Trancendentalism Vs. Anti-trancendentalism

3 Pages 828 Words

My view of life is a mixture of transcendentalism and anti-transcendentalism. I think that is how most people view their lives. You can’t be happy and bright all the time like Emerson and Thoreau pretend to be, and you can’t always be dark and pessimistic like Melville and Hawthorne. There has to be a balance between both ways of thinking.
I agree with Emerson and Thoreau on the idea of that we have to experience things on our own. We shouldn’t learn from other people that is not an effective way of learning. You have to experience things for yourself in life. If you are always learning how to do things from other people and really never have taught yourself how to do something, you can never be sure of yourself. You don’t know your true self by learning from other people. Emerson says that “imitation is suicide”, and it is. Nobody should go on living life if they aren’t experiencing things for themselves. People shouldn’t live their lives just copying other people. I try to do my own thing and experience things for myself not just following everybody else. As a teen it is hard but I know as I grow older I will soon discover who I really am if I keep experiencing things on my own and relying just on myself to learn things.
Many people have a lot of “friends”, but how many true friends do you really have? I think that we might think that we have many friends but if you think about it you only have one or two friends that you really do connect with, someone that you can be completely yourself around, almost as if you were alone. Those friends are the only real friends. They are hard to find but those friends are the ones that you need to hang on to and keep forever. All other friendships might be bad for you but they are good to have. They help learn things in life. When Emerson says that all other friendships are bad for you I think that he is contradicting himself. He says that we should exper...