Little Book

LITTLE BOOK

A novel based on the early life of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Published by Douglas Nordfors at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Douglas Nordfors

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CONTENTS

January 15, 1836

March 25, 1836

April 29, 1836

May 27, 1836

August 12, 1836

JANUARY 15, 1836

Ralph Waldo Emerson is well into his morning ritual.

Already, he has taken a cold bath, dressed, opened the door of his study, crossed the threshold, closed the door behind him, taken wood out of the wood closet, and lit a fire, contemplating possible joy, possible grief, possible failure, boundless joy, boundless failure, and the edges of grief, like the gray tassels on the deep red carpet.

Already, he has gone back out, and sat in the kitchen, eating a slice of apple pie and drinking two cups of coffee, feeling the cold creep up through the soles of his shoes, again and again putting fork and cup down to breathe on his hands.

Now he is back in his study, drawing up his rocking chair with the velvet cushion to the small, round table, not closely enough to use it to write on. He will use his lap as a desk, when he is ready. On the table is a stack of half-sheets of paper, a portfolio, an inkbottle, a pen, two bookends, a row of books on their sides, spines in the air, and an unlit lamp.

It is not yet light out. Interior shutters remain over the four windows, two facing north, overlooking the front yard and turnpike, two facing west, overlooking a line of pine trees the setting sun filters through hours after his morning’s work is cut off until the next morning.

Now his eyes are closed. He is leaning back, rocking ever so slightly, or not at all.

Who can tell? He feels as if he is posing for a painter who is far away in another room in the house.

He appreciates being alone. When he is ready, he will use this morning to begin his little book called Nature. Having written only sermons and lectures in his life, he wants so much to make this little book happen. As little as it will be, next to a sermon or a lecture it will seem as large as the Bible—no, there’s a better way to put it, and he will think of it soon.

He is 32. Before his marriage to his second wife, Lydia, last September, he bought this house in Concord, Massachusetts, for $3,500. There’s room enough in it for his mother, and his brother, Charles, when he is in town, and perhaps for Charles’s fiancée, Elizabeth, if they ever marry.

Just one more practical detail: The money for the house, and, so, to speak, for the free time, came from the settlement of his first wife’s estate in the middle of last year. He has a guaranteed annual income of $1,200. He is not rich. He mildly shocked Lydia by telling her after their marriage that they would have to live frugally. He is comfortable enough. He is surviving.

He considers the stack of half-sheets of paper to be metaphysical hammers and nails. He feels idle, even brain-sick, but only in someone else’s eyes, and not his own.

He is not waiting for words to come to him. He is waiting for words to arise from him. These words will not descend upon a half-piece of paper. These words will well up from underneath a half-piece of paper. We are not given nature. Nature emanates for us.

He also considers the half-sheets of paper to be old worlds. Filled, they will be new. New ideas emanating from a new person. We are not merely children of God. We are ourselves gods, whose fate is only a term for facts that have not yet passed through the light of thought.

He opens his eyes, leans forward, and takes the portfolio and places it on his lap. Then he picks up one half-sheet of paper and places it on the portfolio. Then he takes the pen and dips it into the ink. Then he puts the pen down and lights the lamp.

He picks up the pen again, leans back, and again closes his eyes.

In his will-less, fluid mind is an image: Language is like a carriage that never stops…no one ever gets out and beds down. The image turns into a thought: Through language he regards himself as good, but as having an edge, an almost distasteful edge, but an edge no one has ever tasted. He wonders what he becomes when he takes a long walk outside, in nature. He needs another image.

He chuckles inside, and begins to write. What he writes he knows will not stand as an absolute beginning, but will eventually go somewhere near the beginning. Now that it is written, he can’t take it back. He reads it over, and chuckles out loud, softly, imagining an eyeball with legs stepping over a snow puddle at twilight, an eyeball so transparent that only its legs are visible. He regards the image as sufficiently grotesque, extravagant, shocking. On the actual page, there is no mention of legs, and so he figures that no one will chuckle like him as they read it. He likes that the image has a zaniness, but not a zaniness anyone could simply dismiss with a smile. He thinks of it as civilized, but not removed, not precious. He has a notion that all the things it is not will make a reader sympathetic to it.

He must get on with writing, and stop musing over a few sentences. An image sometimes needs help. What does becoming a transparent eyeball mean? He writes: I am nothing; I see all, and doesn’t chuckle, either out loud or inside. He goes on to explain, modestly, he feels, in light of the zaniness, how he is one with the Universal Being.

He pauses. The half-piece of paper is half-filled. The fact that he himself, or any reader, requires far more words to further explain such large ideas, does not crush him. He is not out to prove anything. He is out to speak back to a wordless, proven, harmonic structure in an intuitive, newfound language. He wants (he already has, for half a page) to put words about nature together in such a way that they, like their subject, never grow stale and crumble. Pausing, he is reminded of the gulf between joy and grief, but believes nature contains both at any time, believes nature will display how he precisely feels at any time. Winter, a bare branch like the arm of someone suffering from consumption, will appear joyous if he feels joy inside—if that someone isn’t a dear friend. Or even if that someone is?

Quickly, he fills the other half of the sheet, pushes it with this thumb to the edge of the portfolio, and lets it fall to the floor.

The fire has died down considerably. He feels he is compensating.

The shutters are like shields. If he opens them, he will shine out the windows.

He is astonished that he has actually begun, though the book, or his reverence for his desire to begin, has been in the back of his mind for several years, like the visible, though inaccessible, stars.

He figures he might as well open the shutters and acknowledge the fact that it is now, barely, light out. He puts the portfolio back on the desk and stands up. He considers the filled half-piece of paper on the floor absolute proof of his existence, and is astonished that it will, barring absolute failure, be merely a tiny part of the overall picture—will be part of a gigantic transparent eyeball made up of tiny transparent eyeballs. He chuckles as if into a little shutter over his mouth. He opens the shutter over one of the north windows and sees snow-covered grass, snow-covered trees, the snow-covered turnpike. He sidesteps over to the other north window and opens its shutter. The same scene confronts him. He is overwhelmed by his sense of unity, far more than an idea, but an idea all the same.

He decides to leave the shutters over the west windows closed. The line of pine trees is a kind of permanent shutter anyway.

He sits back down in his rocking chair. He doesn’t even consider whether he should put the lamp out. It just stays lit.

He puts the portfolio back on his lap and reaches for another half-piece of paper, which he loves, though its blankness is not yet the expression of man and vegetable, and invisible, occult relation.

He begins writing again, rocking ever so slightly, or not at all.

Who is he, exactly?

He desires to be in a world not of contingencies, where things just happen, but of moral possibilities, just as when he contemplates his past, he fills in the meaning, as if offering it the bread and water it was never allowed.

All good people represent everyone. Listen:

Eight years old.

His Aunt Mary came to stay in his house in Boston beginning to be overwhelmed by his father’s final illness .

Thirty-seven, 4 feet and 3 inches, with closely cropped, maybe colorless, hair always covered up with a black band and a mob cap (no, a few curls, blonde, yellowish, always trying to escape), she was, to Waldo, as he told her he liked to be called, beyond human, a force, not in and of herself, but against him, or for him, always, it seemed, bent on crouching inside him, except that it was obvious she never wished to disappear, was always, it seemed, around.

It was difficult for him to think of her eyes as blue, blue being peaceful. They always looked like they wanted to do something for you, or to you, peaceful meaning to be left alone.

Men have a better chance than women of having opinions of their own, he overheard her telling his quiet-as-a-mouse, like-a-fly-on-the-wall-but-in-another-room mother. Was his aunt saying that his aunt was a man? She hovered around him, touching him little, like his mother, and unlike his mother, examining him with her eyes, as if for words she was helpless to do anything about—she could only hope they would sink underneath his skin.

Was he supposed to tell people what he thought, or was he just supposed to have opinions? More than once, his aunt had seemed on the verge of demanding something from him, but not, he thought, an opinion, but a display of physical strength, like lifting his father up out of bed and carrying him to the church so he could speak to the people who looked up at him like 8-year-olds with nothing on their minds but bolts of language they were not born with, they could grow toward.

She hovered around his brothers, too, and leaned over his father and appeared to draw something on his forehead with her finger. Couldn’t she point her eyes at herself, make demands of herself? Couldn’t she and Waldo both carry his father to the church, she marveling at his ability, for a boy so small, to hold up his end?

Waldo, one day, sat alone in the parlor, drawing stick figures in a black, leather-bound book his mother had given him for Christmas, and his Aunt Mary suddenly appeared and began to circle the room, slowly at first, then ridiculously fast, like a child. She touched most everything along her path. She ran her finger across the little space between the spines of a row of books and the edge of the shelf they sat on. For as long as she could without stopping, she palmed the glass of one of the lamps bordering the couch he sat on. She ran her hand across the grandfather clock, at the level of what would have been its stomach if it had been an actual grandfather. When she was in front of him, she glanced at him, then glanced up at the full-length portrait behind him of his grandfather, who always looked to him like he had been carved out of wood and colored in. She reached a hand up as if grab his grandfather’s little shin, then froze, then looked at him so hard that he felt like he had been caught doing something wrong, or more accurately, thinking something wrong. It was as if her blue eyes were searching in vain for a precious artifact that the fire in his eyes never reached, as if he had saved everything for himself and left her to starve.

She came forward a little, then froze again. She was like a statue that kept coming alive and facing the consequences, to be a statue meaning to be peaceful. There was a not unbeautiful dullness about her pink skin, especially under the cheekbones and around the lips.

"What are you doing?" she said.

Drawing.

She cracked a smile. And the dullness around her lips remained.

He wanted to ask her what was wrong with drawing, but he was like a stick figure that couldn’t argue for itself.

"And you do like what you’re doing?"

He didn’t know what to say, partly because he didn’t know what she was asking. If she was asking what he thought of his drawings, his opinion was that they were neither bad nor good. Whatever was ugly about them had no chance of becoming beautiful, or more ugly, so ugly that it would catch people’s attention.

She put her hands out flat, as if to stop him for coming close, though he was a statue, albeit in turmoil.

I’ll be right back, she said, and went out of the room, not touching anything on the way.

He didn’t move. He thought of his father about to disappear forever. He knew all about death from his father’s sermons. His father was about to climb his own words, the knots of meaning like handholds. Waldo began to shake. He could have sworn that weather had gone from being what people took shelter from to what people lived inside.

She came back, holding in two hands in front of her like a small tray, a book, leather-bound like his, but obviously older, well used. He wished his mother had not given him his book, but kept it for herself, occasionally bringing it out to show him.

His Aunt Mary, sister of his dying father, sat down next to him softly, like a ghost he had no choice but to believe in. She held her book between them and opened it to the first