Melbourne Journal #5, The Grampians

Last weekend, Jen and I visited Grampians National Park, which had come up multiple times when we asked for recommendations for places to go near Melbourne. National Parks in Australia are toned-down versions of what they are in the U.S., requiring no entry fees and receiving significantly less management and volume of people. On the way there, we experienced some small town Australia, camping in the town of Creswick and going to a Saturday Farmer's Market that somehow reminded us of our time Eugene in the late-90s. On the second night, we stayed at a cool youth hostel in Halls Gap, and then we did a one night backpack, bagging a couple of peaks along the way. After a long second day, we had a beer and pub food in Halls Gap, and then camped out one last night before heading home. The Grampians are hotter and drier than Melbourne, and both of us felt that they had a similar feel to the Desert Southwest, which we love. It was yet another enjoyable trip. 

I want to say one final thing about the philosophy of Emerson after my last post, which focused on his notion of self-reliance, by which he means the use of a person's intuition and reasoning faculties to define what is right and what is wrong for them. The pitfall of self-reliance, defined in this way, is that one can go astray. A famous recent example of this (at least in my mind) is the story of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, as told in John Krakauer's book, Into the Wild. The counteracting, and balancing, idea is contained in the essay Compensation, which for Emerson is the law of give-and-take (or balance) in the Universe. Here is Emerson on the topic in Compensation:

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know, that they do not touch him-but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and in the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death. 

Here is one of many specific examples that he gives:

Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave their heart, you shall lose your own.

Moreover, 'every advantage has its tax,' so it is important that you pay your debts.

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for a small frugality. 

There are many more such examples in the essay, and there is good news as well. 

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm.

Melbourne Journal #4: The Overland Track, Tasmania

This past Wednesday, we returned from a one week trip to Tasmania, on The Overland Track, which is a very popular 5+ night hut-to-hut hiking trip through Cradle Mountain-Lake Saint Clair National Park. This region is wild and feels on par with Glacier National Park, both in terms of beauty and popularity.  We had a fantastic trip, taking 6 nights to walk the route and bagging several peaks along the way. We had the gamut of weather, with a temps well into the 90s early in the trip and cold and snow on the last day. The trip is reminiscent of the backpacking trips we did in New Zealand, with the same comradery that develops with the group that you walk along the route with.

I'd like to say a bit more about the philosophy of Emerson. On the Overland Track, I read Self-Reliance, which is one of his most famous essays, in which he presents his vision for how a person becomes 'whole.' Despite the essay's fame, I am confident that very few individuals are called to implement its vision, in part because it represents an ideal that is, basically, impossible to perfectly implement. And even for an individual, such a calling can depend upon time-of-life: when I read the essay at 30, it made no impression, whereas upon re-reading it at 45, the impression it made was significant. 

The basic message of the essay is that the force of Nature flows through each of us, and that we become whole only once we have aligned ourselves entirely with this inner-flow. This requires, first, that we accept our fate. From Self-Reliance:

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. 

Second, it requires that we listen to our inner-Nature, becoming our own judge and rejecting the judgement of society and/or of other people when necessary. Again, from Self-Reliance: 

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It love not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.  

And here is where the rubber meets the road. Being a nonconformist (i.e., self-reliant) is extremely difficult, because it invites the judgement of others, or in Emerson's words, "For nonconformity, the world whips you with its displeasure." However, self-reliance is the path we must take to achieve wholeness. One final passage from Self-Reliance:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.