The art of thoroughness

The life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his book Representative Men, “showed us how much may be accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men possess in less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by courage and thoroughness.” I’ve never forgotten this sentence, in large part because the qualities that Emerson lists—apart from courage—are all so boring and mundane. Emerson, I think, is being deliberately provocative in explaining the career of Napoleon, the most overwhelming public figure who ever lived, in terms of qualities that we’d like to see in a certified public accountant. But he’s also right in noting that Napoleon’s fascination is rooted in his “very intelligible merits,” which give us the idea, which seems more plausible when we’re in our early twenties, that we might have done the same thing in his position. It’s an observation that must have seemed even more striking to Emerson’s audience than it does to us now. Napoleon rose from virtually nothing to become an emperor, and he emerged at a moment, just after the fall of a hereditary monarchy, in which such examples were still rare. A commoner could never hope to become a king, but every citizen could fantasize about being Napoleon. These days, when we tell our children that anyone can become president, we’re more likely to take such dreams for granted. (It’s noteworthy that Emerson delivered this lecture a decade before the election of Abraham Lincoln, who fills exactly that role in the American imagination.) As Emerson says: “If Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.”

This is true of other forms of achievement, too. I’ve been thinking about this passage a lot recently, because it also seems like a list of the qualities that characterize a certain kind of writer, particularly one who works in nonfiction. I can’t speak for the extent to which courage enters into it, aside from the ordinary kind that is required to write anything at all—although some writers, now more than ever, display far greater courage than others. But the more you write, the more you come to value the homely virtues that Emerson catalogs here, both in yourself and in the books you read. Even fiction, which might seem to draw more on creativity and inspiration, is an act of sustained organization, and the best novels tend to be the ones that are so superbly organized that the writer can take the time to see clearly into every part. To stretch the military analogy even further, there’s a fog of war that descends on any extended writing project: it’s hard to keep both the details and the big picture in your head at once, and you don’t have time to follow up on every line of investigation. All books inevitably leave certain things undone. For a writer, personal attention and thoroughness come down to the ability to keep everything straight for long enough to develop every element exactly as far as it needs to extend. One of the attractions of a book like The Power Broker by Robert Caro is the sense that every paragraph represents the fruits of maximal thoroughness. The really funny thing is that Caro thought it would take him just nine months to write. But maybe that’s what all writers need to tell themselves before they start.

There’s a place, obviously, for inspiration, insight, and other factors that can’t be reduced to mere diligence. But organization is the essential backdrop from which ideas emerge, exactly as it was for Napoleon. It may not be sufficient, but it’s certainly necessary. Our university libraries are filled with monuments to thoroughness that went nowhere, but there’s also something weirdly logical about the notion of giving a doctoral candidate the chance to spend a few years thoroughly investigating a tiny slice of knowledge that hasn’t been explored before, on the off chance that something useful might come of it. Intuition is often described as a shortcut that allows the thinker to skip the intermediate steps of an argument, which suggests to me that the opposite should also be true: a year of patiently gathering data can yield a result that a genius would get in an instant. The tradeoff may not always be worth it for any one individual, but it’s certainly worth it for society as a whole. We suffer from a shortage of geniuses, but we’ve got plenty of man-hours in our graduate schools. Both are indispensable in their own way. To some extent, thoroughness can be converted into genius, just as one currency can be exchanged for another—it’s just that the exchange rate is sometimes unfavorable. And it’s even more accurate to say that insight is the paycheck you get for the hard daily work of thoroughness. (Which just reminds me of the fact that “earning a living” as an artist is both about putting a roof over your head and about keeping yourself in a position to utilize good ideas when they come.)

And it gives me hope for my current project. John W. Campbell, of all people, put it best. On July 5, 1967, he wrote to Larry Niven: “The readers lay their forty cents on the counter to employ me to think things through for them with more depth, more detail, and more ingenuity than they can, or want to bother achieving.” This is possibly my favorite thing that Campbell ever said—although it’s important to note that it dates from a period when his thinking was hideously wrong on countless matters. A writer is somebody you hire to be thorough about something when you don’t have the time or the inclination. (Journalism amounts to a kind of outsourcing of our own efforts to remain informed about the world, which makes it all the more important to choose our sources wisely.) I’m about halfway through this book, and it’s already clear that there are plenty of other people who would be more qualified than I am to write it. My only advantage is that I’m available. I can think about this subject every day for two to three years, and I can afford to spend my time chasing down details that even a diligent writer who only touches on the topic tangentially wouldn’t be able to investigate. All writing comes down to a process of triage, and as I work, I’m aware of potential avenues that I’ll need to leave unexplored or assertions that I’ll have to take on faith, trusting that someone else will look into them one day. The most I can do is flag them and move on. There are also days when even the humdrum qualities that Emerson lists seem impossibly out of reach, and I’m confronted by the physical limits to how thorough I can be, just as I’m aware of the limits to my insight. As a writer, you hope that these limitations will cancel each other out over a long enough period of time, but there’s no way of knowing until you’re finished. And maybe that’s where the courage comes in.

The size of writers

“Society has, at all times, the same want, namely of one sane man with adequate powers of expression to hold up each object of monomania in its right relations,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in Representative Men, a collection of seven lectures that he first delivered in 1850. He goes on to describe the situation in strikingly modern terms:

The ambitious and mercenary bring their last new mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas, railroad, Romanism, mesmerism, or California; and, by detaching the object from its relations, easily succeed in making it seen in a glare; and a multitude go mad about it, and they are not to be reproved or cured by the opposite multitude who are kept from this particular insanity by an equal frenzy on another crotchet. But let one man have the comprehensive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy in its right neighborhood and bearings—the illusion vanishes, and the returning reason of the community thanks the reason of the monitor.

The first half of this passage perfectly captures our current predicament, but the last sentence comes off as a form of wishful thinking that wasn’t true even when Emerson wrote it. The influence of “one sane man,” even if we assume that he exists, can feel meaningless compared to the power of the mob. Writers like to think that their work puts the world in perspective, but they rarely reach anyone outside their own small circle, and even if they change minds, it’s usually only to nudge them in the direction that they were already going.

I read Emerson’s essay on Inauguration Day, when the influence of responsible writers seemed weaker than ever before. In the era of alternative facts, of a free press that is dismissed as the opposition party, and of countless eloquent voices for reason whose arguments ultimately came to nothing, the stock of the public intellectual is at a historic low. But as Emerson reminds us, this isn’t anything new:

The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must also wish with other men to stand well with his contemporaries. But there is a certain ridicule, among superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy…In this country, the emphasis of conversation and of public opinion commends the practical man; and the solid portion of the community is named with significant respect in every circle…Ideas are subversive of social order and comfort, and at last make a fool of the possessor. It is believed, the ordering a cargo of goods from New York to Smyrna, or the running up and down to procure a company of subscribers to set a-going five or ten thousand spindles, or the negotiations of a caucus and the practicing on the prejudices and facility of country people to secure their votes in November—is practical and commendable.

This certainly sounds familiar. There’s something inescapably American about the cult of big business and its corresponding contempt for ideas. And plenty of us have been left with the uncomfortable feeling that maybe ideas do “make a fool of the possessor,” at least when we try to find evidence to the contrary.

The observations that I’ve quoted appear in Emerson’s essay on Goethe, whom he holds up as the epitome of the writer. This is a revealing choice in itself. Goethe was the most practical of artists: Emerson calls him “the philosopher of this multiplicity; hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and happy to cope with [the] rolling miscellany of facts and sciences, and by his own versatility to dispose of them with ease…None was so fit to live, or more heartily enjoyed the game.” His cultural presence is diminished these days, but he remains a hugely seductive role model for young people who feel torn between a life in the world and a life of the mind. Goethe was a poet, a novelist, a scientist, a dramatist, and a productive figure in public life, overseeing the construction of mines and running the theater in Weimar. He may have been the most naturally brilliant man who ever lived—he placed first in the psychologist Lewis Terman’s controversial ranking of historical figures by intelligence—and he used his gifts to become the kind of person at forty that everyone dreams of being at twenty. A bright college graduate, brimming with unrealized potential, is a sort of larval Goethe, a Hamlet in embryo, but life has a way of closing off most of those avenues. Goethe, almost uniquely, developed every piece of himself to its fullest. But it’s worth remembering that we only remember his work as a privy councillor because he also happened to write Faust, and he was lucky to be a big fish in a small pond. As Emerson puts it: “He lived in a small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, and in a time when Germany played no such leading part in the world’s affairs as to swell the bosom of her sons with any metropolitan pride.”

Emerson pretends to be surprised by this fact, but in reality, it’s only in such provincial surroundings that an author can hope to pass as a public figure. In Weimar, Goethe could do everything; in London or Paris, faced with competition from talented men who had nothing on their minds but practical matters, he would have had to be content with being a great writer. Any thinking human being feels small in comparison to Goethe, but when we remember how small he was compared with the world in which he lived, we start to realize that our smallness is all we have in common. At a moment when so many of us feel helpless, we should pay attention to Emerson when he writes: “Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all times; that the disadvantages of any epoch exist only to the faint-hearted. Genius hovers with his sunshine and music close by the darkest and deafest eras.” And he also identifies Goethe’s only true weakness, which was his unwillingness to grasp the limits of action itself:

Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defense of his life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, a headiness and loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay. Act, if you like—but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament.

Goethe lived a life of extraordinary productivity, but we only care about him—or even Weimar itself—because of what he accomplished when he was alone in his room. And at a time in which blunt, showy gestures and Faustian bargains seem to be valued over the tiny acts of secret courage that writing demands, we should take Emerson’s conclusion to heart: “The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.”

Let us now forget famous men

“More books have been written about [Lincoln] than any figure in human history, with the possible exception of Jesus Christ.”

The photo above was taken three years ago by my then girlfriend, now wife, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. I didn’t get to go, alas—I was living in New York at the time—but the museum, as I was endlessly informed over the next few days, is tons of fun, with elaborate dioramas of the White House, Ford’s Theater, and other family-friendly attractions, including life-size figures of the entire Lincoln clan. When I saw the text of the plaque above, though, I was outraged, for reasons that might seem hard to understand at first. Here’s my verbatim response, at least as well as I can remember: “What about Napoleon?” I demanded. “What about Napoleon?”

You see, I like Napoleon. I like him a lot. Twenty or so books about Napoleon line my shelves, and I’m always on the lookout for more, the older and more adulatory, the better. Why? Emerson’s essay from Representative Men provides a decent starting point, but the short answer is that Napoleon is the most fascinating person I know in world history—”among the most perceptive, penetrating, retentive, and logical minds ever seen in one who was predominantly a man of action,” as Will Durant nicely puts it. He’s the foremost figure of Western history, a man who, for all his flaws, embodies more than any other individual the limits of human energy, intelligence, and ambition. And I was pretty sure that more books had been written about him than anyone else, including Lincoln.

And yet here’s the thing. Napoleon came from almost nothing, and became emperor of Europe. At his coronation, he took the crown out of the Pope’s hands and placed it on his own head. He was, by almost any measure, the most purely productive human being who ever lived. But these days, all that most people could say about Napoleon, if they recognized the name at all, was that he was a short little guy with a funny hat. (Not that short, by the way: he was 5 feet, 7 inches, or roughly the height of Tom Cruise.) That’s what time does: it reduces even the most monumental figures into caricatures of themselves. Two centuries is all it took to turn the leading light of Western civilization to Ian Holm in Time Bandits. It will happen to Lincoln, too, if it hasn’t already happened.

Napoleon, of course, isn’t alone. I was recently reminded of this whole kerfuffle while reading Dean Simonton’s Origins of Genius, inspired by the Malcolm Gladwell article I mentioned last week. Simonton mentions the work of the psychologist James McKeen Cattell, who, back in 1903, made one of the first systematic attempts to rank the thousand most eminent men in history—there were hardly any women on his list—by toting up mentions in major biographical dictionaries and tabulating the results. Here’s his top hundred:

Napoleon, Shakespeare, Mohammed, Voltaire, Bacon, Aristotle, Goethe, Julius Caesar, Luther, Plato, Napoleon III, Burke, Homer, Newton, Cicero, Milton, Alexander the Great, Pitt, Washington, Augustus, Wellington, Raphael, Descartes, Columbus, Confucius, Penn, Scott, Michelangelo, Socrates, Byron, Cromwell, Gautama, Kant, Leibnitz, Locke, Demosthenes, Mary Stuart [the only woman on the list], Calvin, Moliere, Lincoln, Louis Philippe, Dante, Rousseau, Nero, Franklin, Galileo, Johnson, Robespierre, Frederick the Great, Aurelius, Hegel, Petrarch, Horace, Charles V (Germany), Mirabeau, Erasmus, Virgil, Hume, Guizot, Gibbon, Pascal, Bossuet, Hobbes, Swift, Thiers, Louis XIV, Wordsworth, Louis XVI, Nelson, Henry VIII, Addison, Thucydides, Fox, Racine, Schiller, Henry IV (France), W. Herschel, Tasso, Jefferson, Ptolemy, Claudius, Augustine, Pope, Machiavelli, Swedenborg, Philip II, Leonardo da Vinci, George III, Julian, Pythagoras, Macaulay, Rubens, Burns, Mozart, Humboldt, Comte, Cousin, Cuvier, Justinian, Euripides, Camoens.

Now, much of this list remains unimpeachable. The top ten, in particular, would presumably be very similar today, though Bacon would probably give place to Newton, and we’d need to find room for Einstein and, yes, Lincoln. (Also, hopefully, for some women. The only other women, besides Mary Queen of Scots, to make Cattell’s top two hundred were Elizabeth and Joan of Arc, although, at this rate, it’s only a matter of time before we see Sarah Palin.) But with all due respect to my French readers, when I see names like Guizot, Bossuet, Thiers, Comte, and Cousin, among others, my only response is a blank stare. And this is coming from someone who loves Napoleon.

All in all, though, Cattell’s list reminds us how quickly even major reputations can fade. (For an even more sobering reminder, look no further than the bottom of his top thousand. Fauriel, Enfantin, Babeuf, anyone?) And I have no doubt that a contemporary list of the top hundred figures in history, like this one, will look equally strange to a reader a century from now. Just because you made the list once, it seems, doesn’t mean you’ll stay there.

“An obscure and profane life”

[Shakespeare] was master of the revels to mankind…As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But when the question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me?…Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos,—that he should not be wise for himself;—it must even go into the world’s history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men