I’ve been saving the first lines meme for when I needed it. Today I need it. So here is a blast from the past and the first line from the first post of the month for each month this past year.

January: On Beauty and Being Just might require more than one post since the book is fairly bristling with page points, but we’ll see how I do with this one.

February: The drawback of listening to something like The Iliad is that when I want to write about it I have nothing to refer to to jog my memory for names and dialogue.

March: When I look out my window I wish I saw this: (beautiful white sand beach and blue ocean)

April: This week’s Emerson essay from his book Society and Solitude is Art.

May: The Harper’s article “A World in Three Aisles: Browsing the Post-Digital Library” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus is excellent.

June: My peonies are blooming like crazy and they have miraculously stood up against the rain earlier in the week.

July: Last week I read the first half of Emerson’s essay Poetry and Imagination. The rest of the essay is very much a critique of poetry, a statement of what poetry is and should be, as well as what a poet is and should be. (I know that’s two sentences but the first one on its own was lonely)

August: I’ve been on a big paddle boat on the St Croix River all day in the wind and the hot sun and the humidity playing “merging nonprofits meet your new coworkers!”

September: Emerson has written about inspiration before, but his essay entitled “Inspiration,” is only a little changed from the lecture he gave by the same name as part of a series at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore in 1872.

October: Emerson’s essay “Aristocracy” was first a lecture read in in England in 1848 then reworked a bit with additions from other papers to be printed in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

November: As one of the books for the Outmoded Authors Challenge I chose G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

December: Emerson is taking the week off since I spent the weekend shoveling snow and working on school stuff.

Do you think I read any Emerson essays this year?