## Metadata - Author: [[Robert D. Richardson]] - Full Title: First We Read, Then We Write - Category: #books ## Highlights - "Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale-who writes always to the unknown friend." ([Location 605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004L62IEK&location=605)) - The poet may be "isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression." ([Location 616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004L62IEK&location=616)) - "For it is not metres," Emerson goes on, "but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,-a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has a new architecture of its own and adorns nature with a new thing." ([Location 626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004L62IEK&location=626)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change." ([Location 646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004L62IEK&location=646)) - "So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she [Nature] detaches and sends away from it poems or songs,-a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time." ([Location 653](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004L62IEK&location=653)) - Emerson's idea that the great figures in history are each representative of some interest or quality all people share is antimonarchical, antiaristocratic, and anti-Carlylean. Carlyle had argued in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) that great people are simply born better and stronger than the rest of us and we should be grateful to be ruled by them. Emerson's quite different idea provides a rationale for both democracy and universal education. "There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think, what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand." This representativeness of great people can fairly be called Emerson's central social and religious teaching. ([Location 666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004L62IEK&location=666)) - "I find a provision, in the constitution of the world, for the writer." The reason for this is his equally bold insistence that "Nature will be reported." Nature, in other words, is self-registering. "All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by his shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain' ([Location 673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004L62IEK&location=673)) - "Society has, at all times, the same want, namely of one sane man with adequatepowers of expression to hold up each object of monomania in its right relations' ([Location 682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004L62IEK&location=682)) - "Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all times; that the disadvantages of any epoch exist only for the fainthearted." Emerson learned, perhaps from Goethe, the same thing. In "Self-Reliance" he puts it this way:There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power that resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. ([Location 707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004L62IEK&location=707)) - The writer, he says, must "abdicate a manifold and duplex life.... Others shall be thy gentlemen and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee. Others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine. Thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season." ([Location 736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004L62IEK&location=736)) - "Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from the past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf." ([Location 739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004L62IEK&location=739))