In medieval Latin, “florilegium” was a collection of excerpts, sentences, or quotations—culled and curated by a reader — compiled as their own text. The term literally means “a gathering of flowers.” Florilegium can be as basic as commonplace books of quotations, or, in the case below, become occasions for reflection. Here, in the middle of winter, in a season of disarray, it felt appropriate to gather up a bouquet of some small but perennial wisdom.
Upon reading
First We Read Then We Write:
Emerson on the Creative Process.*
Reading is far more active than it may seem. My own life is my real text; books are commentary on life. This doesn’t make reading easy, but Emerson admired Montaigne who said, “I do not bite my nails about the difficulties I meet with in my reading….I do nothing without gaiety.”
Reading is what gives a day substance.
Reading can also become a numbing substitute. I can become “drugged with books for want of wisdom.”
Every book speaks differently to every reader; you must “do your own quarrying” — do the work to gain what I need from my reading.
To make an abstract idea concrete through language is to recognize that what is material in our world is also a language for what is invisible. To see the world this way is to see it as sacramental, to move from what is seen — to “that which is more real.”
Curiosity and humility are good writing companions; I can be “interested in everything but sure of nothing.” I can also be interested both in what my “sentences are aiming for and in the mechanics of the sentences themselves.” And remember that “the most interesting writing is that which does not quite satisfy the reader…. A little guessing does him no harm.”
“[T]ake for granted that the truths will harmonize; and as for the falsities and mistakes, they will speedily die of themselves.”
The ongoing creative process is always more interesting and alluring than the final product because “the best part…of every mind is not that which [it] knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing unpossessed before [it].”
Meanwhile, because “always that work is more pleasant to the imagination which is not now required” — it may be nicer to write when it is completely unnecessary.
Remember that “each of us is emblematic of the whole, that all of history is to be explained by each life.” And “there is no abstraction.”
All I have is what is what is here. I cannot be what I am not, though there be no market for what I am. “Yet,” Emerson says, “line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as [Caeser’s or Adam’s], though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world."
*First We Read Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. By Robert D. Richardson, University of Iowa Press, 2009.
“…though there be no market for what I am.” I felt that in my chest.
I still have Paul's book of “florilegium.” Such wisdom there—and here. Thank you.