Spelling Time: The Reader in Emerson's "Circles"

F OR EMERSON the effect of his place in time has everything to do with the timing of effects in his prose. As the self-proclaimed originator of a tradition, he cannot help hoping to activate in his reader a sense of being at the beginning-in the first presenceof things. To the question What will we have ? he swiftly answers This only-a good timing of things.' Because Emerson is so concerned with giving his own measure to time, the documents which fully register this project are the finished ones. The Journals never engage time through a form which tests the human power to account for it even as it is being dismissed. As a source of our sense of the man they remain invaluable; as a realization of his will resisting the element it must work in, they tell us little.2 Emerson's greatest temptation-to risk becoming nothing by trying to be Allknows no bounds in the Journals, as it finds nothing formal there to oppose it. Works always in medias res, they risk neither the arbitrariness of a beginning nor the curtailment of an end. It is rather while constructing performances addressed to an audience Emerson does attend to the timing of effects within a limited stretch of discourse. While composing Nature Emerson distinguishes between the demands of private thought and public saying: that statement only is fit to be made public which you have got at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity. For himself, a man only