If you have yet to become enthralled in a piece of literature today, try this on for size,
"Come, o my friend, with your earliest convenience, I pray you, & let us seize the void betwixt two atoms of air the vacation between two moments of time to decide how we will steer this torrent which is called Today." (As qtd in Feminist Conversations, 35)
While I wish that I could rewrite the entire portion of this letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Margaret Fuller, I feel that this part is enough. Some of you might think this is hoity toity crap, but I think it is some of the most gorgeous prose. I think what makes it even more gorgeous than some of Emerson's other writing is that this was in a letter. Granted I'm sure that he was still careful about word choice, and how he spoke to his audience, but he definitely did not edit this with the scrutiny of a work to be published. He just wrote, and this is what happened.
I am simply in awe of Emerson's seemingly innate beauty and fluency with words, like "seize[ing] the void betwixt two atoms of air." Are you freaking kidding me! That's amazing! Who thinks like that? Who writes like that? I know we were all talking yesterday about what makes great writers, or how to "make" one, but I want to know how I can write like this, because honestly I don't think I could ever be that brilliant with language. I also wish that more people would write like this today. Unfortunately even if someone did write like this it probably wouldn't be published, because the beauty of language Emerson uses doesn't usually translate into dollar signs on the literary market. It didn't even do that well for the time in which he wrote.
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