Fleeting and Evanescent Flowers of the Mind

 The year 1834 was a great one for Emerson, when a confluence of ideas came together and he began to write (in The Old Manse in Concord) the first biographical essays and Nature.  His notebooks were an essential part of the process of writing. 

According to Richardson, the content of his notebooks changed.

He was now trying to capture not just major conclusions and insights but the slightest, most evanescent hints and glimmers that rose to the surface of his mind and then as quickly sank from sight: 'For the best part... of every mind is not that which [a person] knows, but which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing, unpossessed before hime.' Emerson's journals show that for years he fished along the edges of consciousness, eager to note down the smallest fresh suggestion or hint of a suggestion. He made an effort to recall and write down dreams, to record first impressions, not second thoughts, to recall 'what so rankled at heart and kept the eyes open all night.' These were al struggles to forestall and cheat the repressive processes of the mind, to snatch and write down everything that reached the surface of consciousness.  Much of Emerson's journal is not intended as finished work or public utterance, nor een as the record of private conviction.  He is concerned to explore -- and then to save -- impulses, essays, hints, trials, spurts, exaggerations, the most fleeting and evanescent flowers of the mind.

Emerson developed a system to keep track of these ideas by indexing. "Indexing was a crucial method for Emerson because it allowed him to write first and organize later and because it gave him easy access to the enormous mass of specific materials in his ever-increasing pile of notebooks."  He developed a method that he shared with Elizabeth Peabody:

He advised me to keep a manuscript book -- and to write down every train of thought which arose on any interesting subject with the imagery in which it first came into my mind.  This manuscript was to be perfectly informal and allow of skipping from one subject to another with only a black line between.  After it was written I could run a heading of subjects over the top -- and when I wanted to make up an article -- there were all my thoughts ready.