The Genius Who Forgot to Pay Rent

There's a type of person we all secretly admire: brilliant, a little wild, too busy being extraordinary to answer emails or do the dishes. Emerson had met that person. He was not impressed.

"His art is less for every deduction from his holiness," he writes, "and less for every defect of common sense." Talent doesn't buy you an exemption from the ordinary rules. It just means you break them more spectacularly.

He pictures the artist who scorns the world, then watches the world scorn him back — "little by little." Not a dramatic fall. A slow one. Unpaid bills. Missed appointments. The genius who lit up a room at midnight and can't get out of bed by noon, "a thorn to himself and to others."

Emerson isn't scolding anyone into dullness. He's making a sharper point: prudence and greatness aren't opposites. They're the same muscle. The person who can't be bothered with small honesties — showing up on time, keeping a promise, minding what he spends — will eventually find that the big honesties get away from him too.

His fix is almost tender. Learn "the wisdom of Poor Richard." Stick a tree in the ground because it will grow while you sleep. Keep your word "amidst a swarming population" the way a folded letter somehow finds its one reader across an ocean.

None of this is about being small. It's about being whole. "The best good of wealth is freedom," he says — and freedom, it turns out, is built out of a thousand boring, kept promises, not one thrilling broken one.

Somewhere between the artist who ignores his laundry and the accountant who never dreams, there's a better way to live. Emerson thinks you can be a poet and still return your library books.

From "Essays, First Series" by Ralph Waldo Emerson — read the full free text