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

Words

Nature 49 One modern critic has wondered how Emerson wrote as well as he did, considering how little faith he had in words as such. It is an empty judgment. Emerson loved language as much as any poet does, but he understood that 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. “All language,” says Emerson in “The Poet,” “is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as horses and ferries are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.” Emerson did care for language—a great deal— but he always insisted that words do not exist as things in themselves, but stand for things which are finally more real than the words. This means taking even more care with one’s choice of words. “Skill in writing,” he says flatly, “consists in making every word cover a thing.” He was always alert for what happens when we forget this. “Scholars,” he says, “are found to make very shabby sentences out of the weakest words because of exclusive attention to the word.” A writer needs to get in as close as possible to the thing itself. “Chaucer , Milton and Shakespeare have seen mountains, if they speak of them. The young writers seem to have seen pictures Words 50 Nature of mountains. The wish to write poetry they have, but not the poetic fury; and what they write is studies, sketches, fantasies , and not yet the inestimable poem.” As a philosopher, Emerson favored what philosophers unhelpfully call realism, which is the belief that ideas alone are real. As a writer, though, the Montaigne side of Emerson comes uppermost, and he becomes our kind of realist, a person who believes that there is a real world out there, however imperfectly we perceive it. Since the world is real, the words chosen to describe it must be chosen with all possible care; language reform consists largely of reattaching words to things, and, in the process, redeeming the things and recharging the language. “There is every degree of remoteness from the line of things in the line of words. By and by comes a word true and closely embracing the thing. That is not Latin nor English nor any language, but thought. The aim of the author is not to tell the truth—that he cannot do, but to suggest it. He has only approximated it himself, and hence his cumbrous embarrassed speech: he uses many words, hoping that one, and not another, will bring you as near to the fact as he is.” Emerson fought the use of abstractions. “I cannot hear a sermon without being struck by the fact that amid the drowsy series of sentences what a sensation a historical fact, a biographical name, a sharply objective illustration makes! Why will not the preacher heed the momentary silence of his congregation and [realize] that this particular sentence is all they carry away? Only in a purely scientific composition which by its text and structure addresses itself to philosophers is a writer at liberty to use mere abstractions.” The best words will deliver the thing behind the words. “The true conciseness of style would be such a writing as no dictionaries but events and character only could illustrate.” He liked George Fox for saying, “What I am in words, I am the same in life.” 50 Words Nature 51 Abstraction writ large is Tradition. If I were called upon to charge a minister, I would say beware of Tradition: Tradition which embarrasses life and falsifies all teaching. The sermons that I hear are all dead of that ail. The preacher is betrayed by his ear. He begins to inveigh against some real evils and falls unconsciously into formulas of speech which have been said and sung in the church some ages and have lost all life. They never had any but when freshly and with special conviction applied. But you must never lose sight of the purpose of helping a particular person in every word you say. Of course the same thing applies not just to the church and to sermons, but to all writing and speaking, to all activity where it is a matter of how you choose to use words. It is not enough to understand the importance of words; you...