Emerson's opinion of your opinion of someone else's opinion

Robert Richardson's death has sent me back to his writing, which I'm sure he'd say is the better part of him that survives -- that, and his beloved Annie. (See his "fan letter"/bio of her, Annie Dillard, appended to the previous post below.)

I too am perpetually arrested by Emerson's bold statement about young scholars in libraries, with which Richardson began his lovely little book on Emersonian creativity.

And, I love and share Emerson's distaste for much if not most "academic controversy," which tends to dilute and diminish whatever it touches. I'm reminded of James's comment on "the bald-headed young PhDs  boring themselves at conferences" etc., a remark I found funnier before I became a balding older one. But the point is solid, too much formal scholarship is pedantic and trifling. Emerson, and those who truly appreciate him as Bob Richardson did, aimed higher.

The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…”

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“Yet however much he read, there were whole categories of books the mature Emerson would not read. He would not read theology or academic controversy. He wanted original accounts, first-hand experience, personal witness. He would read your poem or your novel, but not your opinion of someone else’s poem or novel, let alone your opinion of someone else’s opinion…” First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process