Common As Air by Lewis Hyde

Author:Lewis Hyde [Hyde, Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908526052
Publisher: MBI

“NOURISHED BY COUNTLESS INDIVIDUALS”

As noted in an earlier chapter, at one point in “Self-Reliance,” Emerson’s inspirational packet of individualist aphorisms, the body of Benjamin Franklin flashes by trussed in a rhetorical question: “Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin . . . ? Every great man is a unique.”

Where the master? Well, as we’ve seen, there was Sir Isaac Newton for one, whose Opticks helped Franklin theorize about electricity; and Joseph Addison, whose essays in The Spectator helped Franklin learn to write; and there were six European authors whose books on fireplaces helped him design his famous woodstove; and there was John Checkley, from whom he stole the joke about how, if he achieved humility, he would be proud of it. It is not hard to make a long list, once you know a bit about the life, nor was Franklin himself reticent about his debts. The letters on electricity that made him famous in Europe carefully name his Philadelphia collaborators, each of whom contributed to the theory we now associate with Franklin.

Rather than speak of self-reliance, Franklin himself might have been more open to the kind of other-reliant image of the self offered by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Talking to a friend at about the same time that Emerson published “Self-Reliance,” Goethe asks, “What am I?” and then answers:

Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity, and old age all have brought me their thoughts, . . . their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe.

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