Emerson: Essays and Lectures

"This book includes all of Emerson’s work, basically. If you buy this, you have it all in the palm of your hand, starting with Nature and going on for another 1,250 pages or so. Nature is the blueprint for everything Emerson wrote after it. It lays out the core of his notion of Transcendentalism, which again has everything to do with the vast superiority of subjective and intuitive understanding. Another thing I love about Nature is that it includes a personal note, all the more intensely moving for being so rare. Nature was written around the time that Emerson’s brother Charles died. There’s a very beautiful moment where he’s arguing that we shape nature by perceiving it. It’s an interesting pre-Heisenberg idea, that you change what you perceive by perceiving it. Then there’s this passage, which I’ve read a million times: Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. Such beautiful sentences, so deeply felt. The loftiness of the essays can sometimes be their failing, but there’s also an amazing prophetic voice you can hear leaping out of them. There are certainly sentences in Emerson that Whitman could have written, and vice versa. There’s also a shared American sensibility. This is crucial to all of Emerson’s writing. I’d argue that he’s the first great American writer—but he’s certainly the first great American writer determined to be American. The first who thought incessantly about how an American writer would differ from, say, an English writer. Many of the essays take up those questions: How are we different as Americans? How is an American artist different from a European artist? It sets up a highly contradictory set of emotions in all of his work. Emerson is heavily steeped in the tradition of British and Continental writing; those are his heroes. Yet he has such a strong iconoclastic urge. So, he’s simultaneously worshipping his pantheon and smashing it. He can’t stop himself. He didn’t like urban settings very much. He went to New York City several times, and since his brother lived in Staten Island, he would go visit there or give lectures in Manhattan. But he didn’t care for it. The bucolic setting: that was where he thought beauty and truth were to be found. But America, as a gigantic geographical entity, did strike Emerson as sublime: a source of poetry and transcendence. To give him his due, he traveled much more widely than most Americans of his day, because he was a rock star of the Lyceum circuit. Of course he was a person who spent most of his time sitting in his room. “Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.” That was his credo. But he did travel extensively, doing 50 to 100 speaking gigs a year. Emerson’s Transcendentalism was underpinned financially by the estate he got from the death of his first wife, which was mostly stocks and bonds. It came to a little more than $23,000, a very considerable sum in that day. Still, he needed to lecture to make a living. The later two books— English Traits (1856) and The Conduct of Life (1860)—sold reasonably well for the time, but the earlier books, Nature and the two Essays , while hugely important intellectually and culturally, sold in tiny numbers. This was partially because the publishing infrastructure in this country was not very advanced. They’d be printed by a publisher in Boston who would hardly lift a finger to sell them anywhere else. His early audience is a small subset of American lovers of literature and heavy philosophical thought. Boston is the powerhouse of American intellectual life, at least during the first half of the 19th century. If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere as an intellectual and a writer. But once Emerson set up his network with Carlyle and other British writers, his fame traveled to England fairly early. By the time he went for a second trip, he was a known figure. He would lecture in England as well. It wasn’t really about selling huge numbers of books—it was about the impact you could make in that world. He helped Carlyle enormously in America, yes. His deteriorating relationship with Carlyle is also funny and interesting. Carlyle was very cranky to begin with, so as he got more cranky, well, you can only imagine. Meanwhile, Emerson’s temperament moved in the opposite direction. As Carlyle became more obstreperous and impossible, Emerson became more and more tranquil and impossible to ruffle. Jane Carlyle—also a cranky person and very skilled at conveying it—found that infuriating. She hated the fact that he was now a tranquil, serene, smiling man who simply would not rise to the bait. Later, as his cognitive life began to deteriorate, that affect was kind of a mask as well, for not being able to engage anymore. To a degree, he felt himself Carlyle’s junior when he first encountered him. Remember, Emerson was just discovering his own vocation as a writer. He met Carlyle during his first trip ever to Europe, after the trauma of his wife dying and leaving the Church. Though still unformed in some ways, his voice was tremendously inspired by the sound of Carlyle’s. He went to meet him out in the country, and it was a lovefest. Carlyle saw Emerson as his American disciple—as this angelic, beautiful young man who responded to the tone of his voice and transposed it into a Yankee register. And as you mention, Emerson labored very hard on behalf of Carlyle’s literary career in America. He acted as his agent, seeking publishers for his work and brokering deals. “Emerson was discovering the incendiary part of his own personality as a writer, whereas Carlyle was no longer excited by his work” But with Emerson’s burgeoning reputation, Carlyle felt like he’d been flattened out a bit. It must have been difficult to see someone else’s stardom on the rise while his was somewhat on the wane. But I’m talking about something else beyond literary fame: he could see that Emerson was discovering the incendiary part of his own personality as a writer, whereas Carlyle wasn’t quite as excited by his own work anymore. There’s a whole separate book of Emerson’s correspondence with Carlyle, because they wrote so many letters to each other. (I should say it can be procured as a free ebook .) Their letters are great. They write in a very high register, a sardonic one, with a certain humor."