In the spirit of this essay, I want to share how I found it and accompanying context1 in case it might actually be interesting to more people than just me.
I've been going through @plebpoet's recent comments—this is a detail I considered to not mention since I don't want @plebpoet to become too aware that I—should I write "regularly"?—visit her profile even though I told her in person already that I sometimes do that but I think I was just projecting onto her my predicted own feelings if someone would tell me that—is thinking that such projecting is wrong wrong according to this essay?—and found this reply to this post. I remembered that I saw this post when it still had zero comments and almost mentioned her in a reply but I didn't. I was curious if my prediction that she would reply by herself would come true which turned out to be the case.
Reading through the comments, I found a link to transcendentalism in #668794 and got hooked by this:
while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.
I then clicked on "self-reliant" and was surprised it led me to an article about an essay. Even though I already know what this word means, I still clicked on it and expected to see a definition of "self-reliance".
After skimming that article, I wanted to read that apparently very accomplished essay and thus searched for it. What I found is what you see. Thanks to the design of that site, I immediately knew that I stumbled into one of the rare original corners of the internet.
After the draft of this post reached this point, I considered deleting everything and waiting until I read the full essay. I didn't read it in full yet because I am very tired (the distance my head travels before I wake up again is increasing) and actually want to sleep but I also want to have a chance to wake up to potential comments from stackers. Oh, and:
Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
So here this is, and here you are.
Footnotes
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I watched my first episode of Firefly today. I remembered that the word "companion" was used and I thought it'd be fun if I would use that word in this post, too. I like to lookup the words I use before I use them and realized I didn't realize that companions are courtesans in the show. ↩