Commonplace Book, pg. 3 — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As of today, my commonplace book tops 40,000 words and uncounted writers, with additions every week. I scroll through it frequently, sometimes looking for ideas, sometimes avoiding whatever I’m supposed to be doing, more often just for the pleasure of sentences produced by the convergence of a keen mind and killer skill with words.

In this context “commonplace” does not mean everyday or mundane. A commonplace book is a notebook that becomes a place for items that have something in common, typically quotations that you want to assemble in one place. John Locke kept one, as did Thomas Jefferson (beginning around age 15) and John Milton, Robert Louis Stevenson and E.M. Forster.

For this third letter distilled from my own quote stash, I’ve tapped American transcendentalist and 19th-century master of the essay Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a writer, his tread could be heavy and there are times when I wish he’d crack wise just once for relief from his chronic sobriety, but he had a profound mind and a commitment to craft that commends him to your attention.

The passages listed here first appeared in essays including “History,” “Self-Reliance,” and “The American Scholar,” and in his letters and journal.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John, and Paul.

There you go, a 35-word call to action. If Emerson says make a commonplace book, who am I to argue? I love the idea of collecting sentences that “have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” And “make your own Bible” brings to my mind Thomas Jefferson making his own Bible, creating a scriptural commonplace book not by copying text but by taking a copy of The New Testament and scissoring out everything that was not philosophical. All the miracles, all the supernatural bits, the Resurrection, any mention of divinity — gone. Jefferson titled it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English. He got it down to about 85 pages.

In something of that same spirit, Emerson committed himself to facts and truth, and to their power to destabilize. Sober as he was — and my god was Emerson sober — he left hints on the page that he enjoyed tossing sand into the gears of the orthodoxy.

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

Not just truth — “rude truth.” You sense the zing as he penned that phrase. He was no Thomas Paine or Jonathan Swift, but I think Emerson enjoyed skewering pieties and smug assumptions.

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.

From a time when scholarship was a public-facing enterprise, not something so esoteric that only 15 other people in your sub-sub-sub-discipline could understand what you were trying to say. Emerson wasn’t writing just to amuse the Massachusetts cognoscenti and pay the bills, though essays and lectures did provide his living. In his mind, the stakes were much higher.

Every violation of truth is a stab at the heart of human society.

There’s a call to arms for the current American moment. He knew what he was up against.

The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism.

As one says in Baltimore, True dat.

Emerson wrote with confidence. But though he was ordained as a Congregationalist minister, he did not write as a prophet revealing inarguable, eternal truth, or evangelizing for the existence of such a thing. He knew that today’s certainties are tomorrow’s doubts, and that the hardest of facts can prove provisional.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

I take this two ways: Over time, what were once immovable facts tend to soften in our minds, especially when we’re justifying something; and what seem today to be incontrovertible facts frequently must give way to new knowledge that forces their retirement. Emerson qualified himself to his readers.

Let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things.

That could be framed and hung on the wall as the essayist’s credo. Emerson would not approve of the inelegance of the term, but he surely was an unsettler.

No truth is so sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them. Life is a series of surprises.

I may have belabored his earnestness and lack of humor on the page. Emerson was rational above all else, but there were things in the world, like slavery, that caused his blood to surge. Emerson, who was the epitome of reason, wrote this, as true a sentence as he ever penned:

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.