Letter to Emerson
Follow Me, With Me: Responses to Emerson
PS 1600 is the Dewey where you’ll find the library’s stash of Emerson’s writing, even his letters (or P.S. 1600, right before you send your note along). All imaginable compilations. You will find his collected works scattered in volumes or combined in several versions of the same heavy, weaving book, but his journals and letters, once bound, take up a shelf all on their own.
“What can I tell you?” I know it is polite to make a neat list of page numbers and book titles when applying the words of another to the text of your own, but why ruin the feeling of him? Let him be here. Let Emerson’s ghost breathe ice over the words I borrow, and say, “Follow me, with me.” Though I confuse.
Emerson, it is beautiful to watch the struggles and triumphs of your words. They hold you. You wrote to your friend, “I see persons whom I think the world would be richer for losing; and I see persons whose existence makes the world rich.” Like you? And you continue, “But blessed be the Eternal Power for those whom fancy even cannot strip of beauty, and who never for a moment seem to me profane.” Not much more. I think I do what you did only in emails, not letters, where the sun spills its light a certain way and there are words I must send. And now, to you.
When I was reading stories of Raymond Carver out of a book my ninth grade English teacher leant me, I was overwhelmed with the urge to write to the writer. He is dead. I created the letter anyway, and mailed it to Carver’s grave, unsigned, with no return address. Who read it? Maybe it is the writing of a thing and not its destination that matters because mortals are too temporal to make lasting audiences, and once the intended source can read no more, the direction of the written words leak out and become available to speak to anyone, anywhere; I feel like he’s talking to me. That’s what books do. At any rate, I have developed a habit of reading you, Emerson, not as though you had made me your audience but as though you wouldn’t mind me eavesdropping from behind a curtain, as long as I was quiet about it. Does that make sense? For some reason, reading about you and reading from you made me feel real again.
Your hair. Were those mutton chops that crept down to your jaw? Like a scarf. Only, it is the kind of scarf that was accidentally glued to the sides of your face and you managed to rip the rest off, but those tufts remained, like in Dahl’s Matilda where the rotten father went around with the rim of his hat adhered to his face. Alright. I’m being petty at this point, taking low shots at your appearance. Not the first time. I met Adam Levin and felt compelled to point out that his hair had all climbed down from his head, leaving him bald, and settled around his face. No, wait. I thought that, but what came out of my mouth was, “Your book sprained my wrist.”
Not you, though. Emerson, it is the compilation of all your writing—ten, fifteen pounds of it, or am I exasperating the facts?—that sprained my wrist.