Reading and writing …

… Review-a-Day — First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson, reviewed by The Wilson Quarterly — Powell's Books. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

The author of Nature (1836) and such seminal essays as "The American Scholar" and "Self-Reliance," Emerson (1803–82) believed that reading should be a vigorous culling of facts and ideas, directly in the service of one's own intellectual production. Too often, he observed, we read as sluggards, "drugged with books." Thus, he encouraged what we would call speed-reading: Turn "page after page, keeping your writer's thought before you, but not tarrying with him, until he has brought you the thing you are in search of." Most important, don't forget that "you only read to start your own team."