'It is perhaps striking that from the moment the work becomes the search for art, from the moment it becomes literature, the writer increasingly feels the need to maintain a relation to himself. His feeling is one of extreme repugnance at losing his grasp upon himself in the interests of that neutral force, formless and bereft of any destiny, which is behind everything that gets written. This repugnance, or apprehension, is revealed by the concern, characteristic of so many authors, to compose what they call their "journal." Such a preoccupation is far removed from the complacent attitudes usually described as Romantic. The journal is not essentially confessional; it is not one's own story. It is a memorial. What must the writer remember? Himself: who he is when he isn't writing, when he lives daily life, when he is alive and true, not dying and bereft of truth. But the tool he uses in order to recollect himself is, strangely, the very element of forgetfulness: writing. That is why, however, the truth of the journal lies not in the interesting, literary remarks to be found there, but in the insignificant details which attach it to daily reality. The journal represents the series of reference points which a writer establishes in order to keep track of himself when he begins to suspect the dangerous metamorphosis to which he is exposed. It is a route that remains viable; it is something like a watchman's walkway upon ramparts: parallel to, overlooking, and sometimes skirting around the other path—the one where to stray is the endless task. Here true things are still spoken of. Here, whoever speaks retains his name and speaks in this name, and the dates he notes down belong in a shared time where what happens really happens. The journal—this book which is apparently altogether solitary—is often written out of fear and anguish at the solitude which comes to the writer on account of the work.

The recourse to the journal indicates that he who writes doesn't want to break with contentment. He doesn't want to interrupt the propriety of days which are really days and which really follow one upon the other. The journal roots the movement of writing in time, in the humble succession of days whose dates preserve this routine. Perhaps what is written there is already nothing but insincerity; perhaps it is said without regard for truth. But it is said in the security of the event. It belongs to occupations, incidents, the affairs of the world—to our active present. This continuity is nil and insignificant, but at least it is irreversible. It is a pursuit that goes beyond itself toward tomorrow, and proceeds there indefinitely.

The journal indicates that already the writer is no longer capable of belonging to time through the ordinary certainty of action, through the shared concerns of common tasks, of an occupation, through the simplicity of intimate speech, the force of unreflecting habit. He is no longer truly historical; but he doesn't want to waste time, either, and since he doesn't know anymore how to do anything but write, at least he writes in response to his everyday history and in accord with the preoccupations of daily life. It happens that writers who keep a journal are the most literary of all, but perhaps this is precisely because they avoid, thus, the extreme of literature, if literature is ultimately the fascinating realm of time's absence.'

'For instance, we experience the morning as the beginning of the day, and this period typically has a certain quickening freshness to it insofar as we experience ourselves as not yet determined—that is, insofar as we experience ourselves as implicated, in the here and now, in events that are not yet over and done with and that have not yet been set in stone. It is as though the first rays of sunlight themselves announce the indeterminacy or open-endedness of the day, appealing thereby to the indeterminacy of our freedom itself. Or, the actions that we take in completing a long-term project exist for us as culminations, which is to say that we experience these specific events as enveloping in them a whole host of interconnected past events which they bring to fruition. Indeed, according to the sense of time that we operate with while we are actually engaged in completing such a long-term project, it is as though those events that made up the beginning stages of the project are, in a sense, 'closer' to us—more present to us, more continuous with our present actions—than those events that will immediately follow the completion of the project, even though those latter events are closest in the uniform series of clocked time.

Thus the events of human life, as we live them, do not take the form of discrete, equal units of time that are external to one another. Rather, they occur as having internal references backwards and forwards to those specific events that are related to them in meaningful ways. In our lived experience, it seems, we are concerned most basically with the time of beginnings and endings, of initiations and culminations, of anticipations and recollections, of progresses and regresses, of sudden developments and tedious repetitions and stalling, and these various 'narrative articulations' of time seem intimately related to the openings, proceedings and closings that constitute our experience as agents: that is, it is because we ourselves have the capacity to inaugurate new and unprecedented trains of events, as well as the capacity to see things through, respond to obstacles along the way and bring objects to their proper ends—and, in the final analysis, because we experience our own identities as themselves having begun in birth, and as heading towards their conclusive ends in death—that time is not for us primarily a series of discrete, quantitatively identical units of time, but occurs rather as an eventful unfolding of determinate, but open-ended, dramas in which certain events resonate with, or culminate in, or continue, or disrupt, or promise others in meaningful ways. It is because we are living, finite agents, actively staking a claim with respect to what matters most in the world, and constantly engaged in the business of making meaningful lives for ourselves, that the lived time of our existence—the time of our identities or of our biographies—takes the form, not merely of an indiscriminate list of the content of every unit of clocked time we have lived through, but is instead structured in terms of our most noteworthy successes and failures, in terms of the portentous and fateful incidents of childhood, decisive events that alone give determinate narrative shape and meaning to our distinctive self-identities, and in terms of which alone all of the other, more mundane, events get their proper place.'

'What I suggest, to myself as to you, is that Specimen Days must be read. There is a quieter Whitman there, wilier in his truths, and an even more circumstantial America somehow waiting for us.'

'It will illustrate one phase of humanity anyhow; how few of life’s days and hours (and they not by relative value or proportion, but by chance) are ever noted. Probably another point too, how we give long preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than fine work.'

'The product in Emerson of weaving together various journal entries across time is a lecture or text which never has the sharpest force of argument but instead retains sometimes a sententious and at other times a discursive and elaborating character. An Emerson essay, though centered on a theme, is so many variations on that theme. Its appeal is not systematic but insightful. An unusual and perhaps essential quality of an Emersonian text is its capacity to reveal itself differently to different readers. Having assigned Emerson to students for more than a quarter century, I can attest to the curious fact that students infrequently agree in identifying the essential passages in any essay, even in the same paragraph of an essay. The student's reading seems an act fundamentally of recognition: the student finds in paragraph and essay, even in the choice of the most important essays, ideas and insights which he acknowledges to be precise and true. It is not always easy to credit the passages other students underscore or even always to catch the relevance. For my own part, I have found it necessary every few years-to put aside my text of Emerson and buy a new, clean text so as to encourage a fresh reading of him. Habit, or well-grooved character, appears to preclude seeing the breadth of observation and illustration before one's eyes in the text—as in life.'

'Emerson-Exemplar: Friedrich Nietzsche's Emerson Marginalia: Introduction'

'You never stop at anywhere. There's no place to stop at.'

I read now in English, in French, less so in German, much less so and with more difficulty in Russian (and I've started learning Spanish). All along my foreign-language reading has never been very exact, but I've found it an enjoyable part of the language-learning process to make do with more vagueness about what's going on in what I read. As I've gotten better the sense of clarity has stabilized and provided a good index to my progress. Perhaps perversely, even when I know I would get more from reading something in translation, I would prefer to read it in the original language.

Yet from time to time I read a passage and suddenly think, I need to know what this says—meaning, I need to see this in translation. I know just why, too: it's accompanied by the formation of an intention to write about the passage. This intention brings with it the apprehension about getting it just right, and apparently with the recognition that I don't think I can do that in the original language.

It's a commonplace that you're the one in charge when you read, which is maybe why it doesn't matter whether you get it just right. Reading is a contested activity in education because no one likes to give up that little bit of sovereignty.

'Troisième élément, cette construction n'est pas seulement un jeu. Certes, en toute société, le jeu est un théâtre où se représente la formalité des pratiques, mais il a pour condition de possibilité le fait d'être détaché des pratiques sociales effectives. Au contraire, le jeu scripturaire, production d'un système, espace de formalisation, a pour « sens » de renvoyer à la réalité dont il a été distingué en vue de la changer. Il vise une efficacité sociale. Il joue sur son extériorité. Le laboratoire de l'écriture a fonction « stratégique » : soit qu'une information reçue de la tradition ou de l'extérieur s'y trouve collectée, classée, imbriquée dans un système et par là transformée, soit que les règles et les modèles élaborés dans ce lieu excepté permettent d'agir sur l'environnement et de le transformer. L'île de la page est un lieu de transit où s'opère une inversion industrielle : ce qui y entre est un « reçu », ce qui en sort est un « produit ». Les choses qui y entrent sont les indices d'une « passivité » du sujet par rapport à une tradition; celles qui en sortent, les marques de son pouvoir de fabriquer des objects. Aussi bien l'entreprise scripturaire transforme ou conserve au-dedans ce quelle reçoit de son dehors et crée à l'intérieur les instruments d'une appropriation de l'espace extérieur. Elle stocke ce qu'elle trie et elle se donne les moyens d'une expansions. Combinant le pouvoir d'accumuler le passé et celui de conformer à ses modèles l'altérité de l'univers, elle est capitaliste et conquérante. Le laboratoire scientifique et l'industrie (qui est justement définie par Marx comme le « livre » de la « science ») obéissent au même schéma. La ville moderne aussi : c'est un espace circonscrit où se réalisent la volonté de collecter-stocker une population extérieure et celle de conformer la campagne à des modèles urbains.'