"A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles." In these concluding lines of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, he once again pounds his beliefs in nonconformatism across to the reader.

The examples of Jay Gatspy, in The Great Gatspy, and George Babbitt, in Babbitt support Emerson's strong convictions. Jay Gatspy lived a financially comfortable life but spent all of his time living not for himself, but living for his long love for Dazy, a married woman. And George Babbitt was even more ignorant. Conformatism was this man's middle name! The only thing this poor man ever thought about was impressing his "so-called" high class friends.

This type of attitude brought both of these men sorrow, and even killed one of them. There is no doubt that Emerson had some great thoughts in his essay, but in my opinion his strong belief in nonconformatism is wrong as is confromatism itself. Instead of taking an extreme "right win

Beneath Babbitt's exterior, there is a vague nervousness and comfortableness that plagues him his entire life. This plague seems to be caused simply by a lack of integrity-no backbone. When the novel ends, Babbitt says that he feels fine and healthy, and to all appearances he is. However, the reader knows that Babbitt's last bits of intelligence, imagination, and integrity have been distilled into the concept of what is known today as "babbittry."

s again, "...To be great is to be misunderstood," and that one should "Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today." In my mind, these are words from a fool. If I new a man who spoke with harsh words, but contradicted himself day in and day out-even if he spoke with great conviction-I would think of him as a fool as well. When it comes to being misunderstood-yes, people such as Jesus, Socrates, and Galileo were very misunderstood, and they were indeed extremely great men, but they weren't misunderstood because of contradictions, but for having minds far greater than the average man-that is why they were misunderstood.

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Babbitt was so mediocre that he couldn't even enjoy sex with his own wife. His sex life was about as satisfying as Al Bundie, from the show "Married With Children." Babbitt's wife, Myra, had a noisy presence. As a housekeeper and a cook she had lost Babbitt's interest shortly after he married her. Her character serves as Babbitt's domestic anchor and also a millstone around his neck. Babbitt and Myra rarely spoke of important matters. They simply spoke about superficial about such things as material possessions and costly goods-the only thing they had in common.

Now we come to the question of Emerson's Self Reliance. Transcendentalism, or the discovery of the inner soul, seems to be the one of the issues of the writer. There are four main concepts of transcendentalism we should understand in order to assess the essay: 1) the convic

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