Emerson's essay on 'History' may be the classic statement of an American attitude toward civilization as a historical presence, an attitude which turns upon the desire to eat one's cake and have it. As the native transcendentalist confidently dissolves away the facts of the past into the Oversoul, his practical Yankee side is busy offering up those facts as currency for individual use. Since "all history becomes subjective ... in other words there is properly no history, only biography:" the individual is urged to become his own myth-maker, to transform historical shapes into private symbols. Here Emerson implies that everyone is potentially capable of creating 'fictions' and 'signs' from the past, although in a later essay he will assign the Poet as translator of 'the most disagreeable facts' (such as the factory village and the railway) into designs worthy of "the great Order:" Presumably, then, the Poet will also be able to consecrate the clisagreeable facts of history and create a use for the past through his own vision and the word. After all, the cities of antiquity are now 'passing into fiction' and London and Paris and New York must each become 'immortal signs' for those with eyes to see.