First We Read, Then We Write

First We Read, Then We Write

Metadata

• Author: Robert D. Richardson
• Full Title: First We Read, Then We Write
• Category: #books

Highlights

• Like many a beginning grad student, he felt “life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it.”
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• Emerson’s preferred unit of composition is the sentence, not the paragraph and certainly not the essay. He wrote some of the best sentences in English; a surprising number are about writing good sentences.
• Reading is creative for Emerson; it is also active. In “History” he insists that “the student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.”
• His best comments on reading are about its limits and dangers. He was as suspicious of reading as he was of traveling. Escapist reading was, he thought, a fool’s paradise.
• “If I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention,” Montaigne wrote cheerfully. “I do not bite my nails about the difficulties I meet with in my reading… I do nothing without gaiety… My sight is confounded and dissipated by poring.”
• Emerson once noted that Coleridge had identified four classes of readers: the hourglass, the sponge, the jelly-bag, and the Golconda. The hourglass gives back everything it takes in, unchanged. The sponge gives back everything it takes in, only a little dirtier. The jelly-bag squeezes out the valuable and keeps the worthless, while the Golconda runs everything through a sieve, keeping only the nuggets. Emerson was the Golconda reader par excellence, or what American minerscall a “high-grader”-a person who goes through a mine and pockets only the richest lumps of ore.
• But only those who are swamped in books-and thus dealing continually with the views of others-have to worry much about guarding their personal integrity. It is precisely the reader of many books who is in danger of losing sight of his own views, and of becoming, as Emerson says, “drugged with books for want of wisdom.”
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• Yet however much he read, there were whole categories of books the mature Emerson would not read. He would not read theology or academic controversy. He wanted original accounts, first-hand experience, personal witness. He would read your poem or your novel, but not your opinion of someone else’s poem or novel, let alone your opinion of someone else’s opinion. An early lecture records his characteristic and disquieting bluntness on this subject: “A vast number of books are written in quiet imitation of the old civil, ecclesiastical andliterary history; of these we need take no account. They are written by the dead to be read by the dead.”
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• This is not, of course, to deny new thoughts or the original contributions of others. It is just an assertion that we can follow an argument and recognize its strength only by its congruence with our own mental processes.
• “Our age is retrospective;” he begins his grand little book. “It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight, andnot of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?” This is one of the best passages in all of Emerson, not just because it is so deeply typical of him, but because he has here hit upon a fundamental, evergreen view of the world, a way of looking at life available equally to me and to Marcus Aurelius. Simone Weil takes the same way when she urges each of us to escape “the contagion of folly and collective frenzy by reaffirming on his own account, over the head of the social idol, the original pact between the mind and the universe.”
• “Genius, says Emerson, “is the activity which repairs the decays of things.”
• led him, in Nature, to point out that “hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those namely, who hold primarily on nature.” It is the true poet-the genius-who can “pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things.”
• The essential thing was to try again. He noted how parents watchtheir children get knocked down or set back and how these same parents learn to pray for their children’s resilience. It’s not the setback that matters, it’s what happens next.
• Of course we want to know the sources of power. We die for lack of such knowledge. “My heart’s inquiry,” said Emerson, “is, whence is your power?” And, “The one thing we want to know is where is power to be bought. [We would give any price] for condensation, concentration, and the recalling at will high mental energy.” But the real question is always what can you do with the powers you do in fact have. The only acceptable answer for Emerson is performance. “I value men as they can complete their creation. One man can hurl from him a sentence which is spheral, and at once and forever disengaged from the author. Another can say excellent things, if the sayer and the circumstance are known and considered; but the sentences need a running commentary, and are not yet independent individuals that can go alone.”
• Years are well spent in country labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or splendor of his speech.