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.