I have LeFevre and a headache

I hate working when I don't feel well. However, that doesn't make the work go away, and I go through the process wondering (even more than usual) if I've missed the most important point. Yet, this time there were so many points that occurred to me that missing one doesn't bug me.
And then someone (David) wrote Emerson--with a negative connotation--and now I love Emerson.

Emerson's "Self-Reliance" is one side of the coin, however, "The American Scholar" is another. In "American Scholar" Emerson wants us to think on our own, but he also states, "Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? . . . They are for nothing but to inspire" (Wilchens 66). Inspiration is an act of combined intellect, the readers' and the author's. While Emerson does speak of becoming the individual creative intellect, he also states that we should use the books of the past in order to create a better future. I could point out a number of other quotes that demonstrate his agreement with LeFevre, but I'm just on my soap box so I won't.

Many times when reading LeFevre I thought of Emerson. Yes, I really like to read him. The point is that when we invent or create we are not alone, we are relying on the thoughts and inventions of others in order to jump to a new place.

When mapping I could not deal with all the authors cited, so I chose a few and decided to see where the links were. There were many, but what was more interesting to me was the number of fields of study that were part of the whole. Politics, cognition, math, philosophy, composition, anthropology and the list goes on. Writers rely on the ideas and notions of others, but not necessarily of others in their field. I'm not sure how it works in math or science, but I was pleased to see that those who are involved in the field of English, whether as creative writers, composition scholars, or rhetors, they draw from a wide field. It seems that creativity in this field involves thinking outside of everything, not just the box.

What I concluded was this: We create with the ideas and help and words of others, but we are driven by our own passions. It is that passion that is our own to rely on and to use in order to delve more deeply into what we are studying.

Maggie