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

Nature

Nature 27 The practical, down-to-earth Emerson urges us, as we might have guessed, to look to nature for language. On this subject he once quoted Goethe, even though it meant a tussle with German syntax: “They say much of the study of the ancients but what else does that signify, than, direct your attention to the real world, and seek to express it, since that did the ancients while they lived.” This is the old classic stoic line. For answers to the question of how to live, you must turn, not to the gods, not to history, not to the state or the family, but to nature. Emerson, however, turns to nature not because he is an obedient stoic, but from a terrible personal urgency, rather like that of Thoreau. Emerson’s directness, stripped of adjectives, reminds us why he can be considered a modern prophet without our feeling we should apologize for the word. “Our age is retrospective,” he begins his grand little book. “It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories , and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight, and Nature 28 Nature not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?” This is one of the best passages in all of Emerson, not just because it is so deeply typical of him, but because he has here hit upon a fundamental, evergreen view of the world, a way of looking at life available equally to me and to Marcus Aurelius. Simone Weil takes the same way when she urges each of us to escape “the contagion of folly and collective frenzy by reaffirming on his own account, over the head of the social idol, the original pact between the mind and the universe.” In the fourth chapter of Nature, a short chapter in a short book, Emerson considers nature as the source of the language with which we grasp the universe and negotiate the mind’s pact with it. “Nature is the vehicle of thought,” he says, “and in a simple, double, and three fold degree.” He then leads the reader in by steps: 1. Words are signs of natural facts. 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of spirit. The first step is easy. “Words are signs of natural facts. . . . The use of the outer creation [is] to give us language for the beings and changes of the inner creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance . Right means straight. Wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind, transgression the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow.” (In Latin super means raised and cilia means eyebrow.) The abstract and vague word consider leaps to life when we learn that it originally meant Nature 29 study the stars. (In Latin sidus, sideris means star.) Emerson’s recognition of the dependence of language upon nature will lead him, in his 1844 essay “The Poet,” to one of the founding insights of the Oxford English Dictionary, the dictionary dedicated not to authoritative prescriptions of what English words must mean, but to presenting, through quotations, a short history of every word, showing how it has actually been used. “The poets made all the words,” says Emerson, “and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.” It is the poet’s, the writer’s job to “re-attach things to nature.” “Genius,” says Emerson, “is the activity which repairs the decays of things.” It is rare for Emerson to attack anyone, let alone someone trying to be a writer, but his passion for the best over the second best and his zeal for what he saw as the real...