Rereading The American Scholar

Tonight I got my mom's old battered copy of the Viking Portable Emerson down and reread The American Scholar.  I haven't read it in its entirety since...oh, I don't know...probably my undergrad.  I've done bits and pieces, excerpts, when I taught juniors, but the last time I read the whole thing, I was probably very, very tired, and I undoubtedly read it out of a Norton Anthology of some flavor or another, one of those massive chunks-o-Literature I now have in my classroom or somewhere lurking in the back of the house somewhere, onion-skin pages heavily annotated.

It was strange to read this and see the careful notes from my mother's hands.  She has a very different style of annotation, first of all, and we, being similar but ultimately different people, were struck by different parts of the passage.  Sometimes she had underlined the thing I would have, but more frequently, she'd marked something near it.  It was odd.  It made me reflect on deeper issues that she and I have, the way we disagree on things, misunderstand each other.  I think more often than not, we're almost seeing things the same, assuming that we understand in the same way, when really, we're underlining separate sentences....

Anyway, back to Emerson.

Going back through it again without a deadline or thirty-seven other things pressing down on me was liberating.  I always forget how wonderful he is.  I loved everything he had to say.  The ideas that struck me most forcefully were the ones about being careful not to get trapped in the worship of books or ideas and the need for the scholar to be active.

He spoke at length about making sure that the love of knowledge doesn't strangle creativity.  Basically, if books aren't seen as tools, if they become deified, then they will destroy what he calls "Man Thinking."  We have to forge our own patterns, our own ideas, or we aren't doing what we're supposed to be doing; we're just repeating instead of adding anything useful.  He says all this more eloquently, but it struck me powerfully.

The second thing that jumped out at me this time was what he had to say about how the true scholar must go out and experience life or s/he has nothing to pull from.  True knowledge lives.  There is no ivory tower life for the true scholar.  If new experiences and new adventures don't flow in, then no new knowledge is acquired.  Book learning, he says, is only a foundation for practical application.  Scholars should be more about carpe diem than anybody else.

And the whole thing is wonderful.  I'm hacking it to bits with my poor translation.  Get it and read it for yourself.  You can also read it online (with typos, so caveat emptor) here.   All of this is a good kick in the pants for the sadness I've been fighting lately.  There was a passage that directly dealt with that.  One day, I will apparently be able to use it as food for my knowledge.  Heh.  I hope I get there soon.  I'm holding Emerson to that one.