Alien Drums

I finally read something by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’ve been hearing his name virtually my entire life, so it’s about time I got around to reading some of what he wrote. I read his essay, “The American Scholar.” Excellent.

Among the things he speaks of is the influence of the past on the true scholar. I want to share some of his thoughts here for those of you who, like me before this month, had never read RWE.

The “mind of the Past” is inscribed in literature, art and institutions. But books are “the best type of the influence of the past.”

“The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now it is quick thought. It can stand and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.”

All lovers of classic literature will love that quote, I suspect. It’s compelling thought conveyed in beautiful language. But then Emerson goes where I didn’t expect.

“Yet hence arises a great mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation—the act of thought—is transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious; the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

“Hence, instead of Man Thinking we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class who value books as such; not as related to Nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. …

“Books are the best of things, well used; abused among the worst. What is the right use? … They are for nothing but to inspire. … The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence it is progressive. … [T]he genius looks forward; the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead; man hopes; genius creates.”

“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When we can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, … we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is.”

Reading, now, I think, will be different for me.