How can we think through unshielded eyes? Whether it is what you see, what you say or what you hear, behind your eyes, voice and ears is your mind. A requirement for everyday life, our minds give us insight, thought and opinion, but the longer we live the further we seem to wander in a different direction. Ralph Waldo Emerson said a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bard and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his (19). Famous writers, journalists, news reporters, political figures and philosophers are just a few of the many people who actually take their thoughts as genius. These men and women are the same as everyone else, only they have decided to use the voice given to them. Their powerful words give us a new inspiration that will guide our lives, but their words tend to replace our own, no matter how similar the two seem to be.

Walker Percy experienced life and death nearly one hundred years apart from Emerson. Perhaps Percy read Emerson; perhaps he influenced his opinions and format. Percy saw wha

“Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly and what you have already done singly will justify you now (Emerson25).” Emerson, like Percy, pressed the fact that our ideas cannot be lived through the lives of others. Our lives are our own, our thoughts and ideas are our own, we cannot abandon all that we are and have known because conforming to another person’s opinion will make life easier. Independence and solitude are not the easiest to come by but are the strongest and most effective methods of life. By not pursuing our own adventures and not believing in our own ideas, we wont ever be the individual people we are created to be. Our past decisions may try to limit us to continue a specific cycle of choices, but an individual voice is never too late to be heard. As Percy quoted Mounier, the person is not something one can study and provide for; he is something one struggles for. But unless he knows that there is a struggle, his is going to be just what the planners think he is (422).

We heed to someone else’s thoughts more than we do to our own. We are unable to look beyond what we have been told to see and understand the world through our own eyes. Emerson wrote, 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 (23). A great man can see Percy’s dogfish as more than the lab experiment, they can think beyond the brochures and postcards and see the National Parks for the intensifying beauties they naturally are. A great man is not someone who conforms to the opinions of the society as a whole,

Some topics in this essay:
Percy Emerson, Emerson Percy, Waldo Emerson, National Parks, , Walker Percy, independence solitude, emerson percy, own ideas, own opinions,