Only transcendentalish

Here’s a thought, prompted by HDT’s employer and landlord, R.W. Emerson: “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.”  While reasonably self-reliant, I don’t think Waldo’s right on this point, or, if he is, “genius” is a suspect quality, a quite possibly narcissistic begging of the question, not to be overly encouraged.  Long experience inclines me to think rather that in my private heart “nothing but the tritest of truisms is true for all men, much less for all others: tritest of all—that humans are mortal.” And before our mortality, divining the truth of our own individual private heart is work enough for many, perhaps most, of us. I’ll leave that all-believing genius to someone else.