Gardening, cannon-braiding, editing, "magnificence and rats," advice from R. W. Emerson and James Wood

Anybody do any gardening this weekend?  I thought not!  As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in The Conduct of Life:

The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity.  One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other’s duties.  (“Wealth”)

It is possible that Emerson is simply a prankster, and that some of his sentences are the equivalent of that time Charles Baudelaire dyed his hair green.  He just wants to see me sputter.  Or he is having some other kind of fun:

What would painter do, or what would poet or saint, but for crucifixions and hells?  And evermore in the world is this marvellous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

That is from the puzzlingly titled “Considerations by the Way.”  There is no denying that the last line is a good’un, and it would be well worth writing an entire diffusive essay just to use it.

Now this, from the same essay, is untrue in a different way, one useful to book bloggers:

Life brings to each his task, and, whatever art you select, algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics,—all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms, of selecting that for which you are apt;—begin at the beginning, proceed in order, step by step.  ’Tis as easy to twist iron anchors, and braid cannons, as to braid straw, to boil granite as to boil water, if you take all the steps in order.

And literary criticism, in either its amateur or professional form, is much easier than braiding cannons.  It has fewer steps.  Read, think, write.  The pros re-write, or are at least re-written, as Robert Silvers, the founding editor of the New York Review of Books describes in this recent interview:

Aside from Barbara [Epstein], Lizzie [Hardwick] was the major influence.  I would send her reviews and she would say, “Oh, yes, this piece is very good. It just needs a little work.”  And then she would send it back half as long, with paragraph after paragraph cut or compressed.  She had no patience at all for what you would call tired language.

I have a great deal of use and therefore patience for tired language.  It is especially valuable when I am tired or in a hurry or lazy.  I am sometimes tempted to submit a piece somewhere for this single reason, that professional editing would be educational, that it would improve my writing.  Wake it up a little.

Otherwise, I have been unable to see an advantage of more formal publication.  This is James Wood, from a recent interview with Jonathan McAloon (longer version here):

Now my advice would be, try to write longer pieces wherever you can.  One thing that’s changed since I was freelancing is there’s space online to do that kind of thing.  You don’t get paid for it, largely, but there’s the chance to do something at length.

It is possible that Open Letters Monthly, say, would jump at a chance to publish a 9,000 word article on Adalbert Stifter and Austrian literary culture. Sorry, I need to double-check – three weeks = 15 days x 600 words a day.  Yes, so I wrote close to 10,000 words in a fifteen part series on that subject, likely the best thing I am going to write all year.

My great early book blogging insight, my correction to Wood, was that there is no reason to publish the longer piece as a single unit, that I can work with the understandable impatience of the online reader, and that there are in fact enormous benefits from letting readers see the cannon-braiding in progress.  Book blog readers are so knowledgeable and helpful.  They challenge my worst ideas and introduce me to new ones.  Taken as a whole, my pieces rarely end up where I had planned, partly due to the assistance I receive.  I am edited in public; the corrections appear the next day, or year.  This editing does not reduce my word count, and my bad ideas are not politely expunged, but rather remain visible as one of the many steps towards boiled granite.  But it works, in its own way it works.

Boiled granite is useful somehow, yes?  That is why Emerson mentioned it?

Alone with the gods on their thrones - Emerson's "Illusions"

Emerson’s essays are hard to remember because they are illogical.  His arguments often make no sense and are thus hard to follow.  This is not exactly a complaint, but rather the identification of  a difficulty.  Intuition, metaphor, wild leaps, misdirection, and irony are all acceptable tools for the essayist.  Emerson’s predecessors are Montaigne and Plutarch, not Kant and Descartes.

The pieces were all performances, or versions of performances, lectures before they were essays.  Given my troubles with the texts, I find it so difficult to imagine what Emerson’s audiences got out of one of his talks, but he was a successful and even popular speaker.  His essays are road-tested.  I find it helpful to imagine what the actor did with his lines.

The shortest essay in The Conduct of Life is “Illusions,” only nine pages ignoring the usual introductory poem, which is likely a mistake.  The first page, uncharacteristically, is given over to a scene, Emerson’s visit to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, where he is particularly impressed by the “theatrical trick” of a room with a ceiling that, in the dark, uncannily resemble a starry night sky.  The photo at this National Park Service site gives the barest idea of what Emerson saw.  But now Emerson has a hook – “Our conversation with Nature is not just what it seems…  The senses interfere everywhere…” – and more importantly only eight more pages, so perhaps I have a better chance of keeping up with the argument.

Which is that all is illusion, a by-product of perception, or that not all is illusion but good luck sorting the real from the rest, or that – I think this is it – that the world is real and we are responsible for what appears to be its illusory nature.  The illusion is the illusion.  “All is riddle, and the key to the riddle is another riddle.”

The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed.  In London, in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco, the carnival, the masquerade is at its height.  Nobody drops his domino.  The unities, the fictions of the piece it would be an impertinence to break.

So in this case illusions are social.  In others they are imaginative (“What a debt if [a child’s] to imaginative books!”).  Some are perhaps necessary, instinctual defense mechanisms.

We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages.  We live amid hallucinations, and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and all are tripped up first or last.

That first line is wild, but I believe it contains a euphemism.  The examples pile up, some likely, others questionable.  Very little of this is argued except by means of association.  The reader, or listener, must make it fit, if he can:

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe.  All is system and gradation.  Every god is there sitting in his sphere…  On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions…  And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, – they alone with him alone.

Sucked oranges, metaphysical varioloids, hugs in Texas - the wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The fact is that I will never remember what is in these Ralph Waldo Emerson essays.  They slip through the brain, which in my case is admittedly rather spongy.  Sponges drain.  The book at issue is The Conduct of Life (1860), a late one.  Emerson was in his fifties.  The essays are titled “Wealth,” “Power,” like that.  Blunt yet somehow unmemorable.

When I write about a book, when I simply type out lines, they are more likely to stick.  I will try that.  I will work on the fourth essay, “Culture.”

In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot.  Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?  The man runs round a ring formed by his own talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world.  It is a tendency in all minds.  (1015-6, page numbers referring to the Library of America Essays and Lectures)

One might distinguish between those who read Emerson with pleasure and those who cannot by their involuntary response to “metaphysical varioloid” – do you smack your lips or roll your eyes?

How about this one, which I will have to snip a bit:

In Boston, the question of life is the names of some eight or ten men.  Have you seen Mr. Allston, Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, [etc.]?  Then you may as well die.  In New York, the question is of some other eight, or ten, or twenty.  Have you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and brokers, - two or three scholars, two or three capitalists, two or three editors of newspapers?  New York is a sucked orange.  (1017)

That seems strangely relevant, even if we have expanded the cultural list of what we must experience, and then die.

Some people read Emerson for his wisdom, which is surely overrated, and is in no way applicable to me or to Wuthering Expectations:

Though they talk of the object before them, they are thinking of themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for you admiration.  (1017)

In no way applicable.  This is not bad, though, where Emerson gives some advice on education, advocating a long leash, so to speak:

He is infatuated for weeks with Halo 4 and Minecraft; but presently will find out, as you did, that when he rises from the game too long played, he is vacant and forlorn, and despises himself.  Thenceforward it takes place with other things, and has its due weight in his experience.  (1021)

Substitute “whist and chess” in the appropriate place for the actual quotation.  Whist and chess!  Perhaps some of our plagues of the moment are not so new.

I should find something about books. 

So, if in traveling in the dreary wildernesses of Arkansas or Texas, we should observe on the next seat a man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, we should wish to hug him.  (1030)

Exactly, exactly.  Emerson does not say that I actually hug him.  Yes, he was a wise man.

If only you can be the fanatic of your subject

If I were to continue writing about No Name, this would be a post about the enjoyably surprising characters.  Feel free to imagine that post, or to compose your own parody of it.  I have become distracted:

We can easily come up to the average culture & performance; not easily go beyond it.  I often think of the poor caterpillar, who, when he gets to the end of a straw or a twig in his climbing, throws his head uneasily about in all directions; he is sure he has legs & muscle & head enough to go further indefinitely – but what to do? he is at the end of his twig.  (Journal of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jan. ?, 1861*)

I, too, often think of that caterpillar.  Why, it is like me!  In post after post, sentence after sentence, I feel I have reached the end of the twig.  Writing has been unusually laborious lately.  The strain shows, I assume, although I do what I can to hide it.

I am not sure if I am reading Emerson’s journals as a tonic or too precipitate a crisis.  The same thing happened the last time I was reading them, in that case in the form of a little book about Emerson and writing written by Robert D. Richardson.  That book put the fear in me, I tell ya.  "The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent."  That sounds like it could be hard on a fellow.

Amidst all the recent chatter about blogging and the death of literary criticism, I quietly, perhaps with some frustration, ignored the fifth anniversary of Wuthering Expectations.  I was busy writing.  It took some time for me to even acknowledge that Wuthering Expectations is writing, and nothing but.  Other people have their own purposes with their blogs; mine is to write.  Why books, why literature?  New writers are advised to write what they know.  Literature seems to be what I know.**  Emerson again (“we” is Emerson; “you” is also Emerson):

This is what we mean when we say your subject is absolutely indifferent.  You need not write the History of the World, nor the Fall of man, nor King Arthur, nor Iliad, nor Christianity; but write of hay, or of cattleshows, or trade sales, or of a ship, or of Ellen, or Alcott, or of a couple of school-boys, if only you can be the fanatic of your subject, & find a fibre reaching from it to the core of your heart, so that all your affection & all your thought can freely play.  (May? 1859)

Maybe I should start a hay-blog.  No, I simply do not care enough about hay.  I am a fanatic on the subject of literature.  I am writing all of this like I have a choice!

*  From Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte, p. 490.  The second quotation is on p. 485.

**  Or what I want to know.  The helpful patience with which people read what often amount to nothing more than introductory notes, and the useful guidance they provide in comments, often astounds me.  But they are fellow fanatics of their subjects.

Experiencing nature with Peter the Wild Boy - John Williams argues with Emerson and Thoreau

Butcher’s Crossing begins with a pair of epigrams that, if properly understood, could replace the novel, although I had to read the novel to understand them, so what good do they do?  The first is a long slab of Emerson’s “Nature” which can be compressed thusly: “satisfaction… tranquil… halcyons… Indian summer… knapsack of custom… sanctity which shames our religions… judges like a god.”  Strange, gassy stuff.  The second epigram is a little different.  Poets, Emerson, perhaps, prescribe nature as “the grand cure” for “sick spirits”:

But who froze to death my teamster on the prairie?  And who made an idiot of Peter the Wild Boy?

This is so odd that it can only come from Herman Melville, stripped out of who knows what context from The Confidence Man (1857).  Will Andrews, the center of Butcher’s Crossing, abandons the knapsack of custom for the wilderness, for its Emersonian judgment, and his sick spirit is, in fact, cured, but the medicine has some powerful side effects.

In Butcher’s Crossing, the authentic experience of Nature destroys the self.  Personality is effaced by wildness.  All of the characters, not just Andrews, regress in the wild.  Or perhaps they do move forward, stepping out of their humanity, beyond personality, beyond thought.  Thoreau develops an idea like this in the “Higher Laws” chapter of Walden, the chapter I found hardest to understand.

Thoreau, however, also associated experience of nature with knowledge of nature:

Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.  She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. (“Higher Laws,” first paragraph)

This comes just after Thoreau resists the temptation to devour alive a woodchuck, but I think he means this.  Thoreau became an expert naturalist.  Andrews approaches nature with expectations, but knows nothing, absolutely nothing, and he learns nothing about nature along the way.  Everything he learns in the novel – how to ride a horse, how to skin a buffalo – only leads to further mental numbness.  Perhaps that is what he was seeking.

Andrews' ignorance extends far past nature:

Soon, almost to his surprise, it occurred to Andrews that he did not know the Bible well enough to talk about it even in Charley Hoge’s terms – had not, in fact, ever read it with any degree of thoroughness.   His father had encouraged his reading of Mr. Emerson, but had not, to his recollection, insisted that he read the Bible. (45)

Andrews’ father is a Unitarian minister!  I even wonder how well Andrews read Emerson.*  Further down on the same page, Andrews remembers his attempts to “become a transparent eyeball” (a “phrase from a lecture by Mr. Emerson that he had attended”, emphasis mine) in “the fields and woods” near Cambridge.**  Andrews never reads anything, or writes anything.  At Harvard he feels nothing but “meanness and constriction.”  Buried in his buffalo hide sleeping bag, waiting out a Rocky Mountain blizzard (182-3), Andrews is entirely constrained, but there is no meanness, nothing outside himself.

I believe Williams is critiquing the fecklessness of one side of Emerson and Thoreau’s response to nature.  He wants to bring the danger and wildness back into the picture.  Thoreau seems to have learned a similar lesson after he wrote Walden, but I have only read passages of the “Ktaadn” chapter of The Maine Woods, which contains Thoreau’s shattering encounter with real wilderness, so I cannot be sure.  Williams carefully outlines the negative space of an alternative path.  Tomorrow, I will glance at another disciple of Emerson and Thoreau, another authentic encounter with Nature, but one that is brimming with personality.

*  Or how well anyone reads anything.  See p. 199, when Andrews asks Charley to read something from his Bible.

**  A later, almost literal exercise in transparent eyeballing results in a three-day snow blindness (202).   Who made an idiot of Peter the Wild Boy?

Good for that and good for nothing else - Emerson's advice for the writer.

"You must reform your life," Henry David Thoreau urges, and I take notice, having recently reformed my life, or some portion thereof.  Granted, another reasonable response is "Sez you, Hank.  Go hoe your beans."  But he has my attention.  As he did with Robert Louis Stevenson, Thoreau makes me nervous.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, though, is absolutely terrifying, at least the Emerson presented in Robert D. Richardson's First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process (2009), an 85 page distillation of Emerson's advice to writers.  Or, really, to one writer, himself.  Is he ever hard on himself.  I know the feeling.

The single best bit of practical advice about writing Emerson ever gave - best because it is a cry from the heart, because it focuses on attitude not aptitude, and because it is as stirring as a rebel yell - is this: "The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent." (Richardson, 24)

Emerson goes Longfellow and Nannecoda one better.  The arrow that fell to earth he knew not where was not good enough.  Good writing requires complete commitment by the writer; complete commitment is impossible; therefore, well:

Can you distill rum by minding it at odd times?  Or analyse soils?  Or carry on the Suffolk Bank? [many more examples, some similarly dubious]  Or accomplish anything good or anything powerful in this manner?  Nothing whatever...  A writer must live and die by his writing.  Good for that and good for nothing else...  American writing can be written at odd minutes, - Unitarian writing, Congress speeches, railroad novels. (Richardson, 48, quoting Emerson in his journals)

That's all from Emerson's own journals.  That last sentence needs something to emphasize Emerson's contempt - maybe italicize "American" or "can."  Remember that Emerson is here arguing only with himself. 

Why should any of this worry me?  I'm not a writer.  See the little "About Me" on the right - says so right there.  Then, if I may ask, what's been going on at Wuthering Expectations?  What - nothing - American writing, written at odd minutes.

The real Emerson also knew that it required courage for anyone - but especially for a young person - to stand up and say publicly, "I will be a writer." He was well aware, perhaps increasingly aware as he grew older, that such a commitment had a steep cost. (Richardson, 84)

Hmm.  How young, exactly?  How steep?

Robert Richardson, also the author of an impressive biography of Thoreau that I'm reading now, is espoused to Annie Dillard, and I can't help but imagine the conversation at home.  "An advice book, huh? On writing, huh?  Think ya know something about writing, huh?"  "Oh no, dear, it's Emerson on writing, not me.  Everything I know I learned from you, dear.  Please let go of my ear."  Some of my assumptions about the character of Annie Dillard may be a little off.

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.

His only illustration is his own biography - Emerson criticizes his friends

Emerson's journals - most of his writings - are an enormous project of self-criticism and self-improvement. No surprise than that they also contain criticisms of his friends, a central part of his life, criticisms that are constructive and penetrating:

"Henry Thoreau is like the woodgod who solicits the wandering poet & draws him into antres vast & desarts idle, & bereaves him of his memory, & leaves him naked, plaiting vines & with twigs in his hand. Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the End is want & madness." August 1848, p. 391.

And here's the most famous knock on Thoreau:

"Thoreau wants a little ambition in his nature. Fault of this, instead of being the head of American Engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party." July 1851, p. 426.

Emerson constantly doubts and questions the value of his own work, and you can see the element of self-criticism in his portraits of Thoreau. And I should point out that Emerson considered Thoreau something like the Greatest Man Alive. I've misplaced the reference, but somewhere in his journal he describes Thoreau as the only man who actually lives by Emerson's ideals. Not the only other man - Emerson excludes himself. But then there's Emerson's frustration - if you're so smart and talented, get out of your canoe and do something.

Thomas Carlyle, Branson Alcott, Margaret Fuller - along with his barbs, Emerson occasionally expresses amazement that he has been able to associate with these people, great intellects, original thinnkers, brilliant weirdos. But here he is on Alcott:

"Unhappily, his conversation never loses sight of his own personality. He never quotes; he never refers; his only illustration is his own biography. His topic yesterday is Alcott on the 17 October; today, Alcott on the 18 October; tomorrow, on the 19th. So will it be always... this noble genius discredits genius to me." April 1842, p. 281.

This counts as Emerson humor, at least the middle part. Is it also a bit mean? True, but mean? I'm not sure I have the strength of character to hear this sort of thing about myself. When, up above, I called his criticisms "constructive", I meant theoretically. Heard and understood in the proper spirit. How that would actually work, even, or especially, coming from one's closest friends, I have no idea.

This was all private, of course, just for Emerson and posterity. Emerson could be kind of a cold fish, but was not actually cruel, I don't think. It all slept in the journal.

The angel would eat too much gingerbread - Emerson cracks a joke

Somewhere on Wuthering Expectations, although heck if I can remember where, I included Ralph Waldo Emerson in a list of writers I considered humorless. Having read more deeply - or more shallowly? - anyway, more something - in Emerson, I am happy to retract the charge.

In his essay "Nominalist and Realist" (1844), Emerson reminds us that even Great Men are imperfect: "I verily believe if an angel should come to chaunt the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some precious atrocity."

That's, I say, that's a joke, son. I didn't say it was necessarily funny, but an angel stuffing himself with gingerbread is comic. Still deflating the Great Men, he varies the joke in the "Napoleon" chapter of Representative Men (1850) when listing Napoleon's bad qualities:

"He treated women with low familiarity. He had the habit of pulling their ears, and pinching their cheeks, when he was in good humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to his last days. It does not appear that he listened at key-holes, or, at least, that he was caught at it."

OK, "that he was caught at it," not bad.

I have been reading Emerson in something like chronological order. I think he gets funnier as he ages, although I may have only now learned to identify his comic tone. He becomes a bit sour, even, but there's an accompanying recognition of the ridiculousness of things that is very genial. This is easier to see in his journal than in his essays, but traces begin to appear everywhere.

Don't get me wrong - the default Emerson style is "earnest gasbag", but there's a lot of variation around that. Look at this defense of earnestness, in "Montaigne; or the Skeptic":

"The first dangerous symptom I report, is, the levity of intellect; as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers."

This is immediately followed by a parody of his "subtle and admirable friend" Thomas Carlyle, a heavy mocker, who becomes "San Carlo." Again, not exactly funny, but comic, and the only example of Emersonian parody that I have come across, or anyway recognized.

As enjoyable as it is to find this side of Emerson, there is no excuse for this journal entry from December 1850:

"How could the children of Israel sustain themselves for forty days in the desart?
Because of the sand-which-is there."

We promise not to look at their tails or incisors when they come into company - Emerson on the Fugitive Slave Law

"We shall never feel well again until that detestable law is nullifed in Massachusetts & until the Government is assured that once and for all it cannot & shall not be executed here. All I have, and all I can do shall be given & done in opposition to the execution of the law." (p. 420)

This is Emerson on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Emerson's journals contain plenty of politics, mostly regarding abolitionism, but nothing before 1850 had got him so worked up. Emerson in His Journals, the selection I'm reading, has five pages, basically all of April and May 1851, of nothing but anger and bitterness and first-rate rhetoric.

Note that the use of the word "nullified" is pretty radical, a reference to the Nullification Crisis, when it seemed possible that President Jackson would use the Federal military to enforce a tariff law in South Carolina. Emerson is playing with the idea of the breakup of the United States. He's prescient, and in despair.

"Let Mr Webster for decency's sake shut his lips once & forever on this word. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan." (p. 421)

Senator Webster was not just a hero of Emerson's - Emerson thought Webster was a Carlyle-style Great Man of History. But not after Webster supported the compromise that included the Fugitive Slave Act:

"Against this all the arguments of Webster make no more impression than the spray of a child's squirt. The fame of Webster ends in this nasty law." (p. 422)

Unususally scatological for Emerson. He may have had Jonathan Swift on his mind. Here he is a few days later, playing with Swift's "Modest Proposal" - slavery is cannibalism, and slave-owners are devils:

"It was a little gross, the taste for boiling babies, but as long as this kind of cookery was confined within their own limits, we could agree for other purposes, & wear one flag... though they had tails, & their incisors were a little long, yet it is settled that they shall by courtesy be called men; we will make believe they are Christians; & we promise not to look at their tails or incisors when they come into company." (p. 423)

Emerson here acknowledges that slavery was an evil with which he had to some degree made his peace - as long as it was kept down there. The Fugitive Slave Law returned the evil to his hearth, and shook him out of his complacency. His journals are rarely so fiery. This reminds me of what I was trying to say about Roberto Bolaño. Emerson is forcing himself to gauge his own hypocrisy. How unpleasant and difficult; how often do I do that?

Perhaps often enough, actually. Too much of that sort of thing and a person could hardly function. Tomorrow, then, Emerson the comedian.

All page references are to Emerson in His Journals, 1982, ed. Joel Porte.

On him they could not calculate - a note on Thoreau, Emerson, and Reverend King

"Mr Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, & sends his sons to it. They calculated rightly on Mr Webster. My friend Mr Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The abolitionists denounce the war & give much time to it, but they pay the tax."

July 1846, Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal, Emerson in His Journals, pp. 358-9.

This is a tricky passage, full of irony. Webster is the great Senator, a hero of Emerson's. Here we see an early warning of the complete disillusionment that will come a few years later when Webster voted for the Fugitive Slave Act.

Another irony is that neither Emerson or Thoreau are really protesting the Mexican War in and of itself. They are opposed to the war because they believed it was waged in the interests of expanding slavery. Thoreau wrote about his protest in the 1849 "Civil Disobedience" essay, which eventually leads us to Rev. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Thoreau's protest was an unusually productive one.

But yet another irony is that Emerson was one of the abolitionists who paid the tax. He didn't go to jail. Emerson was fully aware of this irony.

Yet another: Emerson and Thoreau were both intellectually indebted to Thomas Carlyle. Around the time Thoreau published "Civil Disobedience," Carlyle was vigourously defending black slavery. This is why intellectual history is so interesting - ideas move around in such mysterious ways. One of the many strands of history that lead to our new President made an important stop in that jail cell in Concord.

I have been reading a lot of Emerson lately; I think I'll spend the week with him.

"The Columbine" - Jones Very

I want to look at one poem here, and leave the context for later.

The Columbine

Still, still my eye will gaze long fixed on thee,
Till I forget that I am called a man,
And at thy side fast-rooted seem to be,
And the breeze comes my cheek with thine to fan.
Upon this craggy hill our life shall pass,
A life of summer days and summer joys,
Nodding our honey-bells mid pliant grass
In which the bee half hid his time employs;
And here we’ll drink with thirsty pores the rain,
And turn dew-sprinkled to the rising sun,
And look when in the flaming west again
His orb across the heaven its path has run;
Here left in darkness on the rocky steep,
My weary eyes shall close like folding flowers in sleep.

This is a strange poem. The poet looks at the columbine long enough and in such a way that he actually thinks he is a flower. This is a version of Emerson, immersed in Nature, becoming a transparent eyeball.

But here, look at the widening sensual range - the eye comes first, but then he feels the breeze, he nods his honey-bell and the bee comes, he drinks the rain and feels the dew and sun. A more complete sensory experience, even though one might think the sensual possibilities of a flower would be quite limited.

And then the eye returns at the end, as the poet remembers that he is a person not a flower - his eyes close "like" the petals. It's all just a metaphor, no matter how intensely experienced.

Note how the return to reality is reflected in the bumpiness of the last line. The first 13 lines of the sonnet have 10 syllables, but the last line has 12 (counting "flowers" as one syllable), to jar the poet back to himself.

We are all wise.

“We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in art.”

R. W. Emerson, "Intellect", p. 421 of the Library of America edition.

Is this true? One thing you have to train yourself to do in order to read philosophy is to put that question on hold. If you stop whenver a premise is untrue, you would not get very far with a large share of philosophers.

Anyway, I don't think it's true. Some people are wiser than others, actually wiser, not just more artful. Some of us are not very wise at all.

Say I modify the statement a little. "Between equally wise persons, the difference is in art." That could be more euphonious. But now it looks true to me. The manner of expression of ideas or wisdom forms a crucial part of their effectiveness or impact. I may have made the sentiment too utilitarian for Emerson's taste, but I feel like I'm moving toward what he really meant.

That's why I'm writing here - working on the "art" side. Maybe it will lead to actual wisdom. Maybe it will only help me appear more wise. Maybe it's just vanity. I'll keep trying.

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.

Visual Emerson

I wondered earlier if Emerson's reliance on visual metaphors was idiosyncratic, or if he got it from his intellectual sources. From his journals:

"Musical Eyes. I think sometimes that my lack of Musical ear, is made good to me through my eyes. That which others hear, I see. All the soothing plaintive brisk or romantic moods which corresponding melodies waken in them, I find in the carpet of the wood, in the margin of the pond, in the shade of the hemlock grove, or in the infinite variety & rapid dance of the treetops as I hurry along."

Signet Classics Selected Writings of RWE, p. 83

Familiar essays

Emerson’s essays can be hard traveling. He is not the friendliest companion. I’m not sure this should matter, but in the familiar essay, it does.

Michel de Montaigne is the master of the form. His style is genial and conversational. Many of his successors imitate this manner in some way – Addison and Steele, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Joseph Epstein. Plutarch, 1,000 years earlier, is similar. None of these writers are as profound as Montaigne can be, not remotely in some cases. But they all feel like they would make good friends. Or good dinner companions at least.

Is this necessary for a great essayist? Francis Bacon’s essays are more like instructional pamphlets, little lectures. Thomas DeQuincey is a brilliant showoff, and I would think he would be a trial at dinner. Emerson wants to be Montaigne’s successor, and match him in moral seriousness (which I think he does). His concerns seem very private, though. He presents a certain view of the world that is original, but perhaps too much his own. Or maybe he is the sort of intense friend who always wants to discuss serious things and gets mad when you just want to make fun of Tom Cruise. Very rewarding to meet once every couple of weeks over lunch, but too strong a presence to see every day.

I should try to dig into one of his essays more carefully. They’re worth the effore, but the effort is very real.

And all of this is flummoxed a bit by the essay I just read, “Prudence”, which begins “What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have little, and that of the negative sort?” which is just the sort friendly stuff I’m talking about.

On Emerson's weird transparent eyeball

"Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infnite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." - Nature, Chapter 1.

To the left is the best "Emerson the transparent eyeball" I could find. I remember a more finished cartoon in my high school English textbook. The cartoon is by Transcendentalist poet Christopher Cranch, a friend of Emerson, so I don't think it was meant to mock, although many people took it that way.

With the transparent eyeball, the ridiculous and the sublime are right next to each other. But I think it's the very fleshiness of the eyeball that grounds the passage. It's the something to go with the nothing in the next phrase. Put in a more generic word - "vessel" or "conduit" or some such - and the whole passage risks a quick trip to infinite space, as pure hot air. That eyeball gives you something to hang on to.

James Wood has criticized Nabokov and similar authors for visually-oriented writing that overemphasizes what can be seen and neglects the rest of the sensual world. Emerson's Nature has the same narrowness - the language is all "seeing" and "eye". Maybe it's just a synecdoche (part standing in for the whole) for the senses in general. But I wonder if an Emerson who preferred music to poetry or birds to stars might have had a different emphasis.

Or maybe the language is borrowed from the philosophic sources. Was there a hint, or more, of Kant and company in there somewhere? Possibly in the chapter titled "Idealism"? Help. I wonder if this stuff comes via Carlyle and Coleridge? How was Emerson's German?

Or, another theory, is our visual vocabulary (colors and shapes, for example) so much richer than that of the other senses that writers interested in precision are naturally drawn, or trapped, there?

All right, I'm looking at the cartoon. The hat is just ridiculous. And the waistcoat.