RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND THE EVER-EVOLVING ART OF ...

throughout his literary career and, towards the end of his life in 1867, he still detailed the
importance of cultivating self-reliance in conjunction with his favorite past time:
I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book
which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that
he read it there; but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he
buys the book, and ransack every page. (Emerson, Journals, 320)
Of all the passages in Emerson’s journals, this one is, perhaps, the most unexpectedly
bitter-sweet. While the experience he details sadly portends the catastrophic memory
loss that would afflict him towards the end of his life, it also offers a kind of model for,
what he found to be, an ideal mode of reading. This entry offers two contrasting
interpretations, but both work to exemplify an idea that I will pursue in defining the ideal
Emersonian reader. The literal interpretation of this passage suggests that Emerson has
ratified and assimilated the work of another writer into his own thought and has simply
forgotten its origin. However, this passage also leaves the possibility open that Emerson
is attributing an original thought to some “forgotten” author and searches in vain for the
text in which it first appeared. When we read in an Emersonian fashion and with self-
reliance, similar difficulties inevitably present themselves. However, the intimate and
active role that we play as readers of whole histories of thought in text—where the work
is vivified and our experiences are ratified—is the key to fostering self-reliance in
ourselves and in others, for the illusory deficiencies we thought we saw in ourselves or in
the external world have been made redundant.
xx