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

Reading

Nature 7 “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing,” Emerson says in “The American Scholar.” “First we eat, then we beget; first we read, then we write.” Reading is creative for Emerson; it is also active. In “History” he insists that “the student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.” All Emerson’s comments about reading aim to strengthen the authority of readers (and writers) of books, and to weaken or lighten the authority of books themselves. In an unpublished late essay called “Subjectiveness,” he put it with compressed simplicity. While you are reading, he said, “you are the book’s book.” His best comments on reading are about its limits and dangers. He was as suspicious of reading as he was of traveling . Escapist reading was, he thought, a fool’s paradise. He liked Hobbes for saying, “if I had read as much as other men I should be as ignorant.” He especially admired Montaigne, who had learned not to overvalue books. “If I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention,” Montaigne wrote cheerfully. “I do not bite my nails about the difficulties I meet with in my reading. . . . I do nothing without gaiety. . . . My sight is confounded and dissipated by poring.” Reading 8 Nature Emerson’s critique of reading makes sense, however, only if we understand that he himself was a prodigious and inveterate reader, a man in love with and addicted to books. He seems to have read everything. He habitually read all the British magazines, all the American ones, and all the new books as they came out. Besides the predictable reading in the Greek and Roman classics, in the history and literature of England, France, and Germany, and in the JudeoChristian tradition, he read the literature and scriptures of India, China, and Persia. He studied Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, and Islam. He read books on Russia, on the South Seas, on agriculture and fruit trees, on painting and music. He read novels, poems, plays, and biographies. He read newspapers, travel books, and government reports. He generally took more books out of the library than he was able to read before they were due back. His charging records at the Boston Athenaeum, the Harvard College Library, and the Boston Society Library are not so much a measure of his intake as of his appetite. He glanced at thousands of books. He read carefully many hundreds that caught his attention. He returned over and over to a favorite few, including Montaigne, Plutarch, Plato, Plotinus, Goethe, de Stael, and Wordsworth. Emerson once noted that Coleridge had identified four classes of readers: the hourglass, the sponge, the jelly-bag, and the Golconda. 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, while the Golconda runs everything through a sieve, keeping only the nuggets. Emerson was the Golconda reader par excellence, or what American miners 8 Reading Nature 9 call a “high-grader”—a person who goes through a mine and pockets only the richest lumps of ore. Reading was a physical necessity for Emerson. “I do not feel as if my day had substance in it, if I have read nothing,” he once wrote a friend. “I expect a man to be a great reader,” he wrote on another occasion, “or in proportion to the spontaneous power, should be the assimilating power.” He knew at first hand the power a book can have. “Many times the reading of a book has made the fortune of the reader,—has decided his way of life. The reading of voyages and travels has waked a boy’s ambition and curiosity and made him a sailor and an explorer of new countries all his life, a powerful merchant , a good soldier, a pure patriot, or a successful student of science.” Of the books which had moved him personally he could write with open gratitude and a clear sense of feeling transported. Of Montaigne’s Essays he said: “It seemed to me as if I had written the book myself in some former life. . . . No book before or since was ever so much to me as that.” When he sent his friend Sam Ward a copy of Augustine...