Sunday, February 13, 2022
6:35 a.m. So, gentlemen, unless you have something better in mind, I thought we might talk a little bit about Emerson. Setting switches: focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. (And again I need to lean on the acronym to remember! How’s that for presence??)
We can discuss Emerson, if you wish. You had better provide context.
How much?
Begin, and the flow will provide whatever else becomes necessary or appropriate.
It’s just that everything connects to everything else – the same problem you have mentioned on your end.
In such cases, any given starting-point provides the initial orientation.
All right. Well, as you know, I have been reading Stephen Whicher’s Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Emerson. I haven’t been reading it in a concentrated fashion, but only now and then, usually over a meal, usually only a few pages or even a few paragraphs at a time. Whicher is interesting, clearly thoughtful, scholarly, interested in Emerson. So, he has insight.
But –
Well, but this isn’t the kind of thing I enjoy. It’s important finally, I get that, or why would I finally be reading it after owning the book for as long as I can remember? But it is analytical in a way I don’t quite –
Well, I was going to say “don’t quite approve of,” but that isn’t true. His task is the same kind of task I set myself to in my Master’s thesis, 50 years ago. It isn’t analysis I find difficult to swallow, nor is his approach, nor conclusions repugnant.
Only, you think you know better, in a lot of particulars or in a general way.
Well, yes. I guess that’s the problem. I had it with many of Hemingway’s biographers, too. They have the scholarship, and they have put in the time and the work, so who am I to disagree, but often enough, I did.
Renew your intention to focus: You are taking a long time to get to it.
Fifteen minutes already. Well -. [Pause] Why don’t we skip my part and move to your part? I may not have provided a place to begin in so many words, but you know where I am and what is going on.
All right. The nub of the situation is that you have always been drawn to Emerson – or, we say “always,” but for several decades, anyway, though not until after a complete immersion in Thoreau – but you have read relatively little that Emerson wrote. Thus you feel at home with him but without sensory evidence for it. We know that’s a strange way to describe your mental situation, but that is what it amounts to: Intuitively you understand Emerson, but evidentially you have relatively little reason to think you should be able to do so.
It I were to put it into past-life terms, it is as if I had been Emerson, and so was immediately fascinated to learn the story of my best friend as put together long after his death and mine. I don’t pretend it is that way, but it is as if it were that way. I picked up Walden and Thoreau’s journal at age 24 and was immediately taken. I wrote my thesis on his personal religion as deduced from his journal from the years 1837 to 1847. In subsequent years I read pretty nearly everything he wrote: 14 volumes of journal, Walden; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod, and essays such as “Life without Principle,” etc. With Thoreau it was recognition; I read and was transported into his inner world, but it isn’t as if I have been him, only as if I understood him so well.
Much as with Hemingway, 40 years later.
That’s true, I guess. But Emerson was different. I have read many biographies of Emerson but relatively little of his writings. The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, for one (a gift from Dave Garland), and English Traits, and a few essays. With Emerson it is as if I already knew how he thinks and what he feels. In a way it is almost, “Why bother to read what I already know?”
Only, you can’t figure out the situation. You are ready to make the situation practical, as we always advise.
Yes, that’s the word for it. And I work on the assumption that somehow there will be something practical for others here too, though I can’t imagine what it could be.
The general application is this: Some will recognize a situation they had thought peculiar to themselves. Seeing your sketch of knowing without having had the means of knowing may put into perspective for them things they had not understood or perhaps had not taken time to understand.
And the practical effect of this is –?
It is usually an improvement when you learn why you do something, and how. In general it is better to be conscious than to be unconscious.
Doesn’t seem like we should have needed so many words to convey so simple a reminder.
But you haven’t gotten to the root of your question yet.
Well, I see Emerson in a way different from the scholars, and different from Emerson himself, I imagine. Oh, and here’s what my question centers on. Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott – they lived in a different world than their contemporaries knew, and a world still unsuspected by people today who don’t live in that world. But I do, and many of my fiends do, and uncounted thousands of people we’ll never meet do. But if any scholar does, it would be worth as much as his or her reputation is worth to admit it, let alone to ascribe to Emerson what really is true.
There you are. And it was so with Hemingway. It is the assumption that different people live in the same world that is the falsifying assumption, particularly given that any description of a common world must be a simplified least-common-denominator portrait. This is what falsifies biographies and critical studies: not that they aren’t based in evidence and logic, but that they are based in one taken-for-granted assumption that is and always must be mostly false.
As you say that, I think of Adomnan’s life of St. Columba of Iona, how very different his procedure is from modern scholarship. Adomnan cares nothing about external evidence such as dates, sequence, etc. What he wants to convey is the quality of the man as evidenced in things that happened.
Yes. Anecdotes, not scholarship.
This sounds like I don’t approve of scholarship, but that isn’t so.
No, it sounds like you don’t approve of scholarship based in post-Renaissance assumptions, which is quite a different statement.
I have had in mind, for decades, the ideas of a book to be called “Thoreau and Mr. Emerson,” intending a sort of biography of their relationship. Initially I thought of it from Thoreau’s point of view, and only the slow drops of water that are years eroded that initial idea. Now I would write it from a point of view much closer to Emerson’s, but rally somewhere between the two. Not that it will actually get written.
The point is that one thing that held you back is the knowledge of how little you had read of Emerson. Another is how incapable you were of conventional scholarship. Another is that what you wanted to convey isn’t obvious to you: It wasn’t the detail of their lives separately or jointly, and it wasn’t an intellectual assessment, nor a comparison.
No, as you say that I realize what I really wanted to do was to show the world they lived in, that was not evident, neither to their contemporaries nor to their biographers. In a way what has been written about them is anecdotal, the journal of the winds that blew while they were there, as Thoreau put it. But how to write what cannot be said?
You see, you wanted to use their lives as examples of indicators of a different experience of the 3D/non-3D as lived in 3D. That isn’t saying what can’t be said, but it is pointing toward it.
All the notes I made, so many binders of material, it seems a shamefully inefficient way to proceed.
It does it you view it through the lens that presumes that a 3D result is the be-all and end-all. But if you look at it as detritus from a lifelong orientation, perhaps not so wasteful. What you – any of you – are here to do is to create yourselves. What else you create in the process is incidental.
Today’s theme, then?
It could be “Knowing and expressing,” that’s one way to look at it. (For, you do realize? Ascribing a theme is a way of orienting the material after the fact, quite as much as it is describing what occurred.)
I see it as you point it out. Okay, then, I’ll transcribe and maybe we’ll see if we just wasted people’s time. Didn’t waste mine, that’s for sure. Thanks, and till next time.