliance a “strange medley of atheism and false independence.”
Despite the blowback, Emerson began to receive international attention for his work. And he continued to write, exploring ideals of individuality and freedom, and the relationship between the soul and the external world. An abolitionist and leader of the transcendentalist movement, which protested the state of intellectual and spiritual mores of the time, Emerson was to influence generations of thinkers, writers, and poets who came after him.
Ruth, who lived with her son after his second marriage, died in 1853, so she was able to witness his prodigious output during the 1840s. And Emerson never seemed to forget the impact his Solo Mom and other women, such as his aunt Mary, had on him: as a popular Emerson quote, re-created today on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs, states: “Men are what their mothers made them.”
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