Society and Solitude

Twelve late lectures on books, clubs, farming, courage and old age, asking how a thinking person can live among others.

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1870(aged 67)
Original language: English

Overview

The California writer Bret Harte reviewed this book in the Overland Monthly in October 1870 and found in it practical sermons from a preacher who had moved out of the church onto a secular platform. That was close to how Emerson understood his own work by then. Fields, Osgood and Company of Boston published the twelve chapters, his first collection in ten years, on 5 March 1870; five of them had never been printed before. All began as lectures, and their subjects are the ordinary business of a life: books and clubs, the household and the farm, eloquence, courage, success, old age. The title essay sets the problem the rest work around. A person who thinks needs solitude to keep their mind their own, and needs other people to have anything worth thinking about; neither can be given up, and Emerson advises keeping one's thinking in the first and one's work in the second. "Works and Days" applies the same view to time: against the tools and machines that have multiplied what a person can do, it sets the single day, which is all anyone has and which most people let pass unused. "Civilization" measures a country by the kind of people it produces rather than by its wealth or size. "Old Age," first printed in 1862 when Emerson was in his late fifties, counts what the years give back as well as what they take.

Key concepts

What does Emerson mean by borrowing the aid of the elements?

He means that human strength works best when it lets nature do the labour. In "Civilization" he contrasts a carpenter chopping upward from a ladder, awkward and weak, with the same man dressing his timber on the ground, where gravity brings the axe down: the planet itself splits his stick. A civilization advances by arranging its work so that the larger forces of nature carry it.

What is the difference between works and days?

Works are the tools, machines and inventions that multiply what a person can produce. Days are the time in which a life is actually lived, and no machine adds to them. Emerson praises the works and then insists the day matters more: it is the one possession everyone has, and what fills it is the person's own attention, which no invention can supply.

What does it mean to measure time spiritually rather than mechanically?

It means counting a life by its depth, not its length. Emerson writes that we ask for long life when it is deep life, or grand moments, that matter. A moment of insight, a fine meeting with another person, a smile or a glance can outweigh years. In that sense, he says, life is unnecessarily long: its value is concentrated in a few hours.

What does Emerson mean by self-trust as the secret of success?

Self-trust is the belief that if a person is here, the authorities of the universe put them here for a reason, with a task written into their own nature. Success, on this view, is not winning against others but doing that task. As long as a person works at it, Emerson says, they are well and successful, whatever the world's verdict on the outcome.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Alone, and among others

Does a thinking person need other people, or need to get away from them? Emerson's answer is both, and the book is about how to divide a life between the two.

Solitude is impracticable and society fatal, Emerson writes, so the head belongs in the one and the hands in the other. The chapters work this out in ordinary places: the household, which ought to show its owner's honest idea of well-being; the club and its conversation; the books worth a reader's hours; the farm, where a person learns nature's patience. "Civilization" sets the measure for all of it. A country is judged not by its census, its cities or its crops, but by the kind of person it turns out.

solitude
conversation
domestic life
reading
literature
civilization
individuality
self-reliance
agriculture
farming
education
character

Enter a dialogue

Days, courage and growing old

What is a single day worth, and what does it take to meet it? Emerson sets the day against the machines, the fears and the years that crowd it.

"Works and Days" grants that tools and machines have multiplied what a person can do, and then turns to the day itself, which arrives veiled and says nothing. Most people let it pass while waiting for a more decisive hour. Time should be measured spiritually, Emerson argues, by moments of insight, not by the clock. The later chapters follow the same thought: courage is being equal to the problem in front of us, eloquence lifts the speaker into the voice of the occasion, and old age, which the street counts only as loss, has gains of its own.

time
technology
courage
fear
aging
eloquence
rhetoric
persuasion
audience
wisdom
memory
labor

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 268
distinct concepts: 484
by passages held, corpus-wide: #279

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “eloquence” and “rhetoric”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 11 pairings. 98 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
eloquence	rhetoric	17
nature	technology	7
courage	education	2
aging	rhetoric	1
conversation	eloquence	1
conversation	nature	1
courage	eloquence	1
courage	rhetoric	1
education	nature	1
education	rhetoric	1
education	technology	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1836 Nature
Emerson's first book, and the seed of nearly everything he wrote afterward. He signed his name to it only when it was reprinted in 1849, in a volume alongside his addresses and lectures.
EN
1841 Essays: First Series
Lectures reworked into essays; with the Second Series of 1844, the book on which Emerson's standing as a philosopher mainly rests.
EN
1844 Essays: Second Series
Darker than its predecessor of 1841, and the book of "Experience" and "The Poet". It closes what is usually counted Emerson's most fertile decade, which had begun with Nature.
EN
1849 Addresses and Lectures
Emerson's public speeches of 1837 to 1844, given to college societies and Boston lecture audiences. The two Harvard addresses here are the best-known occasions of his early career.
EN
1850 Representative Men
Emerson's one book built of portraits of other minds, published after his lecture tour of England in 1847–48 — the journey that later produced English Traits (1856).
EN
1860 The Conduct of Life
One of Emerson's most successful books in its day, and the last collection he published for ten years.
EN
1870 Society and Solitude you are here EN
1875 Letters and Social Aims
Begun to forestall an unauthorized London edition, and the last essay collection published in Emerson's lifetime. Its pieces range from essays of the early 1840s to lectures of his last working years.
EN
1883 Lectures and Biographical Sketches
Added to Emerson's collected works in the years just after his death; a later volume, Natural History of Intellect, followed in 1893.
EN
1893 Natural History of Intellect, and Other Papers
The closest Emerson came to a treatise on the mind, published from his papers after his death and bound with essays from the start of his career.
EN

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