My Giant Goes With Me.

I spent a good deal of time yesterday reading through Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, Self-Reliance. It deals mostly with the idea that humanity does not put enough faith in itself. We have ceased to see the power that exists within each of us. We do not proclaim what we believe and feel, we do not show the world our truth, because we are timid. However, the essay also discusses many other things, and one of these I read yesterday and found to be fascinating, especially as I am, at present, abroad.

“It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet. I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins. Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”

“Traveling is a fool’s paradise,” he writes, and though it goes against everything we, as young, adventurous souls believe, I have to admit there is a kernel of truth in his words. So often we search outwardly for things that have no location. We look for happiness in a foreign land when we should look inward. We look for breathtaking beauty across the globe, when we can find it in our backyard. What I’m coming to realize is that one’s enjoyment and fulfillment has to do entirely with one’s perspective and mental state. If I am not happy in one place, joy will surely evade my grasp in another country. If I am content and know my truth here, then, undoubtedly, I will also know it there. “My giant goes with me wherever I go.”