Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson

AUTHOR: Emerson, Ralph Waldo

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo & Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Emerson's journals provide contextual material for his essays, lectures, and addresses, as well as valuable historical context, including the diet promoted by Sylvester Graham and the efforts of his friends A. Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane at Fruitlands. Emerson is rather critical of Lane's zeal and, even though he supports Alcott and his ideas, his tone is skeptical. After the breakup of the community he is saddened for Alcott, though he also mocks his depression. Throughout his writings Emerson emphasizes a holistic, simple, and mindful life in harmony with nature and spirit. In the context of social reform movements including Temperance, women's rights, Abolition, association, and education, Emerson often finds that those who set out to embrace such changes in lifestyle are overzealous, too much focused on a single issue. He holds that one's diet should be simple, without pretension or fuss.

Volume III
1833, January 25: While sailing to Malta, Emerson witnesses the captain of the ship catching, killing, and butchering a dolphin: “Yesterday, the captain killed a porpoise and I witnessed the cutting up of my mammiferous fellow creature” (24).

Volume V
1838, October 26: “O, worthy Mr. Graham, poet of bran-bread and pumpkins, there is a limit to the revolutions of a pumpkin, project it along the ground with what force soever. It is not a winged orb like the Egyptian symbol of dominion, but an unfeathered, ridgy, yellow pumpkin, and will quickly come to a standstill” (101-102). Emerson does not believe in the Graham diet, as it is not holistic, universal.

1839, May 26: “The poor mind does not seem to itself to be anything unless it have an outside oddity, some Graham diet, or Quaker coat, or Calvinistic prayer-meeting, or Abolition effort, or anyhow some wild, contrasting action, to testify that it is somewhat. The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. Or why need you rail, or need a biting criticism on the church and the college to demonstrate your holiness and your intellectual aims? Let others draw that inference which damns the institutions, if they will. Be thyself too great for enmity and fault-finding” (206).

1839, June 27: On the necessity of idealist holism in reform: “We find extreme difficulty in conceiving any church, any liturgy, any rite, that would be genuine. But all things point at the house and the hearth. Let us learn to lead a clean and manly life. Write your poem, brave man, first in the earth with a man’s hoe, and eat the bread of your own spade. I have no hope of any good in this piece of reform from those who only wish to reform one thing. A partial reform, like Palmer’s, or Graham’s, or the praiser of the country life, is always an extravaganza. A farm is a poor place to get a living by, in the common expectation. A Boston doll who comes out into the country and takes the hoe that he may have a good table and a showy parlor may easily be disappointed. But who takes hold of this great subject of reform in a generous spirit with the intent to lead a man’s life will find the farm a proper place. He must join with it simple diet, and the annihilation of one stroke of his will of the whole nonsense of living for show; and he must take Ideas instead of customs. He must make the life more than meat [this is a reference to Luke 12:23, 'The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment'], and see to it that ‘the intellectual world meets men everywhere,’ in his dwelling, in his mode of living. He must take his life in his hand too. I do not think this peaceful reform is to be effected by cowards. He is to confront a corrupt society and speak rude truth, and emergencies may easily be where collision and suffering must ensue. But all the objections to the great projects of philanthropy are met and answered by a deep and universal reform. Thus, it is said that, if money is given up, and a system of universal trust and largess adopted, the indolent will prey on the good. Consider that our doctrine is that the labor of society ought to be shared by all, and that in a community where labor was the point of honor, the coxcombs would labor; that a mountain of chagrins, inconveniences, diseases and sins would sink into the sea with the uprise of this one doctrine of Labor. Domestic hired service would go over the dam. Slavery would fall into the pit. Dyspepsia would die out. Morning calls would end. Redeunt Saturnia regna” (227-229).

1839, November 26: “Temperance. — The caterpillar and cow and robin mix the sun and blue sky with their diet. We hide our bread in cellars and basements. It matters not how plain is the fare which is spiced by the sun and sky as mountaineers and Indians know” (342).

1839, November 28: “Why is our diet and table not agreeable to the imagination, whilst all other creatures eat without shame? We paint the bird pecking at fruit, the browsing ox, the lion leaping on his prey, but no painter ever ventured to draw a man eating. The difference seems to consist in the presence or absence of the world at the feast. The diet is base, be it what it may, that is hidden in caves or cellars or houses. . . . Did you ever eat your bread on the top of a mountain, or drink water there? Did you ever camp out with lumbermen or travellers in the prairie? Did you ever eat the poorest rye or oatcake with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness? and did you not find that the mixture of sun and sky with your bread gave it a certain mundane savour and comeliness?” (345-346).

1840, June 14: “It is a superstition to insist on vegetable, or animal, or any special diet. All is made up at last of the same chemical atoms. The Indian rule shames the Graham rule. A man can eat anything, –– cats, dogs, snakes, frogs, fishes, roots and moss. All the religion, all the reason in the new diet is, that animal food costs too much. We must spend too much time and thought in procuring so varied and stimulating diet and then we become dependent on it” (413).

1840, September 16: Emerson reflects on the uselessness of diet reform in relation to the more pressing issue of property: “Men will not be long occupied with the Christian question, for all the babes are born infidels; they will not care for your abstinences of diet, or your objections to domestic hired service; they will find something convenient and amiable in these. But the question of property will divide us into odious parties. And all of us must face it and take our part. […] Let my ornamental austerities become natural and dear. The State will frown; the State must learn to humble itself, repent and reform” (458-459).

1840, November 5: Emerson’s approach to diet stems from his belief in being “united,” that is, a self-reliant individual in tune with Spirit or the One: “It is not irregular hours or irregular diet that makes the romantic life. A sylvan strength, a united man, whose character leads the circumstances, and is not led by them, – this makes romance, and no condition” (490).

Volume VI
1842, November 19: Emerson short-circuits reformism with Transcendentalism, that is, he sees reform as a matter of innate, internal disposition rather than outward action: “A reformer must be born; he can never be made such by reasons. All reform, like all form, is by the grace of God, and not otherwise. […] Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia of faith. It is faith run mad. Nature is transcendental ... Lethe. It seemed strange to men that they should thus forget so fast, that they became suspicious, that there was some treachery, and began to suspect their food that perhaps the bread they eat, or the flesh, was narcotic. Hence rose Graham societies” (310).

1843, March 12: On Fruitlands: “Jock could not eat rice, because it came west, nor molasses because it came north, nor put on leathern shoes because of the methods by which leather was procured, nor indeed wear a woolen coat. But Dick gave him a gold eagle that he might buy wheat and rye, maple sugar and an oaken chest, and said, This gold-piece, unhappy Jock! is molasses, and rice, and horsehide and sheepskin” (360). The editorial footnote to this passage explains: “The superfine abstinences of the Fruitlands projectors are here in mind” (360n1)

1843, July 8: At the outset of the Fruitlands project, Emerson voices his doubt but hopes that “Alcott and his family at Fruitlands” will succeed. Overall, he can find nothing to fault in their manners and demeanor; that is, Emerson thinks they are sincere in their idealism: “The sun and the evening sky do not look calmer than Alcott and his family at Fruitlands. They seemed to have arrived at the fact, to have got rid of the show, and so to be serene. Their manners and behavior in the house and in the field were those of superior men, of men at rest. What had they to conceal? What had they to exhibit? And it seemed so high an attainment that I thought, as often before, so now more, because they had a fit home or the picture was fitly framed, that these men ought to be maintained in their place by the Country for its culture. Young men and young maidens, old men and women, should visit them and be inspired. I think there is as much merit in beautiful manners as in hard work.

I will not prejudge them successful. They look well in July. We will see them in December. I know they are better for themselves than as partners. One can easily see that they have yet to settle several things. Their saying that things are clear, and they sane, does not make them so. If they will in every deed be lovers and not selfish; if they will serve the town of Harvard, and make their neighbors feel them as benefactors wherever they touch them, they are as safe as the sun” (420-421).

1843, September 26: “This morning Charles Lane left us after a two days’ visit. He was dressed in linen altogether, with the exception of his shoes, which were lined with linen, and he wore no stockings. He was full of methods of an improved life: valued himself chiefly just now on getting rid of the animals; thinks there is no economy in using them on a farm. He said that they could carry on their Family at Fruitlands in many respects better, no doubt, if they wished to play it well. He said that the clergy for the most part opposed the Temperance Reform, and conspicuously this simplicity in diet [i.e., veganism], because they were alarmed, as soon as such nonconformity appeared, by the conviction that the next question people would ask, would be, ‘Of what use are the clergy?' […] He had this confidence, namely, that Qui facit per alium, facit per se: that it was of no use to put off upon the second or third person the act of serving or of killing cattle; as in cities, for example, it would be sure to come back on the offending party in some shape, as in the brutality of the person or persons you have brutalized” (451-452).

Later, in the same entry, Emerson notes the following: “Queenie [Lidian Emerson, his second wife] thinks the Fruitlands People far too gross in their way of living. She prefers to live on snow” (462).

1844, March 12: Emerson on Alcott’s depression following the breakup of Fruitlands: “Very sad, indeed, it was to see this half-god driven to the wall, reproaching men, and hesitating whether he should not reproach the gods. The world was not, on trial, a possible element for him to live in. A lover of law had tried whether law could be kept in this world, and all things answered, No. […] Very tedious and prosing and egotistical and narrow he is, but a profound insight, a Power, a majestical man, looking easily along the centuries to explore his contemporaries, with a painful sense of being an orphan and a hermit here. […] But I was quite ashamed to have just revised and printed last week the old paper denying the existence of tragedy, when this modern Prometheus was in the heat of his quarrel with the gods. […] He would be greater if he were good-humoured, but such as he is, he 'enlarges the known powers of man,' as was said of Michael Angelo” (503-505).

1844, June 15: On race and Abolition: “If the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization, for the sake of that element no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him, he will survive and play his part. So now it seems to me that the arrival of such men as Toussaint, if he is pure blood, or of Douglass, if he is pure blood, outweighs all the English and American humanity. The anti-slavery of the whole world is but dust in the balance, a poor squeamishness and nervousness; the might and the right is here. Here is the Anti-Slave; here is Man; and if you have man, black or white is an insignificance. Why, at night all men are black. The intellect, that is miraculous. […] Does he not do more to abolish Slavery who works all day steadily in his garden than he who goes to the Abolition meeting and makes a speech? The Anti-slavery agency, like so many of our employments, is a suicidal business. Whilst I talk, some poor farmer drudges and slaves for me. […]  Do not, then, I pray you, talk of the work and the fight, as if it were anything more than a pleasant oxygenation of your lungs. It is easy and pleasant to ride about the country amidst the peaceful farms of New England and New York, and sure everywhere of a strict sympathy from the intelligent and good, argue for liberty, and browbeat and chastise the dull clergyman or lawyer that ventures to limit or qualify our statement. This is not work. […] I think if the witnesses of the truth would do their work symmetrically, they must stop all this boast and frolic and vituperation, and in lowliness free the slave by love in the heart. Let the diet be low, and a daily feast of commemoration of their brother in bonds. ... Let them leave long discourses to the defender of slavery, and show the power of true words, which are always few. ... Let us, if we assume the dangerous pretension of being Abolitionists, and make that our calling in the world, let us do it symmetrically. The world asks, Do the Abolitionists eat sugar? Do they wear cotton? Do they smoke tobacco? Are they their own servants? Have they managed to put that dubious institution of servile labor on an agreeable and thoroughly intelligible and transparent foundation? ... The planter does not want slaves; give him money; give him a machine that will provide him with as much money as the slaves yield, and he will thankfully let them go; he does not love whips, or usurping overseers, or sulky, swarthy giants creeping round his house and barns by night with lucifer matches in their hands and knives in their pockets. No; only he wants his luxury, and he will pay even this price for it. It is not possible, then, that the Abolitionist will begin the assault on his luxury by any other means than the abating of his own. A silent fight, without war-cry or triumphant brag, then, is the new Abolition of New England, shifting the thronging ranks of the champions and the speakers, the poets, the editors, the subscribers, the givers, and reducing the armies to a handful of just men and women. Alas! alas! my brothers, there is never an abolitionist in New England” (532-536).

Volume IX
1856, January 9: On nature and how to be in tune with it: “Nature itself is nothing but a skin, and all these but coarser cuticles. A god or genius sits regent over every plant and animal, and causes this, and knits this to that, after an order or plan which is intellectual. The botanist, the physicist, is not then the man deepest immersed in nature, as if he were ready to bear apples or to shoot but four legs, but one filled with the lightest and purest air, who sympathizes with the creative spirit, anticipates the tendency, and where the bird will next alight; being himself full of the same tendency” (11).

1857, August 2: Emerson proposes that there are only differences of degrees (rather than differences of kind) in the Cosmos, which, in turn, expresses itself in everything: “Maximum and minimum. The doses of heaven are homoeopathic. How little it is that differences the man from the woman; the animal from the plant; the most like from the most unlike things! The sun is as much a creature of fate as any worm which his heat engenders in the mud of earth. Large and small are nothing. Given a vesicle you have the Cosmos” (115).

1859, January (?): “The mask of Nature is variety; our education is through surfaces and particulars; and multitudes remain in the babe or animal state, and never see or know more: but in the measure in which there is wit, we learn that we are alike; that a fundamental unity or agreement exists, without which there could be neither marriage, nor politics, nor literature, nor science” (168).

1862, January 16: Of the basic necessities of life, Emerson says “baking and butchering are good under all skies and times. Farming, haying, and wood-chopping don’t go out of vogue. Meat and coal and shoes we must have. But coach painting and bronze match-holders we can postpone for awhile yet” (358).

Last updated on March 2nd, 2024

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