Nowadays appearance counts much more than who we really are. Most of the times you're forced to show yourself as people want you to be and it happens so often that almost nobody today knows the real "you".
Usually one of those few people is a friend: someone you grew up with, someone you've known in many years, someone you've spent a lot of time with. It takes a very long time to show who you really are.
Both Emerson and Walden said, in many different ways, that you must be self-confident without the need of relying on other people. "My life is for itself and not for a spectacle" Emerson wrote, meaning "you must think about yourself because what other people think is not important", or "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think".
They both found themselves when surrounded by nature: (Emerson) "He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time"; (Walden) "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essensial facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" or "Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself".
At this point the obvious questions to which I want to find an answer are: When are we allowed to be ourselves? What do we need to be ourselves?
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I like your topic as well as your questions that you put in at the end Mavy! I wonder though, are you going to answer these questions in your essay with examples related to real life, or more so within Emerson's and Walden's texts? Overall though I think your essay is going to be super :)
ReplyDeleteI like your ideas so far but where do you think you are going to go off of those. The questions you ask at the end will be a good start but are you going to use real life examples from either your life or others? It is different for everyone to decide when they are themselves? How can we tell the difference between what we think of ourselves and how others percive us to be? I like your ideas. I think you could get a strong essay out of this.
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