First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

by Robert D. Richardson

I learned about this book from Austin Kleon’s newsletter and this blog post and ordered it through interlibrary loan. Emerson would read, take notes, mine those notes for his journals, and mine his journals when writing essays and speaches.

There are useful thoughts here about writing, reading, and creativity. His views on self reliance, at least as quoted in this book, are impossible to defend; this came up more toward the end of the book.

Here are my own raw notes on this book:

Proverbs 24:30-34, on hard work. “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber…”

p. 7, Read history actively. Your life is the text, and the books are the commentary. p. 8, Coleridge’s 4 classes of readers: - 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 - the Golconda runs everything through a sieve, keeping only the nuggets [Golconda is a famous diamond mine]

p. 10, “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.’”

p. 10, “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.” He didn’t read literary criticism (funny, since this book is somewhat in that category, and doubly funny since I’m reading it without having read much Emerson at all).

“anodyne” = a pain reliever. E did not use reading as an anodyne.

p. 11, “It is an economy of time to read old books” (ie, a shortcut to the wisdom of the ages), but a book is not good simply because it is famous.

p. 15, Don’t read collections. Rather, “do your own quarying.”

p. 15, “Do not read when the mind is creative.”

p. 16, In reading, sometimes a chapter is enough. “The glance reveals what the gaze obscures.”

p. 27, E’s view was that we can observe and ponder nature directly, not just observations from the past. But he goes too far, thinking we can demand, “a religion by revelation to us, and not a history of theirs [foregoing generations’]”.

p. 28, supercilious = acting like you’re above others. “Cilia” is Latin for eyebrow, so the word literally means “raised eyebrow.” “Sideris” is Latin for “star,” thus the word “consider” originally meant to study the stars.

p. 35, Listening one day to the local minister in Concord, Emerson observed how he “grinds and grinds in the mill of a truism and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment he or I desert the tradition and speak a spontaneous thought, instantly poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning and anecdote, all flock to our aid.”

p. 36, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” “The moment you putty and plaster your expressions to make them hang together, you have begun a weakening process. Take it for granted that the truths will harmonize; and as for falsities and mistakes, they will speedily die of themselves.”

p. 37, E believed man is born good (Rousseau’s tabula rasa) and open. For this reason, he prized first impressions, hints, glimmers.

p. 38, Atalanta - a mythical huntress who would only marry someone who could beat her in a foot race. A suitor threw down golden apples, she stopped to pick them up, and he won. Listed along side Adam & Eve and Isaac Newton – tales involving apples, I guess.

p. 39, “I lose days determining how hours should be spent.”

p. 49, Reality is larger than language. If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does the dog have? The answer is four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it one.

p. 52, “gazette” used to mean “forbid”.

p. 52, “Literature is a heap of nouns and verbs enclosing an intuition or two.”

p. 70, Write “from the love of imparting certain thoughts” to “an unknown friend.”

p. 77, Rather than seeing poets and Great Men as standing above the masses, E saw them as representative. The poet expresses what we all feel but cannot express. This was his “central social and religious teaching.”

p. 78, The greatness of Jesus is that “alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man… He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take posession of his World.” This really makes my blood boil. As if man were suitable for God! On the contrary, Christ “did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped. Rather, he made himself nothing, … being made in human likeness.” (Philippians 2) This does not sound like esteeming the greatness of man. He humbled Himself to the point of dying on a cross so that blowhards like Emerson might be forgiven for the sin of esteeming themselves so highly.

p. 80, In his old age, Goethe suggested he would not have been able to accomplish anything in English because of Shakespeare:

A dramatic talent, if it were significant, could not help taking notice of Shakespeare; indeed it could not help studying him. But to study him is to become aware that Shakespeare has already exhausted the whole of human nature in all directions and in all depths and heights, and that for those who come after him, there remains nothing more to do. And where would an earnest soul, capable of appreciating genius, find the courage to set pen to paper, if he were aware of such unfathomable and unreachable excellence already in existence! In that respect I was certainly better off in my dear Germany fifty years ago.

p. 81, Self Reliance. At some point, every man “must take himself for better of worse as his portion.” Envy and imitation must be cast aside, and he must make what he can of and by himself. This sounds enobling (certainly American), but is it? Better to rely on God, who made you your self, to use whatever words you say or write, or whatever else you do, to achieve His purposes.

p. 81, “Who is he that shall control me? Why may I not act and speak and write and think with entire freedom? What am I to the universe, or, the universe, what is it to me? Who hath forged the chains of wrong and right, of Opinion and Custom? And must I wear them?” This sounds positively demonic. Does he mean wrong and right in a moral sense, or only in terms of what is acceptible to write and speak? In the block quote that comes next, he speaks to the Universe, sounding like an eternal being who has authority over all creation. No humility, only a vague reference to a God – “a destiny greater than thine” – Who seems quite remote. Surely these are words to inscribe over the gates of the City of Man.

p. 85, E says his personal power comes from nonconformity. Seems like he does conform to the way of the world/flesh. He rejects submission to God, will not acknowledge sin, lives for himself and his legacy.

Thoughts added later

Around the time I started reading this book, I also got a collection of Emerson’s essays and speaches. After I wrote the notes above, I wondered if I was being harsh toward the end, and maybe I should read these words in context. So I flipped to the famous essay Self Reliance, where I read this (emphasis and paragraphing added):

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. **Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.** Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, "What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?" my friend suggested,—"But these impulses may be from below, not from above."

I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

So his “nature” is the standard of right and wrong. In his noncomformity, he places himself in the seat of God, fully conforming to the ways of his father the Devil. This is my “latent conviction” (which he praised earlier in the essay), and with it, I close the book on Emerson.