Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day - I have been enjoying Emerson's journals

I have been reading more of Emerson than his journals - the second series of Essays, his poems, Representative Men - and I had some vague idea of writing a little about these books. The "Montaigne" essay in Representative Men, for example, is fantastic. But I seem to keep circling back to the journals, I think because they present a cogent, concise portrait of the true essence of Emerson.

No, what nonsense. It's because they're easier. More fun to read. Emerson is hard - "Nominalist and Realist," what am I doing reading something titled "Nominalist and Realist"? The essays are dense, rhetorically complex, deliberately contradictory, and long. The same ideas in the journal are bite-size and more easily digested. And if something is too baffling, just skip on; Emerson will be thinking about something else.

The biographical momentum helps, too. Emerson marries, loses his wife, marries again. He has crises of faith. He laments his interest in sex. He praise novels and gets worked up about politics and travels to England. He adores his children; he loses his son. Oh, that last one, almost too hard to read:

"Jan. 28, 1842
Yesterday night at 15 minutes after eight my little Waldo ended his life."

Waldo was five years old. "Every tramper that ever tramped is abroad but the little feet are still." He mourns and moves on, and writes about that, too.

Some Emersonian wisdom, or at least attempts at such:

"At Brook Farm one man ploughed all day, & one looked out of the window all day & drew his picture, and both received the same wages.

The one event which never loses its romance is the alighting of superior persons at my gate.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

The old writers, such as Montaigne, Milton, Browne, when they had put down their thoughts, jumped into their book bodily temselves, so that we have all that is left of them in our shelves; there is not a pinch of dust beside."

The last one is from Aug. 1848; the others from mid-1847. Just a sample. The last one may be a tautology; the first may not make quite the point Emerson wants. Hardly relevant - when Emerson had a thought, he wrote it down. If, soon after, he thought the opposite, that went in the journal, too. Reading the journals is akin to watching Emerson think.

I have been reading the one volume Emerson in His Journals, and am vaguely tempted, just barely, to read the entire journal, all ten volumes or so.

Thomas De Quincey's permanent ephemera - reading 150 year old magazine articles

Wuthering Expectations seem to have been wandering away from the 19th century a bit. It's because of the upcoming* trip to Japan. I'm all kerfoozled.

Or maybe it's what I'm reading, Thomas De Quincey's bizarre, baffling Suspiria de Profundis (1845) and The English Mail-Coach (1849), nominally two sequels to his most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822).

Note the dates - the sequels, such as they are, arrive more than twenty years after the original piece. During that time, De Quincey's prose, plenty odd to begin with, has become more tangled, more obscure, more strange. Childhood memoir - the death of De Qunicey's young sister from "premature expansion of the intellect" (encephalitis), or school tales about composing Latin poetry - alternate with visionary episodes describing "The Apparition of the Brocken" or the destuction by earthquake of the Jamaican town Savannah-la-Mar, Poe's "City in the Sea" in prose.

This all ties in somehow to the visions De Qunicey has under the influence of opium. The "Dream-Fugue" that ends The English Mail-Coach may or may not pull it all together.

The Confessions is a foundational work, cemented in place by Charles Baudelaire, of Decadent literature, not a place I normally spend much time. With this later writing, De Quincey is pushing into the Visionary category, beyond reason, perhaps beyond interpretation.

The oddest thing, in a way, is that these pieces, as well as Confessions, as well as basically anything by De Quincey that anyone still reads, are magazine articles. When you received your March 1845 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in the post, you would open it to find Part I of Suspiria de Profundis right up front. You can follow that with a reviews of Stephens' Book of the Farm and Lord Malmesbury's Diaries and Correspondence, an essay on "British History in the Eighteenth Century," and, you've been waiting breathlessly, I know, Part II of "German-American Romances".

It's all anonymous, except for a mediocre poem attributed to "J.D."

Most of William Hazlitt's best essays, Charles Lamb's great Elias essays, almost everything Poe wrote, healthy chunks of Emerson, Hawthorne, Carlyle, are all magazine writing, something I usually think of as ephemera. Another idea to rethink.

This might be a good place to point to praymont's attempts to improve his prose through perusal of Carlyle, Lamb, and Hazlitt. I predict success with the Hazlitt more than the others, but would love to be proven wrong. What would a contemporary Carlyle sound like? So best of luck.

* Upcoming = tomorrow.

Emerson approves of my listmaking

"The simple knot of Now & Then will give an immeasureable value to any sort of catalogue or journal kept with common sense for a year or two. See in the Merchant's compting room for his peddling of cotton & indigo, the value that comes to be attached to any Blotting book or Leger; and if your aims & deeds are superior, how can any record of yours (suppose, of the books you wish to read, of the pictures you would see, of the facts you would scrutinize) - any record that you are genuinely moved to begin & continue - not have a value proportionately superior? It converts the heights you have reached into table land. That book or literary fact which had the whole emphasis of attention a month ago stands here along with one which was as important in preceding months, and with that of yesterday; & next month, there will be another. Here will occupy but four lines & I cannot read these together without juster views of each than when I read them singly."

Journals, April 15-16, 1839

I keep a sort of memorandum book, just jotting down the events of the day. Most days are pretty empty. I was inspired in some way by reading James Boswell's journals (the first volume, The London Journal, is a delightful masterpiece), but I don't include much real writing like he had. I assume I am keeping this for some future version of myself. That's what Emerson is really getting at here.