The philosopher, writer, and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson died this week in 1882 in Concord, Massachusetts, at the age of seventy-eight. Almost five decades earlier, he told an audience at Harvard, "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books."
Emerson was a champion of individualism and an adamant proponent of trusting in one's best self against the backdrop of a lifelong self-directed, even intuitive, education. Oliver Wendell Holmes called that speech ("The American Scholar") "the declaration of independence of American intellectual life," so it's only fitting that the contemporary writer Robert D. Richardson has captured Emerson's life and work through a form he calls "intellectual biography" -- meaning that he reads not only everything that his subjects have written, but also everything they have read.
In the preface to his 1995 book Emerson: The Mind on Fire, he writes that it was intended to be "a companion piece of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986). My approach to both Thoreau and Emerson has been to read what they read and then to relate their reading to their writing."
Richardson took the same approach in writing William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006), and the three books -- about Emerson, Thoreau, and James -- each took a decade to research and write. Richardson's immersion in his subjects' rich imaginative lives via their extensive reading lists has led one interviewer to observe, "Richardson is so familiar with the nineteenth century that some passages read like memoir with a tense shift."
Richardson describes Emerson's extensive and interactive reading life as it really took off in his late teens:
"During this active seedtime, Emerson was also reading in all directions. He read systematically only for a particular project. He read current books and old books…And from almost everything he read he culled phrases, details, facts, metaphors, anecdotes, witticisms, aphorisms, and ideas. He kept this energetic reading and excerpting up for over forty years; the vast system of his personal notebooks and indexes -- including indexes to indexes -- eventually reached 230 volumes, filling four shelves of a good-sized bookcase…
Now, during late 1821, 1822, and early 1823, he was reading the Swiss economist Simsmondi's History of the Italian Republic in the Middle Ages and Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History. His aunt questioned him about Eichhorn's Apocalypse…and about Ram Mohan Roy, the great Hindu monotheist and founder of modern Hindu liberalism, then making a small stir in the pages of the Christian Examiner. He read Shakespeare's Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra."
The list goes on … and on and on. Given his companion-like approach to studying Emerson's writing and creative reading, Richardson was dealing with an embarrassment of riches in capturing his subject.
If a biographer working in the same tradition were to write an intellectual biography of you decades or even generations from now, what would he or she find on your reading list? Which of those books would reveal your deepest preoccupations, questions, aspirations, and fears, and which have given you permission to trust more deeply in yourself? Whether stacked in a messy nightstand pile or tracked in handwritten journals or on a digital spreadsheet, the titles that you deem worthy of your time and attention can't help but define you.