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- 12598
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
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- 12546
- text
- into that bottomless spring of original thought which the occasion and
time had caused to burst out in himself. Now he congratulated himself
upon all his cursory acquisitions of this sort; ignorant that in reality
to a mind bent on producing some thoughtful thing of absolute Truth, all
mere reading is apt to prove but an obstacle hard to overcome; and not
an accelerator helpingly pushing him along.
While Pierre was thinking that he was entirely transplanted into a new
and wonderful element of Beauty and Power, he was, in fact, but in one
of the stages of the transition. That ultimate element once fairly
gained, then books no more are needed for buoys to our souls; our own
strong limbs support us, and we float over all bottomlessnesses with a
jeering impunity. He did not see,--or if he did, he could not yet name
the true cause for it,--that already, in the incipiency of his work, the
heavy unmalleable element of mere book-knowledge would not congenially
weld with the wide fluidness and ethereal airiness of spontaneous
creative thought. He would climb Parnassus with a pile of folios on his
back. He did not see, that it was nothing at all to him, what other men
had written; that though Plato was indeed a transcendently great man in
himself, yet Plato must not be transcendently great to him (Pierre), so
long as he (Pierre himself) would also do something transcendently
great. He did not see that there is no such thing as a standard for the
creative spirit; that no one great book must ever be separately
regarded, and permitted to domineer with its own uniqueness upon the
creative mind; but that all existing great works must be federated in
the fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic whole; and
then,--without at all dictating to his own mind, or unduly biasing it
any way,--thus combined, they would prove simply an exhilarative and
provocative to him. He did not see, that even when thus combined, all
was but one small mite, compared to the latent infiniteness and
inexhaustibility in himself; that all the great books in the world are
but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied
images in the soul; so that they are but the mirrors, distortedly
reflecting to us our own things; and never mind what the mirror may be,
if we would see the object, we must look at the object itself, and not
at its reflection.
But, as to the resolute traveler in Switzerland, the Alps do never in
one wide and comprehensive sweep, instantaneously reveal their full
awfulness of amplitude--their overawing extent of peak crowded on peak,
and spur sloping on spur, and chain jammed behind chain, and all their
wonderful battalionings of might; so hath heaven wisely ordained, that
on first entering into the Switzerland of his soul, man shall not at
once perceive its tremendous immensity; lest illy prepared for such an
encounter, his spirit should sink and perish in the lowermost snows.
Only by judicious degrees, appointed of God, does man come at last to
gain his Mont Blanc and take an overtopping view of these Alps; and even
then, the tithe is not shown; and far over the invisible Atlantic, the
Rocky Mountains and the Andes are yet unbeheld. Appalling is the soul of
a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond
the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in
himself!
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