User:Mekontoo/sandbox

Ralph Waldo Emerson's most famous proverb; “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door" first appeared in the anthology BORROWINGS: A Collection of Helpful and Beautiful Thoughts  published in 1889 and edited by Sarah S. B. Yule and Mary S. Keene. It was Sarah S.B. Yule who contributed this quotation which she had noted down when attending an address given by Emerson in 1871. There is no record of this proverb in Emerson's published works or his papers and over recent times (perhaps because of the difficulty in deriving coherent meaning  from such disparate propositions) it has been argued that it is a misquotation of; “I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.” ―  Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1820-1872- Vol V 1912 edited by Waldo Emerson Forbes and Edward Waldo Emerson. But this argument fails on chronological grounds because the public in general, including Sarah S. B. Yule, would have no means of accessing Emerson's private journals before the commencement of their publication in 1909. Furthermore, the differences between the two statements go well beyond one being a "misquotation" of the other and the proverb seems to have been created by a radical reworking of the journal extract; and this points to Emerson, himself, as being the author of the proverb.But is the proverb, as recorded by Sarah S. B. Yule in 1871, an accurate account of what Emerson actually said? At the very least, she should be accorded a presumption of sincerity; and since she included the proverb in a collection of Helpful and Beautiful Thoughts she may well have believed that she understood its meaning. The proverb itself consists of two parts: three initial propositions and a conclusion. The triune form of the first part, traditionally, is how a riddle is posed (exemplified by the most famous riddle of all in the Greek myth of Oedipus and the Theban Sphinx) and in his Poems published in 1847, Emerson gave the poem The Sphinx special prominence by placing it at the beginning of his book. This being so, it is reasonable to hypothesize that those enigmatic propositions that Sarah S. B. Yule recorded, may constitute a triune riddle; if so,then there exists a correct answer would satisfy all three.