Emerson And I Will NOT Be Hanging Out Together In The Afterlife

So, I have a bone to pick with a one Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Namely, he sucks. Dead or not, he's a crap author and a crap speaker. Now maybe you're reading this and thinking, "Hey, who are you to call someone else a crap writer?" Well, it takes one to know one, baby, so shut up and keep reading.....

I guess I should explain my sudden saltiness towards Mr. Self Reliance. Let me just preface this by saying that he was never one of my faves, never. He was never going to reach the same status in my heart or mind as, say, Geoff (Chaucer, for those not in the know). But all the same, there is a reason for the recent hostilities between us.

I have a writer friend who was working on a piece and wanted to use the following quote:

Truth is beautiful, without doubt, but so are lies.

This quote is all over the internet as being attributed to R.W. Emerson, or He Whom I Loathe. However, my writer friend and I wanted to verify exactly when the "venerable" Emerson made this quote. This seemed like an easy thing to do. I mean, I'm practically a librarian and I spend my time at the law firm researching so what's a little quote to someone like me? I could find the source in a matter of minutes....or so I thought.

Turns out, this quote, though attributed to Emerson all over the place, even in several books, has no primary source. No speech, no lecture, no essay, nada. So unless Emerson just went around mumbling crap like this under his breath all the time, the quote didn't come from him. And in fact, it seems to me that it is a gross misquote of something he actually said in another speech. See, it took me 2 days of researching and dragging several other friends and librarians into it before I gave up and told my writer friend to not use the quote since we couldn't verify that it was indeed a true Emerson quote. In those two days, I read more of Emerson's transcend-bullcrap-ism than I ever care to for the rest of my life. All for some stupid quote.

I hope that Emerson and Thoreau and all their hippie friends end up living together in a VW Bus on Walden Pond in the Great Hereafter......as for me and mine, we'll be at that big mall in the sky, buying Prada and wallowing in our shallowness....so kiss it, Ralphie, cuz you ain't welcome 'round me. You are so not in the Dead Boyfriends Club.