(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Emerson was a poet, essayist, and lecturer.
Books for him were often stimuli, inspirations for thought. He counselled: “Do not attempt to be a great reader, and read for facts and not by the bookful” (Woodbury 1974). This involved what we’d now term skimming: “learn to divine books, to feel those that you want without wasting much time over them” (p. 27). We should develop a taste and techniques for evaluating the usefulness of a book (pp. 27–8):
The glance reveals when the gaze obscures. Somewhere the author has hidden his message. Find it, and skip the paragraphs that do not talk to you.
The book becomes not a text to read from beginning to end, but a collection of ideas from which we must locate those that are meaningful for our purposes. Often, one chapter is sufficient (p. 27).
This method of divination includes learning “how to tell from the beginnings of the chapters and from glimpses of the sentences whether you need to read them entirely through” (p. 28). To evaluate books efficiently we can page through them relatively swiftly, “keeping the writer’s thought before you”, until we have found what we were searching for; then, reading slowly, dwelling with the author (ibid.). We should read only to start our “own team”; books are a tool, a prompt (ibid.).
Elsewhere he glossed this idea as: “Books are for the scholar’s idle times” (Emerson 2015, 96). When we’re inspired or find an insight, we should put the book aside because reading is not an end in itself. But Emerson goes further, advising us to stop reading if we find ourselves becoming absorbed in the text: “Reading long at one time anything, no matter how it fascinates, destroys thought as completely as the inflections forced by external causes” (Woodbury 1974, 29–30). We should remain at a distance from the text, watching for our impressions. Otherwise we “accumulate dreams” instead of facts (ibid.). (Emerson cared little for fiction).
To read well we must be inventors (Emerson 2015, 97):
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labour and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
This is an effortful yet artistic stance where the text gives free rein to our imaginations, but like creative writing it is a skill that we need to develop.
As for what to books to study, we should read authors “who are not lazy; who put themselves into contact with the realities” (Woodbury 1974, 25). Emerson appreciated religious texts and travel writing where the writer expressed their actual experiences. By reading authors “who wrote about facts from a new point of view”, we become familiar with the author’s “atmosphere”: it’s unimportant if their facts are ultimately wrong, or if they err in their reasoning. The reading of original, first person accounts is invigorating and instructs us in observation (p. 26). We learn to perceive more astutely what we experience in life and in books. We can hone this ability by describing what we see when we travel ourselves (p. 25).
Emerson favoured original works on the basis that for a work to be preserved it must be good, so it’s a better use of time to read the old and famed (Emerson 1912, 195). Contemporary works are harder to judge because “it is not so easy to distinguish betwixt notoriety and fame” (p. 196). He was comfortable reading classics in translation, though, on the belief that “What is really best in any book is translatable, — any real insight or broad human sentiment” (pp. 203–4). He suggested avoiding the reading of “what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and the train”—the opposite of the classic (p. 196). Further, he advised against “all second-hand borrowing books”—compilations, anthologies, collections of excerpts and quotations—because nobody “can select the beautiful passages of another for you” (Woodbury 1974, 27).
Reading and writing were inextricably linked for Emerson. His “organized, persistent, purposeful journal keeping is one of the most striking aspects of his early intellectual life” (Richardson Jr. 1995, 42). His biographer explains (ibid.):
He wrote constantly, he wrote about everything, he covered hundreds of pages. When he had nothing to say, he wrote about having nothing to say. He read and indexed and reread what he had written
In college Emerson began keeping journals to list books he’d read, quotations from his reading, and his reflections that these readings inspired (pp. 41–2). His use of journals shows how he assimilated what he read, remembering what he found important, and derived from it original thought. To some extent, his writing is the reason he read.
These journals left out “the chaff and dross of daily routine and dull reading”, so moved from one great highlight or notable quotation to the next (Richardson Jr. 1995, pp. pp. 320). Such a journal “converts the heights you have reached into table land” (p. 320). The best of his day’s reading and thought was recorded in his journal, and the best of his journals were transformed into his essays (ibid.).
Emerson discouraged study proceeding from curricula or detailed plans: “The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a mechanical one of hours and pages” (Emerson 1912, 194). This helps us pursue our purpose, instead of reading miscellaneous works in a desultory fashion: study should be driven by the pilot of our genius, by the books that are proper specifically to us (ibid.). This way whether we read one book or many we will read advantageously (ibid.). This exemplifies Emerson’s notion of trusting our own nature and following our passionate curiosity, and reflects his understanding that learning in this way is fruitful because we remember the material that engages us.
He offered three practical rules for reading (p. 196):
- Never read any book that is not a year old.
- Never read any but famed books.
- Never read any but what you like.