I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, and heartily recommend, the book I just finished reading: Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott, by Odell Shepard. Published in 1937 in Boston by Little, Brown and Company, this masterpiece of biography was the publisher’s Centenary Prize Book, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1938. It’s easily one of the best biographies I’ve read, and I’ve read many. Shepard’s work, […]
Concord — harmony; a grape; a town; Emerson; Thoreau; all that’s forgotten, but not unknown. * Negativity: the great pandemic. Yet the cure is instantaneous, and starts with yourself. * How strange, being a member of a species smart enough to kill itself. And here is our mother, gently whispering over us, Live, and we think her voice is only the sound of the waves, the wind in the trees. […]
If ours isn’t a true friendship, maybe it’s because we aren’t really listening to each other. * From Emerson’s journal, 1869: In the heavy storm I heard the cathedral bells squeaking like pigs through the snout. * Time and energy given to hurt feelings is time and energy taken from feeling compassion for the person you think has hurt them — the result being, there are two feeling hurt instead […]
I go on reading things in Emerson’s journal he thought would never see print. And yet here they are, more than a century and a half later, and so here is Emerson. Almost word for word, I remember many things said by my grandparents. And so here they are. Friends, parents, relatives, animals, places, here they are, to be forgotten and remembered for however long. And here we are. Glaciers. […]
Yesterday morning we dug the dahlias, and in the afternoon I manured the ground for planting next spring. Fluffed and raised from digging, the space looks like a new grave. This morning, the tubers having been cleaned, separated into smaller clumps, and dried, we tucked them away in peat moss for their winter nap in the garage. The apricot tree is bare and fruit buds for next year’s crop are […]
This morning I finished Edward O. Wilson’s Naturalist. After lunch I read in Emerson’s journal about the death of his little boy, Waldo. Two months ago, I ordered Library of America’s forthcoming two-volume edition, Molière: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations. Today I removed the plants from the pots, barrels, and planters behind the house. I also cleared the gutters, which were full to the brim with birch leaves and fir […]
A poem of a sentence from Emerson’s journal, written 19 June, 1838: A young lady came here whose face was a blur & gave the eye no repose. The story behind it? Gone. Or is it still to be written? Mass shooting. I wonder how old I was when I first heard or read that term. No matter — now it is commonly used in plural form. It was certainly […]
After some time away, I’ve drifted back into Emerson’s journal, where, after reading for a while today, I found myself on Page 590 of the first volume of the two-volume Library of America edition. This time around, the searching sweetness of his observations makes me feel like a butterfly or hummingbird; his hesitations, confessions, and insights are flowers. It’s a springtime, summertime reading. Our grapes are in bloom. After losing […]
Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Wells Brown are both in Europe now, seeing the sights, meeting people, writing their observations and travel notes. One is a free man, wondering what freedom really is. The other is a fugitive, who knows what freedom is, or thinks he does. This leaves us to ask the reader of these two books if he knows. And he replies by saying that whatever he knows, […]
While reading Emerson’s journal this morning, I came to a one-line entry of such a painful, personal nature that even now, almost two hundred years after it was written, I feel I have invaded the poor man’s privacy. Yet I am glad I read it. Had I been the editor, I would have thought long and hard about including it, but I am sure I would have done so — […]
William Michaelian 