Emerson's active seedtime

 Ralph Waldo Emerson's development as a writer and thinker was accompanied (aided?) by enormous amounts of reading and journal keeping.  

One thing he had learned in college was how to keep journals.  Beginning in 1819, when he was a sophomore, Emerson began keeping a college theme notebook as well as a list of books he had read. A third notebook , begun for drafts of his college essays on Socrates, turned into a notebook for poetry. A fourth, begun in 1820 for notes in a lecture course by George Ticknor, grew into a general notebook for drafts of essays and poems, Also, in 1820 he began a series of notebooks, each called "Universe," each with a number, which were commonplace books full of quotations from his reading.  He began yet another series of notebooks in 1920 called "Wide World." He filled two the first year.  After a lapse in 1821 -- graduation year -- he began again earnest in 1822, filling "Wide World" notebooks 3 through 9 with his own thoughts and observations on a wide range of subjects.  He filled three more in 1923.

Emerson's organized, persistent, purposeful journal keeping is one of the most striking aspects of his early intellectual life.  He wrote constantly, he wrote about everything, he covered hundreds of pages. When he had nothing to say, he wrote about having nothing to say.  He read and indexed and reread what he had written.  He copied letters into his journals and prose from his journals into his letters.  He laughed at much of it when he read it over, inserting comments such as "dead before it reached it subject," but he kept at it.  These early journals are mostly dross and largely unoriginal, but they are impressive in their fluent persistency.  They are efforts, essaying at original composition, first reachings for the essay that became his lifelong form.

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.  he habitually read the North American Review, the Edinburgh Review, and the Christian Examiner.  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 over 230 volumes -- filing four shelves of a good-sized bookcase.  The notebooks were in part his storehouse of original writing and in part a filing system, designed to store and give him access to the accumulating fruits of this reading on every topic that ever interested him throughout his life.