ON WRITING, READING, AND WRITERS: A SELECTION FROM EMERSON’S JOURNAL

Emerson began keeping journals in 1820, when he attended Harvard College, and continued to keep them until 1877. Excluding various record, engagement, and account books, they included commonplace books (compilations of quoted excerpts from various sources), notebooks of poetry, compositional notebooks in which he worked drafts of lectures and essays, and a record of nearly sixty years of observations, considerations, and ruminations.

In January 1834 he wrote in one journal: “This Book is my Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition.” By careful indexing Emerson was able to systematically work through these voluminous entries to cull those entries that could coalesce into a lecture or essay.

Emerson’s journals can be represented in several ways: by presenting one journal whole, to show a microcosm of his cosmos; by selecting random passages on a variety of topics from the entirety, to show the range and depth of the journals; or, to do what I have done here, by selecting passages on a particular theme, in much the same way that Emerson himself might do. The theme of Emerson on writing, reading, and writers serves as a reminder that Emerson was, above all else, a writer. It was his profession, and it is something that is easily lost among his roles as a reformer, a Transcendentalist, and an intellectual.

—J.C.

1824: It is excellent advice both in writing and in action to avoid a too great elevation at first. Let one’s beginnings be temperate and unpretending, and the more elevated parts will rise from these with a just and full effect. We were not made to breathe oxygen, or to talk poetry, or to be always wise.

September 6, 1830: If a man loves the city, so will his writings love the city, and if a man loves sweet fern and roams much in the pastures, his writings will smell of it.

July 8, 1831: No man can write well who thinks there is any choice of words for him. The laws of composition are as strict as those of sculpture and architecture. There is always one line that ought to be drawn, or one proportion that should be kept, and every other line or proportion is wrong, and so far wrong as it deviates from this. So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head.

July 10, 1831: Old English writers are the standards, not because they are old, but simply because they wrote well. They deviated every day from other people, but never from truth, and so we follow them. If we write as well, we may deviate from them and our deviations shall be classical.

August 16, 1831: Every composition in prose or verse should contain in itself the reason of its appearance. Thousands of volumes have been written and mould in libraries of which this reason is yet to seek, does not appear. Then comes Adam Smith, Bacon, Burke, Milton; then comes any good sentence, and its apology is its own worth. It makes its pertinence.

July 11, 1833: Does any man render written account to himself of himself? I think not.

April 28, 1834: Literature is the conversion of action into thought for the delight of the Intellect. It is the turning into thought what was done without thought.

It aims at ideal truth. But it is only approximation. The word can never cover the thing. You don’t expect to describe a sunrise.

August 19, 1834: What mischief is in this art of writing. An unlettered man considers a fact, to learn what it means; the lettered man does not sooner see it than it occurs to him how it can be told.

November 1834: There is a way of making the biography of Luther as practical and pertinent to-day as the last paragraph from Liverpool upon the price of cotton.

December 19, 1834: He who makes a good sentence or a good verse exercises a power very strictly analogous to his who makes a fine statue, a beautiful cornice, a staircase like that in Oxford, or a noble head in painting. . . .

The maker of a sentence, like the other artist, launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

March 27, 1835: He who writes should seek not to say what may be said, but what has not been said that is yet true.

February 24, 1836: The book is always dear which has made us for moments idealists. That which can dissipate this block of earth into shining ether is genius.

March 27, 1836: He only is a good writer who keeps but one eye on his page, and with the other sweeps over things; so that every sentence brings us a new contribution of observation.

After June 7, 1836: Do not fear the multitude of books. They all have their place.

After June 11, 1836: I am afraid that the brilliant writers very rarely feel the deepest interest in truth itself.

After June 22, 1836: How hard to write the truth.

After July 21, 1836: Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of triumph out of Shakspear, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.

August 27, 1836: To-day came to me the first proof-sheet of Nature to be corrected, like a new coat, full of vexations; with the first sentences of the chapters perched like mottoes aloft in small type! The peace of the author cannot be wounded by such trifles, if he sees that the sentences are still good. A good sentence can never be put out of countenance by any blunder of compositors. It is good in text or note, in poetry or prose, as title or corollary. But a bad sentence shows all his flaws instantly by such dislocation. So that a certain sublime serenity is generated in the soul of the poet by the annoyances of the press. He sees that the spirit may infuse a subtle logic into the parts of the piece which shall defy all accidents to break their connexion.

October 29, 1836: When the mind is braced by the weighty expectation of a prepared work, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

May 25, 1837: Composition. Let not a man decline being an artist under any greenhorn notion of intermeddling with sacred thought. It is surely foolish to adhere rigidly to the order of time in putting down one’s thoughts, and to neglect the order of thought. I put like things together.

After May 26, 1837: Why rake up old MSS. to find therein a man’s soul? You do not look for conversation in a corpse.

July 26, 1837: Yesterday I went to the Athenæum and looked through journals and books—for wit, for excitement, to wake in me the muse. In vain, and in vain. And am I yet to learn that the God dwells within? That books are but crutches, the resorts of the feeble and lame, which, if used by the strong, weaken the muscular power, and become necessary aids. I return home.

July 27, 1837: Many trees bear only in alternate years. Why should you write a book every year?

July 29, 1837: Books are for the scholar’s idle times.

September 19, 1837: On the 29th August, I received a letter from the Salem Lyceum, signed I. F. Worcester, requesting me to lecture before the institution next winter, and adding, “The subject is, of course, discretionary with yourself, provided no allusions are made to religious controversy, or other exciting topics upon which the public mind is honestly divided!” I replied, on the same day, to Mr. W. by quoting these words, and adding, “I am really sorry that any person in Salem should think me capable of accepting an invitation so incumbered.”

October 21, 1838: A man may find his words mean more than he thought when he uttered them, and be glad to employ them again in a new sense.

After June 13, 1838: Read and think.

June 18, 1838: The art of writing consists in putting two things together that are unlike and that belong together, like a horse and cart. Then have we somewhat far more goodly and efficient than either.

After October 26, 1838: Every word, every striking word that occurs in the pages of an original genius, will provoke attack and be the subject of twenty pamphlets and a hundred paragraphs. Should he be so duped as to stop and listen? Rather, let him know that the page he writes today will contain a new subject for the pamphleteers, and that which he writes tomorrow, more. Let him not be misled to give it any more than the notice due from him, viz., just that which it had in his first page, before the controversy. The exaggeration of the notice is right for them, false for him. Every word that he quite naturally writes is as prodigious and offensive. So write on, and, by and by, will come a reader and an age that will justify all your contest. Do not even look behind. Leave that bone for them to pick and welcome.

After May 12, 1839: Our aim in our writings ought to be to make daylight shine through them.

July 5, 1839: Why should we write dramas, and epics, and sonnets, and novels in two volumes? Why not write as variously as we dress and think? A lecture is a new literature, which leaves aside all tradition, time, place, circumstance, and addresses an assembly as mere human beings, no more. It has never yet been done well. It is an organ of sublime power, a panharmonicon for variety of note. But only then is the orator successful when he is himself agitated, and is as much a hearer as any of the assembly. In that office you may and shall (please God!) yet see the electricity part from the cloud and shine from one part of heaven to the other.

September 5, 1839: Good Reading is an art also.

After September 18, 1839: It is no easy matter to write a dialogue.

After November 3, 1839: It is only known to Plato that we can do without Plato.

December 1, 1839: Would you know the genius of the Writer, do not enumerate his talents or his feats, but ask thyself what spirit he is of? Has he led thee to Nature because his own soul was too happy in beholding her power and love? or has he only shown you stars and mountains, woods and lovely forms as his house, bribing you by the splendor of his palace to come and see him? What has Lord Byron at the bottom of his poetry, but, I am Byron, the noble poet, who am very clever, but not popular in London?

After December 4, 1839: I read the first lecture of my course on the Present Age; with the old experience that when it was done, and the time had come to read it, I was then first ready to begin to write.

December 22, 1839: I do not care what you write, but only that you should show yourself a man by writing.

May 31, 1840: The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life.

June 1840: I know nobody among my contemporaries except Carlyle who writes with any sinew and vivacity comparable to Plutarch and Montaigne.

After July 26, 1840: Shall the scholar write every word in his mind,—how bad as well as how good he is,—like Rabelais and Goethe? or shall he be an eclectic in his experience? Is there not then cant when he writes more chastely than he speaks if you should hear his whispers? Let him then mend his manners and bring them within the mark which he trusts his pen to draw.

October 7, 1840: I have been writing with some pains essays on various matters as a sort of apology to my country for my apparent idleness. But the poor work has looked poorer daily, as I strove to end it. My genius seemed to quit me in such a mechanical work, a seeming wise—a cold exhibition of dead thoughts. When I write a letter to anyone whom I love, I have no lack of words or thoughts. I am wiser than myself and read my paper with the pleasure of one who receives a letter, but what I write to fill up the gaps of a chapter is hard and cold, is grammar and logic; there is no magic in it; I do not wish to see it again.

January 1, 1841: I begin the year by sending my little book of Essays to the press. What remains to be done to its imperfect chapters I will seek to do justly. I see no reason why we may not write with as much grandeur of spirit as we can serve or suffer. Let the page be filled with the character, not with the skill of the writer.

After January 1, 1841: These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies;—captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly!

February 10, 1841: What right have I to write on Prudence whereof I have but little and that of the negative sort?

July–August 1841: We all know enough to be endless writers. Those who have written best are not those who have known most, but those to whom writing was natural and necessary.

Let us answer a book of ink with a book of flesh and blood.

September 28, 1841: Every man, no doubt, is eloquent once in his life.

September–October, 1841: Every sentence hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.

October 1841: Why do I write another line, since my best friends assure me that in every line I repeat myself?

October 1841: I told Henry Thoreau that his freedom is in the form, but he does not disclose new matter. I am very familiar with all his thoughts,—they are my own quite originally drest. But if the question be, what new ideas has he thrown into circulation, he has not yet told what that is which he was created to say.

After October 23, 1841: We read either for antagonism or for confirmation. It matters not which way the book works on us, whether to contradict and enrage, or to edify and inspire.

After November 10, 1841: All originality is relative.

After November 22, 1841: All writing is by the grace of God. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. In these sentences that you show me, I can find no beauty, for I see death in every clause and every word. . . . Give me initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making words.

February 4, 1842: I have heard that Sheridan made a good deal of experimental writing with a view to take what might fall, if any wit should transpire in all the waste pages. I, in my dark hours, may scratch the page, if perchance any hour of recent life may project a hand from the darkness and inscribe a record. Twice to-day it has seemed to me that truth is our only armor in all passages of life and death.

After April 6, 1842: The Poet should not only be able to use nature as his hieroglyphic, but he should have a still higher power, namely, an adequate message to communicate; a vision fit for such a faculty.

April 14, 1842: If I should write an honest diary, what should I say?

April 14, 1842: A poet is an affirmer.

After September 4, 1842: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.

After October 12, 1842: Every man writes after a trick, and you need not read many sentences to learn his whole trick.

November 25, 1842: Yesterday I read Dickens’s American Notes. It answers its end very well, which plainly was to make a readable book, nothing more.

After August 25, 1843: Henry Thoreau sends me a paper with the old fault of unlimited contradiction. The trick of his rhetoric is soon learned: it consists in substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air; snow and ice for their warmth; villagers and wood-choppers for their urbanity, and the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. With the constant inclination to dispraise cities and civilization, he yet can find no way to know woods and woodmen except by paralleling them with towns and townsmen. Channing declared the piece is excellent: but it makes me nervous and wretched to read it, with all its merits.

After September 26, 1843: Tennyson is a master of metre, but it is as an artist who has learned admirable mechanical secrets.

After January 30, 1844: I never seem well to do a particular work until another is done. I cannot write the poem, though you give me a week, but if I promise to read a lecture day after tomorrow, at once the poem comes into my head and now the rhymes will flow. And let the proofs of the Dial be crowding on me from the printer, and I am full of faculty how to make the lecture.

After March 2, 1844: Writing is an impossibility, until it is done.

March–June 1845: Writing should be the settlement of dew on the leaf, of stalactites on the wall of the grotto, the deposit of flesh from the blood, of woody fibre in the tree from the sap.

March–June 1845: It is easy to read Plato, difficult to read his commentators.

March–June 1846: Hawthorne invites his readers too much into his study, opens the process before them. As if the confectioner should say to his customers, “Now, let us make the cake.”

After February 26, 1847: An autobiography should be a book of answers from one individual to the many questions of the time.

July 15, 1847: Oh day of days, when we can read! The reader and the book. Either without the other is naught.

After April 19, 1848: Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale—who writes always to the unknown friend.

Before September 10, 1848: I observe that all the bookish men have a tendency to believe that they are unpopular. Parker gravely informs me by word and by letter that he is precisely the most unpopular of all men in New England. Alcott believes the same thing of himself, and I, no doubt, if they had not anticipated me in claiming this distinction, should have claimed it for myself.

After September 7, 1849: For good reading, there must be, of course, a yielding, sometimes entire, but always some yielding to the book.

After November 17, 1849: Many after thoughts, as usual, with my printing, come just a little too late; and my new book seems to lose all value from their omission.

The fate of my books is like the impression of my face. My acquaintances, as long back as I can remember, have always said, “Seems to me you look a little thinner than when I saw you last.”

Byron’s life suggests that a partnership of authors would have the same immense advantage for literature that concert has in war, in music, and in trade . . .

It is well worth thinking on. Thus, if Thoreau, Ellery [Channing], and I could (which is perhaps impossible) combine works heartily (being fired by such a desire to carry one point as to fuse all our repulsions and incompatibilities), I doubt not we could engender something superior for quality and for effect to any of the thin, cold-blood creatures we have hitherto flung into the light.

After January 1, 1851: I found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs.

May 1851: You write a discourse, and, for the next weeks and months, you are carted about the country at the tail of that discourse simply to read it over and over.

January 1853: ’T is very costly this thinking for the market in books or lectures: as soon as any one turns the conversation on my “Representative Men,” for instance, I am instantly sensible that there is nothing there for conversation, that the argument is all pinched and illiberal and popular.

After September 8, 1853: The other day, Henry Thoreau was speaking to me about my lecture on the Anglo-American, and regretting that whatever was written for a lecture, or whatever succeeded with the audience was bad, etc. I said, I am ambitious to write something which all can read, like Robinson Crusoe. And when I have written a paper or a book, I see with regret that it is not solid, with a right materialistic treatment, which delights everybody.

Before March 14, 1854: I have no fear but that the reality I love will yet exist in literature.

After August 15, 1854: A man can only write one book. That is the reason why everybody begs readings and extracts of the young poet until thirty-five. When he is fifty, they still think they value him, and they tell him so; but they scatter like partridges, if he offer to read his paper.

Before September 4, 1854: No book has worth by itself; but by the relation to what you have from many other books, it weighs.

Before September 5, 1854: It is curious what new interest an old sentence or poem acquires in quotation.

September 5, 1854: I put the duty of being read, invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it?

Before May 20, 1855: Ellery Channing’s poetry has the merit of being genuine, and not the metrical commonplaces of the magazine, but it is painfully incomplete. He has not kept faith with the reader; ’t is shamefully indolent and slovenly. He should have lain awake all night to find the true rhyme for a verse, and he has availed himself of the first one that came; so that it is all a babyish incompleteness.

Before May 20, 1855: Bias. The writer who draws on his proper talent can neither be overshadowed nor supplanted. The oak may grow as beautifully and as vastly as it will, it never can take a ray of beauty from the palm; and both of them at their best will only set off the beauty of the pine or the elm.

Before May 20, 1855: I hold that a wise man will write nothing but that which is known only to himself and that he will not produce his truth until it is imperatively demanded by the exigencies of the conversation which has arrived at that point. So is the shrine and pedestal ready, so he produces his statue, and it fills the eye.

June 1855: A scholar is a man with this inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.

Before May 2, 1857: I suppose the same impulse of the air entering into the trachea of an ass will bray, and into the trachea of a nightingale will sing. Inspiration is as the receiver.

After July 28, 1857: I can no more manage these thoughts that come into my head than thunderbolts. But once get them written down, I come and look at them every day, and get wonted to their faces, and by and by, am so far used to them that I see their family likeness, and can pair them and range them better, and if I once see where they belong and join them in that order, they will stay so.

After September 4, 1857: Good writing sips the foam of the cup.

September 1857: The ballads got their excellence, as perhaps Homer and the Cid did, by being conventional stories conventionally treated, with conventional rhymes and tunes and images, done over and over, until, at last, all the strokes were right, and the faults were thrown away.

After February 14, 1859: ’T is very important in writing that you do not lose your presence of mind. Despair is no muse . . .

April 1859: I am a natural reader, and only a writer in the absence of natural writers. In a true time, I should never have written.

April 1859: I have now for more than a year, I believe, ceased to write in my Journal, in which I formerly wrote almost daily. I see few intellectual persons, and even those to no purpose, and sometimes believe that I have no new thoughts, and that my life is quite at an end. But the magnet that lies in my drawer, for years, may believe it has no magnetism, and, on touching it with steel, it knows the old virtue; and, this morning, came by a man with knowledge and interests like mine, in his head, and suddenly I had thoughts again.

After February 16, 1861: I often say to young writers and speakers that their best masters are their fault-finding brothers and sisters at home, who will not spare them, but be sure to pick and cavil, and tell the odious truth.

Before September 1, 1861: I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, Persuasion, and Pride and Prejudice, is marriageableness.

December 1861: Good writing, how rare! . . . But the old Psalms and Gospels are mighty as ever; showing that what people call religion is literature; that is to say,—here was one who knew how to put his statement, and it stands forever, and people feel its truth, as he did, and say, Thus said the Lord, whilst it is only that he had the true literary genius, which they fancy they despise.

June 1862: ’T is inexcusable in a man who has messages to men, who has truths to impart, to scribble flourishes. He should write that which cannot be omitted; every sentence a cube, standing on its bottom like a die, essential and immortal.

June 1862: I wish only to read that which it would be a serious disaster to have missed.

After October 23, 1863: Every one would be poet if his intellectual digestion were perfect; if the grass and carrots passed through all the four stomachs, and became pure milk.

After March 26, 1866: When I read a good book, say, one which opens a literary question, I wish that life were 3000 years long.

October 12, 1866: If your subject does not appear the flower of the world at this moment, you have not yet rightly got it.

March 1867: The advantage of the old-fashioned folio was, that it was safe from the borrowers.

Before April 10, 1867: The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the universe which runs through himself, and all things.

After July 2, 1867: I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book, and ransack every page.

After October 21, 1869: If a man would learn to read his own manuscript severely,—becoming really a third person, and search only for what interested him, he would blot to purpose,—and how every page would gain! Then all the words will be sprightly, and every sentence a surprise.

March 15, 1870: My new book sells faster, it appears, than either of its foregoers. This is not for its merit, but only shows that old age is a good advertisement. Your name has been seen so often that your book must be worth buying.

October 2, 1870: The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into new land.