In The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views of which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given forgetting that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.” He wrote some of the best sentences in English about writing:
- The first rule of writing is not to omit the thing you meant to say.
- Good writing and brilliant conversation are perpetual allegories.
- All writing should be selection in order to drop every dead word.
Yet Emerson was suspicious of reading and warned against reading as “escapism,” what he called “a fool’s paradise.”
This makes sense only if we understand Emerson as a prodigious reader. He read widely and diversely, about Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, fruit trees, Pacific Island cultures, among many other topics.
He also liked to quote Coleridge, who described four types of readers:
The hourglass: Gives back everything it takes in, in the same form
The sponge: Give back everything it takes in, just a little dirtier
The jelly-bag: Squeezes out the value and keeps the worthless
The Golconda: Runs everything through a sieve and keeps on the nuggets
Emerson shunned the passive acceptance of “famous” books, encouraging each to form their own opinion.
The way to write is to throw your body at a mark once all your arrows are spent.”
Some of us are digging back into Emerson during COVID-19, starting with this fine biography by Robert Richardson (who, by the way, was married to the legendary Annie Dillard, who apparently really helped to shape his writing!)