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Practical Hints
- University of Iowa Press
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Nature 23 We do not usually think of Emerson as an intensely practical person. Give us Emerson for ideas, perhaps, but Thoreau for the practical application. But this is to ignore a side of Emerson that is enormously practical, even though the practicality may be masked by humor or drawn out—by fine attention to detail—into astonishing Platonic universals. Once when a wagonload of firewood arrived at Emerson’s Concord home while he was indoors talking with his usual gaggle of idealist friends, Emerson looked out the window and, rising from his chair, said, “we must deal with this just as if it were real.” Tide mills were another common reality in Emerson’s day. In Boston a dam was built between two points of land jutting out into Massachusetts Bay, and a tide mill was then situated in the middle of the dam to take advantage of the seven- to nine-foot tides in the area. The incoming and outgoing tides turned a waterwheel that ground corn. Emerson admired the skill behind the arrangement “which thus engages the assistance of the moon, like a hired hand, to grind, and wind, and pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron.” It was just a short step for Emerson to turn this observation into a good Practical Hints 24 Nature phrase: “hitch your wagon to a star [emphasis on the word your].” What looks at first like barn-dance exuberance from the Polonius of Concord turns out, on closer examination, to be a happy phrase for a common practical contrivance. This unlikely combination of the high-flying and the downto -earth is pure Emerson. The same qualities show up in his advice—almost always in the hortatory mode—about the practical business of writing . Underneath the well-constructed phrase (“I am a rocketmanufacturer ,” he once remarked) lie the practical demands of the daily struggle for adequate expression. The best single bit of practical advice about writing Emerson ever gave—best because it is a cry from the heart, because it focuses on attitude not aptitude, and because it is as stirring as a rebel yell—is this: “The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.” There is a strangely appealing air of desperation, finality , of terminal urgency to many of Emerson’s observations. They come to us as ultimatums, messages found in bottles, fire alarms, battle flags, treasure maps, last words, or family secrets. The poor commentator yearns for boldface, italics , or capital letters: “The only path of escape known in all the worlds of God is performance. You must do your work before you shall be released.” Emerson gets the same energy, the same compression, the same authority, when he speaks of “the great class, they who affect our imagination, the men who could not make their hands meet around their objects, the rapt, the lost, the fools of ideas.” Emerson’s practical writing advice grows from his personal experience. He spent a great deal of his life preparing to write, trying to write, even writing. In every admonition we hear his willingness to confront his own failures; indeed, 24 Practical Hints [3.235.120.15] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:22 GMT) Nature 25 he never seems more than a few inches from utter calamity. He urges us to try anything—strategies, tricks, makeshifts. And he always seems to be speaking not only of the nuts and bolts of writing, but of the grain and sinew of his—and our— determination. Sometimes he is terribly direct. If you want to write, just write. “There is no way to learn to write except by writing,” he told Woodbury. Sometimes he would just sit down and start writing—anything—to see whether something would happen. He was quick to spot the same trick in others. “I have read,” he noted, “that [Richard Brinsley] Sheridan made a good deal of experimental writing with a view to take what might fall, if any wit should transpire in all the waste of pages.” He has little to say about planning, but much about other aspects of getting started. “You should start,” he told his young friend, “with no skeleton or plan. The natural one will grow as you work. Knock away all scaffolding. Neither have exordium or peroration. What is it you are writing for anyway ? Because you have something new to say? It is the test of the universities and I...