On this day in 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson published his first book of essays.

While I know that we read a poem of his and probably a brief essay in high school, that was the extent of my contact with him until I moved to Atlanta in 2001. At Chapter 11 Books, I picked up a copy of The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson for several weeks, simply devoured it.

That copy got lost in one of my moves and I recently picked up a nice hardback edition of his collected essays from a used bookstore (I also picked up a collection of his early poems, but he’s not a great poet, to be honest).

One thing that very much struck me, once I actually got around to systematically reading him, was how sophisticated he was. I had read some Kant a few years previously (most of the first Critique and the entirety of the second) and was, like many readers of Emerson, very aware of the great debt he owed to Kant.

In school, he was presented as a sort of homespun caricature of American pragmatism, so to see him in such correspondence with (arguably) the greatest philosophical mind since Aristotle was a revelation.

Sigh. Another reminder of the inadequacies of the American system of education (and no, the fix does not include breaking teachers’ unions or giving out vouchers, but yes, it probably does involve paying and treating teachers like respected professionals and also less testing).